“You know, people in that Chinese restaurant serve cat meat.”
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard this slur and urban legend. I have, of course, been accused of eating dogs and asked if my parents cooked cats in our Chinese restaurant. For most of my life, my only remedy was to ignore, or shrug, or accept it as another racist trope to mock immigrant families and to make us look, feel and live as perpetual foreigners. It was usually not worth starting a fight over. But the stakes have changed..
