Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

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Jake Schneider’s path in life was derailed by Shabbat. In college, he majored in economics and planned to be a businessman, but after he started cooking Friday Sabbath dinner for his campus Hillel organization, he realized his place was in the kitchen. On breaks, he returned to Chicago and knocked on restaurant doors, offering to work for free. The first chef to give him a shot was Francis Brennan, who put him on garnish prep at Lettuce Entertain You’s late, great fine-dining experiment L20.

“I didn’t know what I was doing, but they didn’t kick me out,” he says. “And that turned into my first kitchen job after college. It was a very intense environment.” After five months, he did get transferred to relatively less demanding pasta prep in the basement at RPM Italian, and then moved on to stints at Perennial Virant, Wood, and Daisies, where he built up experience in pickling, charcuterie, and working with midwestern terroir. Still, a lack of formal training kept him from moving up on the line. Just as he was about to give up, he took a job in recipe development for a meal kit start-up, and that’s where he’s been for the last four years.

Jake Schneider Credit: Ariel Schneider

Early last summer he decided to get back on track. “I’m not a super religious person, but Judaism has always been a part of my life. And being a professional food person, the food part of Judaism has always been a backbone for me. It’s just something I can’t get away from.”

That’s when he launched his side hustle, Schneider Provisions, a pop-up “old-world delicatessen, with a modern purpose.” At first it was online sales of pickled half sours, asparagus, and mushrooms; and vacuum-sealed corned beef and lox by the pound. Then came catering gigs, corned beef burger grill kits, and Yom Kippur breakfast platters.

And now comes Monday Night Foodball, when Schneider takes over the line at the Kedzie Inn for the Reader’sweekly chef pop-up. On October 17, Schneider’s bringing in a belly-busting menu of towering hot sandwiches on North Shore Kosher Bakery bread—traditional corned beef and mustard, turkey on rye—and some of those modern curveballs, like his grandmother Eunie’s brisket dunked in Italian beef jus, with Russian dressing and giard; and marinated eggplant and latkes stacked on a challah bun. He’s bringing that corned beef burger too.

There’s also a pickle plate, and latkes with sour cherry mustard. As I mop the dribble from my keyboard, the turkey noodle soup is already simmering.

At the bar, Jon Pokorny’s building whiskey sours with Manischewitz floats, but I promise nobody will give you the side-eye if you ask him to spike Schneider’s Dr. Brown’s black cherry soda ice cream float with your spirit of choice.

Preorder now, via email: [email protected]; or DM via his Instagram. Or just pull on comfy pants and strut into 4100 N. Kedzie, and order on the spot, starting at 5 PM this Monday, October 17.

Meantime, feast your orbs on the full Monday Night Foodball schedule. Yes, that is Schneider Provisions returning on the first night of Hanukkah with Zeitlin’s Delicatessen.

Credit: Kirk WilliamsonRead More

In 2020, movie theaters were one of the first places to shutter, thanks to COVID-19. Theaters everywhere closed, leaving everyone stuck streaming at home.

Albany Park resident Adam Carston went online and got his cinema fix by getting into a time machine of sorts: online newspaper archives. He (virtually) went to closed theaters (remember the State and Lake?) and peeked at grind house and X-rated offerings, playing day and night, through the paper’s movie ads.

“I don’t know if it’s like the repressed Catholicism thing or what, but titillation was really big money here in Chicago,” Carston says. “They all tell a story of what was going on.”

To keep track of his archive dives, he created Windy City Ballyhoo on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s a repository of Chicago movie ads, photographs, and film reviews from the last century. 

“I’ve always been fascinated about how art and media reflect where the culture was and where it is,” Carston says.

Growing up in Oak Forest, Carston was part of the VCR generation.

“People dropped the kids off at a baseball practice. My parents dropped me off at the video store. I’d literally be at the video store for an hour or two,” says Carston, an underage cinema missionary. “I often joke that I was raised by the Three Stooges because [my dad] had like dozens of Three Stooges tapes.”

He also took his growing obsession to school. “Like Taxi Driver, John Waters movies. I watched Blue Velvet in sixth grade and tried to describe it to the kids in class.”

He later went to Loyola and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. Carston calls himself a “jack of all trades,” often hopping from project to project. His work on documentaries includes the recently released Live at Mister Kelly’s. Carston says it was while working on that film that his eyes began to wander.

“Right next to the nightclub ads were movie ads. Sometimes, I’d fall down a rabbit hole of wanting to look at those,” says Carston, giving him the idea for Windy City Ballyhoo in 2020. 

The ads, some dating back to the 1920s, are illustrated with eye-catching images, daring the audience to experience something they’ve never seen before. At any given time, you’ll see pictures of trucks on fire, barreling off the road, almost jumping off the page. Others, from the 1930s, show illustrations of singers and mimeographed pictures of stars. It wasn’t just fun stuff people got to see in the ads. One that’s about 100 years old has the words “BIRTH CONTROL” in bold, in the center of the page, and different showtimes for men and women—presumably to watch the movie separately and not get any immediate ideas. Some theaters had a DIY aesthetic, cutting and pasting images from press kits to make their own ads.

Yijun Pan for Chicago Reader

With countless movie ads from the 20th century, how does Carston decide what to post?

“I take clippings because there’s a major movie or some kind of historical significance. But quite honestly, I just look for a weird story.”

Chicago audiences got more than popcorn and a double feature in those days. 

“During the Depression, a lot of theaters would give away silverware and plates,” Carston says. “It was all this ballyhoo to get people in.”

A “triangle” of theaters in the Loop always drew crowds: The Chicago Theatre, State-Lake Theatre (closed in 1984; ABC 7 now has that space), and the Loop Theater (closed in 1978, demolished in 2005). 

“The Loop, this tiny, little theater, would, per capita, outgross both of them some years,” says Carston, adding that there was one revelation about a Chicago movie theater with an unusual reputation.

“The Woods Theatre was a great movie palace that went into the grind house fare and was really known for its sketchiness,” he says. “People commenting on social media saying that they used to work there, and that they would pre-pop all the popcorn and put it in the basements. And then they would find that rats had somehow burrowed their way through the plastic bag and had their way with the popcorn. And then they would still bring it up to serve people.”

Despite some dinginess, most moviegoing experiences in Chicago were fun events.

“In the 70s, the Congress switched over to a Spanish-language format, and stayed that way for several years. But that’s hardly an anomaly,” says Carston. “In Lincoln Square, the Davis Theater used to show German-language films. These theaters would service their communities.”

Adam Carston’s Windy City BallyhooTwitter: @WCBallyooInstagram: @windycityballyhooFacebook: facebook.com/windycityballyhoo

Another specialty for like-minded moviegoers was adults-only fare, advertised alongside mainstream movies. 

“Pornography was really big business, like hardcore, post-Deep Throat. Hardcore pornography took over mainstream theaters for several years. And we’re talking about a lot of theaters,” Carston comments.

“Michael Todd Theatre and the Cinestage, which is just around the corner from the State and Lake theater—they routinely would play pornography, especially Cinestage became kind of a home for it,” he says, adding that lighter fare, like the Russ Meyer film Vixen!, drew a steady stream of moviegoers.

“It ran for at least a year and a half there and just was constantly selling out and became kind of this, like, sensation in Chicago. And then mind you, that wasn’t hardcore. That was softcore,” Carston notes.

If Carston’s movie theater time machine was actually operational today, he’d go to Chicago’s south side to places like the Regal Theatre. 

“There was Cab Calloway opening for a W.C. Fields film. I’d be down for that in the 1930s,” Carston says. 

One movie had a different kind of marketing campaign for south-side moviegoers.

“There was an Italian film that Roberto Rossellini made called Paisan, and it’s kind of an anthology film with a lot of different stories. And one of the stories is about an African American soldier in Italy after the war and his adventures with this kid,” Carston says. “So when the ads for the south-side theaters where it played came out, they made that guy (Dots Johnson) the star of the movie.”

Windy City Ballyhoo also led Carston to find a new film fanatic friend in a famed Hollywood screenwriter who zoned in on their mutual love for all things weird and wonderful in the world of cinema. Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt) grew up in South Bend, Indiana, in the 1970s, and he remembers following the Reader’s Dave Kehr’s reviews religiously.

“The ads became a key part of the movie dream. Looking at the ads now brings back a Proustian memory invoking the essence of the past,” says Karaszewski. He can’t get enough of digital archives.

“I started collecting many old ads myself. Then I discovered Windy City Ballyhoo and found a kindred spirit,” says Karaszewski. “Here were people obsessed with the same goofy crap I was.”

One movie (and Chicago event) Carston is trying to track down is Under Age, from the 1960s. 

“About a Mexican boy or teenager accused of molesting or raping a girl. And there’s a whole trial about it. And supposedly the gimmick was they would have local celebrities on the jury for the film. Here in Chicago, Irv Kupcinet and some other columnists are on the jury and this was at the Loop Theater. I have photos of it. I have ads on it,” says Carston.

“They don’t specify if they prerecorded it or they just put their name on a pamphlet they handed out or yes, they’re on stage. It sounds like a really bizarre scenario.”

Windy City Ballyhoo isn’t just a time capsule of what people were watching; Carston says it presents city history. The film ads show a cultural shift, how times and attitudes have changed, how people weren’t really deterred by ratings or reviews. The ads did the job of social media today: they shout out what you want to see—and what you didn’t even know you wanted to see. They speak to you like they spoke to other Chicagoans who wanted to see a black-and-white image come to life on the big screen.

Carston notes, “I think you can learn a lot about American culture and film history by looking at the movie scene here in Chicago.”

Read More

In 2020, movie theaters were one of the first places to shutter, thanks to COVID-19. Theaters everywhere closed, leaving everyone stuck streaming at home.

Albany Park resident Adam Carston went online and got his cinema fix by getting into a time machine of sorts: online newspaper archives. He (virtually) went to closed theaters (remember the State and Lake?) and peeked at grind house and X-rated offerings, playing day and night, through the paper’s movie ads.

“I don’t know if it’s like the repressed Catholicism thing or what, but titillation was really big money here in Chicago,” Carston says. “They all tell a story of what was going on.”

To keep track of his archive dives, he created Windy City Ballyhoo on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It’s a repository of Chicago movie ads, photographs, and film reviews from the last century. 

“I’ve always been fascinated about how art and media reflect where the culture was and where it is,” Carston says.

Growing up in Oak Forest, Carston was part of the VCR generation.

“People dropped the kids off at a baseball practice. My parents dropped me off at the video store. I’d literally be at the video store for an hour or two,” says Carston, an underage cinema missionary. “I often joke that I was raised by the Three Stooges because [my dad] had like dozens of Three Stooges tapes.”

He also took his growing obsession to school. “Like Taxi Driver, John Waters movies. I watched Blue Velvet in sixth grade and tried to describe it to the kids in class.”

He later went to Loyola and got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history. Carston calls himself a “jack of all trades,” often hopping from project to project. His work on documentaries includes the recently released Live at Mister Kelly’s. Carston says it was while working on that film that his eyes began to wander.

“Right next to the nightclub ads were movie ads. Sometimes, I’d fall down a rabbit hole of wanting to look at those,” says Carston, giving him the idea for Windy City Ballyhoo in 2020. 

The ads, some dating back to the 1920s, are illustrated with eye-catching images, daring the audience to experience something they’ve never seen before. At any given time, you’ll see pictures of trucks on fire, barreling off the road, almost jumping off the page. Others, from the 1930s, show illustrations of singers and mimeographed pictures of stars. It wasn’t just fun stuff people got to see in the ads. One that’s about 100 years old has the words “BIRTH CONTROL” in bold, in the center of the page, and different showtimes for men and women—presumably to watch the movie separately and not get any immediate ideas. Some theaters had a DIY aesthetic, cutting and pasting images from press kits to make their own ads.

Yijun Pan for Chicago Reader

With countless movie ads from the 20th century, how does Carston decide what to post?

“I take clippings because there’s a major movie or some kind of historical significance. But quite honestly, I just look for a weird story.”

Chicago audiences got more than popcorn and a double feature in those days. 

“During the Depression, a lot of theaters would give away silverware and plates,” Carston says. “It was all this ballyhoo to get people in.”

A “triangle” of theaters in the Loop always drew crowds: The Chicago Theatre, State-Lake Theatre (closed in 1984; ABC 7 now has that space), and the Loop Theater (closed in 1978, demolished in 2005). 

“The Loop, this tiny, little theater, would, per capita, outgross both of them some years,” says Carston, adding that there was one revelation about a Chicago movie theater with an unusual reputation.

“The Woods Theatre was a great movie palace that went into the grind house fare and was really known for its sketchiness,” he says. “People commenting on social media saying that they used to work there, and that they would pre-pop all the popcorn and put it in the basements. And then they would find that rats had somehow burrowed their way through the plastic bag and had their way with the popcorn. And then they would still bring it up to serve people.”

Despite some dinginess, most moviegoing experiences in Chicago were fun events.

“In the 70s, the Congress switched over to a Spanish-language format, and stayed that way for several years. But that’s hardly an anomaly,” says Carston. “In Lincoln Square, the Davis Theater used to show German-language films. These theaters would service their communities.”

Adam Carston’s Windy City BallyhooTwitter: @WCBallyooInstagram: @windycityballyhooFacebook: facebook.com/windycityballyhoo

Another specialty for like-minded moviegoers was adults-only fare, advertised alongside mainstream movies. 

“Pornography was really big business, like hardcore, post-Deep Throat. Hardcore pornography took over mainstream theaters for several years. And we’re talking about a lot of theaters,” Carston comments.

“Michael Todd Theatre and the Cinestage, which is just around the corner from the State and Lake theater—they routinely would play pornography, especially Cinestage became kind of a home for it,” he says, adding that lighter fare, like the Russ Meyer film Vixen!, drew a steady stream of moviegoers.

“It ran for at least a year and a half there and just was constantly selling out and became kind of this, like, sensation in Chicago. And then mind you, that wasn’t hardcore. That was softcore,” Carston notes.

If Carston’s movie theater time machine was actually operational today, he’d go to Chicago’s south side to places like the Regal Theatre. 

“There was Cab Calloway opening for a W.C. Fields film. I’d be down for that in the 1930s,” Carston says. 

One movie had a different kind of marketing campaign for south-side moviegoers.

“There was an Italian film that Roberto Rossellini made called Paisan, and it’s kind of an anthology film with a lot of different stories. And one of the stories is about an African American soldier in Italy after the war and his adventures with this kid,” Carston says. “So when the ads for the south-side theaters where it played came out, they made that guy (Dots Johnson) the star of the movie.”

Windy City Ballyhoo also led Carston to find a new film fanatic friend in a famed Hollywood screenwriter who zoned in on their mutual love for all things weird and wonderful in the world of cinema. Larry Karaszewski (Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt) grew up in South Bend, Indiana, in the 1970s, and he remembers following the Reader’s Dave Kehr’s reviews religiously.

“The ads became a key part of the movie dream. Looking at the ads now brings back a Proustian memory invoking the essence of the past,” says Karaszewski. He can’t get enough of digital archives.

“I started collecting many old ads myself. Then I discovered Windy City Ballyhoo and found a kindred spirit,” says Karaszewski. “Here were people obsessed with the same goofy crap I was.”

One movie (and Chicago event) Carston is trying to track down is Under Age, from the 1960s. 

“About a Mexican boy or teenager accused of molesting or raping a girl. And there’s a whole trial about it. And supposedly the gimmick was they would have local celebrities on the jury for the film. Here in Chicago, Irv Kupcinet and some other columnists are on the jury and this was at the Loop Theater. I have photos of it. I have ads on it,” says Carston.

“They don’t specify if they prerecorded it or they just put their name on a pamphlet they handed out or yes, they’re on stage. It sounds like a really bizarre scenario.”

Windy City Ballyhoo isn’t just a time capsule of what people were watching; Carston says it presents city history. The film ads show a cultural shift, how times and attitudes have changed, how people weren’t really deterred by ratings or reviews. The ads did the job of social media today: they shout out what you want to see—and what you didn’t even know you wanted to see. They speak to you like they spoke to other Chicagoans who wanted to see a black-and-white image come to life on the big screen.

Carston notes, “I think you can learn a lot about American culture and film history by looking at the movie scene here in Chicago.”

Read More

Albert Chen (Christopher Thomas Pow) is sitting on a park bench eating what appears to be a burrito or a hot pocket when a hunched old man, dressed in an intersection of athleisure and preppie that signals respectability, comfort, and a baseline certainty of invisibility, shuffles in. “Hey! You Chinese?” he hollers. Albert, though he is, in fact, Chinese—rather, third-generation Chinese American—mutters, “That doesn’t mean we’re like bonded.” 

“This weird old man was . . . racially profiling me,” he tells white coworker Russ the Bus (Garrett Lutz), who proceeds to racially profile Albert as a diligent robot whose most interesting attribute might be where he’s from (“Uyghur from Kyrgyzstan . . . Tibetan raised by Nepalese monks . . . Vietnamese raised by wolves”), before demanding that Albert, once more, share the code that he worked on while Russ slacked. “I was raised to believe in sacrificing my individual needs for the sake of the group,” notes Albert. “So fine. I will give you my code. Again.” 

Tiger Style!Through 10/30: Wed and Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM; open captions Thu 10/20, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $35-$90

Racial self-hatred is the subject of Mike Lew’s Tiger Style! in which Albert and his older sister Jennifer (Aurora Adachi-Winter), who are American-born, Harvard-educated, and live together in Irvine, California, blame their upbringing for their shortcomings, and their white (and whitewashed) colleagues are only too happy to let them do it. Albert is a software engineer who can’t get a promotion from his Asian American boss (Rammel Chan, who also plays the aforementioned old man and Albert and Jennifer’s father), who finds Albert “unrelatable” compared to Russ, even if he does all the work. Jennifer is an oncologist who can’t get her deadbeat man-child white boyfriend (played by Lutz), whom she supports financially and who finds her exotic but neither domestically submissive nor sexually domineering enough, to marry her. Could traditional Chinese cultural values, such as humility, collectivity, and hard work, be to blame for their failure to find happiness in white American society? Albert and Jennifer are ready to believe. 

“Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy,” wrote Cathy Park Hong in 2020’s Minor Feelings. “Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort, to peck yourself to death.” This becomes the unspoken philosophy behind Albert and Jennifer’s so-called “Asian freedom tour,” wherein they attempt to go “full Western” by berating their parents, yelling at their bosses, goofing off at their jobs, and going to therapy. “Instigating a fight with our family sounds like a full and satisfying evening of entertainment,” says Jennifer. 

Unfortunately, it is not. The trouble with Tiger Style! (directed for Writers by Brian Balcom) is that it not only illustrates racial self-hatred and its roots in white supremacy, it performs such hatred upon its characters, who are cartoonish, unlikeable, and ultimately act the part of stooges to their own oppression. Albert and Jennifer embody stereotypes of the model minority and abhor themselves for it (“ . . . the Chinese American Ivy Leaguer who went into medicine—you’re the vanilla ice cream of Asians,” scoffs Albert of Jennifer). Despite the reminder that their grandparents were laundry workers and farm laborers who struggled to raise their families from poverty to middle class under drastically more discriminatory conditions, they spend nearly the entire two hours aspiring for nothing better than to become the mediocre white men who dominate them. 

When their academic and artistic achievements don’t bring them satisfaction in their lives, and straight imitation fails to transform them into full-fledged mainstream white Americans, they quit their jobs and book a one-way trip to Shenzhen to colonize the motherland like the deluded puppets they are. “How are you going to dominate China?” asks Albert. “I’m gonna ride a panda?” says Jennifer. “I’m gonna bungee jump the Great Wall!” 

China, in the form of the Communist Party and their self-sacrificing factory worker cousin Chen (Deanna Myers, who also plays their mother, a matchmaker, and a therapist, if that’s not too Freudian), rightly slaps the two upside the head but, in its depiction, is about the equivalent of Toyland in Pinocchio: parodically gratifying, then horrifying, in which a more mature parental figure who is herself imprisoned within the system sets them free to a freedom conditioned by the constraints of capitalist reality (but I digress). 

In other words, Albert and Jennifer not only never transcend white expectations of them—they are those expectations played out like a minstrel show. Rather than offer a narrative that might reveal nuance, dimension, and humanity, Tiger Style! makes no gesture toward an interiority that might suggest that the siblings deserve something better than the life that has been foisted upon them by strict parenting and American culture. The best it can do is offer the briefest flashes of insight as asides (“But what if we’re viewing China as tourists, and everything seems more exotic and vibrant than it actually is? Like in the same way others viewed us as exotic back home,” wonders Jennifer briefly, before succumbing again to a haze of cheap consumer goods and paternalistic government practices).

The satire of Tiger Style!, if it is one, might be too subtle for white audiences, and, as one of three Asians in the audience on October 8, it remains painful to hear others laugh when Albert and Jennifer get bullied by dumb white dudes and otherwise launch themselves into walls. Mr. Lew, as a writer from Irvine, California, with the wrong kind of “Dr.” in front of my name, whose achievements have brought me into the game as long as I remain quiet, hardworking, and dedicated to a position of servitude, I share your frustrations at the limitations of American society. But for whom or what is this play, which does not contradict the stereotypes it claims to challenge but rather affirms them? Tiger Style! certainly holds a mirror up to white American society, but as long as white people cannot see themselves in the faces of Asian folks, the message cannot be transmitted.

I give you back your own words:

Albert: “But the answer can’t be glacial generational progress. It can’t just be family endurance. At some point other people have to change and acknowledge our right to exist.”

Mom: “Yes but we can’t change the world, only you.” 

Read More

Albert Chen (Christopher Thomas Pow) is sitting on a park bench eating what appears to be a burrito or a hot pocket when a hunched old man, dressed in an intersection of athleisure and preppie that signals respectability, comfort, and a baseline certainty of invisibility, shuffles in. “Hey! You Chinese?” he hollers. Albert, though he is, in fact, Chinese—rather, third-generation Chinese American—mutters, “That doesn’t mean we’re like bonded.” 

“This weird old man was . . . racially profiling me,” he tells white coworker Russ the Bus (Garrett Lutz), who proceeds to racially profile Albert as a diligent robot whose most interesting attribute might be where he’s from (“Uyghur from Kyrgyzstan . . . Tibetan raised by Nepalese monks . . . Vietnamese raised by wolves”), before demanding that Albert, once more, share the code that he worked on while Russ slacked. “I was raised to believe in sacrificing my individual needs for the sake of the group,” notes Albert. “So fine. I will give you my code. Again.” 

Tiger Style!Through 10/30: Wed and Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sun 2 and 6 PM; open captions Thu 10/20, Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $35-$90

Racial self-hatred is the subject of Mike Lew’s Tiger Style! in which Albert and his older sister Jennifer (Aurora Adachi-Winter), who are American-born, Harvard-educated, and live together in Irvine, California, blame their upbringing for their shortcomings, and their white (and whitewashed) colleagues are only too happy to let them do it. Albert is a software engineer who can’t get a promotion from his Asian American boss (Rammel Chan, who also plays the aforementioned old man and Albert and Jennifer’s father), who finds Albert “unrelatable” compared to Russ, even if he does all the work. Jennifer is an oncologist who can’t get her deadbeat man-child white boyfriend (played by Lutz), whom she supports financially and who finds her exotic but neither domestically submissive nor sexually domineering enough, to marry her. Could traditional Chinese cultural values, such as humility, collectivity, and hard work, be to blame for their failure to find happiness in white American society? Albert and Jennifer are ready to believe. 

“Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy,” wrote Cathy Park Hong in 2020’s Minor Feelings. “Your only defense is to be hard on yourself, which becomes compulsive, and therefore a comfort, to peck yourself to death.” This becomes the unspoken philosophy behind Albert and Jennifer’s so-called “Asian freedom tour,” wherein they attempt to go “full Western” by berating their parents, yelling at their bosses, goofing off at their jobs, and going to therapy. “Instigating a fight with our family sounds like a full and satisfying evening of entertainment,” says Jennifer. 

Unfortunately, it is not. The trouble with Tiger Style! (directed for Writers by Brian Balcom) is that it not only illustrates racial self-hatred and its roots in white supremacy, it performs such hatred upon its characters, who are cartoonish, unlikeable, and ultimately act the part of stooges to their own oppression. Albert and Jennifer embody stereotypes of the model minority and abhor themselves for it (“ . . . the Chinese American Ivy Leaguer who went into medicine—you’re the vanilla ice cream of Asians,” scoffs Albert of Jennifer). Despite the reminder that their grandparents were laundry workers and farm laborers who struggled to raise their families from poverty to middle class under drastically more discriminatory conditions, they spend nearly the entire two hours aspiring for nothing better than to become the mediocre white men who dominate them. 

When their academic and artistic achievements don’t bring them satisfaction in their lives, and straight imitation fails to transform them into full-fledged mainstream white Americans, they quit their jobs and book a one-way trip to Shenzhen to colonize the motherland like the deluded puppets they are. “How are you going to dominate China?” asks Albert. “I’m gonna ride a panda?” says Jennifer. “I’m gonna bungee jump the Great Wall!” 

China, in the form of the Communist Party and their self-sacrificing factory worker cousin Chen (Deanna Myers, who also plays their mother, a matchmaker, and a therapist, if that’s not too Freudian), rightly slaps the two upside the head but, in its depiction, is about the equivalent of Toyland in Pinocchio: parodically gratifying, then horrifying, in which a more mature parental figure who is herself imprisoned within the system sets them free to a freedom conditioned by the constraints of capitalist reality (but I digress). 

In other words, Albert and Jennifer not only never transcend white expectations of them—they are those expectations played out like a minstrel show. Rather than offer a narrative that might reveal nuance, dimension, and humanity, Tiger Style! makes no gesture toward an interiority that might suggest that the siblings deserve something better than the life that has been foisted upon them by strict parenting and American culture. The best it can do is offer the briefest flashes of insight as asides (“But what if we’re viewing China as tourists, and everything seems more exotic and vibrant than it actually is? Like in the same way others viewed us as exotic back home,” wonders Jennifer briefly, before succumbing again to a haze of cheap consumer goods and paternalistic government practices).

The satire of Tiger Style!, if it is one, might be too subtle for white audiences, and, as one of three Asians in the audience on October 8, it remains painful to hear others laugh when Albert and Jennifer get bullied by dumb white dudes and otherwise launch themselves into walls. Mr. Lew, as a writer from Irvine, California, with the wrong kind of “Dr.” in front of my name, whose achievements have brought me into the game as long as I remain quiet, hardworking, and dedicated to a position of servitude, I share your frustrations at the limitations of American society. But for whom or what is this play, which does not contradict the stereotypes it claims to challenge but rather affirms them? Tiger Style! certainly holds a mirror up to white American society, but as long as white people cannot see themselves in the faces of Asian folks, the message cannot be transmitted.

I give you back your own words:

Albert: “But the answer can’t be glacial generational progress. It can’t just be family endurance. At some point other people have to change and acknowledge our right to exist.”

Mom: “Yes but we can’t change the world, only you.” 

Read More