Study of Chinese Impact on Small Town Canadian Culture Via Chinese Cafe Menus

March 31, 2012
  

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.

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants 

 

Chinese Food And Korea

February 9, 2012

       Young-Kyun Yang, a Korean anthropologist, has studied the place of Chinese food in Korea.  In one paper published in the Korea Journal, he noted that "Chinese restaurants opened in Korea from the late 19th century to provide mostly male Chinese-Koreans with very simple food. Chinese foods were cooked, sold, and consumed exclusively by Chinese-Koreans until the 1940's. In the 1950's and 1960's, although the Chinese dominated the business, the food became a representative food for dining out for Koreans. By the 1970's, Koreans were the overwhelming majority of customers in Chinese restaurants, and Chinese cuisine became established as a part of Korean food culture. Chinese food remained virtually almost the only option for dining out and the only foreign food that common Korean people could easily access. They consumed 'exoticness' and 'convenience' through Chinese food. As Korean society became more modernized and globalized, the Korean demand for food became more varied. In order to satisfy those demands, not only did the restaurants become diversified, serving various ethnic foods, but Chinese restaurants themselves have also been diverged into various styles.

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese food 

 

Whatever happened to stainless steel serving dishes in Chinese restaurants?

July 12, 2011
 Serving dishes like the one I am holding were commonly found in Chinese restaurants of a generation ago. What they lacked in "oriental" or "Chinese-y" decoration, these minimalist but clean designs by F. S. Louie Co. of Berkeley made up for by keeping your food hot over the entire meal.

At a book talk I gave in San Francisco this June to the Culinary Historians of Northern California at the small but charming Omnivore Bookstore, I was completely surprised by appearance of my friends, Joe and Liz Chan, each of whom have written narratives about their parents' stores for my books, Joe for my Chinese restaurant history and Liz for my Chinese Laundries history.  Joe then surprised me with the gift of this "silver trophy" saved from the 1950's era Mandarin Inn Restaurant of his father in Muncie, Indiana.  The brief history below  of F.S. Louie Co. a supplier of Chinese restaurant tableware, comes from Priscilla Wedgars's site at the University of Idaho.  

Posted by John Jung.

 

"Authenticity" ... applied to Vietnamese Food

June 24, 2011
Aliette de Bodard, a Vietnamese-French award winning sci-fi and fantasy author, made some valid points on the question of what constitutes 'authentic' food on her blog. These excerpts give you the flavor, pun intended, of her observations:

"What makes an authentic recipe? What is and is not an acceptable variant? [1] How should a cuisine as a whole be judged? Because truth is, like cultures, cuisines merge and adapt, and evolve. Sometimes, they adapt because they don’t have basic ingredients: there’s a very cute Vietnamese cookbook in French, Le Chant du Riz Pilé (Song of Crushed/Ground Rice), which makes do without half the Vietnamese staples, because it’s an old book and those staples weren’t available in France at the time." 
... "In the specific case of immigrants, new dishes become created, whether for the diaspora or for a foreign audience: General Tsao’s Chicken is a pretty good example of a typical Chinese-American dish that you won’t find in Chinese restaurants in France (and, if Wikipedia is correct, which isn’t always the case, a dish that the Chinese in China didn’t much appreciate)."
..."There’s also the “restaurant effect”: restaurants tend to serve festive food that you can’t make at home; therefore, most people’s perception of foreign cuisines is really skewed, because the signature dishes tend to be extravagant dishes that are only served for feasts. One good example in France is chả giò, fried rolls, which everyone associates with Vietnamese cuisine in spite of the fact that it’s hardly part of an every day Vietnamese meal."

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Culture and cuisine 

 

Is the Food in Chinese American Cookbooks "Authentic"?

June 21, 2011
       The issue of 'authenticity' inevitably surfaces when ethnic foods of any type, Chinese or other, are evaluated. I have often wondered to what extent "foodie snobbism" is at work.  Food dishes, like language, evolve over time and differ over space. Can there be a single recipe that is the authentic version for a dish? Who 'decides,' and using what yardstick, whether a dish is 'authentic'? And, is authenticity the end all which trumps even 'great taste'?
      I recently stumbled upon an arcane but thought-provoking analysis of this issue as it applies to recipes in Chinese American cookbooks, past and present:  "Authentic” Chinese Food: Chinese American Cookbooks and the Regulation of Ethnic Identity   It is a revised version of Malindo Lo's 2000 master’s thesis in Regional Studies-East Asia at Harvard that was presented at the Association for Asian American Studies conference in 2001.
      Here are a few brief excerpts worth chewing on:
... “authentic,” ... functions as a norm or ideal against which cultural practices having to do with food are compared. The idea of the “authentic” thus produces foods, practices, and people who are constrained by that ideal. It demarcates those who fit within the regulated space of the authentic from those who do not; it separates the “authentic” Chinese from the “inauthentic” (Chinese) American.
     "In many Chinese cookbooks published in America, the word “exotic” is used over and over, resulting in the representation of a cuisine that is unknowable yet simultaneously subject to Western authority.... the reader is confronted by the constant, contradictory reiteration of Chinese food as complex and baffling, but which can nonetheless be easily mastered by the Western chef who follows the instructions presented.
... If Orientalism is “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” are these Chinese American cookbook authors merely complicit in the Orientalist enterprise? Their presentations of Chinese cuisine are often overt attempts to dominate and restructure—to authorize—particular versions of Chinese culture. 

Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Culture and cuisine 

 

Chinese Family Restaurants "Down Under"

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 develop migration patterns reinforced culture, perpetuating and strengthening the dominance of Cantonese cuisine in Victoria. Forced at the turn of the century into one of the few occupational avenues available to them, the Chinese developed highly successful and enduring businesses which have made a significant economic and cultural contribution to Australia."

In Nichol's 2010 Melbourne Chinese Studies Group seminar presentation, "Chinese restaurant children: negotiating Australian lives," she noted that ‘Restaurant children’ recognised the importance of fulfilling the obligations of their Chinese heritage, yet at the same time were negotiating their futures as Australians. They tend not to be described as ‘pioneers’, yet in many ways their struggles were just as valiant and the obstacles they negotiated were no less daunting.

Posted by John Jung.

 

Chinese Owners of Pennant Hotel in Saskatchewan

March 23, 2011
     Chinese not only ran restaurants on the Canadian prairies but also managed small hotels, that they saved from going out of business during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
 "The Pennant Hotel was not, strictly speaking, a family business. Rather, it was run by several men – relatives or friends – who worked as partners. This was necessary because, from 1885 until well into the 20th century, restrictive immigration laws prevented Chinese from bringing their wives and children to Canada."
     The same circumstances existed in the U. S. for many businesses, which were owned by "paper merchants" who were often silent partners. As a 'merchant,' a laborer could apply to bring his wife and or children from China.

Posted by John Jung.

 

Chinese Restaurants in small Canadian towns

March 7, 2011
In Yellowknife, NW Territorties, the Wild Cat Cafe, opened in 1937-8, was a gathering place for prospectors, miners and pilots and the hub of Yellowknife's social activity. Prospectors wheeled and dealed, community members held meetings and banquets, while visitors came and went by floatplane. Later, the Wild Cat was used as Yellowknife's first ice cream parlour and Chinese restaurant.

  .     
 Named using the initials of the last names of its founders,  Calvert, Vopni, and Menlove, the CVM cafe in Carberry, Manitoba, opened as a western-style restaurant with a formal second-floor dining room before it became a Chinese restaurant and coffee shop operated by the Kwan Yuen family, a long-standing line of local confectioners and restaurateurs.  Nearly every small urban centre in Manitoba boasted a Chinese restaurant (and many still do), a source of mildly exotic food in an otherwise conventional North American market of dining-out cuisine.Source: Town of Carberry By-law No. 5/2006, June 12, 2007

Posted by John Jung.

 
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About Me


John Jung 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.

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