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Reviewed by:
  • Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada
  • Donald Goellnicht (bio)
Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, by Lily Cho. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. X + 207 pp. $24.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4426-1040-8

Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada by Lily Cho is one of those rare academic books that has gained considerable cross-over attention. Cho was interviewed several times on CBC radio and in major newspapers about the role of Chinese restaurants in small town Canadian life and culture; indeed, she emerges as a remarkably articulate, engaging, and poised public intellectual. The parts of Eating Chinese that have attracted this wider public discussion are those that I would categorize as creative non-fiction. These sections are extraordinary in that they accomplish what books of academic criticism rarely do: they make me feel as deeply as they made me think. Affect is currently a hot topic in literary and cultural theory and criticism, but most theorists and critics treat the subject in a purely theoretical fashion; Cho dares to evoke affect at particular points in her text—the whole introduction is written in this mode—a strategy that is remarkably effective. [End Page 230]

Beyond these highly evocative sections, Eating Chinese makes a major contribution to Chinese diaspora studies through its attention to small town Canada. As Cho notes, studies of the Chinese Canadian diaspora—and diaspora studies more generally—tend to focus almost exclusively on large urban centers, where there are distinct Chinatowns, both traditional and new/suburban. The ubiquitous small town Chinese restaurant, she observes, "is at once everywhere . . . and yet almost nowhere in contemporary discussions of Chinese immigration, diasporas, Canadian multiculturalism, transnational migration patterns, and global movements of people and capital" (7). She convincingly argues that the death of the small town Chinese restaurant has been announced prematurely, and she sets out to reclaim it "as vital to contemporary Chinese diasporic discourse," important because it lies "at the juncture between old [labour] and new [entrepreneurial] diasporas" (10), while at the same time constituting "spaces of interaction between Chinese and non-Chinese communities" (12). She treats the Chinese café, then, "as a cultural site that is productive of Chineseness, Canadianness, small town Canadian culture, and diasporic culture more broadly" (13), a bold claim that Cho brilliantly demonstrates in her subsequent chapters that analyze the meanings of the Chinese restaurant in different registers. She examines discursive sites such as the story of sweet and sour pork, a "fake Chinese food"; Chinese restaurant menus; two folk songs by Joni Mitchell and Sylvia Tyson that reference Chinese restaurants; Karen Tam's spectacular and evocative art installations, the Gold Mountain Restaurants project; and Fred Wah's biotext, Diamond Grill.

Cho is rigorous in her analyses, with a wide-ranging and detailed knowledge of both the archive she is studying (and simultaneously constructing) and the theory that can illuminate the archive. The arguments in Eating Chinese are always informative and thorough, but some parts of the book are more satisfying than others. The best parts for me are when Cho engages with creative artists whose work is so complex that it can enter into dialogue with the theory on equal terms—and here I have in mind Karen Tam's installation art and Fred Wah's prose-poem/biotext. Without these meaty, imaginative, and subtle texts to work with/through, Cho tends to reach for an excess of theory that overburdens the lighter fare of Sylvia Tyson's and Joni Mitchell's folk songs or Chinese restaurant menus. Her analysis of the menus as sites of agential resistance or "counterculture" (a gem of a pun) is admirable in intention but less than wholly convincing. How can the reproduction of Chinese stereotypes in the menu be a form of effective resistance if the stereotypes are not modified in any way, if the white colonial diner gets "exactly what [he] ordered" (68) and thus leaves the restaurant unchanged? [End Page 231] This, for me, points to the difference between a menu and creative literature: the former, designed to sell a product, lacks the opportunity for irony and...

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