He sees Uncle Roger as a way of pushing back against what someone could call "cultural appropriation." But not Uncle Roger. And now a bunch of people are going to go on with their day thinking, 'oh this is how it's done,' and further ruining the cuisine," he said. And he finds it disrespectful when someone is "bringing to their audience of how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people that – this is egg fried rice. He's also got his own YouTube cooking react channel. Tsao is behind the upcoming Mission Sandwich Social in Brooklyn, NY. "It feels like there still needs to be a lot of education around the fact that MSG is not bad for you, and that it's actually in everything, including a lot of Western foods," she said. "That's been one of the big culture war points of contention," says Jenny Lau, who runs Celestial Peach, a platform dedicated to telling the story of Chinese food. Uncle Roger has big love for it (at a recent show, Ng, as Uncle Roger, brought a bag of MSG on stage with him), but it's absent from a lot of Western cooking. Past the accent and the easy dirty jokes, there's almost a public service to these Uncle Roger videos when it comes to correcting the record on things Western chefs constantly get wrong about Asian cooking. Ng took that formula and ran with it, and suddenly no food media personality was safe from Uncle Roger – from established Food Network alumni like Jamie Oliver (a favorite target of his), Rachel Ray, and Nigella Lawson, to newer stars on the scene like Matty Matheson and Joshua Weissman. "Looking back on it, I realize I've combined three things that not many people have combined – the YouTube idiom 'the reaction video,' the character comedy and something relatable like food." Hiyaaaaa." The clip went viral, and the video currently sits at over 29.5 million views on YouTube. "Why you measure water with cup? Just use finger! Finger! You put rice, put water, until finger – first joint, the finger. To Ng, it was hilariously bad and primo content for an Uncle Roger takedown. A Rice to Meet You fan had sent it over, and Ng was going to do a react video to it anyway, but why not take this new bit on a test run? The BBC way of making egg fried rice, to put it gently, deviated from the norms of how an East Asian person might make egg fried rice. Ng tried doing a few things with the Uncle Roger character, but what really popped off was reacting to a BBC video of presenter Hersha Patel making egg fried rice. When we met for this interview in the middle of four sold-out shows in New York City, I'd forgotten to ask if he wanted to bring his orange polo for the photo shoot. So now, Uncle Roger always wears his signature orange polo (buttoned up to the top), with a huge phone case attached to his belt. And the look arose after Ng DM'ed all of his friends to text him pictures of their dads. The name Roger is a nod to the type of Anglicized name that's a by-product of colonization in Malaysia (kind of like Nigel, come to think of it). The rest of the character developed from there. He's a bit of a cooking know-it-all, even though he's not out here in a kitchen day in and day out. He talks a big game, but is loveable enough to call everyone niece and nephew. And then with that accent I threw in some attitude to kind of mimic my older generation Asian uncles" said Ng.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |