Even though Ann Hui released "Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants" in February, the book — in which small-town Newfoundland Chinese restaurants play a prominent role — continues to garner reaction.
Hui, the national food reporter at the Globe and Mail newspaper in Toronto, said that readers felt connected to the book, as there is at least one Chinese restaurant in most small towns.
She’s been flooded with feedback about people who have either grown up going to such restaurants, or who grew up in one.
The Chinese restaurant, for many Canadians, was their first real exposure to anything exotic, Hui noted. They became common fixtures across Canada, and indeed North America, in the 1960s and ’70s.
But for the Chinese immigrant families that operated the restaurants or have taken them over, they have been a means of income and entry into the culture of their chosen communities.
The book originated from a two-part feature that Hui wrote for the Globe after pitching the idea of visiting small-town chop suey restaurants from Victoria, B.C., to Fogo Island.
Hui wanted to tell their vibrant and diverse stories, of how the families came to Canada and became part of the communities they were living.
With the resonance the series got from Canadians, Hui was approached about a book. Chop Suey Nation was published by Douglas and McIntyre.
After the series was published, Hui discovered her family could have been included — Hui’s parents had run a Chinese restaurant, The Legion Cafe (Abbotsford, B.C.), before she was born.
While writing the book over the course of a year and a half, Hui had been spending a lot of time in Vancouver as her dad was very sick at the time (and eventually passed away) and it was then he told her about their restaurant about an hour outside Vancouver.
“I was stunned by this,” said Hui in a phone interview. “I never thought to ask my own parents.”
That family history became woven into the book.
Initially setting out on the 2016 trip, Hui’s hypothesis was that the restaurants maybe were disappearing, as immigrants strove to see a different opportunities for their children and their next generations as the work is demanding.
(Her father had worked in restaurants in Vancouver and told her from the time she was young how hard the life was, but she hadn’t heard about their Abbotsford experience.)
“What I actually found on the trip was the exact opposite, how very much vibrant these places were as part of their communities,” Hui said.
As she travelled small-town Canada she found oftentimes the restaurants were being run by third, fourth or sometimes fifth generations, keeping the traditions of many decades. Sometimes the succeeding generations put a new spin on the family business, reinventing the dishes in a modern way.
And sometimes other newcomers would take over the restaurants, as the businesses remain a place to get a new start in their life in Canada.
To operate the restaurants, they don’t need to know a lot of English and there’s no hurdles in terms of the need for their formal training to meet Canadian criteria.
Newcomers taking over where others have moved on is exactly what happened in Deer Lake since Hui’s visit.
Canton Restaurant is among those who have a role in Hui’s series and book.
When she visited in 2016, Hui noted found a novel take on "chow mein" – which literally means "fried noodles."
“And when I made it to Deer Lake, Nfld., I would see an all-caps sign on the door of the Canton Restaurant, warnings tourists that the ‘chow mein on our menu is cabbage,’ ” Hui had written in 2016.
“Owner Richard Yu explained that early Chinese cooks figured out how to thinly slice cabbage into ‘noodles.’"
The innovation was in response to the lack of availability of certain ingredients on the island.
Vincent Tan answered the phone when The Telegram called Canton restaurant recently.
Over the busy kitchen clanging in the background, Tan was only able to speak for a few minutes, but explained that he works at the restaurant with his parents, renting from Yu for the past few years.
The family, he said, had come from, Guangzhou, China.
The menu is unchanged, he said.
“We do respect to the local flavours they want…. We do whatever the customer likes,” said Tan.
He’s only heard mention of the book a couple of times from customers, but said business is good with a loyal following in the community.
“It is not bad,” he said. “It is just that we can stay together as a family.”
The cabbage chow mein sign is still up and there are no plans to alter the recipe.
"The customers are already used to it,” he said.
Another restaurant that has a prominent role in Chop Suey Nation is of Kwang Tung on Fogo Island, run by Huang Feng Zhu.
“I became determined to find Huang, to understand how she ended up running a Chinese restaurant on Fogo Island. I wanted to know how she wound up there alone. So, I set out a plan: to drive across the country, visiting as many small-town Chinese restaurants as possible,” Hui wrote in her 2016 series.
Huang has limited English, so the interview was conducted in Cantonese, revealing that her husband was running another restaurant in Twillingate and her children had moved on.
When Hui landed there by plane as the ferry was shut down due to weather, a local man overheard her transportation dilemma — no car rentals or public transport on Fogo — and offered her the use of his car, a generous gesture from a stranger that astounded Hui for its trustfulness.
“I tweeted about it shortly after in 2016. The responses were so funny — everyone outside Newfoundland was blown away,” Hui said, adding people in Newfoundland reacted as if it was normal.
Prior to embarking on her 18-day trip across the country visiting two or three Chinese restaurants a day, Hui was not alone in thinking of “chop suey” Chinese as lesser-than the “authentic” Chinese cuisine, but her views have changed.
“What I’ve come to realize is that authenticity is a misnomer as if in China, a country of over a billion people, there’s an agreed-upon 'authentic' way to make any one dish,” she said in promotional material for the book. “But more importantly, as I learned the history of this cuisine, I came to realize and appreciate the ingenuity of it. The cooks who created this cuisine faced a long list of barriers, including systemic racism and economic discrimination. This food was a display of perseverance, creativity and entrepreneurialism, all values that are about as authentically Chinese (and Canadian) as it gets.”
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