“Have you eaten yet?,” a familiar Chinese greeting, might be the title of this book, but for the author and director Cheuk Kwan — and for almost every restaurateur he interviews in his tour of Chinese restaurants across 15 countries and five continents — food is only the entry point. Because “running a Chinese restaurant is the easiest path for new Chinese immigrants to integrate into the host society,” Kwan writes in his memoir-cum-travelogue, “there’s no better way to tell the story of the Chinese diaspora than through the stories of Chinese restaurant owners.”
Kwan, who was born in Hong Kong, spent his formative years in Singapore and Japan, and now resides in Canada, begins his journey in the vast, flat plains of Saskatchewan. There, we meet Noisy Jim, the retired proprietor of a Chinese café who was born in the same coastal province where Kwan’s grandfather grew up. Noisy Jim arrived in Vancouver at the age of 12 as a “paper son” at the height of Canada’s Chinese Exclusion Act. To gain Jim entry, his father obtained the identity papers of a dead Canadian resident named Chow Jim Kook, whose name Jim would keep for the rest of his life. For years, he toiled in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant until he was called back to China to marry the woman his family had chosen for his bride. The couple returned to Canada to open their own Chinese café in a remote prairie town, raised seven children and served egg rolls and chop suey: food that was neither Canadian nor, according to Jim, “what Chinese people eat.”
