Escalating Danger in Contemporary Legends

Today at work I was going to eat shrimp fried rice from the Chinese restaurant in the mall, but a story that my assistant manager told me changed my mind. She said that one of the girls in her cosmetology class said one of her friends got sick from eating at one of the local Chinese restaurants. The girl thought she had food poisoning. She went to the doctor and he told her it wasn't food poisoning, but syphilis. She said that she didn't get sick until after she ate the shrimp fried rice at the Chinese restaurant. The doctor asked if she had any left over. She did, so she brought it in and the doctor tested it. Four samples of semen were found in the rice and one was carrying syphilis (Fall 1998).

And,

The . . . story that she [the student's friend] relayed to me was about a Chinese restaurant in her hometown. According to Barbara a woman ate there and then later on in the week she went to the doctor with a horrible rash all over her face. She had contracted herpes and upon further investigation the police discovered three different types of semen in the food she ate at the restaurant earlier in the week (Fall 1998).

Please note in these that while syphilis and herpes are less threatening than AIDS, there are three or four people ejaculating into the food, and the scene has shifted from an American (fast-food) restaurant to a Chinese one, long established in legendry as perilous. A confluence of xenophobia, food contamination, and disease motifs is creating new, more potent hybrids.

Even the basic legends about Chinese restaurants serving cat meat have escalated in their offensiveness, as in two more examples. In one a woman became ill after eating a chicken dish at a Chinese restaurant. When the doctor examined the leftovers, the "chicken" turned out to be a cat with "VD," an unspecified sexually transmitted disease (Spring 1999). The other has a slightly different twist, arid, judging by students' reaction, an apparently escalated "Ew, gross" coefficient:

A woman became very ill and went to the doctor. When they tested the Chinese food she had left over in her refrigerator, it turned out that it was made from the uterus of a cat with a yeast infection (Spring 1999).4

Even where real chicken and not diseased cat is used, the dangers (and the gross-out factor) have escalated, as in these next stories:

Just before I was going to move to Athens, several of my friends and I got together to go shopping. We decided to eat lunch at Burger King, and I told everybody while we were standing in line that I was tired of hamburgers, and that I was going to get a chicken sandwich. My friend Carla told me that I should not do that. I asked her why, and she told me that a friend of hers that goes to school at the University of Georgia ordered a chicken sandwich at the Wendy's in Athens, and only ate half of it because she said it had too much mayonnaise on it. Later that night she also got really sick and her roommates took her to the hospital. The doctor asked the girl if she had eaten anything unusual that day, and she said all she had eaten was a chicken sandwich from Wendy's. The doctor then asked if she had any of it left, and she said she had saved the part she did not eat, so one of her roommates went to get it. They discovered that what she had thought was mayonnaise was really puss [sic] because the chicken had had a huge boil on it and the girl had popped it when she bit into the sandwich (January 1998).