Can a font be racist?

Is there such thing as a racist font? Can the design and branding of a restaurant come across as racist, but also profit from culturally and linguistically diverse groups at the same time?

Absolutely.

Enter Johnny Hu Chinese Restaurant, soon to open in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. Alarm bells ringing. I hate everything about this restaurant already, but it was an Instagram story they posted that grinded my gears.

I can’t really believe I have to put this down in black and white, but using this chopstick font, Chinese restaurant font, chop suey font, wonton font - whatever the fuck you want to call it - is offensive, backwards and just plain foolish.

Jeff Yang said it best in his 2012 article “Is your font racist?”

The roots of the font seem to be an attempt to emulate the swashing brushstrokes used in Chinese calligraphy. “But of course, the problem is that they were drawing these fonts, not painting, and following pen conventions rather than brush ones,” he says. “That’s why you get these stark daggerlike shapes, that to the untrained eye, may look like ‘Asian’ script” — but which in reality simply signify a generic exotic, non-Western aesthetic.
Since they were first invented, chop suey/chopstick fonts have been used in a broad-spectrum manner to represent faux Asian culture, often paired with extremely stereotypical representations of Asian people. (“You’ll see caricatures with slanted eyes and buck teeth,” says Shaw.)

It’s particularly jarring to see a white creator, grinning from ear to ear as she proudly shows off her work. Her casualness - and which is encouraged by the restaurant operators - seemingly invokes the casual racism at play here, with the nonchalant use of yellowface font not even registering.

Especially if you are not of Chinese descent. Hey there might be some people with Chinese heritage involved - please @ me and I’ll retract everything.

But why do some Chinese restaurants still use this font?

“In many places it’s become a signaling device,” he says. “Fail to use this kind of lettering and you run the risk of being overlooked. If your sign is something really nice in Helvetica, people might go, ‘Is that really a Chinese restaurant?’ So there’s a commercial incentive for takeout places to use this typeface.

Even after I jokingly mentioned that the restaurant should get someone to look over the traditional Chinese characters included in their branding, Johnny Hu Chinese Restaurant didn’t seem irked by the obvious tone deafness of not even checking (cue bad examples of tattoos in Asia).

“Tell us tell us!!!!” was the response to me.

Whether you want to recognise it or not, using these fonts, along with the images of retro Asian culture, is a reminder for Chinese-Australians (heck all Asian-Australians) that they are always the “Other” and their differences can be capitalised and mocked for personal gain.

It’s a nod back to the horrific time of the Yellow Peril in the 19th and 20th Century, the good ol’ days of the white Australia Policy (“two Wongs don’t make a white”) and just a general fear of “being swamped by Asians” (shoutout to Pauline).

This is the rest of the restaurant’s wonderful branding so far:

So back to the font. Is your font racist? A simple Google search brought up these fantastic articles that are well worth a read (Johnny Hu Chinese Restaurant take note) and they explain it far better than I ever could.

The casual racism of yellowface fonts

Wonton font

Designing the Chinese American brand

Chop Suey Font

Many of these articles are really, really dated. Margaret Cho wrote hers back in 2012! That’s how backwards it is in Australia compared to the US, and we have a long way to go in education and awareness.

Food is always political. Food is resistance.