Here’s the Full Story of the Panda Express Postdoc

As soon as Twitter found the “Panda Express Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies” at the University of Pennsylvania — posted on The Chronicle’s own job board — the jokes started rolling in.

“Born too late to experience a good job market, too early to be a teen TikTok star,” lamented one Twitter user, a doctoral student studying Asian immigration. “Just in time to see the Panda Express postdoc.”

Outrage soon followed. “IN NO UNIVERSE SHOULD A POSTDOC BE SPONSORED BY PANDA EXPRESS. The fact that it’s in Asian American studies is optically awful,” wrote another Twitter-using graduate student, who is not in an Asian American studies program.

“Oh my god,” tweeted Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis, contributing writer at The Atlantic, and Twitter user with 109,100 followers. (He later wrote he didn’t mean to judge. But he asked readers to “consider the lower-status postdoc whose CV will forever be an orange chicken ad.”)

Completing the life cycle of a viral post on Twitter, people replied to Bogost’s tweet with outrage about his outrage. “What’s the problem here, Ian? … It’s a great Asian American immigrant-success story.” “This says everything about the snobbery of a certain sector of academics.” There was even a sprinkling of bad Chinese-food jokes that, in their cringiness, read as vaguely distasteful, if not racist. “Two writing samples? Is that like two sides, one lo mein, one rice?” Free hint with meal: Dad jokes don’t work if they’re about marginalized communities that are not your own.

But the story of the Panda Express Postdoc is in many ways similar to those of more-solemn-sounding academic fellowships.

There’s a big donor: Forbes estimates that Panda Express does $3.5 billion in sales annually. And there’s a personal connection: Andrea Cherng, daughter of the founders, Andrew and Peggy Cherng, and chief brand officer for the Panda Restaurant Group, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a major in sociology and a minor in Asian American studies.

In fact, Andrea Cherng was among the students who pushed for the creation of Penn’s Asian American studies program, which was established in 1996, said faculty members involved with it at the time. Nearly every Asian American studies program owes its existence to student activism, experts say, and Penn’s is no exception.

“Panda and the Cherngs have always been avid supporters of the AAPI [Asian American/Pacific Islander] community and causes through philanthropy as well as brand and corporate initiatives,” read a written statement sent to The Chronicle by Jessica Chao, a spokesperson for the Panda Restaurant Group.

Panda Express has pledged $450,000 to support five positions over the next three years. The scholars will be Penn’s first-ever postdoctoral researchers in Asian American studies. “It’s historic,” said David L. Eng, one of the program’s directors.

A Good Name to Know

Not everyone involved with the Asian American studies program’s founding at Penn knew of Andrea Cherng and her family’s background, but enough did. When the program celebrated its 25th anniversary in March 2022, with a series of events that drew hundreds of attendees, Eng and his co-director, Fariha I. Khan, kept hearing Andrea’s name. Alumni knew their beloved program was always seeking funding and a more stable future. Couldn’t Cherng be a source?

The directors submitted a grant application last fall to the Panda CommUnity Fund, an effort created through a $10-million pledge that Panda Express made in 2021 to support nonprofits serving minority communities. Why didn’t the funders call the position something less eyebrow-raising, like the “Cherng Family Postdoc”? As one Twitter user wrote: “If this was the Richie Rockefeller IV postdoc, no one would bat an eye.” Chao explained that the fellowships are named after the restaurant, not the family, because the money comes from the corporate fund and not the family foundation.

Staff members at the Cherng Family Trust reviewed the application, and Khan and Eng got the good news over email in February.

Big Asian American donors aren’t new to supporting higher education, both within and outside of ethnic-studies programs. In 2017, the Cherngs themselves donated $30 million to what’s now called the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. But there’s been fresh interest in the study of Asian Americans and their roles in American culture and history since the onset of the pandemic.

In the early days of the coronavirus’s spread in the United States, former President Donald J. Trump began calling it the “Chinese virus,” and the country saw a rise in hate incidents aimed at people of Asian descent. In response, Asian American activism of all kinds ramped up, and in 2021 two high-profile universities received major gifts related to Asian American studies and student life. Stanford University’s Asian American Activities Center got an endowed directorship, and Harvard University received more than $45 million from 10 alumni to expand the Asian American studies program.

Meanwhile, Asian American student activists upped their demands for Asian- and Asian American-focused courses, hires, and student centers. There’s plenty of room for growth in the discipline. Outside of the western United States, Asian American studies departments are underdeveloped, experts say. Among Ivy League institutions, only Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania have dedicated programs.

Since the pandemic began, Duke University, Harvard, and Penn have all made cluster hires in the field. “This moment is transformative,” Khan said.

Mass Appeal

Early in the pandemic, the Cherng family, too, was disturbed by rising anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment.

Peggy Tsiang Cherng was born in Myanmar, Andrew in China. Both came to the United States for college in the mid-1960s, meeting as freshmen at Baker University, in Kansas. Profiles of the Panda Express business have attributed its success, in part, to the software that Peggy, who holds a doctorate in electrical engineering, wrote to track sales and inventory.

Andrew opened the first Panda restaurant with his father, in Pasadena, Calif. (Peggy joined later.) Panda dishes have an authentic Chinese origin — Andrew’s father had trained in culinary school in southwest China — but they’ve been tweaked to appeal to the American masses, Andrea Cherng has said. “They took what they knew and they tailored it to an American audience, in order to have the volume of business they needed to provide,” she told The Splendid Table in 2017.

Early in the pandemic, the chain suffered steep losses in certain regions, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Our stores and associates did experience xenophobia,” wrote Chao, the Panda Express spokesperson, but the company sought to regain public trust through health measures in the stores and donations to community Covid-relief efforts.

Through Chao, Andrea declined interview requests from The Chronicle. She was quoted in the Penn student newspaper during her undergraduate days, advocating for more Asian American hires and raising awareness for ethnic-studies programs at the university. When the Asian American studies program was formally established, she became chair of its undergraduate advisory board.

Rosane Rocher, professor emerita of South Asia studies and the program’s first director, recalled Andrea taking on secretarial tasks for the fledgling program, which had no dedicated staff members. “She was a dream,” Rocher said.

After earning advanced degrees in law and business, Andrea worked elsewhere in the private sector before joining the family business.

In a statement, Andrea wrote that she hopes Panda Express’s investment in the Asian American studies program will help students to “understand our collective history” and “learn from the past so that there could be greater belonging for those that may appear to have foreign faces.”

Every program might hope to leave such a mark on its students that they remember it, three decades later, and that at least one of them has the means to turn that memory into major support for scholars and research. In return, the donors would typically get naming rights.