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

Eating Chinese is an impressive study of the impact of Chinese restaurants on the construction and development not only of Asian Canadian diasporic communities but also of Canada and Canadian identity. The book is deeply historicized, well researched, and sophisticated in its deployment of theories from Homi Bhabha to Jürgen Habermas. It takes as its ‘texts’ the menus of Chinese cafés, songs by Joni Mitchell and Sylvia Tyson with Chinese restaurants in their titles, the art installations of Karen Tam, as well as the poetry of Fred Wah. The book is profoundly scholarly but also ‘immensely readable,’ as Vijay Mishra notes (back cover). In an age of globalization and rapid advances in technology, Cho encourages us to take the slower road and pay attention to the Chinese restaurants in small towns to see the possibilities of diasporic agency located in the everyday menus of these restaurants.

The introduction provides a nice taste (hard to resist the pun) of Cho’s style, a mix of anecdotal narrative, poetic musing, social history, photographs, theory, and cultural analysis. She begins the chapter with a description of the ‘New Dayton Café, a Chinese restaurant that no longer exists in a town that no longer exists,’ and then speculates, ‘But has it really disappeared? After all, you can still drive into almost any small town in Canada and expect to find a Chinese restaurant. Chinese people still seem to work in them.’ She writes, ‘[T]he small town Chinese restaurant is an awkward reminder of the ways in which modernity sometimes stammers, prematurely announcing the death of that which is not yet dead . . . Indeed, I want 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.’ Cho provides some interesting statistics to bolster her argument about the importance of looking at the legacy of the early migration of the Chinese to Canada. For example, ‘According to the 1931 Canadian census, Chinese people made up less than one percent of the Canadian population, and yet one out of every five restaurant, café, or tavern keepers was of Chinese origin.’ Today, the Chinese communities ‘born of railway workers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and those of the wealthy transnational capitalists from Hong Kong who migrated in the late twentieth century,’ are all lumped together under the rubric of Chinese diaspora. Cho’s work explores the distinction and connections between the old and the new diasporas, asserting that the ‘old diaspora is constitutive of, and coeval with, the new.’

The variety of ‘texts’ that Cho deals with means that her chapters engage with a number of different topics, including the significance of Chinese food; self-representation and otherness in Chinese restaurant menus; Chinese restaurants as public spaces; and food, memory, and ethnic identity. If there is a theme in these chapters, it is the way ‘eating Chinese’ is inseparable from the history of dislocation, racialization, and sadness that has been subsumed by the craving or longing for what we call ‘real Chinese food.’ The book is historical, nostalgic, evocative of memories of a bygone era, and yet timely and prescient. The book will forever change our attitude to Naugahyde and sweet-and-sour pork.