Best of Proof: The Plan to Kill the Chinese Restaurant

What do you get when you take two childhood friends with the passion for unexplored history and a whole lot of booves? You get us! Queen's podcast! And here at Queens, we are spilling the tea on all kinds of women from history. From New Orleans, Voodoo Queen, Marie Levoe, to Marie Antoinette, and everything in between. Each queen is paired with a cocktail recipe that will totally get you in the mood to hear the fun, dramatic, and juicy stories of fascinating women from history. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Cheers! Hey, Lily Miller here. I am the host of Terrestrials, a show all about animals and nature from Radio Lab. If you've ever wanted to hear a story about an octopus breaking out of an aquarium, or a squirrel that can regrow its brain or do wild stories unfolding inside a tree stump? Well, we've got an episode for you. And did I mention? We sometimes break out into songs. Join us, Terrestrials, over on the Radio Lab for Kids Feed. Listen wherever you get podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Kevin Pang here. We're busy reporting for season 12 of our show. So for the next few weeks, we're going to look back into our archives and dig up our all-time favorite episodes. This week, we're replaying an episode that's dear to my heart. It was first broadcast in July 2019, and it's reported by Monica Ang, who was my deskmate for many years at the Chicago Tribune. Monica looks into why there are so many Chinese restaurants in the U.S. and why it was there an organized effort 100 years ago to kill off Chinese restaurants all together. So on this week's episode of Proof, hosted by Founding Host Bridge and Landcaster, a story of Chopsui and Survival. This is the plan to kill the Chinese restaurant. According to industry standards, there are more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants here in the United States. So let's compare that number to the number of McDonald's in the United States, which is right around 14,000. So if we added in now all the U.S. Wendy's and Burger King restaurants, that brings us up to about 28,000. In order to cross that 40,000 restaurant threshold, we're going to have to add in a whole bunch more. And that includes all of the KFCs, Taco Bells, and Arbis. So all of this is to say that Chinese restaurants are 100 percent absolutely part of the American landscape. I mean, there were Chinese restaurants here that predate the start of the Civil War. So it was really surprising to me to find out that there was a time when the fate of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. was not so certain. From America's test kitchen, I'm Bridget Lancaster, and this is proof. My family opened a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Pumpkin in Chicago in the 1920s. This is Monica Eng, a Chicago Public Radio reporter. It was opened by my great-grandpa, Joe Eng, who came here around the turn of the century. And his place was built as the largest and most beautiful Chinese cafe in the world, seating for 2,000. It had this huge dance floor and a stage for the house band called Thelma Terry and her playboys. Thelma also played at this mobster joint called Colosseumos, as in Big Jim Colosseumos. So I sort of knew that Chinese restaurants were a different breed back then, but I had no idea just how different. That isn't until I read about some of these crazy laws folks were pushing around the turn of the century. One was this 1910 Massachusetts law that aimed to ban all white women under 21 from entering Chinese restaurants. If they were older, they'd be the non-Asian real chap around. And get this. It passed in the Massachusetts house. That seems unbelievable. I mean, in today's standards at least. I know. I was curious to say the least. So I looked at the work of UC Davis Law Scholar Jack Chin. Because when he first saw this law, he pulled at the thread and unraveled a history of Chinese restaurants in the US that is barely known today. And it's definitely not reported. It reveals this organized effort to wipe out Chinese restaurants altogether. I'm sitting here at Sunwa Barbecue Restaurant with a popular Chinese spot launched in 1987 in Chicago's third Chinatown. But this whole neighborhood might never have existed if some people had their way a century ago. The place is full of families, couples and friends eating fried rice, noodle soups and roast duck. There's a huge birthday party next to us with grandma and toddlers all at the same table. A server helps them celebrate by ringing a gong. Like most Chinese American joints, this place is packed with families, especially on Mother's Day, Father's Day and Christmas. And that's largely true across the nation. So how is it that a century ago, Chinese restaurants were seen as so dangerous that they had to be wiped out? Why did people want to obliterate this from the American culinary scene? To understand, it helps to get a picture of Chinese restaurants back then. So a century ago, a lot of Chopsui houses had these colorful or neat dining rooms. Some had curtains and closed booths for privacy. They were seen as these kind of sexy, clandestine spots where diners went for an exotic escape. Think dimly lit, smoke-filled rooms with ragtime music. Some Chinese restaurants were just Chinese restaurants, plain and simple, straightforward, a diner type of place. Then other Chinese restaurants traded on the perceived exotic nature of Chinese food and China towns. This is Jack Chin. He's a law scholar at UC Davis. And he wrote a paper called The War Against Chinese Restaurants. It highlights the largely unknown effort to get rid of Chinese restaurants at the turn of the century. Some of them would have lurid displays. They would have actors. They would have casts of people who would act out stereotypical Chinese vices. So you would see people smoking opium, that sort of thing. So that people who went to a restaurant like that really felt like they were going somewhere far away. Another kind of thing that went on in Chinese restaurants of this era was a sort of freedom, an escape from the restraint of conventional society. The proprietors of these restaurants were immigrants. They often did not speak perfect English. They were not really connected to the main stream community in certain ways. They also spawned this craze for something called slumming. So beginning in the 1890s, middle-class and upper-class whites, including white couples, would go slumming in the China towns of the country to see an exotic wild spectacle. And so this was a common social activity beginning before the 20th century. For some people, it was attractive for the folks who went slumming in China towns. The idea of being associated with a certain naughtiness, with a certain underworld quality was attractive. But it also resulted in some quite serious efforts to restrict Chinese restaurants. What was really scary to some is that these restaurants were also attractive to young women, women who were gaining new freedom in Hutzpah in this period. It's around this time that women are asking for the right to vote, some are working more, and there's this desire to get out and experience small freedoms outside the confines of societal expectations. And they were going sometimes on un-shaperone dates to these places. And as time went on, it was in some circles a custom, a cool thing to do for a young couple that was courting to have a date at a Chinese restaurant, a Chopsui date. And the reason is that when a young couple goes to a Chopsui restaurant, they are getting away from ordinary social convention. A restaurant with a Caucasian proprietor, with Caucasian employees, is really directly part of your community. And if you have a drink, if you smoke a cigarette, or worse, if there's hand-holding, kissing, that might get back to your people. But if you go to a Chinese restaurant, you're away from the scrutiny of the community to a significant degree. But there was a dark side as well. Like today, in the early part of the 20th century, the United States was still in the throes of an opioid epidemic. It started in the late 1800s when doctors dispensed opioids for everything from battle injuries, to menstrual pain, and even toothaches. But by the early 1900s, opium addicts, or what they called "hop addicts," were blighting urban areas. And a lot, though certainly not all, of this opium use was happening in urban Chinatowns. And so this true, but exaggerated reputation for opium dens, it didn't help. In fact, it fed into this narrative of Chopsui restaurants as centers of vice, full of danger and immorality, and it made them a target of, quote, "moral concern," more on that later. The more immediate concern about Chopsui houses came from the labor unions. "Labor unions? What do you mean by that?" Well, see, the wage scales for Chinese workers, and Chinese restaurants were a lot lower than for workers and white-owned restaurants. Figures show that around 1905, a white cook and a Chinese cook might make 35 bucks a week. But for that money, the Chinese cooked worked longer hours and seven days a week with no day off. So they essentially drove down the price of labor, drove down the operating cost for Chinese restaurants, and then the meal prices. So the white business owners were like, "We can't compete here." Well, I can understand that. I mean, it would be difficult to compete on an economic level when you've got Chinese restaurants that are driving down wages. Absolutely. And that's why unions exist, right? To support a decent standard of living for workers. So on its face, I totally get it. But when you start to dig a little deeper, it doesn't look so pretty. See, rather than attempting to unionize the Chinese laborers or lobby the government to approve standards for everyone, the union, it tries to eliminate the competition. And so what follows is this coordinated attack on Chups2E houses that almost wipes them out entirely. Chinese laborers and Asians more broadly were barred from union membership. The cooks and waiters union even excluded workers who had any Asian ancestry. The unions made a decision not to try to organize Asian workers. They generally were all white. Sometimes they would have a black auxiliary local. Sometimes they would let African Americans in, but not to the main local, but to one off to the side. But for the most part, they considered and rejected the idea of bringing Chinese Japanese workers into the unions. There's an example of this in San Francisco in 1903 where white union laborers boycotted their employers until the San Francisco Hotel and Restaurant Keepers Association agreed to fire all Chinese and Japanese workers. So when the cooks and waiters union, for example, was negotiating with restaurants and bars, they would say that one of the terms of our contract is that you have to fire all the Asians and sometimes employers would agree to that. So they didn't invite them to unionize. They tried to get them fired from other jobs, but then the next steps Chin says were restaurant boycots, telling people to stay out of chop sewage joints in solidarity. They said no union member should go to a Chinese restaurant, no person who supports the labor movement should go to a Chinese restaurant. And if boycots were effective and worked, then maybe these Chinese restaurants would go out of business. The boycott became a national union policy. The AFL or the American Federation of Labor is by far the largest and most powerful labor union in the US. And they backed these initiatives, which gave the efforts a lot of political power, but that didn't always stop them. But boycotts didn't really work. And the problem was that when a Chinese restaurant is offering a good product at a good price, it's hard to keep people from going to it. And union members would lament. Union leaders would lament the fact that notwithstanding the boycott that was in effect, their members would be seen sneaking into Chinese restaurants. And they might be fine when they were caught, but the boycotts didn't really succeed in accomplishing their goal. So boycotts spread throughout the country. Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Minnesota, Ohio, Texas, Utah, Fuf, and all these more local initiatives to prevent Chopps, Sui House ownership spread as well. And believe it or not, it wasn't always so civil. And Tacoma, Chinese laborers were literally evicted from their cities, physically removed from town by prominent citizens. In Idaho and Oregon, workers threatened to hang Chinese laborers if they cross their paths. As you can probably guess, a lot of restaurants shuddered. But others decided to fight in court. In 1919, Cleveland, Ohio was home to 20 Chinese restaurants. And unions were picketing two of them, one called the Golden Feasant and the other, the Peacock Inn. The picketers urged other white Americans to, quote, "confine their patronage and support to restaurants operated by Americans or white persons." So the Peacock Inn decided to sue. The case was presided over by Judge Foreign, a former congressman and member of the Cooper's International Union. So this judge is intimately acquainted with both union and Asian labor matters. And so what was the ruling? Well, the unions lost. The judge said that all men, quote, "even including Chinaman residents of the United States stand equally before the law," unquote. He said that the picketing clearly wasn't an attempt to unionize workers since Asian workers weren't permitted to join the union. And so it was obvious that the union's real aim was to shudder the businesses altogether. And they couldn't do that unless there was a legal reason. His decision stated, "If a Chinaman can furnish better food at less cost than a white man, he would be patronized. And I know of no law that will compel or force any patron to pay a higher price for inferior food, merely because it is prepared and served by a white man." Wow, I mean, that's a victory. I know, and it's kind of really satisfying to read. In this sentiment, it was carried out in courts across the United States, knocking down the union's boycott efforts one by one. But while the Chinese restaurants were winning in court, they were losing in the court of public opinion. More than 300 Chicago white girls have sacrificed themselves to the influence of the Chopsui joint during the last year, according to police statistics. Vanity and the desire for showy clothes led to their downfall. It is declared it was accomplished only after they smoked and drank in the Chopsui restaurants and permitted themselves to be hypnotized by the dreamy, seductive music that is always on the top. So at the same time that this war on Chinese restaurants is happening, there's a very strict immigration law in place. We've probably heard of it. It's called the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. And it says only certain immigrants from China are permitted to immigrate to the United States, merchants, teachers, officials, etc. And it prevented any Chinese immigrant from becoming a citizen. So the Chinese population and the US at the time is mostly men, laborers who intended on working then returning home. It's estimated that in 1890 Chinese men outnumbered Chinese women 27 to one in the US. And this made people nervous about letting white women anywhere near Chinese men. Remember, this is a time for young white women, who are at the beginning of women's suffrage, experimenting with living freely. And so many of them are venturing out into Chinatown, maybe on a date, or maybe alone for a good time, but mainly is a sort of expression of their newfound freedom. And so in these chapsouli houses, you have music, sex, drug, single women dating, interracially. And it caused a real moral conundrum from more conservative white Americans. Here's an excerpt from a 1910 Chicago Tribune investigation of Chinese restaurants. The laws of morality and health, police regulations, and practically all the other protective measures are being violated openly by many chapsouli establishments. Young girls with breeds down their backs are daily escorted into many of these oriental places by boys wearing their first long trousers, and are being introduced to cigarette smoking, drinking, and other evils destined to make them the slave lives of China men or drag them down into lives of more open shame. There are endless publications that sound exactly like this. Beware, your innocent daughters will be lured into chapsouli restaurants where they'll drink and smoke opium and marry Chinese men or be held prisoner in opium dens. Be afraid. Well, I gotta say, it seems much to do about nothing. Yeah, in most cases, it was. But as always, it's not always that simple. There was this one case. It was the scandalous murder of LC Siegel in 1909. LC Siegel was a member of the prominent Siegel family. Her grandfather, Fran Siegel, was a civil war general. And throughout her life, she had done local missionary work with her mother in and around New York's Chinatown. Until 1909, when her body was found in a trunk on the top floor of an eighth avenue apartment. LC had become involved with one of her missionary pupils, the owner of Chapsouli House. His name was Leon Ling. The police had found love letters signed by LC in Ling's apartment after her body was found. The theory is that Ling had discovered Siegel's infatuation with another Chapsouli House proprietor. Ling's roommate testified that he witnessed Ling murder her through a keyhole in their apartment above the Chapsouli House. Ling disappeared. Police sent out calls to look for Ling in New York's Chinatown, advising that he may be disguised as a woman. He was never found. I should say, this murder was sensational at the time. It grabbed headlines, it was definitely in the public eye. I liken it to the OJ Simpson trial. Try to remember what it felt like to have the 1994 NBA Finals interrupted by watching a white Bronco driving 45 miles per hour down the highway. El Collings disappeared with OJ Simpson earlier today, shortly after he had been formally charged with the murder of his wife. Now let's go back to Marv Albert and the playoff game Mark. And that's kind of how this LC Siegel trial played out. So even years after that trial, it presented this opportunity for labor unions to capitalize on public fear, on the concern for morality and safety of young women and to try to legally eliminate Chinese restaurants. So there was never any resolution of the case and it really focused critical attention on Chinese restaurants and it gave rise to a movement to regulate them. So the LC Siegel murder really is the turning point that leads the unions. Unions had never liked Chinese restaurants and they had been trying to find ways to deal with Chinese restaurants. But this was a turning point. This was a hook that allowed them to say, "See what we've been telling you all this time. Chinese people, Chinese food is a problem and it's time to deal with it." After the break, Chinese restaurants face yet another existential threat. Before the break, reporter Monica Eng was telling us how the sensational 1909 murder of LC Siegel spurred public outrage and that was aimed at the nation's Chinatowns and Chop Sui joints. So Monica, what happens next? Okay, so the unions aren't making much progress trying to boycott Chinese restaurants. Despite all these efforts, they just can't compete on price, give people a good time for a reasonable price and they'll keep coming. So the unions realize they can sort of exploit this public concern about the influence of Chop Sui restaurants on young women and was heightened in the wake of this LC Siegel murder and so they use it as a Trojan horse to push legislation that this time will surely eliminate the restaurants. And that's where this 1910 Massachusetts legislation comes into play. The one that aims to keep white women out of Chinese restaurants, it was called the, quote, yellow peril bill. Ah, so we're back to that point because that's the law that pretty much started you right down this whole rabbit hole. Right, so here's Jack Chin talking about how he first stumbled on this legislation and what it did to his curiosity. So before I started working on this project, as far as I know, nobody really knew about the union effort to eliminate Chinese restaurants from the United States. And the way that I found out about it was over 20 years ago when I was doing a search in a database and I found a 1911 decision from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court that said that a proposal to keep white women out of Chinese restaurants that had been passed by one house of the Massachusetts legislature would be unconstitutional. But it confused me, it puzzled me, where did this come from? Chinese restaurants are from the perspective of 2019 very popular, they're in malls, they're in food courts, they're in suburban areas, and everybody seems to like them. Why would there be this concern about Chinese restaurants? And so that was the thread that I started polling and trying to figure out what could have caused the Massachusetts legislature to seriously consider keeping white women out of Chinese restaurants. And it wasn't just Massachusetts, there were similar laws banning white women or women as a whole from Chinese restaurants in states and cities across the country. I'm talking about Iowa, Montana, Morgan, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, even as far as the sketch in Canada. Women did not yet, at that point, have the right to vote, so all these efforts in the legislatures were put forth without any input from women, right? That's absolutely right. And a lot of the women, they just kept going to chop sui houses, even though, and sometimes because, they were these places that embodied rebellion. So in many cases, police enforced unlegislated curfews and raids. They arrested swaths of chop sui patrons, especially women, if get this. They couldn't produce marriage certificates to prove that the men who are with them were their husbands. Geez, whatever happened to that law. So bottom line, these bills and laws were deemed unconstitutional. One by one, they got struck down in the courts. In the case of the Massachusetts quote-unquote yellow peril bill, that one was supposed to apply to all women under the age of 21. So in a lot of cases, it would have prevented not just white women, but also Chinese women from going to these places with their husbands. And the legislators saw this problem. They were like, yeah, that's true, but we're going to press on with the bill anyway. So the Massachusetts House rejected the vote in 1910, but then reintroduced it in 1911. Finally, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court was like, if you pass this bill, it will be unconstitutional and void because you're just doing this at Chinese own places. You're clearly targeting chop sui houses based on race, and that won't stand. So they withdrew the bill, and that's largely how it played out across the country. The laws just weren't constitutionally viable. So these laws and boycotts to stop Chinese restaurants, in the end, they failed. But in another way, the campaign kind of worked. All of these anti-Chinese efforts, the attempted laws, the boycotts, the immigration restrictions, and the public outcry, they ended up cutting the number of Chinese laborers in the US in half by 1920. And while the Union couldn't kill Chinese restaurants, they struck this even bigger blow to Asians in general. Here's Jack again. The political motivation didn't go away. The political impetus to keep America white didn't go away. And so what happened is the American Federation of Labor and other groups who shared this concern did prevail on Congress in 1917 and 1924 to further restrict Asian immigration. And so they did not destroy Chinese restaurants. But in 1917, they extended the Chinese Exclusion Act to all of continental Asia. In 1924, Congress extended the Chinese Exclusion Act to everyone who was ineligible to citizenship in the United States. And because there was a racial restriction on naturalization that primarily fell upon Asians, no Asians after 1924 were allowed to immigrate unless they were in one of the accepted categories, diplomats, merchants, teachers, students, etc. All right, now wait a minute. So they were not able to uphold those laws against Chinese restaurants, but they were able to keep the Chinese immigration restrictions and then even expand them to other Asian people. So if that's the case, how did we end up with so many Chinese restaurants? Well, again, that has to do with these arcane legal maneuvers going on behind the scenes around the 1910s. At the time, they might have seemed like these super tiny and incremental changes, but they ended up having these huge effects on the nation's food. So remember, there was that Chinese Exclusion Act that technically barred all Chinese laborers and only letting teachers, students, diplomats, and merchants. Well, for years, the Chinese and their lawyers have been challenging and chipping away at the language of it using multiple cases. And the question became what are merchants? And this was a complicated question. There was something like a dozen cases in the US Supreme Court that dealt with the question of who is merchant exactly what exactly is merchant. And one of the things that happened, one of the reasons that Chinese restaurants were important in the Chinese community is that there was this back and forth over the years in the courts and in the immigration bureaucracy about whether Chinese restaurant proprietors were merchants. But ultimately, around 1915, there came a consensus that yes, if you are the owner or, importantly, a part owner of a Chinese restaurant and you do no manual labor. That was one of the keys, then you're considered merchant. And if you're merchant, you can immigrate to the United States, you can bring your children, you can bring your spouse. And so this was a way for Chinese people to get around the Chinese Exclusion Act and come to the United States. And so addressing this tiny word in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the word merchants, that opened the floodgates. You had tens of thousands of Chinese restaurant tours applying for entry. And my great grandpa was one of them. After this 1915 consensus on the word merchant, you saw Chinese restaurants skyrocket around the country. By the 20s, some cities saw Chinese restaurants grow by eight and even 20 times. But with this provision for restaurateurs came a catch. It almost seemed like it was aimed at the city reputation of some of the earlier joints. The restaurants had to be "high grade Chinese restaurants." And the people who applied had to be the bosses, not the workers. And this is rich. Two white people had to vouch for the character of these applicants. So entrepreneurs like my relatives who had never really been restaurateurs back in Guangdong, where we came from, suddenly they took up the restaurant business. And they built some pretty swanky places. You had white tablecloths, art decoday cores, and big dance bands. Places like my own families, Golden Pumpkin, and Hoseye Guy restaurants in Chicago. This was sort of a glamorous place, an elegant place. A restaurant that didn't primarily compete based on price, but competed based on the quality of the experience. And so there were Chinese restaurants that had live music that had dancing, that had entertainment. But at places like the Forbidden City in San Francisco, at places like Ruby Foods in New York, these were glamorous joints that people like Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby and celebrities of the era, politicians, actors would go to see and be seen. The Studio 54 of the 20s and 30s was a role that some of these Chinese restaurants played. And little by little, public attitude changed toward Chinese restaurants. Unions felt safer from the dangers of low-paid Asian workers. And Chinese restaurants eventually became this integral part of American culture. And just about every neighborhood and every small town across the country. Plus, they got really good at adapting to trends and giving local customers what they wanted. At some of my family's restaurants, that meant adopting a teaky vibe with tropical drinks and pupu platters. And my grandpa's Hoseye Guy, it meant offering a whole American side to the menu. They even had this whole separate American kitchen. That's where my dad and uncle worked summers. They were baking apple pies and Parker rolls every morning to serve up with the fried chicken and steaks along with the chapsuie, of course. Today, that flexibility can mean anything from adding a sushi bar to keeping bland chapsuie on the menu because that's just what the local customers want. I think Chinese restaurant operators above all else wanted to figure out how to have sustainable businesses here in this country and they adapted. Why Chinese restaurants as opposed to other things? Well, I think part of it has to do with language, Chinese immigrants from China couldn't do things that required fluency in English, most of them because they didn't speak English well enough. And they also had to face the employment discrimination at the time. There were lots of jobs that weren't open to them because they weren't citizens and they couldn't naturalize because of their race. There were lots of jobs that even if they were technically open to them, socially weren't open to them. And so Chinese restaurants were sort of a sweet spot, a combination of where the greater society was interested in interacting with Chinese and where Chinese people could make a living. So maybe that's the takeaway. You can try your boycotts, you can demonize the race, you can push your laws, and you can try to keep Chinese out of the country. But somehow through ingenuity, entrepreneurship, and giving the customer what he wants, the Chinese restaurant will always find a way to survive. And survive they have. Back here at Sunma restaurant, a second generation has taken over the restaurant from their dad, Eric Chong. These are of hip cocktails and craft beers along with the roast duck and their dad's special Hong Kong barbecue. Last year, they even picked up a special James Beard Award. And what was the category? American Classics. That's Monica Eng, a reporter at Chicago Public Radio and co-host of The Chewing Podcast. If you want to see some cool images of the Chinese restaurants that Monica's family owned in Chicago, the Golden Pumpkin and Housai Guy, while we put them up on our website, that's www.americasteskitchen.com/proof. Go check it out. And be sure to check out The Chewing Podcast. It's a podcast about food and health, and it's hosted by Luisa Chu and Monica Eng. There you go. It's Chu Eng. Love it. And if you like in-depth, deeply reported stories about food like this one, you're going to want to go give it a listen. And you can get that podcast wherever you're listening right now. Proof is hosted and produced by me, Bridget Lancaster. Our executive producer is Caitlin Keller. Sarah Joyner is our producer, associate producer, Caroline Rickert, scoring sound design and mixing by Matt Boyton of Ultraviolet Audio, editing by Caitlin Keller, Sarah Joyner, Jordan Pearson, and Connor Olmstein. Brian Campbell of Signal Sounds can post our theme music, "Additional Music" by Kyle Forester. Post-production support from Henne Margolis, our production manager, is Dianne Knox. Jack Bishop is the original fortune cookie and chief creative officer of America's Test Kitchen. David Nussbaum is our CEO. Oh, and one more thing. If you like proof, we'll be sure to subscribe so you'll get new episodes as soon as they drop. And while you're there, we would love it if you'd leave us a rating or just write us a review wherever you listen. It really helps other people find the show.