Our Claim On Our Culture

Your background doesn’t make you an expert.

By: Sophia Ong

Photo by: Layan Boulon

At the tail end of 2025, a TikTok user posted a video complaining about seeing white people in Asian grocery stores like H-Mart. Holding a (symbolic?) bunch of green onions with two hands, she says she “can’t stop herself from giving snark” to non-Asian shoppers around her. 

Two sides arose from this issue, as usual on social media. Those agreeing with the user and pointing to instances of racist jokes made in grocery stores about unfamiliar foods or the gentrification of traditional Asian foods, and those arguing that gatekeeping grocery stores and the food within them is ridiculous. 

I’m somewhere in the middle. If anything, this whole debacle exposed to me some nuanced, uncomfortable truths about culture and what we “gatekeep”. 

As a Chinese-American, I only feel qualified to speak about the Asian-American sector of this discussion, but I believe this discussion has implications for many other cultures. It’s clear that there have been multiple instances of the gentrification of Asian food, where non-Asian people will take something like matcha or pho, and “reinvent” it in some non-traditional way to sell it for higher prices. 

But the ferocity with which Asian-Americans seem to fight these cultural attacks seems disproportionate to the level at which they resonate with their own Asian culture. 

Here’s my disclaimer: of course, culture diffuses. Of course, there isn’t any “right” way to be Asian-American, and no one should be shamed because they never learned how to speak Cantonese or Filipino. But it is much easier for me to sit down at a table with my aunts and grandparents and fill my stomach with sticky rice and chicken feet than it was for me to learn every accent in Mandarin and memorize “Jingle Bells” in Chinese. 

I suspect that the way some Asian-Americans will rally around their cultural foods has to do with a) pride, of course, but also b) a way to grapple with their lack of engagement with the other, deeper parts of their culture. 

Ube becoming popular should not be a personal affliction to you. Understand that a cultural food becoming popular outside your cultural group means more awareness and money going into the pockets of the people who produce it. There is no reason to get upset at seeing people from different backgrounds shopping at your favorite ethnic store, unless it brings about a feeling of insecurity that the one hold you have on your culture doesn’t inherently belong to you. 

We also must be aware of selectivity. We can’t be ashamed of the parts of our culture that are less palatable to a Western audience, while simultaneously championing and gatekeeping the parts that have become more popular. 

The idea of belonging is critical here. 

We belong to a culture, or many cultures, and it’s perfectly okay and wonderful to celebrate that culture. But our culture doesn't belong to us.