There’s nothing like the smell of napalm in the morning to whet your whistle for an ice-cold beer.
At least that’s what the owners of Rickshaw Bar seemed to think when they opened a Vietnam-themed watering hole in Melbourne, Australia — in an area of the city known as “Little Saigon.”
Now members of the community are calling out the establishment for its “hurtful and insensitive” decorative motif, including pint glasses filled with bullets, used dog tags, discarded military aircraft materials and references to the chemical weapon Agent Orange, which the US notoriously employed to eliminate forest cover and crops for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops during the 20-year war.
Customers at Rickshaw Bar are called up to “settle into a booth or bunker down at the bar.”
“There’s no smoke without fire,” read other signage.
The Asian-Australian media site Liminal magazine shared a scathing Twitter critique of the concept on Tuesday.
“Imagine a war where over a million people died, & then imagine deciding to create an aesthetic out of it, to sell cocktails filled with bullet shells, with an Agent Orange theme,” they wrote in a tweet that saw the support of nearly 1,500 on Twitter.
Beginning in 1954, the Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, saw millions of lives lost, including 58,000 US soldiers, some 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers, about 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters and a staggering 2 million civilians who were caught in the crossfire.
“In a year where anti-Asian racism has risen dramatically, this bar has opened *in Richmond*, a suburb with a strong Vietnamese population, including people who would have *literally fled this war*. This is horrific,” Liminal continued in its post.
According to one response to the tweet, Melbourne-based dining outlets didn’t immediately ascertain why the bar might be considered problematic.
“What’s troubling is also that none of the editors at @concreteplay and @UrbanListMELB saw a problem. @UrbanListMELB even wrote: ‘no objections from us,’ ” they pointed out, highlighting stories that showcase the new establishment.
Following the backlash on social media, Rickshaw Bar has since removed the offending images and ads from their feeds.
“We have taken down our content and apologise to anyone that was offended or found the content inappropriate,” the bar wrote on Instagram on Wednesday. “We have revised our tone and are working hard to make this right. Sorry for any distress caused — it was never our intent.”
Before taking down the materials on Instagram, their page was flooded with criticism, accusing the bar of “trivializing other people’s trauma,” according to the Independent, which obtained screenshots of the comments prior to removal.
“My family is still suffering PTSD and you thought it was a good idea to capitalize on their pain,” said one distressed bar-goer.
Despite the war finally ending in 1975, the Vietnamese continue to live with the deadly remnants of it, including unexploded landmines that still injure and kill innocent people today. Traces of Agent Orange — a mixture of herbicides with links to life-threatening diseases including cancer, leukemia and Parkinson’s — also pose lingering effects on the country’s people and the environment.
The controversy comes at the end of a year that saw renewed prejudice against Asian populations, tied to the Chinese origin of COVID-19. Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, anti-Asian attacks have surged globally, with a 150% spike in hate crimes against Asian-Americans between 2019 and 2020 alone, according to a new analysis released by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, a nonpartisan research and policy group.
