Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (review)

When one Chinese meets another Chinese who is a stranger, a ready way to index each other is through the dialects they speak: Cantonese from Hong Kong or Macau? One of the many southern dialects from the coast? Shanghai vernacular? Taiwanese? Or Putonghua, the official spoken language of mainland China? And if one wants to pursue ethnic origin further, what kind of Chinese character does a Chinese write: the more classical and complicated script that Chinese of a certain age from Hong Kong would have learned while Hong Kong was still a British colony or the abbreviated script instituted in China after the Second World War? All these questions and answers, as might be noted, do not include Chinese who had immigrated to North America, or Australia, or parts of Europe and so on a century ago. Second- and third-generation overseas Chinese might rightly feel marginalized by, first, the dominance of the People’s Republic of China as the focus of Chinese issues and, second, by the economic clout wielded by recent immigrants who have chosen mainly to settle in cities such as Vancouver or Toronto or Sidney or New York. Eating Chinese by Lily Cho attempts to redress this oversight in current scholarship on diasporic Chinese cultures.

To Cho, the restaurants that served chop suey and the Chinese who owned them are seen as “Too old to be recuperated within the new narratives of multiculturalism and too new to be a proper object of wistful histories” (5–6), but Cho wants “to suggest that these restaurants illuminate both the difficulty of sustaining the presentness of the past in Chinese diaspora and the need to do so” (7). To that end, the author engages in examining “a range of diverse texts: folk tales and rumours, menus, Canadian folk songs, art installations, and literature” in order to illuminate “a different facet of the restaurant as a cultural space” (14). Wanting to go beyond the theoretical positions on diaspora taken by critics such as Rey Chow or Avtar Brah, Cho writes, “Rather than worrying over who might be counted as diasporic and who should have their claims to diasporic membership revoked, I am committed to showing how diasporic communities emerge out of the relationships within and across diaspora” (15).

In chapter 1, Cho moves from “a narrative of containment and expulsion” symbolized by cooking by Hong Kong Chinese under British colonial rule, to the serving of sweet and sour pork in Chinese Canadian restaurants, a practice described as “a semiotic virus that cannot be contained” (31).¹ Interspersed between examinations of the two poles of food production are readings and references to Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Raymond Williams, Freud, and Stuart Hall. The chapter ends with Cho reminding the reader that “The public space of the small town Chinese restaurant opens up the possibilities of resistances that may not have a record in the colonial or settler colonial archive, but that are nevertheless present” (43) and thus should be part of the postcolonial narrative in scholarly research. Cho underlines this claim and expands it in chapter 2 by an elegiac overview of small town Chinese restaurants in Alberta. Cho’s lingering over the establishing of Public Lunch Counter in Olds, or New Dayton Cafe and its menu, is part of the attempt to prevent “relegating what might be considered old diaspora subjectivities to the dustbin of Chinese diaspora history rather than thinking through the ways in which these identities ... are constitutive of it” (76).

Chapter 3 examines Joni Mitchell’s “Chinese Café/Unchained Melody” and Sylvia Tyson’s “The Night the Chinese Restaurant Burned Down” “because the representation of the Chinese restaurant ... illuminates its peculiar role in the consolidation of white subjectivity” (81). The following chapter focuses on the installation art of Karen Tam: Gold Mountain Restaurants. The restaurant space in these installations is recognizable as “a specific genre of Chinese restaurant characterized precisely by [its] lack of cosmopolitanism” (109). To Cho, Tam...