I was stunned. Never before had I heard about the Legion serving Chinese food. Never before had I known my parents had run a Chinese restaurant. All those years growing up, my dad would turn up his nose at chop suey-type Chinese restaurants. “This is fake Chinese,” he would say. Even when I'd gone on my cross-country road trip, he had seemed puzzled that I should travel all that way just to write about chop suey restaurants. Neither he nor Mom mentioned that they'd owned one.
In the spring of 2016, Chinese-Canadian journalist Ann Hui flew to the west coast of Canada to begin an epic road trip: She wanted to visit small towns all across the country in order to meet and interview the owners of Chinese restaurants – which all seem to offer the same chop suey and deep fried chicken balls in sweet red sauce, all with the same red vinyl booths and paper menus written in the same “won ton” font, all run by first or second generation Chinese immigrants – and ask them: How did you wind up here? What brought you here? It wasn't until after her trip (which Hui wrote up as an article for The Globe and Mail) that Hui learned her own parents (who had been notoriously tight-lipped about their personal histories) had owned and operated two “chop suey-style” Chinese restaurants before she was born. No longer willing to have her personal questions dismissed, Hui spent the next several months “interviewing” her father in the same way she had all those other restaurant owners, and along the way, the two of them uncovered family secrets and histories that were surprising to them both. The book that Hui ultimately made with the addition of this further material, Chop Suey Nation, is one that alternates tales from her road trip with the history of her own family going back a few generations, and ultimately, each half of the story illuminates the other; the personal information suggests the common pressures that forced so many destitute Chinese immigrants to seek a better life for their families by travelling to “Gold Mountain”, and the common experiences of the restaurant owners taught Hui about the hardships that her parents were reluctant to admit to. Part memoir, part travelogue, part sociological exploration, this is a type of book that I find very interesting; as for Chop Suey Nation's execution, I was a little underwhelmed. Still, basically interesting.
To begin with, I don't know if I completely accept the basic premise: Hui knew that her parents had been restaurant owners – her dad worked as a chef (along with other part-time work) his entire career – but she didn't know that their restaurant had served “chop suey” cuisine? Or that learning that fact would rock her world and force Hui to reexamine everything she thought she knew about her family? The premise works for the book's format, but it seems a stretch. (I also found it hard to believe that Hui had zero clue as to why the town of Vulcan, Alberta would promote tourism by making ties with Star Trek [her husband had to explain who Spock is??], and while I know Hui wants us to understand that she grew up eating “real Chinese food” like sliced jellyfish and fish bladders, would she really not know the difference between spring rolls and egg rolls, which she apparently ordered in many of the restaurants across the country, never figuring out which was which?) And I wish Chop Suey Nation had been edited better: Near the beginning, Hui and her husband are having dinner with her family in Vancouver, on Canada's west coast, the night before the road trip was to officially begin, and she notes that they were chatting about “our plan to drive west for eleven hours straight the next day”; good luck with that. In the photo credits, one restaurant is described as being in Deer Lake, NS – and I thought to myself, There's a Deer Lake in Nova Scotia?, but of course in the text of the book that follows, Deer Lake is properly set in Newfoundland. And at one point Hui writes, “Dad would wash the dishes, rinsing out coffee mugs and toast crumbs.”: I'm sure he wasn't rinsing out his toast crumbs. (And I know this might read as pedantry, but these are just illustrative examples – I was jarred by mistakes and clumsy writing throughout.)
As for the meat of the book: The stories of the restaurant owners started to blur together a bit – Hui hadn't set up any interviews beforehand, so there were plenty of stories of people who were too busy to speak with her and people who could only speak briefly in between customers – but she was able to find and record a few particularly interesting histories along the way. By sharing the details of her own family, Hui recounts the historical events that forced Chinese immigrants to seek a better life in Canada (poverty, famine, the Cultural Revolution), and by noting the systemic racism that these early immigrants faced (the Head Tax, the Immigration Act that eventually closed Canada's borders to Chinese immigration, the harassment and prejudice from the rank and file that forced Chinese men to take “women's work” in laundromats and restaurants), Hui is able to answer her own questions of how these chop suey-style Chinese restaurants spread from coast to coast, with budding entrepreneurs taking a successful business plan (and purloined recipes that meet Canadian tastes) as they moved ever eastward, rising from restaurant employees to restaurant owners.
Just weeks earlier, I had been so dismissive of this food as “fake Chinese”. Now I realized I had been completely wrong. This ad-hoc cuisine, and the families behind it, were quintessentially Chinese. It was pure entrepreneurialism. Out of cabbage, they'd made noodles. Out of a bucket and water, they'd grown bean sprouts. They had created a cuisine that was a testament to creativity, perseverance and resourcefulness. This chop suey cuisine wasn't fake – but instead, the most Chinese of all.A common experience (for Hui's parents and the later Chinese immigrants that she interviewed) seems to have been an early immigrant in the family who did the impossible: Borrowing heavily to make the move to the mysterious Gold Mountain alone, and after many years of back-breaking labour, a man could then hope bring the rest of his family over. Opening a restaurant, this family works for eighteen hours a day, the children enlisted in helping out, but as hard as it is, something is being built for the future. This second generation is then pressured to take over the restaurant – the impossible has already been accomplished, they are only being asked to do what is hard – and these people take over the eighteen hour days, their own children doing their homework at a back table until needed to bus tables or fetch ingredients. But when these Canadian-born children grow up, the last thing their parents want is for them to take over the family restaurant: this third generation is encouraged to become accountants and physiotherapists, even journalists, and do what they love instead of being tied to what is hard; “The bitter before the sweet” wasn't meant for the Canadian-born. It was also interesting to note the change in demographics of Chinese immigrants (from the poorest of the poor to the Hong Kong millionaires that we love to blame for driving up the price of Vancouver real estate) and that with the rise of the Chinese middle-class and the availability of more convenience and luxury goods in their home country, the idea of moving to far away Canada and facing racism and back-breaking labour isn't nearly as enticing to the modern day resident of China (and also explains why so many of the remote chop suey-style restaurants are now run by immigrants from Korea and Vietnam).
I did enjoy all of the historical and sociological information, and particularly the details of what Hui uncovered about her own family; these deeply researched and heartfelt personal sections were much more interesting to me than the stories Hui was able to glean through brief interviews with the overworked restaurant owners who hadn't known she was coming to interview them. For a cross-country road trip, I thought that there would be more travel writing – giant statues of a pierogie, a lobster, and an axe aside, not much is said of the changing landscape – but I did appreciate that every time Hui stepped into one of these restaurants, she was recognising the same footprint over and over: the narrative is more about what is the same from coast to coast than what is different. And overall, quibbles aside, Hui's narrative held my interest and answered the questions she laid out at the beginning.
