In her book, “This is What Democracy Looked Like: A Visual History of the Printed Ballot,” Cooper Union professor Alicia Cheng draws attention to the “chopsticks font,” as she calls it, used by San Francisco politician Dr. White politicians, meanwhile, have been using chop suey fonts to stoke xenophobia for over a century. Critics believe that using chop suey typefaces is downright racist, particularly when deployed by non-Asian creators. It’s hard not to cringe at the Chinese stereotypes bundled up with each font package – especially when seen through the lens of today’s heightened vigilance toward discrimination and systemic racism. Variations on the font are commercially distributed as Wonton, Peking, Buddha, Ginko, Jing Jing, Kanban, Shanghai, China Doll, Fantan, Martial Arts, Rice Bowl, Sunamy, Karate, Chow Fun, Chu Ching San JNL, Ching Chang and Chang Chang. Type designers in the West have since cooked up many of their own versions of chop suey. House of Moy Lee Chin Restaurant, Miami Beach, Florida in 1980. But this has not prevented the proliferation of chop suey lettering and its close identification with Chinese culture outside of China.” “Neither the food nor the fonts bear any real relation to true Chinese cuisine or calligraphy. “Mandarin, originally known as Chinese, is the granddaddy of ‘chop suey’ types,” Shaw wrote in the design magazine, Print. It is perhaps no surprise that this Eastern-inspired lettering emerged in the late 19th century, an era when Orientalism coursed feverishly through the West. Shaw traces the fonts’ origins to the Cleveland Type Foundry which obtained a patent for a calligraphy-style printing type, later named Mandarin, in 1883.

These “chop suey fonts,” as American historian Paul Shaw calls them, have been a typographical shortcut for “Asianness” for decades.

There’s a good chance you pictured letters made from the swingy, wedge-shaped strokes you’ve seen on restaurant signs, menus, take-away boxes and kung-fu movie posters. Here’s a thought experiment: Close your eyes and imagine the font you’d use to depict the word “Chinese.”

Chinese calligraphy style font