Eating Chinese : : Chinese Restaurants and Diaspora / / Lily Cho.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Asian Studies Backlist (2000-2014) eBook Package
• VerfasserIn: Cho, Lily,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2018]; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)

"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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments I -- Introduction -- Chapter One. Sweet and Sour: Historical Presence and Diasporic Agency -- Chapter Two. On the Menu: Time and Chinese Restaurant Counterculture -- Chapter Three. Disappearing Chinese Café: White Nostalgia and the Public Sphere -- Chapter Four. Diasporic Counterpublics: The Chinese Restaurant as Institution and Installation -- Chapter Five. 'How taste remembers life': Diaspora and the Memories That Bind -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index