When people dine in restaurants, however elegant or humble, Chinese or other cuisine, they rarely think about the kitchen and the conditions under which the restaurant staff toil to serve the orders from the patrons. It is hot, especially for the cooks, crowded with wait staff and kitchen help rushing around in tight quarters to serve meals in a timely manner.
In Chinese, and probably in other ethnic restaurants, many of the workers are immigrants who find short-term employment through an un... Continue reading ...
Posted by John Jung on Sunday, July 16, 2017,
In :
Racism
In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act and other laws that barred Chinese laborers from immigrating or becoming U.S. citizen.
MIT legal historian Heather Lee discovered an important exception to these laws: Some
Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list, leading to a Chinese rest... Continue reading ...
How do Chinese choose names for restaurants? Although they change over time most of them seem to consist of a limited combination of a few terms. Thus, Golden, Silver, Jade, Imperial, Panda, China, Hong Kong might be combined with terms like Palace, Dragon, House, City, Wok.
One empirical study by Frank Shyong and David Chan based on close to 7,000 restaurant names gathered from several decades confirmed this impression as they found a high repetitiveness of Chinese restaurant names.
Why? Th... Continue reading ...
Posted by John Jung on Tuesday, October 7, 2014,
In :
Chinese food
Chinese immigration to Italy has increased dramatically over the past decade or two. As in other places, culture clashes sometimes occur and Chinese and Italians experience similar problems. Award winning journalist Suzanne Ma, a Chinese Canadian, who has a novel "Meet Me in Venice" coming out in February 2015, presents a charming and insightful talk about the negative feelings toward the influx of Chinese, and their food, in Italy. Continue reading ...
I
t has never been an easy job working in a Chinese restaurant. Whether you were a cook, waiter, busboy, the hours were long, the pay was low, and the working conditions poor. The earlier source of this labor was primarily from Guangdong and the cuisine was Cantonese but after President Nixon's ping pong diplomacy in the early 1970s broke through the Bamboo Curtain, a shift toward another impoverished province, Fujian, as the primary source of labor rapidly expanded. And, they introduced a ... Continue reading ...
Cleveland, Ohio never had a large Chinese immigrant population. The 1920 U. S. Census records show there were about 240 Chinese there, the highest number in the early 20th century. That total includes children, so the number of adults was even smaller. Yet, there were many Chinese restaurants, as shown in the montage above, that operated there from around the 1920s to 1960s for the most part. The 12 restaurants shown above from picture postcards were rather large and nicely decorated. Man... Continue reading ...
A radio reading about an opening of a new Chinese restaurant , Hung Far Low, in 1902 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This city has done a commendable project in celebrating its history with this and similar recordings by the Grand Rapids Historical Commission.(Note: The link will not automatically play the audiofile. The easiest method is to click one of the STREAMING options such as MP3 via M3U in the column on the far left of the screen under LISTEN TO AUDIO) Continue reading ...
Posted by John Jung on Tuesday, May 10, 2011,
The story of the Chinese family restaurants outside of North America is remarkably similar in other parts of the world where the Chinese diaspora of the mid to late 19th century spread. Barbara Nichol has written about the history of Chinese restaurants in Melbourne, Australia from 1830-1950. "The restaurant industry was central to the way many in the Chinese
community supported themselves and their families back in China over the
early decades. Return visits home and the opportunity to de... Continue reading ...
Posted by John Jung on Thursday, November 11, 2010,
When most people think about Chinese family restaurants, they think of:- quick preparation,
- poor and sometimes indifferent, if not rude, "service"
- makeshift or mismatched interior decor,
- shabby and often funky exterior appearance,
- located in slummy neighborhoods
Although their comments do not come from a "random" sample, postings on websites such as YELP clearly confirm these views of Chinese restaurant patrons. So why have they been so popular for so many decades? Despite these problem... Continue reading ...
Posted by John Jung on Friday, June 4, 2010,
In :
Book talks
Although the evening event focused on Chinese laundries because the three speakers, Elwin Xie, Judy Fong Bates, and yours truly, all shared experiences of growing up in our family laundries, I also was able to talk about the origins and characteristics of family-run Chinese restaurants, the focus of "Sweet and Sour."
Here is a detailed description of the event and photos of the traditional village dishes served , 
What better setting in which to make a presentation about this iconic C... Continue reading ...
Posted by John Jung on Friday, June 4, 2010,
In :
family
During the research process for Sweet and Sour, I suddenly realized that I had relatives on my mother's side living in Saskatchewan that I had never met. As I was learning that virtually every small town across Canada, especially in the prairies, had a small Chinese-run cafe, I wondered if my cousins had also had a Chinese restaurant. After some effort, a bit of luck, and half a dozen phone calls, I was able to locate a second cousin by phone who confirmed that one cousin had in fact run a ... Continue reading ...
For someone who never ate in a Chinese restaurant until he was 15, mainly because he grew up in the 1940s in a place where not a single Chinese restaurant existed for over a 100 miles, it is odd that I would find myself writing about this ubiquitous and widely popular 'institution' for eating all across the world.
Had it not been for the fact that a retired Chinese restaurateur in attendance at a talk I was giving about Mississippi Delta Chinese grocery store families approached me af... Continue reading ...
After retiring from a 40-year career as a psychology professor, I published 4 books about Chinese immigrants that detail the history of their laundries, grocery stores, and family restaurants in the U. S. and Canada.
