We are the Other - 38th Street & Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis, MN I love wings (pun intended). The best for my money was Shorty & Wags Original Wings, which had been on this corner for over 30 years. The tired-looking owners (perpetually behind the counter and in the kitchen) were white, the clientele mostly black, and I was always the only Asian in the room. There are few things that transcend race, a really good chicken wing joint being one of them. They closed several months ago and I’ll really miss them. A couple of weeks ago after returning from my China trip, I was startled to see this grinning signage. The former Shorty & Wags had been stripped of its façade to reveal an image from the previous original wing joint (Art Song’s, which I vaguely remember). The coolie hat wearing, cross-eyed buck-toothed Chinaman seems a holdover from the not-so-long ago, nostalgic pre-post racial era of my youth. We’ve come so far. In popular culture we’ve evolved from Mickey Rooney-esque caricatures to kung fu classics, nerds and geeks who never get the girl, and crazy, naked Asian guys who jump out of car trunks. Thank god for Jeremy Lin.
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We are the Other - 38th Street & Nicollet Avenue, Minneapolis, MN

I love wings (pun intended). The best for my money was Shorty & Wags Original Wings, which had been on this corner for over 30 years. The tired-looking owners (perpetually behind the counter and in the kitchen) were white, the clientele mostly black, and I was always the only Asian in the room. There are few things that transcend race, a really good chicken wing joint being one of them. They closed several months ago and I’ll really miss them.

A couple of weeks ago after returning from my China trip, I was startled to see this grinning signage. The former Shorty & Wags had been stripped of its façade to reveal an image from the previous original wing joint (Art Song’s, which I vaguely remember). The coolie hat wearing, cross-eyed buck-toothed Chinaman seems a holdover from the not-so-long ago, nostalgic pre-post racial era of my youth.

We’ve come so far. In popular culture we’ve evolved from Mickey Rooney-esque caricatures to kung fu classics, nerds and geeks who never get the girl, and crazy, naked Asian guys who jump out of car trunks. Thank god for Jeremy Lin.