FRESNO, Calif. — David Rasavong’s cultural pride is evident all throughout his restaurant.
It’s on the wall of family portraits and where a stunning mural depicts his family’s journey from Laos to California. It’s on the menu filled with Lao and Thai dishes like the crispy coconut rice salad of Nam Khao and the stir-fried rice noodles of Pad See Ew.
And it’s in the fact that Love & Thai in Fresno, California, is open at all. A baseless accusation grounded in a racist stereotype about Asian food using dog meat brought a six-month barrage of harassment so heated that Rasavong, 41, closed down its previous location over fears for his family’s safety.
His earlier restaurant had itself only been open for seven months when a so-called animal welfare crusader in May implied on social media that a pitbull tied up at an unconnected home next door was going to be served on the menu.A day after the initial commentary, vitriolic statements, voicemails and calls rained down. Rasavong’s body still tenses up when recounting, in particular, a call from an elderly woman.
“She was so disgusted by me and yelling and screaming, and the only thing I can remember hearing her say at the end was ‘Go back to the country you came from you dog-eating mother-effer,’” Rasavong recently told The Associated Press.
Within days, he closed that restaurant because it no longer felt safe between the harassment and people loitering in the parking lot outside of business hours.
The false accusation tapped into a longstanding slur against Asian cuisines and cultures that has persisted in the U.S. for over 150 years, dating back to the xenophobia that grew in the U.S. after Chinese immigrants started arriving in more visible numbers in the 1800s and other Asian communities followed. It’s also one that Asian American communities are fighting against.
It may be astonishing to some that a claim rooted in a racist stereotype took down a family’s restaurant three years after “Stop…
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