Boston University announced last month that it would add 15 new Chinese dishes to its residential dining menus. But the dishes did not impress the very people the dining services were courting.

In the comments section of the announcement published on BU Today, a news and information website managed by the university’s marketing and communications office, a student named Phyllis wrote, “I am from Beijing, China. The sad thing about this news is that none of the new added food item I have eaten or even heard of when I was in China… It is still American-Chinese food.”

Adding new Chinese dishes was part of BU’s effort to retain the Chinese students in campus housing after the mandatory stay period in freshman year. While 75 percent of American and non-Chinese students return to campus housing in their sophomore year, less than half of Chinese students do so, according to BU Today.

Other BU students from China and Taiwan expressed a similar sentiment. Most found dishes like “Sichuan chili chicken and eggplant, sticky rice”, “pho chicken bowl, ramen noodles” and “soy caramel beef lettuce wrap, glass noodle salad” perplexing. “Caramel beef?” said Jiaan Yu, a sophomore from Nanjing. She frowned and pulled back her head as she read the list of dishes. “Seriously these are Chinese food?”

The university’s particular interest in the Chinese students was also a reaction to their burgeoning population in recent years. China was the biggest single-source country of BU’s overseas students in 2013, representing 35 percent of the university’s international student body. Taiwanese students, comprising four percent, was the fourth largest foreign contingent.

BU is one of the many universities across the United States that are becoming more ethnic aware and responsive about varying student needs, according to John-Eng Wong, visiting scholar in ethnic studies at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity. At the University of California Santa Barbara, there are various ethnicities represented in the cafeteria menu. The Rhode Island School of Design added Korean dishes to cater to its significant Korean student population. “I would say that it’s a good thing that universities try to respond to the evolving character of their student bodies. It wasn’t always that way,” said Wang.

But BU’s grasp of Chinese food falls short of its desire to win over the Chinese population.

Ten Chinese students interviewed said they wouldn’t call the 15 dishes Chinese. Among them, “steamed orange white fish with baby bak choy and rice noodles” received the most objections. “No, we don’t use fruits in our cooking, maybe only pineapple,” said Qi Suo, president of the university’s Chinese Student Association and a senior from Beijing. “Steamed orange white fish? I don’t think any part in China cooks fish with orange,” said sophomore Jing Zhen Zhang, another Beijing native.

In addition to inaccurate cooking techniques, the dishes also incorporated Japanese and Vietnamese ingredients, such as udon and pho. Americans always mix various Asian elements, said Zhang. “Chinese food here is fusion,” He said. Shanghaiist, a China-based blog that publishes Chinese-related news and commentaries, picked up the story on BU Today and pointed out that the university had homogenized various Asian cuisines in the dishes. “Aside from lumping all Asian cuisines together,”said the website, “the 15 new Asian dishes on their menu seem just as bastardized as the aforementioned American-Asian food…”

To make matters worse, the dishes do not represent the regions of china where most of BU’s Chinese students are from. Huaiyan Wang, owner of Beijing Café, a northern Chinese restaurant at Commonwealth Avenue popular with local students, said that most of the dishes are Cantonese. “Bak choy, we never say that, we say napa. That is very typical Cantonese. Like hoisin, people from the north never use that. Egg noodles, people from the north never eat egg noodles,” she said.

The gravitation towards Cantonese cooking, also evident in Chinese restaurants across the United States, has a lot to do with the first large-scale Cantonese migration to the country, said Merry White, a BU anthropology professor. “But the food Chinese workers cooked for others was an invention. Chow mein, chop suey, and egg foo yung had antecedents in China but were invented here,” she said. Homogenizing various Asians and their cultures, White explained, is a propensity the Americans picked up from the British to mean “a geographical entity, a cultural form, a racial category, and a culinary template.”

But not all Chinese favor Cantonese cooking, said Wang. “I’m Chinese. When I stayed in Guangzhou, I got stomach upset. The food is good, they’re fresh. Just the way it’s cooked, and my stomach doesn’t like that.”

According to BU’s Chinese Student Association, most of its members are from Shanghai, Beijing, Sichuan, Nanjing, and Hangzhou. (Suo believes there is also substantial number of students from Guangzhou, but they tend not to join the association because they do not speak Mandarin, the language of most members.) Each of these cities has its characteristic cuisine. Zhang said that the Chinese food in America was too sweet for his liking. “I’m from northern China. Our food is salty and with heavier flavors,” he said.

Taiwanese food is an entirely different cuisine. “Because Taiwan was ruled by Japan for 50 years, Taiwanese cuisine is an amalgamation of Chinese and Japanese techniques. Taiwanese food is more light-handed with the seasonings compared to Chinese food in general,” said David Huang, president of BU’s Taiwanese Student Association. To illustrate the difference between Taiwanese and Cantonese cuisine, he added that Taiwanese’s preferred noodles are rice vermicelli, cellophane noodles, and rice flour noodles (also known as rat noodle because of its shape), none of which were included in the 15 dishes. Another Taiwanese student, Kevin Huang, said he hoped to see the iconic scallion pancake, salt and pepper chicken, and Taiwanese beef noodles in the university’s dining menu, but he might be disappointed.

“It’s very difficult for us as a dining service to meet the needs of every student on campus. The variety of food from the regions is so different. What’s available, how they cook, what they have had at home…” said Christopher Bee, BU dining services executive chef. “The cooking style is different as well. Our kitchens aren’t really equipped to move forward with high heat cooking, very rapid pace cooking.” All except three of the 15 dishes, Bee said, were developed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for which BU’s caterer, Aramark Holdings Corporation, was the official catering service provider.

That said, Bee emphasized that the 15 dishes were not a be-all end-all offering to the Chinese students. “This is new for us. We put this together to begin a process. The continuing development of this thing is what’s really important to us. As we do more research, as we speak to folks to get some feedback,” he said.

To get the ball rolling, White suggested, the university could refrain from blending various ethnic cuisines into one. “Just because there are Pan Asian, or fusion restaurants doesn’t give the kitchens a free hand to misname things. Since students will care. Why don’t they hire Chinese cooks to make ‘real’ dim sum, if they want Cantonese specialties? Or get a noodle chef to pull noodles?” she asked.

Then again, some students didn’t mind eating fusion dishes. Suo said she was open to all kinds of dishes because she “loves all Asian food”.

Shigang Zhu, a junior at the College of Arts and Sciences, said, “I can’t really distinguish authentic Chinese or Asian Chinese food. If the food tastes good, I’ll eat.”

*Written for Sheryl Julian’s food writing class at Boston University, where I am pursuing a MLA in Gastronomy.