The Korean War Memorial in Veterans Memorial Park, Auburn, New York

Seven Korean War veterans raised money and organized the construction of The Korean War Memorial in Auburn, New York in 2007. The memorial honors American soldiers who participated and died in battle to save a nation from communism, following the Allied countries’ containment policy during the Cold War. While the exact designer(s) of the final memorial is unknown, the veterans who facilitated the memorial’s construction likely influenced the final design, which features “Korean War” in a striking East Asian typeface. 

The font is better known today as the Chop Suey/Wonton font, as seen on present-day Asian restaurant signs and takeout bags. In the United States, it is widely associated with Asian culture, particularly China, Japan, and Korea, by perpetuating an exoticness in its resemblance to the brushstrokes used in Chinese characters. But beyond Chinese businesses and industries, it is further repurposed as a representation of all things Asian, encapsulating Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and other cultures into one universal typeface. While the font’s reputation proves useful for distinguishing an Asian business from a non-Asian business, it simultaneously disregards the complex diversity of East Asian cultures in favor of Western desires. Furthermore, using the font on a sentimental war memorial feels inappropriate, as it generalizes Korean identity as a simple branch of Asian-ness. The South Korean peoples’ lives that were lost and upheaved from the war and violence feel diminished in favor of ensuring that a Western audience recognized the foreignness of Korea as a concept. 

Western designers’ continuous, widespread use of mimicry fonts makes Western audiences ignorant to the unique components of East Asian language systems. Truthfully, many Americans find it difficult to visually differentiate Korea’s Hangul, Japan’s hiragana, katakana, and kanji, and China’s Hanzi, if they never studied the languages before. Hangul uses syllabic blocks and forms alphabetic syllabary. Japanese is mainly syllabic, but combines kanji (borrowed Chinese logographic characters) with hiragana and katakana. Hanzi is primarily logographic, with each character pronounced as a syllable. But when each culture is represented in society as a standalone font like Chop Suey, how can individuals inherently know the difference? Designers dictate the visual infrastructure of the world around us, and the Wonton font demonstrates the need for language-specific fonts that represent the world’s various writing systems.