Dave Chappelle grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland (which was roughly 77% White), while commuting into Washington, D.C., to attend the Duke Ellington School of the Arts (where the student body was about 85% to 90% Black).
That background enabled him to act as a cultural bridge between two worlds. A similar dynamic applies to some extent to Joe Rogan, whose hippie, tree-hugging, soon-to-be-divorced parents moved him from San Francisco to the Boston area. Decades later, that shared frequency came full circle in 2021 when Chappelle brought Rogan on as a supporting act.
I have watched all of Chappelle’s specials, and I even saw him live at the worst comedy venue possible. I was pretty sure it was at the Irvine Amphitheatre, and thanks to the power of the internet, I now know it was on September 15, 2013. Like those two, I had a very similar experience going from what I call Cowarado, even though I saw no cows, to California, the land of raisins and Asians. Yeah, I wrote extensively elsewhere about what that transition was like, so now I want to write a short piece that focuses on my parents and my own connections to the Chinese and Taiwanese communities growing up.
My second “girlfriend,” back in high school in Colorado, was Chinese, and thinking back, I want to say she had HK vibes. Actually, I know it was definitely Hong Kong, not mainland China, because I remember a family member of hers, I think it was her sister or sister-in-law, had an English accent, and whenever she got pissed she’d say, “bloody hell.” Her family and extended family, including her brother-in-law, had lived in LA prior, if I remember right. Her uncle, whose name I think was Andy, got me hooked and sealed my love for cars, and more importantly import tuner cars. One day while I was out, I still remember the first time I saw his blacked-out, lowered ’86-’87 Honda Civic Si with a Mugen kit, limo tint, Mugen exhaust, 15” Autoform wheels, a Porsche Design steering wheel, and 205/50-15 Yokohama A008s. That spec sheet stood out back then, but what’s even more impressive is that a build like that would be respected at any local car show today.
Before I go any further about that Chinese family living a few minutes away, I have to go back some. Back when I was a wee kid, around 11 years old would be my guess, I remember my sister and I always fighting over the Chinese food leftovers from Great Wall Chinese Restaurant off of Havana in Aurora, Colorado (now it’s a Korean BBQ spot, even though that’s really grilling, not barbecue, and next door is an adult store). One of our favorite dishes was “Szechuan beef” served over a stringy, dark bed of greens. For decades, I thought it was possibly ong choy or kong xin cai because it looked like it, and it had a distinctive taste with the thin cuts of beef that I have never, ever found another place able to replicate the way they did. Since we loved it so much way back then, we were told it was watercress, though I still had my doubts because culinary translations always get muddied; if you ask what iriko or niboshi is in English, you’ll get mixed results flipping between anchovies and sardines. Luckily, just like finding the exact date I saw Chappelle in Irvine, I wasn’t able to confirm with confidence that it actually was watercress until I wrote this. According to you-know-who (it rhymes with Hey Hi), that “bed of greens” in Cantonese and Hong Kong restaurants “was a traditional way of plating hot stir-fried shredded or sliced beef (niú ròu sī) directly over an uncooked or flash-blanched bed of watercress, a standard technique. The boiling-hot savory sauce (soy, garlic, ginger, oyster sauce, and starch) wilts the delicate upper leaves tableside while leaving the long, tangled stems crunchy and distinctly stringy.”
Because of that dish and that spot, my parents got to know the owners well. Whenever we ate out, it was rarely, if ever, Japanese food; it was always either Piccolo’s for pizza or Great Wall. Unfortunately, the owners of Great Wall eventually closed up shop and retired. Their son, Peter Chan, who had worked strictly in the front of the house, started his own spot in downtown Denver off of 13th in 1985, so that watercress beef dish sadly did not make the transition. Throughout the years, even if he couldn’t replicate the Szechuan beef, Peter did get me out of a ticket. At one point, I even poorly helped him out a few times delivering take-out orders, way back before MapQuest or Google and Apple Maps existed, when you had to have downtown Denver memorized and locked down even though I lived near the DTC. Aside from that, my most memorable moments with Peter happened more than once when I was working back of the house at Sushi Den, the top Japanese sushi spot in Denver, and he’d just walk himself right into the back of the kitchen. Peter is the type of dude with real presence, meaning you won’t forget him, if you know what I mean. That is why he stayed in business so long, greeting and knowing everyone, chatting it up while taking and randomly shouting orders with all the regulars and locals in the neighborhood. Luckily, in January 2025, after 40 years of operating the cafe, he transferred ownership directly to his seven longtime employees, including kitchen staff and delivery drivers, and retired for good.
Peter is a longtime acquaintance, but when it came to my dad’s own circle of friends, one of the main ones was Harlan Chan. We feared Harlan as kids because not only was he fairly tall, he would always pinch our cheeks hard, not just once, but every single time he saw us. Throughout the decades growing up in Colorado, out of all my dad’s friends, the three we saw the most were Harlan, a German couple with their two daughters (I’m not sure about their whereabouts now), and Herman Casagranda, known simply as “Cas” (RIP, 1917 to 2011). Out of the three, I have to go off on a quick tangent to mention Cas’s wife, Lucy, and his two sons, Steve and Mike, whom I didn’t remember until my mom filled me in on them. Cas was a prominent mid-century Colorado artist, educator, and copper enameler. As kids, we remembered him best because he had a cabin or chalet up in Frisco featuring a large knight he had crafted, a flex of his metal-smithing skillz; thinking back, I wonder how big that knight actually was, because to us kids, it seemed massive. Those were the three friends of my dad’s we saw most often, and if you ask me how they all knew each other, as usual, I don’t know.
Once I moved to California, I was initially around the Viet community in San Jose, on the East Side. Later on, my neighborhood and business were off Saratoga Ave. That is also where I met a girl who told me something along the lines of being Chinese, but actually Taiwanese. I remember just thinking, “Okay, sure,” with no deep understanding of what that meant; to me, she was just someone who took violin lessons, went to Cal, and knew what “whey” was when playing Scrabble, cuz tutors, while I just had cartoons.
During my time in the Bay Area, aside from the Viets in San Ho, every single business contact I dealt with when I had my shop was Chinese (don’t be like Jesse Plemons in the movie Civil War and ask me, “What kind of Chinese?”). That included spots like Autosport Performance, Phil’s shop, which I think was called Fantasy Motorsports (if I remembered that right, my memory doesn’t totally suck), Leo’s shop with Will at Revolution Motorsports, and of course Dave Shih. Beyond work, after I closed up shop and started contracting, I lived and hung out with a bunch of Thai people. Those were some really good times, which included driving what would later turn out to be a stolen Lotus Esprit in the Hayward Hills.
When I came back to Colorado for a short stint, I think right around Y2K and prior to the dot-com bust, I dated a 5’9″ Taiwanese girl whom I will nickname NHY (just going by her initials). Unlike back in San Jose where the distinction didn’t really register, she was the one who actually exposed me to what it is to be Taiwanese. She loved vegetables, including the aforementioned kong xin cai, which I learned about from her, along with stinky tofu and what I dubbed “butthole hot pot,” aka lǔ dàcháng. The reason I can mark that exact timeframe is not only because I was already shooting on a digital camera back then and have time-stamped pics, but also because when her mom flew in from Taiwan to visit, I moronically took her to go watch Black Hawk Down, which was released nationwide in the United States on January 18, 2002, regardless of the fact that she didn’t speak English. I figured, hey, her mom was military, so she might enjoy it, though of course I was the one who really enjoyed it.
Because NHY was always seeking out legit food, we ate at China Beijing so often that I somehow ended up building their website, and more importantly, I got to know the two operators, Bing and Lee. Although my memory is a little foggy on the exact relation, I believe it was Bing’s brother still living in China who actually had the money to invest in the restaurant. Whenever his brother came out from China to visit, they would rent a Cadillac and he would go on massive shopping sprees for high-end goods. At the time, it was something I couldn’t fathom, as they explained that the supply chains in China were so untrustworthy that the only way to guarantee genuine products was to buy them abroad. Except, much like when I was first told the vague differentiation between being Chinese and Taiwanese back in California, another detail never fully registered with me at the time: even though his brother was doing well financially over there, the whole reason they set up shop here in the US and worked so hard was so he wouldn’t have to raise his kids in China.
I don’t like to use the word “crazy,” but it is crazy how I didn’t grasp the weight of that back then to the degree I get it now, over two decades later. Back then, you could still spot mainland Chinese businessmen by their less-than-stellar suits, and China had just joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) on December 11, 2001, becoming its 143rd member after 15 years of negotiations. At the time, the disillusioned US assumption was that China would turn out just like our ally Japan, thinking that if their economy grew, that was all they needed and they would naturally lose interest in the whole communism thing. As historian Sarah Paine at the U.S. Naval War College has broken down, the West projected its own maritime-power mindset onto Beijing, assuming trade creates shared prosperity and democracy, while failing to grasp that continental dictatorships only use economic wealth to entrench the regime’s power (wait till you see how they use AI). That is the exact reason high-net-worth individuals like Bing’s brother have been trying to get their money and their kids out of China ever since, despite the CCP trying to thwart it.
Several decades later, when I wrote my manuscript, I realized I had never done an actual tally of who I had dated over the years. As a dude, I had did do the casual mental checklist before: Pinay, check; Japanese, check; White mutts, check, Korean, check; Vietnamese, check; an ethnic Korean of German nationality, check; half-Black and half-Japanese, check; Black, check; Bolivian, check; Puerto Rican, check. Yet I had never really stopped to realize how many of the women I dated were Taiwanese. That might sound like a body-count flex, but my main reasoning behind it all is to illustrate the diversity of my circle and how ethnicity and nationality were never an issue amongst us Asians and everyone else in California. Yes, some were first-generation immigrants, and the rest were almost all Asian Americans.
Growing up in Colorado, the vast majority of my friends were White. After moving out west, I lived with a French (Charles) and Russian (Sveta) couple, along with Chinese roommates, in a place right on 5th across the street from San Jose State University (SJSU). Later on, I moved in with Charles and Sveta, and we lived with another French dude. When they moved to Texas, and later during my decade in Newport Beach, I oddly enough ended up renting a room out to a French dude, a Portuguese dude, and a British girl. However, during this time and for the next couple of decades, my circle stretched from Filipino friends to a lot of Korean homies from Colorado who were also living in California.
With 2027 approaching, the target date Xi has set to take the sovereign country of Taiwan and the exact year I plan on being in Asia, I find myself looking back at my own frame of reference. I grew up in a predominantly White neighborhood with Black immediate neighbors, where the Denver Buddhist Temple was my only connection to the Japanese American community. Later, living everywhere from the Bay Area to LA, both my family’s relations and my own relations with mainland Chinese, Hong Kongers, and Taiwanese people were always frictionless, like well-lubed rod bearings. Except now, with every libtard thinking communism is cool, saying anything bad about any minority makes you racist because they act like they are the moral authority. When it comes to geopolitics, they simply take the side of the underdog out of performative virtue. To them, Japan and China are the same, except when it comes to what Japan did to China, which makes China the underdog and Japan, like the West, the villain. All the while, they speak over Asian Americans like me.
That is why I feel compelled to do whatever I can to thwart the CCP’s nationalism, which only exists to stay in power by creating these BS hostilities when it’s the people in power causing all the problems. It’s draining because no other country on the planet is stoking regional volatility like China. You might say the US is too, but the sheer volume of Chinese spies, sabotage, illicit bioweapons facilities, cyberattacks, and threats against Japan, a US ally, to cut off Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s head is entirely asymmetrical. China is the objective aggressor, and across Asia, they have been the largest imperialist power. Their gray-zone tactics, total disregard for international law, and habit of operating with complete impunity are why Greenpeace and every other environmental NGO are powerless against China (I seriously researched that because I thought, “Why the eff do they never call out China?”), even though China is the world’s biggest polluter and is negatively impacting marine life globally. Except none of that seems to matter, and the most disconcerting part is that people think and vote along party lines, and I am calling it now that they would back communist China over the rules-based international order, including Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.
“We have no choice but to chop off that dirty neck that has lunged at us without a moment’s hesitation. Are you ready?”
Xue Jian (薛剑), Consul-General of the People’s Republic of China in Osaka
I experience a commercial version of this on a daily basis due to what I do. If you see any product online hyping that it is Japanese, it most likely is not Japanese, because Japan’s top site is still Yahoo! Japan and Japanese companies largely lack a digital footprint, especially outside of Japan. Instead, Chinese-linked commercial entities have used Japanese naming, characters, and imagery to fill that void and claim an association they have not earned. Genki Forest sold beverages with the Japanese character “気,” Japanese-style packaging, and text claiming supervision by a Japanese company while manufacturing in China. Miniso used Japanese characters in its logos and signage, store layouts modeled on Japanese retailers, and marketing that positioned it as a Japanese designer brand. Cosmetics brands have used Japanese-style romanization of Chinese names. Packaged foods have carried Japanese characters and “Hokkaido”-style claims while being made in China. Cookware sellers on e-commerce platforms have run fabricated “Japanese craftsman” stories for products manufactured in China. In each case, the presentation captures an association the operator has not earned. Japan does not run the reverse. Japanese brands do not adopt Chinese naming or imagery to claim an association they have not earned.
As for the ordinary Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese people I have known for decades, I do not even associate them with all the CCP drama. The problem is the commercial entities operating with the complicit approval of the CCP; in fact, they encourage the fraud, scamming, and other tactics their citizens can wreak. CCP nationalism and origin misrepresentation are not the people, but the regime looks the other way and encourages it and it is well documented. The law makes the people part of it whether they like it or not, under Article 7 (along with Articles 28 and 52): “Any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work in accordance with the law, and keep secret any state intelligence work secrets that they become aware of. The State shall protect individuals and organizations that support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work.” The Thousand Talents Plan then reaches past citizens to the diaspora, with two prongs: the CCP can employ anyone who is ethnically Chinese, and it asks them to willingly betray the US. Either way, the regime erases the line between the person and the state. Both the manufactured nationalism and the Western framing that collapses that distinction or treats the state as an underdog deserve to be rejected. My personal contacts and that commercial pattern supply the grounds, and the 2027 timing is the occasion.
Growing up in a predominantly White state like Colorado, I feel like a cultural bridge, much like Dave and Joe. What that meant was I didn’t inherit old-school regional or group tribalism; instead, my identity and passions were shaped by the Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese people who fed my family, who I dated, who got me further into my love for cars, who did business with me, or who were straight-up my homies. Because I have five decades of lived proof that Japanese, mainland Chinese, HKers, and Taiwanese people naturally coexist without hostility, I refuse to stay quiet as tensions heat up and 2027 approaches, pushing back against both the CCP’s manufactured nationalism and the predominantly White Western ideologues who hide behind “anti-racism” to excuse a dictatorship, yet think Thailand and Taiwan are the same place. Yes, Becky and Karen, I’m talking to you.
A total lack of knowledge about Asia and Asians doesn’t stop a lot of people from treating their feelings like facts. I remember an RTD light rail operator here in Colorado, an older, bearded, heavyset White dude, telling me, “China’s not communist.” Here I am, an obvious Asian dude, and I know he has no idea whether I’m Chinese or Japanese, because Hank Hill doesn’t even know, yet he had no problem telling me what China is or isn’t. I think it started to sink in, because he turned and walked away.
