East meets West in the Chinese Restaurant
By Ivan Todosijczuk, Research Profile Project

If you do any driving on the Prairies, there are certain common features you’ll find in many rural communities. There are grain elevators. There are old pick-up trucks. There are gas stations with their old pumps. And very likely, there’s a Chinese restaurant. “If you drive across the country, which I did quite a lot with grad school and just as a part of living in this country, one of the things that struck me was that there was a Chinese restaurant in every town that we went to. It was strange because it was so consistent, reliable, and yet really odd,” says Dr. Lily Cho. “And my family had some connection. My father ran a restaurant in the Yukon. He had never cooked and never run a restaurant before. He spoke no English yet he opened a restaurant in the Yukon. And so many people have done this. Chinese people have gone off to really remote places, far away from the urban centres with their own Chinese communities, to do what I thought was really odd. This is what partly spurred me on to look further into this. The restaurants can and do tell us a lot about the immigration and migration of Chinese in Canada, as well as the construction of race in Canada and its connection to food culture. There’s a real intimate connection between eating and experiencing the world,” says Lily.

Lily Cho’s PhD in English Literature focuses on the Chinese restaurant and it’s place in Western Canadian culture. But she had an immediate problem. “It was a very difficult dissertation because it was relatively non-traditional. In your standard thesis you take a set of texts, a set of novels or poetry, and construct questions around that,” says Lily. “One of the biggest challenges with a dissertation on Chinese restaurants, especially from my perspective of literature and culture, was to figure out what text I was going to use. A lot of the work went into constructing my archive. This meant bringing together a set of documents and materials that would help me answer the questions I started with, namely Why Chinese restaurants? What do you do with their overwhelming presence on the Canadian landscape and their relative absence in terms of how we talk about Chinese communities and migration patterns in Canada?”

Lily quickly discovered there were lots of people interested in the research she was doing. This realization occurred while she was being interviewed on CBC radio. “What came out of that interview was a tremendous listener response,” says Lily. “People wrote in with their stories and their connection to the restaurants that were so multiple and so outside of my own. I really got the sense there was something important going on within the restaurants. They are the kind of space where people come together to work out how they understand being Chinese and non-Chinese. I really got the sense there was something really important going on there about how the restaurant was working as the kind of space where people come together to work things out, to work out how they understand each others cultural similarities and differences. All kinds of conversations happen.”

One aspect of Chinese restaurants that embraces the written word, and has become almost an art form, is the menu. Go into any restaurant, Chinese or not, and you’ll get a menu. With Chinese restaurants, there’s a uniformity across the culture, yet there’s a uniqueness to the individual menu. Lily says that not only does a Chinese menu define the Chinese food, but it also specifically identifies Canadian food. “Chinese restauranteurs offer up a vision of Canadianism to the Canadians as well as a vision of what it is to be Chinese,” says Lily. “There is an identity here. Restaurant menus give a sense of what a community is thinking.”

The menu also has a historical link to printing. “The novel and the newspaper both emerged at about the same time because of print culture,” says Lily. “The restaurant menu follows the same trajectory. What print culture made possible was the reproduction of a menu and the idea that you could go to one place and expect the same food all the time with the same consistency. And there’s also the structure between what the menu says and what you get. It allows you to define culture through a print medium. It’s an object of exchange and of communication.”

One of the conclusions Lily has drawn from her research is that the Chinese restaurant was a critical aspect of the multicultural mosaic in Canada’s past, and the foundation for the present. “Restaurants had been largely overlooked, especially in the non-urban environment, and how it affects the settlement of various ethnic groups,” says Lily. “There was an overwhelming bias towards urban research almost to the exclusion of rural. The history of Chinese immigration, even prior to the construction of the railway at the turn of the 20th century, is tied to the immigration of Chinese to Canada today. To talk about present day race in Canada without talking about older communities means you lose sight of the way problems have emerged and how we have arrived to where we are today. And people still emigrate to small towns, not just the big urban centres.” And they still open up restaurants and hand out menus.

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