Reading the description of the story made me smile a little because my reaction to my first encounter with tamales is "this is like Mexican zhongzi." (Mexican food has very familiar tastes to me)

Which brings to mind the design choice made by the owners of El Sol Mexican Restaurant in Harrisonburg, Virginia when they bought out an erstwhile Chinese restaurant; since they couldn’t bring themselves to get rid of the cute landscape mural with pandas, they added a few touches to Mexicanize it:



(Image description: a landscape that started out as Chinese, with a yellow full moon rising over distant mountain peaks on the horizon, a bamboo clump at left, a meandering stream, and a fir tree at right. There are a couple low-growing cacti that probably originated as something else. The bamboo is now bearing chilies, overpainted on some of the leaf shapes, as fruit.

Pandas in sombreros inhabit the scene: one eating a bamboo shoot which has been converted into a taco filling, one drinking from the stream, one sniffing one of the cacti, and one using a small stringed instrument to serenade another panda (in a mantilla tagging her as feminine) perched in the fir tree.)