A recent book published by Lily Cho, a Chinese Canadian professor of English, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada, examines the impact of Chinese Canadian cafes across the small prairie towns on their communities by analyzing the content of their menus! The fact that her father opened such a cafe in the Yukon despite never having previously worked as a cook led her to analyze the role that these community gathering places played in their communities. Despite decades of anti-Chinese sentiment, Chinese and non-Chinese interacted cordially in these cafes, with Chinese cooking mostly white food to white people, mixed in with a handful of Chinese-like dishes like chop suey, egg rolls, and chow mein.
 I was especially interested in this work because, as I posted a blog entry over a year ago, only recently did I realize that my distant relatives that I never met who immigrated from China to Saskatchewan a generation ago undoubtedly must have operated such a cafe. After numerous calls, and with the help of Canadian contacts, I did locate their adult children who confirmed my hunch. Moreover, I got to meet some of them in Vancouver last year and go to dinner with them at, where else, a Chinese restaurant, but one that served authentic Chinese food.