Uncle Roger, Go Fuck Yourself
Look, I didn’t want to write this article. I want my name to be associated with topics that are actually significant. But for better or worse, Uncle Roger is significant. The man has tricked ten million YouTube followers into thinking he’s funny. He’s convinced major cities across the world to let him book several stand-up tours. He’s rudely shoved himself into collaborations with almost every celebrity chef on the internet. And—in true food influencer fashion—he just opened a shitty overpriced restaurant that exists solely to milk his tired, obnoxious brand and that everyone’s going to forget about in a year or two. So for better or worse, I have to talk about this guy, because it doesn’t seem like he’s going to stop anytime soon.
But let me explain myself first. For those precious souls lucky enough not to know, Uncle Roger is the creation of one Nigel Ng, a stand-up comedian and influencer. The character speaks in an exaggerated Asian accent and wears an orange polo that seems to ask the question “What if Tom Scott was stupid?” Ng compares him to that one old Asian uncle who just likes to complain about everything. And complain he does, as countless videos on his channel are dedicated to roasting white chefs who mess up Asian dishes. Popular targets include well-established celebrity chefs like Jamie Oliver, Rachel Ray, and Nigella Lawson, but he’s roasted just about everyone with his facepalms and “haiyaas”. Whatever he does, it seems to work: he’s blown up on YouTube and seemingly no chef on the Internet can try to make Asian food without him hearing about it.
Now you may start to ask yourself, why would I be mad about this? It seems like his targets deserve what they get. And if you look at Jamie Oliver putting jam in his fried rice, and you cringe as much as I do, Uncle Roger’s videos seem pretty cathartic. But I’ve fallen out of love with his whole shtick because roasting white chefs is low-hanging fruit. A depressingly large number of them are fairly bad at Asian cuisine (so Uncle Roger’s probably never going to run out of content to react to). These videos do a good job pointing out the colonization-induced arrogance that many Western chefs display towards Asian food. But criticizing Asian food being done wrong is easy. Knowing what it means to do it right is hard. And it’s that second one where the cracks in Uncle Roger start showing.
When people criticize Uncle Roger, one of the first things to come up is inevitably the accent, often seen as a racist caricature. Kenji Lopez-Alt famously doesn’t like him for this reason. Other people will rush to his defense, claiming that the accent is legitimate and a perfectly fine way to represent a character whose first language isn’t English. Personally, though, I take no sides on the legitimacy of the accent, because it’s just not a very interesting question. What I’m going to focus on is the substance of Uncle Roger, the ideas the character promotes. If his purpose is to take down chefs who are bad at Asian food, what does he seek to replace them with? What has made his vision of Asian food so popular? And what are the limitations of his vision, the parts that he leaves out? Spoilers: he leaves out a lot.
In recent years, the use of MSG in Asian food has entered mainstream discourse in an interesting way. An increasing number of chefs and activists have defended it as a legitimate ingredient, pointing out that the health risks long associated with MSG have been exaggerated by racism against Asian people and food. These people have worked to legitimize MSG, already found in everything from Doritos to Parmesan, and make it a point of pride for Asian restaurants and cooks. Amidst this wave of activism, who should we find but Uncle Roger, the old curmudgeonly Asian guy, who likes MSG not out of solidarity with any antiracist activism but simply because Asian food is supposed to have MSG in it and that’s just how it goes. Any acknowledgement of the work that’s been done to make that a legitimate position goes ignored. Nigel Ng himself dismisses said activists in an interview for NPR, saying he doesn’t even want to be associated with them: “The day Uncle Roger comes out and says the words ‘cultural appropriation,’ just smack me in the face and tell me to stop doing comedy. That’s how I know I failed.” The message is clear: Uncle Roger won’t platform or collaborate with Asian activists but he’s perfectly willing to ride their coattails and profit off of their work. So much for him being our ally.
In fact, Nigel-Ng-as-Uncle-Roger has conveyed surprisingly conservative viewpoints on Asian food. Take, for instance, the time he said that Laotian and Cambodian food were just shittier versions of Thai food. In a move that should have surprised absolutely no one, the internet dogpiled on him for it, with even the Cambodian Ministry of Tourism condemning Uncle Roger’s words as racist. (Okay, that last part was a bit of a surprise.) His response was merely that “Asian people criticizing other Asian people is just a way of life.” He didn’t even try to distance himself from the character, claiming that Uncle Roger is the one that said it and not Nigel Ng. This was something that, for all intents and purposes, he genuinely believed. Okay, then. I really shouldn’t need to mention the fact that the Thai government has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into promoting its own cuisine as a sort of gastronomic propaganda. To dismiss Lao and Cambodian food as inferior is to buy into that propaganda unquestioningly. A few seconds of googling could have disproved Uncle Roger and ended this “joke” before it even started. But I guess basic research skills aren’t funny to this guy.
Another thing that’s rather baffling when you actually start to think about it is Uncle Roger’s complete unwillingness to explore vegetarian food, claiming that only white people care about not consuming meat. To be clear, there are a lot of (mostly elderly) Asian people who act like this, and it’s easy to see where he gets the idea from. But it makes no sense for a person who seemingly cares about representing Asian food to a Western audience to ignore an entire world of plant-based recipes. You’re saying that Buddhist temple cuisine doesn’t exist? You’re saying there aren’t a million ways to cook tofu, mushrooms, or yuba? One of my earliest food memories of Taiwan is going to a vegetarian restaurant with my family, an increasingly common sight in twenty-first century Taiwan. (The mock duck looked especially interesting.) But there’s no place for food like this in Uncle Roger’s world, which really just makes me sad. He and his audience miss out on so much interesting food because he’s stuck doing this bit. Dismissing vegetarianism as a “Western thing” is laughable—and not in the way it’s intended to be.
Occasionally, Uncle Roger is willing to make small concessions to his narrow-minded, elitist outlook on Asian food. When a Lao chef rightfully called him out on his prejudice towards Lao food, he made a video with her just to learn about it. He’s acknowledged the legitimacy of vegan fish sauce and vegetarian curries. You know what he’s never done, though? Accept that Asian people with food allergies exist. It’s been four years since Peanut Allergy Guy and nobody’s ever called him out on it—I guess it’s up to me to be the first. Alright then, kids! Who wants a flashback?
Now, I’m bringing this up because it’s fucking personal. I’ve been living with food allergies for basically my whole life. I know perfectly well there are dishes I’ll never get to eat. I know there are whole countries in Asia that I can’t visit because I won’t be able to safely feed myself while I’m there. And I know there are plenty of Asians like Uncle Roger who can’t accept that food allergies exist, or who can’t accept the precautions you need to take when you have them. I also know there are plenty of Asians with food allergies who suffer daily because their parents don’t teach their children what they are. I know this because some of them are my actual uncles.
In a lot of ways, though, I got lucky. When my grandmother first immigrated to the US, she worked in a Chinese restaurant for years and learned how to cook for the small Taiwanese American community around her. When I was diagnosed with food allergies as a baby, things began to slide into place for her. She knew there were certain ingredients she didn’t like, because she always felt terrible after eating them, but she hadn’t known why for the longest time. Eventually it turned out she had food allergies too, but she never had the language to describe them until I came along. After that, she spent years remaking old Taiwanese classics so I could eat them. She was never the kind of person to ask “why can’t you just take off the peanuts?” She suffered directly under that mentality. She was the kind of person to take all the peanuts out of the kitchen, clean the whole place from top to bottom, and then make the version of the dish without peanuts even better than the original.
I wasn’t the only person to benefit from my grandmother’s cooking renaissance. Lots of the dishes she learned how to make in an allergy-friendly way were things she had never made from scratch beforehand. My whole family soon realized they were better than the store-bought versions, and from then on, my grandmother would never stop cooking huge batches of homemade, allergy-friendly Taiwanese food for all of us. As I got older, I learned how to cook for myself as well, because I knew I’d have to as an adult. And yes, it’s expensive, and it’s five times as much work as eating out, and sometimes I do wish things could be easier. But I make my version of Taiwanese cuisine with effort and care, and I make it to honor the years of work my grandmother put in to figure it all out. That’s what real Asian food looks like: it has the empathy and flexibility to adapt to the needs of anyone who wants to eat it, and it’s straight-up higher quality food because it’s forced to be. It also does all of that while defending itself from white people trying to appropriate it.
All of this is to say: the people who defend Uncle Roger by saying “at least he’s realistic” completely miss the point. He represents precisely the kind of Asian person that shouldn’t exist! The people in my life who act like Uncle Roger are the ones who least understand food. The people who care about food allergies understand Asian food as an art form, and they elevate their own cooking from copying dishes to creating them. This is work that takes effort. This is work that takes patience and creativity to pull off. And it’s work that Uncle Roger is never going to understand, because he isn’t smart enough to understand it.
Nigel Ng’s bio on his Youtube page reads: “Not a chef, I just complain.” And I’ll give it to him, he’s right. That one fact explains everything about his videos. Lacking any real depth of knowledge of Asian food, and faced with creating a character that supposedly does, what’s the only thing he can do? Default to stereotypes. Hence the accent. Hence the same sad, tired jokes in every video. Hence the old cranky Asian man who can’t accept change, because every Asian is like that according to white people. But it gets views! It gets all the fucking views on the internet! And real Asian food, made with personality and empathy and understanding, gets shafted because of shitty, effortless slop like this guy makes.
So fuck Uncle Roger. Fuck the exactly six jokes he repeats in every video. Fuck his not-even-half-effort at activism. Fuck his lousy cooking skills that he tries to impress actual chefs with. Fuck him and all the Asians who still act like allergies don’t exist. Fuck his restaurant that overcharges for middling egg fried rice. Fuck eggs while we’re at it. Fuck his stupid clickbait thumbnails. Fuck his zero-substance roasts of Jamie Oliver. Fuck this attention-hoarding, stereotype-filled, pretend-expert, barely-comedic, uninteresting, pathetic, vapid excuse for a character. I am tired of even thinking about Uncle Roger, so after all that he needs to go and fuck himself.
This may be a bit of an unexpected turn, but I genuinely like Nigel Ng, the actual human being. He’s done interviews for outlets like Wired and Mythical Kitchen, and when he’s not performing, you get to see someone totally different from Uncle Roger. He strikes me as a person who’s passionate about food even if he can’t cook (lots of people are—he’s not alone there). Where Uncle Roger is frequently a stuck-in-the-mud conservative when it comes to his tastes, Nigel seems to actually like learning about different foods. His real accent, far from a caricature, is a mix of Malaysian, British, and American English, reflecting all the places he’s lived in. I may disagree with him on certain issues, but one thing is clear: he is far more than the one-dimensional character the internet compels him to play. [deep breath] Also, I DON’T NEED YOU TO FORCE UNCLE ROGER INTO EVERY INTERVIEW YOU DO. IT ISN’T REMOTELY FUNNY OR INTERESTING WHEN YOU DO THIS. HE’S NOT A REAL PERSON WITH A REAL PERSONALITY. HE DOESN’T NEED ANYONE TO ASK HIS OPINIONS ON ANYTHING, BECAUSE HE ONLY HAS LIKE TEN OF THEM, WHICH YOU’VE ALREADY REPEATED IN EVERY FUCKING VIDEO YOU MAKE.
But brands? They sacrifice their ability to evolve in order to become commodities. And when they die, nobody cares enough to bring them back. They vanish out of view, then out of memory, and then out of significance. And thus is the way Uncle Roger is destined to go.
So Nigel, this last part’s addressed to you. Uncle Roger has, for better or worse, blown up beyond anything you could have imagined. In the process, what’s happened to him—and I’m sure you’ve known this ever since the restaurant opened—is that he’s no longer a character. He’s become a brand. And that’s a subtle change, but it’s a critical one. Characters are reinterpreted by people through generations, and thus they can be resurrected indefinitely. But brands? They sacrifice their ability to evolve in order to become commodities. And when they die, nobody cares enough to bring them back. They vanish out of view, then out of memory, and then out of significance. And thus is the way Uncle Roger is destined to go.
With that, I ask you: why wait for him to die? Why drag out the inevitable expiration of your brand? Give him up now and move on with your life. Make some content with actual effort put into it. Be like Gordon Ramsay, or Esther Choi, or Martin Yan—the people you actually seem to admire. Make comedy that seeks to educate people about real Asian food, rather than telling them what they think they already know. Travel the world and tell us about all the different Asian foods that you find. For too long, your talents have been wasted on Uncle Roger, and I know you’re feeling it more than ever. So don’t let them be wasted anymore! The death of Uncle Roger will be the birth of Nigel Ng. It will be the birth of something genuine, something thoughtful, and something that might even be a little bit funny. In a world where Asia grows more powerful by the day, it’s about time we in the West learned to appreciate its culture and its food, with someone guiding us along. I can hardly think of a better person to do that than you, Nigel. But I can hardly think of a worse person to do it than Uncle Roger.
P.S. I can’t write anything without making it at least a little bit educational, so here are some videos by people with much more intelligent takes on Asian cuisine than Uncle Roger:
Why American Chinese Food Deserves Respect by Xiran Jay Zhao
Tea: How Britain Screwed India and China by Elliot Sang
Jamie Oliver’s War on Nuggets by Folding Ideas (not Asian but at least a real critique of Jamie Oliver)
Beoseot-tangsu by Maangchi
And some books too (because y’all need to read more):
Ever-Green Vietnamese by Andrea Nguyen (vegetarian Vietnamese food)
A-Gong’s Table by George Lee (vegetarian Taiwanese food)
Hawker Fare by James Syhabout (Lao food)
SAOY-Royal Cambodian Home Cuisine by Rotanak Ros (Cambodian food)
Recipes for Fish Cakes and Zongzi by Ling Jen Lee, transcribed by Marcus Ho (I wrote these down all the way back in high school-a bit rough but I think they’re still usable)