[LINK] "Museum probes link between Chinese restaurants and small-town Canada"

[rfmcdonald]

Speaking as someone from a small town (by Canadian, not Island, standards) who loves Canadian Chinese food with its egg rolls and chicken balls with red sauce and fried rice with chicken, Katherine Laidlaw's article "Museum probes link between Chinese restaurants and small-town Canada" in the National Post certainly caught my attention. Who knew that Chinese restaurants played such a critical role?

Kitschy restaurants such as the Tams’ are ubiquitous across Canada, a chain of unexpected strongholds of Chinese-Canadian identity stretching across the country. A Chinese restaurant features prominently in CanLit classic Who Has Seen The Wind by W.O. Mitchell. Joni Mitchell wrote Chinese Café/Unchained Melody, singing “Down at the Chinese café/we’d be dreaming on our dimes.”

There’s one in nearly every Canadian city and town. And yet some argue the Chinese landmarks, a mix of Western and Eastern cultures and born from struggle and exclusion, are fading from Canadiana. “A lot of these cafés have closed,” says Victor Wong, executive director of the Chinese Canadian National Council. “The old-timers have passed away and their children are off to the cities, where they’re welcomed as young professionals.”

[. . .]

Linda Tzang, cultural curator at the Royal Alberta Museum, said the travelling exhibit will encourage its viewers to consider why these restaurants, in the face of widespread racism toward the Chinese, have now grown into an anchor of many communities, not least because of their unique brand of Cantonese “chop suey” cuisine, which is not traditional Chinese, but deliciously deep-fried and sweet.

“When I was looking at Chinese restaurants in Alberta, what struck me was almost every tiny town had at least one and sometimes two,” Ms. Tzang said. “It goes against stereotypes of what a small town is, how Chinese people work socially, how Chinese culture works.”

The industry even supports a magazine called Chinese Restaurant News; in 2005 it reported there were three times as many Chinese restaurants as McDonald’s franchises in the United States. There’s no comparable statistic here but Lily Cho, an associate English professor at the University of Western Ontario and author of Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small-Town Canada, says she’s never visited a Canadian town that didn’t have one.

Many Chinese workers were employed building the Canadian Pacific Rail line into the early 1900s. But in 1923, Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act, restricting Chinese immigrants from entering Canada except under the titles of merchant, diplomat or foreign student. Shut out from professional occupations and farming, many dispersed to communities along the CPR line, some opening laundromats and grocery stores, but most realizing that they could support their families running restaurants, particularly in the Prairies, where the cafés often had no competition.

Initially the restaurants served Western-style food (fish and chips, steak, apple pie), not introducing the now-popular Canadianized Chinese food (chop suey, sweet-and-sour chicken balls) until the 1960s.

Edmonton writer Bill Mah recalls his childhood growing up at Eddie’s Café and Confectionary in Alberta, eating family meals in the café kitchen and sleeping below the restaurant owned by his parents. “For me, the little red-brick restaurant on the main street of Killam during the 1970s was the place where my mother and father cooked and served breakfast, lunch and dinner, mostly on their own while raising three young boys,” he wrote in Wednesday's Edmonton Journal.