Burger King Gets Grilled for Offensive ‘Vietnamese’ Chopstick Ad

Burger King New Zealand came out with a promotional video featuring people trying to eat a burger with chopsticks.

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Maria Mo, a Korean New Zealander, saw the sponsored video while scrolling through Instagram. She tweeted a clip of the ad. In it, several people struggle to eat a burger using giant chopsticks.

About 124,000 people viewed Mo’s video within two days of her tweeting it. The full video featured more clips of people struggling to eat the burger with chopsticks, according to Mo.

Many were enraged by the company’s decision to make fun of chopsticks, an eating utensil used by ethnic groups across Asia for thousands of years. Asian communities across the world, including in the U.S. and New Zealand, use chopsticks for eating and cooking.

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Mo, a classical pianist, said she was “fed up” with seeing Asians portrayed by powerful companies in a diminished way.

“I felt extremely fed up, and tired,” Mo said about seeing the ad.

People of color “are constantly having to deal with microaggressions as well as outright hatred and it just never ends,” she added. “And I could not believe that such a concept was approved for such a big, well-known company. It says a lot [about] what kind of demographics they must employ across the board for their ads.”

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