Mission Chinese is a scam; it's more popular than Chinese restaurants run by Chinese people. It's funny how people prefer fake versions of real things–it's about commodity, novelty, pre-chewed food.

Carol Li is a Brooklyn-based jewelry designer and the lead creative designer behind Janky Jewels. Known for their playful and pearly designs, Janky Jewels creations have been seen on Olivia Rodrigo, Bella Hadid, and Ella Emhoff, among others. Li sits down with editor-in-chief Tess Pollok to discuss our most recent issue, WAR GAMES, and share her thoughts on camp aesthetics, life in Lower Manhattan, the personal brand, and wanting to belong somewhere that doesn’t exist.

CAROL LI: I haven’t seen the movie War Games. It’s about chess, right?

TESS POLLOK: It’s about a gamer, played by Matthew Broderick, who wants to prove that he’s the ultimate chess player, and he accidentally hacks into the US government’s NATO nuclear computer and challenges it to a game of chess. So he thinks he’s just playing a game but the computer is actually imitating thermonuclear war with Russia and preparing real missiles for launch, endangering the world and so on. I thought it was an interesting movie about stakes: how chess and nuclear war are just strategy sets with different stakes. I don’t feel like most people I know have a decent sense of what the stakes of their lives are. Does that remind you of anything in your life?

LI: A lot of things come to mind. Instagram fights, random beef, Lower Manhattan life in general. In hindsight, nobody cares about most of it. I see transplants and random white people fighting over things no one has any stake or claim to every day. It’s just so funny. Like, I think it’s so funny-not that it’s actually funny-that there’s a food pantry down the street from Dimes Square. There’s elderly Chinese people picking up free bread because they can’t afford food next to people eating $30 entrees. Or Mission Chinese, which is a scam.

POLLOK: How is it a scam?

LI: Danny Bowien is definitely capitalizing off the fact that people are a little bit racist and assuming. He's not Chinese, he's a Korean guy adopted by white parents, he's from Utah. I mean, there's nothing wrong with him making Chinese food, chefs make different cuisines all the time. I just think it's funny that Mission Chinese is what it is when it's in Chinatown next to so many Chinese restaurants run by actual Chinese people.

POLLOK: It's commodity, it's novelty, it's pre-chewed food, culturally speaking.

LI: I think it's related to the Lucien complex or the Odeon complex, also, nostalgia for the Warhol era. This idea of building a personal brand and the politics of which places end up becoming places for “people in the know.”

POLLOK: I agree, it's all about personal branding and self-mythologizing. It's funny how places and other things on the material plane, like restaurants, are folded into this never-ending quest people are on to declare themselves to the world.

LI: It's a cult mentality. It's the same as when you work somewhere and they're, like, “We're a family here,” and it's actually just a trick to ensure that you stay exactly where you are and feel like you're a part of something that isn't real.

POLLOK: It's interesting that people now are trying to reproduce this type of lifestyle in the Lower East Side – it's expensive now, it's difficult to get an apartment there. It's not actually that analogous to how Warhol and his peers would have been living, it's another way of conflating place with self.

Parade as a company has monetized people's fears of not being relevant. It's like a sermon with an underwear photo in the pulpit instead of a priest.

LI: Yeah, and I think the sadness surrounding the death of China Chalet is really funny because it wasn't a particularly fun place to be. There was always a crazy cover and a lot of pressure. It's less about community-building and more about being able to afford access to certain places.

POLLOK: Nostalgia for something you didn't even like–to admire something you dream of and then sacrifice the experience of it to perform it.

LI: The establishment is dead, it can't speak for itself, it can't stop you from rewriting your own experiences. People like remembering their past as character-building when the person they are now is mostly built off of their own insecurities, wanting to belong somewhere that doesn't exist. This isn't a hot take, but brands capitalize off of our insecurities in a huge way. I think Parade is a great example of a company that's basically monetized people's fear of not being relevant. There's no way they actually make any money because they give away so much free shit, but there's not a person in New York who doesn't know what it is. Because they managed to not pay for an ounce of marketing. They take advantage of our desire to feel, it's like a sermon, I guess, but with an underwear photo in the pulpit instead of a priest.

POLLOK: “The attention economy.”

LI: Exactly. Social currency to currency. I don't hold a lot of hatred or criticism towards that. I feel like my peers get really angry at rich people, inherited wealth or whatever. As someone with working class parents who's surrounded by wealthy people, I'm not really stressed out by it. It doesn't have anything to do with me. It's discouraging as a business owner but there's nothing you can really do about that. Not that it's not fun to talk about. My friend will be really annoying talking about her ex, like, “Yeah, him and his friends basically run New York,” and I'm, like, “I'm from New York and I've never fucking heard of these people.”

POLLOK: There's a high level of self-importance across the board.

LI: If you grow up in an upper class environment you're obviously groomed to think you're spectacular and worthy of everything, but I really dislike the Gen Z attitude about how much we all deserve everything. Shit's tough.

POLLOK: It's bad for your personality to think you're special. Definitely one of the most annoying traits. I know a lot of people who are still disentangling that for themselves.

LI: For me it was going from, “You're not special,” to “you're worthy of something.” I used to introduce myself to people over and over because I thought that people didn't recognize me. But on the flip side, I've known people, especially men, convinced that everyone hates them and that they're undeserving of love–self-hating narcissism. Or, when white women go on retreats to find themselves. The only thing at stake in their lives is their own self-discovery.

POLLOK: Did you ever read Jill Soloway's She Wants It?

LI: No.

POLLOK: There's a great company retreat scene in it. People aren't getting along on her show, so she's, like, “I'm not a regular boss, I'm not a regular capitalist, so we're going on a retreat instead of doing an HR process.” Really funny shit. “I'm not a capitalist so I'm going to reproduce the capitalist process in an exactly identical way but because of my own self-importance I'm going to pretend this is totally different.” It would have cost less money to just have an HR person do it, honestly.

LI: I see the push for communism as relating to artificial intelligence. Obviously there's factors beyond my ability to describe, but, what does it actually mean to push for communism? Do people not understand that there are no organic beet tortilla chips under communism? It just doesn't fit in with how people live their lives at all.

POLLOK: I think the interest is mostly aesthetic.

LI: Nobody has their own beliefs, we don't even believe what we believe. We're stuck on having the work done for us. My dad was a Trump voter, like many working class people. Money rules families. It made sense to my dad because he was promising that we were going to make more money and he would rather have that than a Democratic welfare plan that's not going to work. We live in the most secular time imaginable. We're not willing to give up anything for our beliefs because they're so watered down, they're just words.

Do people not understand that there are no organic beet tortilla chips under communism?

POLLOK: Secularism, capitalism, and Western thought, I think those three together–all of them work broadly to undermine human dignity and create a lack of respect for inherent human dignity. If you look at it on that level, sorry to make such a flippant comparison, but when people are, like, “We hated going to China Chalet but we miss it so much,” I think our culture is making us trade things that are actually meaningful so we can buy them back.

LI: I was thinking recently about the idea of “ugly aesthetics” and how they relate to camp and sustainability and personal branding. It's connected to the way brands are obsessed with working class aesthetics, and so are we. I saw someone wearing a vintage McDonald's uniform the other day as an outfit. And Jeremy Scott did McDonald's. I'm trying to think of some other examples–Telfar did White Castle. Blah blah, mimicking the struggle while distancing ourselves from it. I hate the trope of the broke college student. You'll be in a room full of different people, your friends and classmates, and everyone will be going, “Oh, I'm a broke college student,” but everyone saying that means a completely different thing.

POLLOK: A funny thing I noticed recently–in terms of how people have been dressing at parties, it's just a mess. I went to someone's apartment recently and everyone there was dressed like they were at court in 17th century Versailles or they lived in a West Virginia trailer park. There was no in between. It would be a guy in ripped Carhartt with his balls hanging out sitting on a couch next to a blonde girl in a corset with thousands of silk ribbons in her hair. It's just so funny to look at that and go, “You're actually exactly the same person.”

LI: Every day is Halloween.

Carol Li is a Brooklyn-based jewelry designer and the CEO and head designer behind Janky Jewels.

Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.