Lacey Torge Tourist Productions Food and Performance Spring 1998 Commodifying and Consuming Kitsch at the "Original Drag Queen Restaurant" "The more you drink, the prettier we look" from the register receipt at Lucky Cheng's From the street, Lucky Cheng's does not appear to be unusual. You would see a tenement building, one much like every other building on First Avenue, that had once been a Turkish bathhouse, but is now a "trans-Asian" restaurant. However, the mobs of white, (mostly heterosexual) twenty-something women standing in front of the building, planning what performance for which they will stand in line at the TKTS booth tomorrow morning, aren't there to get some quick takeout. As they wait, they know that this particular evening's performance is already underway. Lucky Cheng's opened its heavy, bordello red doors November 1994. Heading towards its fourth year of serving up trans-Asian cuisine and similarly trans-Asian drag queen waitresses, Lucky Cheng's has undergone a transformation of clientele and culinary perspective. Situated in the trendy East Village, Lucky Cheng's has been drawing diners from all over Manhattan and beyond. Originally, it was a hive of downtown style; attracting the usual suspects a novel, left-of-center establishment could expect. Over time, however, hipsters got over it, chic queers moved on and the faddishness wore off. Lucky Cheng's was forced to reinvent itself. It continued not only advertising in underground queer presses, but also as a genre unto itself in more popular tourist rags -- under headings such as "Novelty Restaurants" or "Unique New York Experience." Looking to the high volume of tourists that wander into the East Village each year who are looking for an "unconventional" experience, Lucky Cheng's was transformed into a premiere tourist event. Though there are other similarly themed restaurants in Manhattan (most notably Stingy Lulus and Lips), Lucky Cheng's became the "Original Drag Queen Restaurant." Further than this, they have also franchised the business out to Miami Beach and New Orleans, adding another layer to the New York location's "original" status. Because their marketing savvy has been focused towards commodifying their distinctiveness, the food has been overlooked. Neither when the restaurant first opened, nor more recently has anyone pretended to come for the food; the allure is the wait staff, first and foremost. The restaurant is undergoing a food identity crisis of sorts, having gone through extensive cooking staff changes almost every year and having four different executive chefs since its original opening. The different chefs have taken steps to make the food more theatrical, however, they have yet to approach food that is tasty. Instead of focusing on the food, the creators of Lucky Cheng's attended to the theme. What the customers, are eating, therefore, is the ambiance, the atmosphere, and the staff. The restaurant is produced as a heterotopia of flavor and spectacle. The idea is to offer pre-packaged camp on individual serving platters. Lucky Cheng's is themetizing kitsch, making it easily accessible and readily consumable. Methodology "Facts all come with a point of view." David Byrne, unknowingly on epistemology The framework I am setting up for myself is filtered through a complicated relationship between reflecting and affecting the action I have recorded in my fieldnotes. The time I spent writing my notes produced new interpretations that I could not have otherwise conceived. In addition my most literal act of taking notes actually changed the course of events at certain times. In addition, theory and interpretation guided my experience explicitly. Due to the nature of this project, the research, literature review, and fieldwork were all carried out simultaneously, allowing me to watch the direct interaction between theory and practice. Furthermore, "writing up" is neither linear nor unilateral. The textual construction of experience and interpretation is dialectical in nature and the methods of producing an ethnography of a site is even more complex. Also, because this is a touristic site, from the production to the reception of the production, nothing can be read as neutral; it has been overproduced, placing my analysis in a precarious position of contributing to the spectacle. My perspective also, is biased by my own concerns and interests. My goals in this project is not objectivity, but rather a clearer goal of what Roger Sanjek identifies as "validity" (1990: 396). This means that I have been systematic and careful about how I collected information. The spectator is the true writer of an event. Further, performances (which these are) are not static or fixed; performances are ephemeral, resisting representation or reproduction (Phelan 148). I would also like to raise the issue of generalizability, which is related to the synchronic nature of my small study. In an effort to contend with this I will use a focused, rather than a panoramic lens. It is tough on a ethnographer to figure out a way to present material that is transparent enough to see the process and construction, but still careful and understandable. I studied Lucky Cheng's restaurant of the East Village in New York City, for approximately nine weeks. Most of the fieldwork took place inside the restaurant, though I was known for loitering outside with waiting patrons. I usually visited the restaurant one to two times a week. Sometimes I would sit and eat food in the main dining room, more often however, I would sit at the bar at the entrance of the site. In a series of visits, I informally interviewed sixteen people, ten of whom were patrons, six of whom were staff. I conducted formal interviews with four people who worked at Lucky Cheng's. I also took copious fieldnotes of the general spectacle and of conversations I overheard; in addition to interviews, I made drawings of the space. I tried on numerous occasions to take photographs, but due to inconsistency of permission I was not able to take any photos. My intention was to use a multiple perspective approach. I wanted to interview a full range of informants, making use of the informal bar context. I accomplished this for the most part, with the emphasis on the customer interactions. I never went through any "incorporation" process. The staff were accustomed to being approached and talked to about the topics I usually ventured into; they had no reason to be suspicious of me. As a matter of course, they usually forgot me and I would have reintroduce myself time, and again, making acquaintances with only one or two of the informants. My own position was transient. I was constantly dealing with the dual roles of researcher and patron at a restaurant, usually favoring the latter over the former. I tried to look fashionable without being distinctive. I seldom offered previous knowledge or background to any of the informants about my intentions. Not that I was secretive, just attentive to their opinions. In terms of defining myself, I presented myself as a student who was interested in the rhythms and rituals of this restaurant. Production and Consumtion at Lucky Cheng's "There are few spectacles corporate America enjoys more than a good counterculture" Tom Frank, editor of The Baffler The web page for the New Orleans' franchise begins with "Lucky Cheng's, things aren't always what they seem," suggesting that the blurring of culinary and sexuality categories is at the crux of the philosophy of the restaurant. Thematized service and setting is often part of many restaurant experiences; there is an expectation of consistency between the environment and the food. In this case, the staff is just as hybrid as the meal, or as one advertisement for the restaurant touts, "matching the nouvelle blend of the cuisine in perfect combination is our signature wait staff." There is a peculiar "Asianness" that is being forgrounded as well; customers are allowed to experience directly the multiple identities of the waitresses and what they eat complements this. Hybrid food is only the smallest part of the larger Lucky Cheng's experience. However, food is the medium through which race and gender get codified. Further, I explore the possibility of Lucky Cheng's unique blend of foods and atmosphere which performs something that appears as gay cuisine, marked with the qualities of camp and kitsch. "It looks like we might run out of the Bangkok Snapper, if we do, just hop onto the plate and serve yourself," said one waitress to another, both wearing tight embroidered black knit mini dresses and stilettos standing by the bar waiting for their orders to come up. On a Friday night at Lucky Cheng's the wait can be as long as an hour. People patiently sit on the curb outside, fill the orange stairway leading to the restaurant, sit at the bar upstairs, or go downstairs, into the Suzie Wong Pearl Cream Lounge. This night I had my usual seat at the bar, I, too, was waiting for a table to open up. I asked them how their night was going and, one waitress said, "oh, alright, if don't mind being devoured by a hungry crowd who doesn't care if you feet hurt." They did not pay much attention to me and before I knew it, their orders were up and they were whisked back into the main dining room. For a researcher focusing on the consumption of other's identities for entertainment, I could not have asked for a better answer. Collapsing categories of sexuality, race and food, Lucky Cheng's destroys the context by selective "borrowing." The restaurant "shanghais" cultural artifacts in the name of a creating a thematized atmosphere. There are two central ways it accomplishes this. The first is borrowing from analogous kitsch culture, allowing the cultural context to become a series of analogies. For example, the restaurant has an event you can order off of the menu called the "drag box." "Order a surprise performance for someone at your table for $20!!!Ask your server." One employee explained this practice, Straights want access to good queer entertainment but without any of the hassle. With the drag box, it is supposed to be like a sexy jukebox, all the formality goes away -- guys are always getting their shirts pulled off and a couple of girls too! It is all about ordering a drag queen off of the menu to come to your table. You are immersed in an environment and people expect that this is what goes on here. This conjures up images of strip clubs, where one could order a lap dance and simultaneously invokes drag's cultural history in cabaret clubs and bars. The second kind is borrowing from dominant culture and involves switching meanings. On every table there are "Chinese take-out" containers with candles in them. Reconstituting an everyday object into an aesthetic object, or turning it into a knick-knack, adds to both the kitschiness and the "Asianness" of the space. The atmosphere is "Asian" to say the least, but there are also other generic cultural artifacts throughout Lucky Cheng's. The waitresses sway past wearing the simulacra of East Asian dress with spiked heels and fishnets, by the Chinese screens and painted lanterns in the dining area; it is a windowless box of a room awash in blood-red lacquer, gilt, shantung, mirrors and pulsating Latin dance music. The decorations evoke a Chinese New Year celebration, a Hindu Wedding and a brothel in Tokyo all at once. The feeling is plush, though many of the actual objects are fabricated from paper or cardboard. Though all of the drag queens are performing "Asianness," their "actual" ethnicities range from Filopena, Indian, and Japanese to African-American, Latina, and Caucasian. The waitresses are in a double drag. A feeling of geographic dissonance frames perfectly the food and staff. The entire atmosphere is what Foucault calls "heterotopic" (1986). Heterotopia is the consolidation of distinctive places as though they were one, an aggregation of localities that have no rationality to them. Miriam Kahn calls a heterotopic space a "geographical non-sequitur" (1995: 326). Arthur Koestler (1964) reminds us that the creative act is not in the act of creation in the sense of creating a new idea or creating something out of nothing; but rather the act of creation often uncovers, selects, reshuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts. In this sense, anything goes with anything else; it comes down to your organizational prowess instead of your imagination or creativity, and your ability to juxtapose disparities and dissonance with ease. Because heterotopic spaces create taxonomic dilemmas, meanings are constructed. The restauranteurs become cultural critics, bricoleurs creating an experience via pastiche and corporate models of commodification. Lucky Cheng's thematizes "Asia" without the logic of geography nor the accountability of fixed meanings. In this case the theme thrives on hybridity. In tourism literature one of the central tenets to the organization of a touristic site is creating distinctions and producing difference. Only in New York City would the issue of "sameness" be a problem for restaurants that have drag queens as servers. As it is, however, Lucky Cheng's must create the most distinguishable experience for its customers as possible; Lucky Cheng's has drag waitresses, but with an edge. As was stated earlier, consistency in theme of service and food is a conventional expectation. The theme eroticizes and exoticizes drag by foregrounding its Asianness and its Otherness. It is more than "just" dinner. The spectacle comes with dinner. The food and the staff become synthetic and simulated; they become kitsch or camp. The objects are approximating something, but never the "real" thing. Using the paraphernalia of kitsch gives the producers a certain mobility in staging and theming authenticity/inauthenticity, a hybrid and fake Asianness. They are working with the aesthetics of fabrication and spectacle instead of trying to merge "traditions." Ridiculous juxtaposing conflates postmodern hybridity with a kind of post-postmodern parity. Because Lucky Cheng's is heterotopic, it reduces everyone (and everything) to the level of mainstream, "popular" culture, without any concern for history or heritage. Staging kitsch and camp can call attention to the deep fragmentation people feel about constructing identities. However, because of the way the staging is framed, I have to ask, can new meanings be created out of this or only endlessly self-referential works that continuously re-frame what came before? Lucky Cheng's attempts to create a heterogenous and cosmopolitan setting, offering a comforting modernity to its patrons, letting them feel as if they too can mingle with the theme, in what appears to be an "abject" or "deviant" space. They, too, can interact (transact) with the hip objects of popular culture. It is vis-a-vis food culture that tourists are able to have an interaction with "live Asian drag queens." If the same tourists were to go to a nightclub specializing in some kind of drag performance, they would have access to the visual spectacle, but they not would likely have the opportunity to interact with them. In the case of Lucky Cheng's, the interaction is also a transaction. The waitresses are waged labor; with such an understanding there is a set of services guaranteed to the customer. This means that there is a protocol to what the patron can expect. Among these expectations, is the anticipation of a full experience, a whole event. Because the central commodity being offered is food, a visitor to Lucky Cheng's will have certain presumptions about the promise of experiential or "performative" food. A visitor should be transformed after "eating" at this restaurant. Now, depending when you visit Lucky Cheng's will answer whether this promise will be fulfilled or not. Since the restaurant's inception, the quality of the food has been an issue to patrons; Lucky Cheng's has undergone extensive staff changes and employing four separate executive chefs in four years. The owners have been attending to the problem of low quality food, but apparently not efficaciously. Reviews of the restaurant abound in phrases such as, "it's such a hoot you'll barely notice the food -- which may be lucky" and "It's known for its generally charming (and some would say seductive) transvestite waitfolk but not for its food" (from Zagat 1997 and www. cuisine. net respectively). Customers complain that the flavors are not easily distinguishable, that what the dishes actually consisted of was never made clear, that the sauces were confusing, and that "the menu read better than it tasted" (personal interviews). One older woman said the food "made about as much sense as the waitresses," which is to say, not very much sense. This disorientation is consistent with the general atmosphere the restaurant establishes. We are to be bewildered by the dizzying sights, the amalgam of dishes, and the hybrid employees it creates continuity with the theme. To one customer, the one who mentioned that she did not know what the components to individual dishes were, said, "It's okay. After all, this is a place where labels are not especially important." All three of the Lucky Cheng's franchises have "innovative" menus, specializing in Latin-Asian in Miami and Creole-Asian in New Orleans. At the New York location, a customer could have the "Ming Vase Pu Pu Platter of Beef and Chicken Satays" for an appetizer, a "Singapore Seafood Noodles with Rice in a Cilantro Yellow Curry Sauce" for an entree, and to share with your companions there is "Imelda's Shoe" for dessert, "one pound of Belgium chocolate transformed into a perfect size 8 stilletto-heeled (sic) pump brimming with chocolate mousse, fresh berries and a dash of vanilla bean sauce." So, if the restaurant is always crowded but the food is confusing and is quite unremarkable, what is the attraction of coming here to eat? Why don't people go to a club to see drag queens or head downstairs to the Suzie Wong Pearl Cream Lounge to have the experience? What does the appeal of eating an expensive, notoriously poor quality meal in this space offer that lounging at a bar in the adjacent space does not? What are the patrons of Lucky Cheng's eating, and therefore, what is being consumed? Roland Barthes writes that food is "a system of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations and behaviors" (1997: 21). For Barthes, food signifies. Associating food with elements of gay culture might give a customer a feeling of access to "alternative" culture. Because the food is thematized and there is a protocol that goes with it, it extends past the plate. Without the food we have no experience. The food is transferred into a "circumstance," as Barthes calls it (1997: 26). Lucky Cheng's is entirely circumstance, all event, all spectacle. There are two reasons Lucky Cheng's would be a less effective system of significations without food. The first is that food informs the behavior. Food transmits information to the customer about how to behave and carries through the idea of the spectacle and event with it. So whether the actual food is tasty is not important (unless, of course, you are doing fieldwork there and are forced to eat it in order to carry out your task). What is important is the fact of "Food" at this space. This brings me to the second reason food is absolutely integral to the functioning of this site, which is that food is communicative. Susan Zukin has argued, "Waiters are less important than chefs in creating restaurant food. They are no less significant, however, in creating the experience of dining out" (1995:154). The food is contingent on the servers' ability to perform the food. Their adeptness of making the food event portentous and dazzling is at the foundation of the restaurant. What would Lucky Cheng's be without the food? It would be "just another" gay bar. Drag queens in bars are not distinctive; you could go anywhere and see that. However, a drag queen serving food in a restaurant, now that is something you might pay to see. The entire system of interactions and transactions depend on the fact that there is food present and that it is a restaurant. Barthes concludes his article, "Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption," with the phrase, "food is an organic system" (1997: 26). I had to reach back to Durkheim to understand what Barthes means here. Durkheim, in The Division of Labor in Society (1987), indicates a shift in society to "organic" imagery. He means organic in reference to the human body, in the sense that it is interdependent -- each part is reliant on the other parts; further, organic solidarity, to Durkheim, is about difference, about experiencing your niche in the world in connection to the differences that define you in relation to other niches. This is a vivid analogy Barthes draws up. This is because both food and tourism at Lucky Cheng's are interdependent; they work together in producing a "distinctive" experience. The Lucky Cheng's "niche" is one that performs a gay sensibility. I say perform because it uses the tropes of a gay sensibility "a creative sensibility which reflects a consciousness that is different from the mainstream" (Babuscio 1993:19) without actually, truly, engaging them. Also, because it has boundaries; it has characters, costumes, protocols; there is a script; and the performance is finite, in that it ends each day and a similar act is repeated the following day. What is keeping it from "being" part of queer culture is the fact that though its consciousness may be reflexive about its identity, the restaurant is placed in mainstream material culture. Lucky Cheng's, as a cultural and social object, may have had subversive potential if it maintained its clientele by non-exploitative methods. However, marketing Asian drag as eye-candy here to be experienced and talked to and touched is certainly not gay sensibility. Before going any further, let me add that when I refer to Lucky Cheng's I am referring to the place as a restaurant and touristic site; there is a completely different set of practices of subversion, resistance, or even autonomy for the waitresses themselves. Lucky Cheng's is not emphatically part of queer culture. It offers pre-digested and predictable version of it, formulaic with its self-proclaimed "naughtiness" and "subcultural" entrepreneurship. In the same vein as Taco Bell's "extreme" taco, MTV's "Buzz Clips" of "alternative" rockers, and Jack Keroac advertising for The Gap, we have Lucky Cheng's, "where things aren't quite as they appear." This culminates at the point where you find angsty and angry teenage cyber-poets writing poems about Lucky Cheng's alongside their manifestos for how Kurt Cobain's death was a travesty against the youth of America. In general, gays and lesbians do not patronize the restaurant. However, queers do support the individual queens by meeting them after work in the Suzie Wong Pearl Cream Lounge downstairs or at a nearby bar or club. Stingy Lulu's, a drag owned and run restaurant on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, owner Karacona Cinar, however, sees drag as less of a "theme" than a way of life, and shuns the notion of franchising his restaurant. "We're not even encouraging tourists to come here," he says. "We were serving drag queen customers first, and since we're always busy, there's no reason to change our clientele." This line of conversation I am arguing toward also makes me a little uncomfortable. Am I providing a hierarchy of establishments based on which one is more "authentic?" I am traipsing on the uneven ground of "official" voices and "unofficial" places, of margins and centers, authenticity and inauthenticity, commercial and underground. I am enacting exactly what I aim to critique, what Edward Bruner calls "retaining an essentialist vocabulary of origins and reproductions" (1994: 398). It is a complicated topic and I do not know what other vocabulary to use; the grammar of us/them is well articulated and accessible. I do hope, however, that by complicating the issues of representation and reception I will be able to offer a multivocal reading. Though Lucky Cheng's is not a queer space, where queer people go and have a set of interactions that reflect a kind of gay sensibility, the fact of its existence is claimed by the official voices of gay culture The Advocate, H/X Magazine, OUT, and others which have a relationship to visibility of any kind that marks everything involving queer people as important. This is a separate topic that should be explored, but is too tangential for the scope of this essay. There are two central elements to Lucky Cheng's simulation and performance of queer culture; they are the use of kitsch and camp in the exploitation of the drag queens' sexualities and ethnicities. Customers are offered the opportunity to "experience" a cheeky exotic Asian-American drag queen. Instead of West meets East, we have West eats East. The visual cannibalization of Asian drag queens is part of the self-conscious narrative of the restaurant. "Lucky Cheng's: Delectable Pan-Asian Cuisine, Even More Delectable Drag Wait staff," reads the material reproduction of the site, the postcards and advertisements. Using terms of kitsch and camp is their effective method of sharply articulating the distinction between a hungry voyeuristic culture and an appetizing object of occularity. Kitsch has been defined by Matei Calinescu (1987) as: a specifically aesthetic form of lying. As such, it obviously has a lot to do with the modern illusion that beauty may be bought or sold. Kitsch, then, is a recent phenomenon. It appears at the moment in history when beauty in its various forms is socially distributed like any other commodity subject to the essential market law of supply and demand. Once it has lost its elitist claim to uniqueness and once its diffusion is relegated by pecuniary standards, "beauty" turns out to be rather easy to fabricate. This fact may account for the ubiquity of spurious beauty in today's world, in which even nature (as exploited and commercialized by the tourist industry) has ended up resembling cheap art (229). Selling, distributing, commodifying, accessing and fabricating "beauty" is also juxtaposed with the simultaneous super-sexualization and the desexualization that comes with drag. In this world of pure spectacle and transaction, the waitresses almost have to caricature themselves to become visible; they perform the dual roles of hyper-vixen, a vestibule for an orientalist homoerotic fantasy, and harmless neuter, acquiescent, submissive and compliant with the customer's needs. Because of the valuative nature of kitsch, it becomes an hermeneutic and interpretive trope. I mean this in the sense that to call something kitsch is to ascribe it a certain value and to mark it as all surface, lacking all discriminating faculties; kitsch is aesthetically substandard. Further, kitsch usurps all other aesthetic principles under the rubric of itself. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in "Disputing Taste" (1998) has noted, "As a postmodern concept, the aesthetics of kitsch consumes the reception of kitsch as well as the object, the commodity and its consumers, the programmed response and its subversion." Kitsch has a totalizing effect. Drag used as a kitsch symbol gets recuperated as a romantic figure, a neutralized object for easy consumption. Kitsch appears as a simple way of filling spare time. Tourists are not attracted to Lucky Cheng's because of its complexity, but because of its status as a form of easy "subversive" entertainment. The food elaborates this by that fact that it is usually artfully presented, but low in quality or taste. Quite literally, the food is in bad taste, it is all form and no substance. For example, the mammothly indulgent and dramatic "Imelda's Shoe" dessert is all theatricality. One women who was in a group who ordered it was amazed by the spectacle of it, but said that the taste was pretty much one note: "The mousse was actually icy and the berries were too soft, it tasted like one of those solid Easter bunnies that you get for fifty cents at Kmart." She thought about it for a moment and added, "But I guess those bunnies aren't named after Imelda Marcos, right?" She laughed about the absurdity of this distinction for a few moments and caught up with her friends. This left me thinking that this was aesthetic of irreverence at its finest, because visitors are expecting kitsch, they aren't expecting flavor, just theatricality. Therefore, if the food is depthless and one-dimensional, no one is surprised. It seems like it might, perhaps, be more surprising if the food had actually been complicated and interesting. It is the irony of that last statement which leads me to the next trope of Lucky Cheng's. It is their deployment of camp. Drag provides a vocabulary which criticizes the routine and ordinary by transforming it into "glamorous, satirical frivolity," or camp (Baker 1993:2). It has been proposed that the term "camp" has come from the French term camper, "to pose or strike an attitude" (Bergman 1993:6). Camp is a style that uses exaggeration and artifice. It is in direct tension with popular culture ("consumerist culture") and people who recognize camp as subversion are usually outside of the mainstream. Camp is self-mocking and parodic in nature. David Bergman argues that there are elements to camp which actually neutralizes the stigma of drag queens, making them the least threatening and most visible part of gay subculture. Therefore, drag queens become "the first element of gay social practice that straight people are willing to confront," he then adds, as if it is an afterthought, "probably so that they can feel superior to it" (1993:7). By knowingly embracing bad taste, or other elements of camp, the servers surpass merely embodying a "transvaluation" of values; they enact a guerilla warfare on signs (Hebdige 1988). One reading is that the drag queens' signs of marginalization are usurped and turned on dominant culture by being put in a different context. The implicit irony in camp is that while drag queens are making fun of something, they are also realizing its inescapable appeal. Drag queens become a farce of their own identity, the source of power and social relations, embracing and estranging themselves at once. The waitresses have a form of redress and resistance within the infrastructure of the site. It is at this point that I cite one irreversibly masculine patron, who by the end of his bachelor party was predatory about having his waitress "for dessert," and who was the subject of an excess of camping. During the last show of that evening, right as bachelor #1 had settled his bill, a few of the girls working that night hovered over his table. He was obviously ready to go; he had been particularly rowdy that night, so much that he was a central spectacle of the evening. They took turns sitting on his lap while lip-synching to a song the DJ was spinning; they would get up only in return for money. Because he was the focus of attention on different terms now, he sheepishly paid a dollar or two to each of the girls. He was obviously annoyed and tried to slip away towards the men's room, muttering something about, "faggots ruining his night" a little too loudly for a restaurant. For one second there was a disruptive tension in the main dining room, but was quickly remedied by the emcee for that evening who said, "Listen up, Grabby," as she called him, "I wouldn't go there if I were you." She started to make obscene jokes about him. Her tone was calm and ironic. She was in control of this situation. The more she de-eroticized herself, separating herself from the drunken sexual gaze of this man, the bawdier and more obscene she became. By undermining his heterosexual voyeurism, she initiated a project to reclaim the space as her own. However, commodifying camp in this setting for this audience is also the lens through which disruptive irony has come to be expected and counted on and therefore undermined. On this particular night, I later overheard two women in the restroom discussing this event. They thought that the emcee had been "too witty" and wondered if the whole thing had been staged. One of the women said that she had heard that drag queens were "obnoxious" but did not realize to what degree. She said something along the lines of, "I mean, he was a paying customer, he didn't deserve that." Commodifying camp and kitsch removes the subversiveness of the interaction and renders irony impotent. This suggests that positioning the transgendered "oriental" body and its threatening excess of otherness as the direction of occularity offers up an easy target for misunderstanding and "occidental" homophobia. Although the relationship between the waitresses and the customers is meant to be ironic, it is too close to reality; the campy representations corresponds all too closely to conspicuous power differentials. In this sense, camp has the same limitations as Mikhail Bakhtin's carnival. Bakhtin argued that temporally spaced disorder can lead to inversion, reversals, and subversion -- a true transgression. However, the social disruption of carnival often ended up reifying the very status quo it aimed to critique. The "subversion" was legitimated and restricted, everything that appeared to have political potential happened under the thumb of those who were licensing it. Terry Eagleton, argues, "Carnival ... is a permissible rupture of hegemony ... There is no slander in an allowed fool" (1981: 148). At Lucky Cheng's also, the licentiousness is similarly licensed. Lucky Cheng's has the potential to be dangerous or challenging, though it simultaneously confirms the authorities which support it. Staging disorder "with permission" preempts the political potential by those who are not able to similarly perform with the same license. The space between the actors (the waitresses) and those staging the "ambiguity" (the management) is fraught. The figure of the effeminate male Asiatic embodied in this instance in the transvestite dancer, singer and waitress represents one face of the orientalist homoerotic fantasy, it is within the frame that the producers of Lucky Cheng's have set up to represent the figure that the audience can safely participate with this imagined body. Kitsch and camp become aesthetic forms of lying, easily parodied and simplified. An unusual "realness" is the effect of this representation. The waitresses become signs of themselves. Like the case of the menu, they have hybridized the stereotypes until they are unrecognizable, until the final "object" of consumption is a category unto itself. Perhaps, this hybridity does have within it the ability to diffuse power among representations, to appropriate and contest the "realness" that is being produced. The fragmented/ hybridized/ kitschified identifications permeate the play of power and exclusion that is inherent in the overdetermined process of identity construction, they become hyper-identities, if you will. I am going to make a move here from discussing the organization of the space to a discussion of the audience. Theorizing reception in a site such as Lucky Cheng's is essential in understanding its complexity. It is a site that is working on many levels at any given time. Further, any discussion of patrons, customers, or, in particular, tourists, should necessarily imply a discussion about heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity. There are as many kinds of tourists as there are modes of tourist experience. Also, there is an implicit "intercontextuality" as Arjun Appadurai put it in a recent lecture. By this, Appadurai means that we cannot lose sight of the fact that people do not separate their viewing techniques. Tourists do not always differentiate, often the same kind of seeing is used from one place to another. Finally, a whole infrastructure of tourism is at work which is completely interconnected and interdependent -- organic, even; it sends tourists to sites, who then take in the sites in a linear fashion, along their geographic itineraries. The average customer at Lucky Cheng's is a white, heterosexual woman, in her late twenties, on vacation. According to members of the staff, well over sixty percent of the customers would fit into this profile, and that number continues to grow. The other forty percent consist of an aggregation of straight men Caucasian, Latino, and African American; queer tourists gay, lesbian, and transgendered; and groups of teenagers of multiple identities, most of whom appeared to be heterosexual. Obviously a person's sexuality is not as easily quantifiable in terms of "real" numbers. However, these are the statistics I received from the restaurant. They do, therefore, reflect at the very least who the restaurant believes is its market. What is interesting is that almost everyone comes expecting a "queer" environment. One employee referred to a complaint they frequently receive, "where are all the gays?" The answer he gave to me was an exhausted one, "The queers are over it -- they don't see it as a novelty anymore. When they come they end up being part of the show. It is for people who are afraid to go to gay places." Perhaps, this is suggesting that the restaurant haven't been effective in their theming; Lucky Cheng's is not authentic enough. Though the restaurant continues to advertises strongly in more of the mainstream gay press, it is in guidebooks like Let's Go: New York, New York City Guide, Time Out Guide: New York and others that cater to a young cosmopolitan traveler from which the restaurant garners much of its patrons. If you go looking for information about it on the Internet you are far more likely to find write-ups in the "Things to do" section instead of the restaurants pages. Once the customers have found the restaurant, what occurs is an elaborate set of receptions. Of the customers I spoke with, the most common response was fascination tinged with aversion. Upon asking numerous groups how they liked their experience, I received answers such as, "Umm, it was unusual, it freaks me out a little bit," "they were so interesting I could have looked at them all day," "our waitress, waiter, oh, whatever, was great, but some of them were too weird, and "I liked it so much, but then I hated it. They were too real, but not real at all." Walter Benjamin has written about the concept of ambivalence. It is the idea of being simultaneously repelled and seduced by a representation. There is ambivalence, however, because we have the desire to consume what disturbs us. The seduction is the flip side of this uncertainty. Lucky Cheng's, replete with its hypnotic music and sexual servers/servants, lures the patron into participating in something of which they might otherwise be very critical. Since the first known drag balls in the early 19th century, the central spectators consisted of an unusually high number of people looking for access to "decadent urban nightlife" (Harris 1995:66). Daniel Harris, found "Embedded within the aesthetics of drag is the sensibility of the heterosexual tourists who constituted the first dumbstruck audiences for which drag queens camped it up with slinky boas and peacock fans, succumbing to the self-dramatizing impulse of turning themselves into theatre for voyeuristic onlookers." Harris goes on to argue that a central tenet to drag's aesthetic is the act of self-exoticization for a fascinated, but reviled straight audience, whose "unthreatening remoteness drag queens magnified in order to keep these two worlds reassuringly separate" (1995:66). The gaze of the 19th century drag balls was a heterosexual one, it is the gaze of a tourist in the ghetto terrified and exhilarated. Almost 200 years later we find a peculiarly similar leering at Lucky Cheng's. It is the self-same curiosity-seekers that are drawn to the restaurant. What appears to be the central component of attraction is the spectacle of the restaurant -- the food, the atmosphere, the staff and the ambiance. Though this might seem an obvious statement to make at this point, I am using spectacle critically and to connote a specific set of meanings. Spectacle comes from the French spectare, "to watch," and specere, "to look." Further, it is defined in the Mirriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary as: (1) "something exhibited to view as unusual, notable, or entertaining" and (2) "an object of curiosity or contempt." These two definitions necessarily repeat Benjamin's definition of ambivalence and reflect Eagleton's problem with carnival. Like kitsch, spectacle infers evaluation, judgement and direction. The etymology is important, because the space between watching and looking, between looking and seeing is huge. To speak of a touristic gaze is to invoke an entire range of visualities. Guy Debord, in The Society of the Spectacle (1967, 1992), writes, "The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images" (12). In the case of Lucky Cheng's, the directive gaze becomes Debord's "social relationship"; the spectacle serves to give efficacy (or not) to the waitresses. Whether the customers are watching or looking, looking or seeing, determines their idea of the value they place onto the restaurant, depending on if their curiosity was peaked. Scrutiny and spectacle collapse into one another, creating a logic for a touristic theory of looking. Coinciding with reception of the spectacle is the "self-dramatizing" effect of the waitresses, themselves. It is both the gaze of the on-lookers and the performing body which makes a spectacle out of itself. It is the display of a carnivalesque, grotesque body which performs a spectacular excess; it is exaggerated, constructed and masqueraded. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, in "Objects of Ethnography," has argued, "The inherently performative nature of live specimens veers exhibits of them strongly in the direction of spectacle.... The blend here of repulsion and attraction, condemnation and celebration, so typical of the reception of ethnographic displays in exhibition halls, reveals that the source of the critique is also the basis of the appeal" (1991: 393). Not simply a modern day freak show or ethnographic exhibit, Lucky Cheng's allows their objects of display to have locomotion throughout the dining room and to be armed with a potential arsenal of resistance, camp; however, their display is no less spectacular. Further, the relations are mediated through food, in a restaurant setting. However, the effects of the self-produced spectacle should not be overlooked when thinking about the main dining room as a whole. It, like the larger spectacle of the food, ambiance, and atmosphere, opens itself up to the valuative gaze of ambivalent attention. This kind of looking, watching, or seeing can serve the function of subcultural cleansing, providing a way of purifying ourselves of queer stereotypes and excess. Bell and Valentine suggest that the taste for exotic and ethnic foods reflects as certain kind of attitude something they refer to as "cosmopolitanism" (1997: 117). A true cosmopolitan, they suggest disdains corporate versions of inauthentic cuisines; a cosmopolitan will go miles and miles out of their way to find the "real" thing, unaffected by contaminates. I am not sure what they would say about Lucky Cheng's in that context. For this restaurant, there is no authentic. There is the spectacle of "real" drag queens, but beyond this, the complete site is a set of simulations and performances meant in no way to represent an authentic anything. Chris Rojek suggests that the pursuit for "authenticity" is becoming less of a priority for tourists (1997: 70). Perhaps I am arguing that as the piles of tourists are bused into to Manhattan to experience more and more simulated experiences that it is the "locals" (who are equally produced) who are going out (becoming tourists of a different kind) to Union City, New Jersey or Jackson Heights, Queens to have their own "real" experiences. There is a potential at Lucky Cheng's which seems to respond to a kind of "emergent authenticity" which is dynamic, appealing, and most of all changeable (Craik 1997:114). Lucky Cheng's, itself, has potential to transform the fixed notions of touristic experiences, where tourists abide by the laws of the primitive and Other. Yet at the same time, they draw on these familiar tropes to elaborate this dynamic possibility, giving a kind of negotiated experience in which a customer could sample the fare without "the hassle" as one employee put it. Ritzer and Liska have noted that differentiating between the simulated and the real becomes multifarious in nature and ultimately too entangled with each other; they suggest that, "In such a world, the tourist would not know an authentic' experience even if one could be found" (1997: 107). By using excessively inauthentic elaborations to attract tourists Lucky Cheng's involves a search for easy and accessible camp and kitsch, producing the illusion of an extraordinary experience. It is here that I see the potential for Lucky Cheng's as a tourist site; as it becomes more eclectic and "performed" the higher the capacity for a tourist or customer (I am using them interchangeably now) to recognize the deep fragmentation of authenticity, that culture shifts, adapts and is constantly evolving and is interdependent. I have identified one kind of tourism that precludes a subversive reading of the site. However, there is a kind of visitor that would respond to Lucky Cheng's without exploiting the staff and would appreciate the kitsch and camp without simplifying it. It is not what I found but as a prescriptive, I think if Lucky Cheng's tried to appeal to, what are being called, "post-tourists" we might find a non-exploitative manner of patronizing the site. People who would not be there to gawk, but to appreciate the performance. "Post-tourism" is defined as a "playful, ironic, and sometimes formally individualized attitude to sight-seeing" (Rojek 1997:62). 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