Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada

( 1 )

Overview

"Chicken fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and an order of onion rings, please."

Chinese restaurants in small town Canada are at once everywhere - you would be hard pressed to find a town without a Chinese restaurant - and yet they are conspicuously absent in critical discussions of Chinese diasporic culture or even in popular writing about Chinese food. In Eating Chinese, Lily Cho examines Chinese restaurants as spaces that define, for those both inside and outside the ...

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Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada

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More About This Book

Overview

"Chicken fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and an order of onion rings, please."

Chinese restaurants in small town Canada are at once everywhere - you would be hard pressed to find a town without a Chinese restaurant - and yet they are conspicuously absent in critical discussions of Chinese diasporic culture or even in popular writing about Chinese food. In Eating Chinese, Lily Cho examines Chinese restaurants as spaces that define, for those both inside and outside the community, what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be Chinese-Canadian.

Despite restrictions on immigration and explicitly racist legislation at national and provincial levels, Chinese immigrants have long dominated the restaurant industry in Canada. While isolated by racism, Chinese communities in Canada were still strongly connected to their non-Chinese neighbours through the food that they prepared and served. Cho looks at this surprisingly ubiquitous feature of small-town Canada through menus, literature, art, and music. An innovative approach to the study of diaspora, Eating Chinese brings to light the cultural spaces crafted by restaurateurs, diners, cooks, servers, and artists.

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What People Are Saying

Vijay Mishra
Eating Chinese is a brilliant book, sensitively written, and grounded in a first-rate mastery of the archive. Lily Cho provides a path-breaking and immensely readable account of the ways in which food mediates the reception and reading of the Chinese diaspora in Canada and in the West generally. The work is a full nine-course Chinese banquet, written with the kind of sympathy which only a native informant can bring to the subject. Eating Chinese is one of the best books on diasporic lives and diaspora theory written these past few years.
— Vijay Mishra, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Murdoch University
David L. Eng
This ingenious study of Chinese restaurants in small town Canada is as startling as it is brilliant ... Cho's deeply affective and moving ruminations serve a feast of critical insights on the politics of Chinese diasporas, old and new.
— David L. Eng, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
Vijay Mishra
Eating Chinese is a brilliant book, sensitively written, and grounded in a first-rate mastery of the archive. Lily Cho provides a path-breaking and immensely readable account of the ways in which food mediates the reception and reading of the Chinese diaspora in Canada and in the West generally. The work is a full nine-course Chinese banquet, written with the kind of sympathy which only a native informant can bring to the subject. Eating Chinese is one of the best books on diasporic lives and diaspora theory written these past few years.
— Vijay Mishra, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Murdoch University
David L. Eng
This ingenious study of Chinese restaurants in small town Canada is as startling as it is brilliant ... Cho's deeply affective and moving ruminations serve a feast of critical insights on the politics of Chinese diasporas, old and new.
— David L. Eng, Department of English, University of Pennsylvania
David L. Eng
This ingenious study of Chinese restaurants in small town Canada is as startling as it is brilliant ... Cho's deeply affective and moving ruminations serve a feast of critical insights on the politics of Chinese diasporas, old and new.
Vijay Mishra
Eating Chinese is a brilliant book, sensitively written, and grounded in a first-rate mastery of the archive. Lily Cho provides a path-breaking and immensely readable account of the ways in which food mediates the reception and reading of the Chinese diaspora in Canada and in the West generally. The work is a full nine-course Chinese banquet, written with the kind of sympathy which only a native informant can bring to the subject. Eating Chinese is one of the best books on diasporic lives and diaspora theory written these past few years.
Fred Wah
In Eating Chinese, the special on the menu is the dementia of diaspora, a palpable reading of memory and history located in the small town Chinese-Canadian restaurant. In shedding light on some of those "spaces where modernity sometimes stammers," Lily Cho usefully interrupts the states of mind that complicate the logic of migration and notions of home.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781442641051
  • Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
  • Publication date: 11/11/2010
  • Series: Cultural Spaces Series
  • Pages: 224
  • Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Lily Cho is an assistant professor in the Department of English for the Universoty of Western Ontario.

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

  1. Sweet and Sour: Historical Presence and Diasporic Agency
  2. On the Menu: Time and Chinese Restaurant Counterculture
  3. Disappearing Chinese Cafe: White Nostalgia and the Public Sphere
  4. 'How taste remembers life': Diaspora and the Memories That Bind

Conclusion

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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Customer Reviews

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Sort by: Showing 1 Customer Review

  • Posted October 18, 2011

    IT SHOWS YOU HOW TO COOK AND EAT LIKE A CHINESE/CANADIAN PERSON!

    This is very interesting of a cook book when i got a free sample, it was very interesting of the first couple of "meals" or a.k.a. snack-able items you could choose to make or bake and eat whenever you want... so pick it, enjoy after you look for a recipe to make so you and your family/friends can enjoy it! It gives you a chance to do something new or different every once in a while.

    Sincerely,
    The girl who said this!

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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