Driving across the country in a hatchback vehicle, Lily Cho was surprised by the number of Chinese restaurants she counted in towns that whizzed by her windows.
Lily Cho, an associate professor in the Department of English at The University of Western Ontario, explores how Chinese restaurants offer a ‘palatable’ version of Chineseness that promotes tolerance and anti-discrimination in her soon-to-be-published book, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada.
“Everybody has this moment when they realize every town they go to there’s a Chinese restaurant,” Cho says. “It struck me as odd that they were everywhere and I started to wonder how they got there and what it meant that they were there and so ubiquitous on the Canadian landscape.”
She decided to explore the cultural phenomenon and her results have been turned into the book, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, due out in November.
Seeing Chinese culture served up across Canada in small towns got Cho thinking about the role the often family-run businesses played in translating Chinese culture to non-Chinese residents and how the restaurants promoted tolerance and anti-discrimination.
“They are everywhere and yet they didn’t seem to be very prominent in terms of how we talked about the big issues like multiculturalism or race in Canada. In those kinds of discussions we tend to look at Chinatowns – big urban populations,” says the associate professor in The University of Western Ontario’s Department of English, currently on leave to hold the Canadian Studies Fellowship at the University of Toronto.
Finding answers meant digging through countless representations of Chinese restaurants in Canadian cultural artifacts, as well as menus, art, music and folk stories.
The foods listed on most modern Chinese restaurant menus resemble the same dim sum, rice, meat and vegetable dishes no matter which city in Canada you’re sitting in. But food choices differed as you look back through the decades, reflecting the tastes and influences of the time.
For example, a menu from a Chinese restaurant in a small town in Alberta from1910 shared little resemblance to those recognizable today. Rather than having Chinese food to order, the menu included Mexican items.
“At first I thought it was very anomalous, but I did more research and I found out that many of the cooks were connected to working on the railway in Canada,” she says. Many railway workers travelled north along the California coast and picked up culinary skills and traditions while working alongside Mexican labourers.
It wasn’t until the mid-20th century (about the 1940s) that what is now thought of as “Chinese food,” like chop suey and chow mein, began to appear on the menu.
Cho sees the restaurant owners as writers of their own culture story, presenting Chinese culture to the world through their food, décor and menus. “It was a way to communicate to non-Chinese Canadians something about Chineseness,” she says.
“The questions about whether or not it is authentic is, in some ways, less relevant than what their representations of Chineseness tells us about how they wanted to communicate something about their culture or cultural difference to the people and places they were in.”
Restaurant owners offered a “palatable” version of what it means to be Chinese, she says, noting the challenges for owners working in locations often isolated from larger Chinese populations.
Canada has a long history of open discrimination against Chinese immigrants, such as the Chinese Head Tax and Exclusion Act. But using a “fast-food” formula of Chinese culture, Cho says they were able to break down racial and cultural barriers.
“At a time when there was a lot of discrimination and fear and racism around Chinese people, there was also an incredible openness to eating food cooked by Chinese people,” she explains. “What I think is so brilliant about what they did is the standardization of the menu, (which) I see as having something to do with the standardization of a version of Chineseness that circulates all through Canada for many years.”
The restaurants also helped to build community amongst Chinese immigrants.
Unlike typical family businesses where the owner’s children carry on the legacy, Chinese restaurants are often passed along to other immigrants. In fact, this is how Cho’s family got into the restaurant business in Whitehorse, Yukon.
“Pretty much everyone in my family has worked in restaurants or are still working in restaurants. When I started to travel across the country and see all these restaurants everywhere, I realized it wasn’t just my family … going off to remote parts of the country to run restaurants in improbable places.”
In publishing the book, she hopes to draw attention to the topic and encourage further study in the area.
“A lot of people seem to think these restaurants are some feature of a time that is no longer with us,” Cho says. “And yet, if you go into any small town today, you will see a restaurant that is in operation and people still go to get food.”
Published by University of Toronto Press, the book can be preordered through Chapters or Amazon.