Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  In China, authenticity wasn’t the question. It was just about tradition.

  Then Mr. Li arrived in Drumheller. Suddenly he had to grapple with a new world: a new language, a new country and a new city. He knew he’d have to learn to do things all over again. But he hadn’t expected cooking to be one of those things. In his cooking skills, at least, he’d been confident.

  But when he arrived in his uncle’s kitchen, he said, he was befuddled. He barely recognized any of the dishes on the menu. He watched, puzzled, as his uncle and the other cooks used techniques that would have gotten him fired from any kitchen in China—deep-frying seafood, or covering fresh vegetables with heavy sauces. He watched the cooks call these new dishes “lemon chicken” and “chop suey.”

  At first he pushed back. He tried to introduce dishes like mapo tofu or laziji to the menus. Some customers were polite and would at least try them—their grins melting into grimaces as soon as he looked away. This was a blue-collar town not known for adventurous diners. Most of his customers had lived in Drumheller all their lives and worked on farms, or at the nearby oil fields, or at the Drumheller Institution, a medium-security prison in town. (According to Statistics Canada, over half of all adults in Drumheller have no post-secondary education, with a high school diploma or less). Most of them stuck with what they knew.

  Each day, he’d pack up the leftovers, boxes and boxes worth, to bring home. Gradually, he stopped trying. “Chinese food”—now he was talking about the authentic stuff—“it’s very hard to make,” he said. “If they don’t like it, I don’t want to waste too much time on it.” So he, too, learned how to deep-fry seafood and slather dishes in thick sauces. It’s what the people want, he figured. Might as well give the people what they want.

  By this point, we’d been talking for almost half an hour. The dining room was entirely quiet now, after the last of the lunch crowd had asked for their cheques and left. In the back of the dim dining room, Mr. Li’s father-in-law’s head was craned toward the TV news, set to mute.

  Mr. Li sighed. He’d just returned to China for a visit, he said.

  “In China right now,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “It’s really good.”

  In the time since he and Ms. Xie left, many of their old friends had risen to China’s new middle class, carried by a booming Chinese economy. Mr. Li’s old friends were now in cooking positions at five-star hotels and famous Beijing restaurants. They lived fast-paced lives in China, surrounded by modern conveniences and modest luxuries. Many of them owned brand-new flats and carried around the latest smartphones. They lived comfortable lives.

  Here in Canada, meanwhile, they had arrived just as Alberta’s economy began to sink. One by one, their customers were losing their jobs. Each day, the dining room was quieter and quieter. The cost of food kept rising.

  Here they were in this town, Mr. Li said, switching to English: “Nothing too exciting. Every day, same same.” He held his arms in the air, gesturing around the restaurant to illustrate.

  Their timing had been all wrong.

  As he spoke, Ms. Xie reappeared at his side. I asked her if she had friends in town, and she nodded yes, though not convincingly. “Some of the customers here are very nice,” she said, quietly.

  Were there other Chinese-speaking families living in the city? People she could speak with comfortably?

  She counted in her head.

  “I think—seven or eight?” she said.

  “Seven or eight families?”

  “Seven or eight people.”

  Her response stunned me. I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. (Later, when I looked up the census figures for Drumheller, they showed that, of 6,400 or so residents in the city, only ten listed Chinese as their first language.)

  “Is it lonely?” I asked.

  She stayed silent for a long time.

  “Of course, when we first came here, it felt very lonely,” she said.

  A few moments, she added, as if it were an afterthought, “Now, we feel better.”

  She didn’t seem convinced. I knew I wasn’t.

  * * *

  By the time I was getting ready to leave the Diana, Anthony had come into the restaurant to wait for me. He’d gone for a walk around the town, but found that most of the streets were empty. We walked out together toward the car, and as we drove away, I thought about what Mr. Li had said, about how confused he’d been by the “Chinese” food he’d found in Drumheller. It was the same reaction I’d had to my Chinese New Year lunch all those years earlier.

  It was clear this was a made-in-North-America cuisine. But who had created it? And how much of it was Canadian?

  At the Diana, one of the dishes on the menu had caught my eye. I had noticed it back at Amy’s too. There, the chafing dish labelled “ginger beef” had been almost completely empty, which I took as a sign that it was a popular item. Before coming to the Prairies, I’d never before heard of ginger beef. But from what I could tell, it was a Prairie specialty.

  I thought it might help me understand the origins of this “chop suey” cuisine, especially the Canadian kind. So I called up the Silver Inn Restaurant in Calgary, where ginger beef had allegedly been invented. Kwong Cheung, the restaurant’s owner, picked up the phone. He chuckled when I asked about the dish. He was used to telling the story.

  The Silver Inn Restaurant was first opened in Calgary in 1975 by Mr. Cheung’s sisters, Lily and Louise, he told me. It was a chop suey restaurant, like almost all Chinese restaurants at the time. At the Silver Inn and at Chinese restaurants across North America—in Chinatowns in San Francisco, or New York, or Vancouver—there were only so many Chinese customers. Survival was dependent on winning over white customers. And despite an interest in “exotic” foods, many non-Chinese customers at the time still wanted flavours and ingredients that were somewhat familiar: sweet or salty or a little bit sour. They weren’t ready for tongue-numbing spices or slimy textures. They were adventurous, but only a little.

  Many of the first chop suey restaurant owners were used to thinking on their feet. Most of those restaurant owners weren’t even trained chefs. Many had only started restaurants because they had no other options, because the work didn’t require formal training or much English, and also because until the mid-twentieth century, they had been barred from other professional occupations. These cooks had learned through improvising and by copying others.

  Even if they wanted to create authentic Chinese food, many of the ingredients they would have needed—spices, sauces or varieties of fresh produce or seafood—were difficult to find in North America anyway. So again, they improvised. Based on the ingredients available to them, they concocted new dishes they thought might appeal to Western audiences. They borrowed from the recipes and flavours they remembered back home, but added healthy doses of soy sauce and ketchup and sugar to appeal to Western tastes.

  Thus was born chop suey—in other words, “bits and pieces” or “scraps.” The dish was the only constant you would find in every chop suey restaurant from coast to coast. It could vary from place to place and city to city. Some used green cabbage while others had napa. Others substituted carrots or celery. Sometimes it was beef chop suey, or chicken chop suey, or vegetable chop suey. The only ingredient that was always there was bean sprouts. Bean sprouts could be grown anywhere so long as there was water. As long as you have water and a bucket, you can grow bean sprouts.

  Chop suey. In other words, whatever happened to be available.

  Gradually, this ad hoc cuisine became standardized. One dish would become so popular that customers would start asking for it everywhere. And then suddenly every restaurant was serving the same dish. The most popular American chop suey dishes, many of them created in San Francisco’s Chinatown, spilled over the border to Canada, like chop suey itself, and General Tso’s chicken.

  But there were important Canadian contributions too.

  Mr. Cheung explained. Ginger beef was created in the mid-1970s by
his brother-in-law George Wong, he told me. It came to him while brainstorming new menu ideas.

  Mr. Wong was running the restaurant with his wife, Lily (Mr. Cheung’s sister), and business was decent. But like any restaurant owner, he knew he’d have to increase alcohol sales to be profitable. So he hoped that new menu items, such as smaller dishes and snack-type plates, might help.

  Mr. Wong was originally from Hong Kong and had spent several years working in Peking-style restaurants. There was one Peking-style dish in particular that came to mind: a beef dish that was sweet and chewy, almost like beef jerky. It was popular back in China, often eaten as a snack. He put the dish on the menu with high hopes.

  But the reactions were lukewarm. Most of the customers were white. Most were accustomed to tender Alberta beef. To them, the idea of chewy beef seemed odd. And the spices, the ginger and chilies and garlic Mr. Wong had used, were too intense for the Calgary palates.

  So he went back to the kitchen.

  After testing out a few different recipes, Mr. Wong had a moment of inspiration. His customers loved fried foods. “He thought, ‘Why not make it a French fry?’” said Mr. Cheung.

  So Mr. Wong tried it: he coated thin strips of beef in a thin batter, then deep-fried the strips to create a crisp outer layer. He was careful to avoid overcooking, so the inside of the meat stayed tender, highlighting the fresh, local beef. Then he tossed everything in a sweet chili-ginger-garlic mix, toning the spices down just a bit from the original version.

  It was, like all good chop suey dishes, the perfect combination of sweet, salty, tangy and crunchy. It had some of the “exotic” Chinese flavours the customers were looking for, but blended with familiar “Western” ideas.

  As soon as customers tried it, they loved it. It was an instant hit.

  Thanks in large part to the popularity of the dish, the Silver Inn became massively popular. And like any good idea in a Chinese restaurant, its signature recipe was replicated.

  As the dish spread across the Prairies, there was one key difference between the copycats and the Silver Inn original. At the Silver Inn, the dish was simply known as “deep-fried shredded beef with chili sauce.” But though many customers tried and loved it, few could remember its name. There weren’t many others cooking with chili at the time, so the customers didn’t recognize the flavour. They mistook the spiciness for ginger, and began asking Chinese restaurants across the Prairies for “that beef with the ginger stuff.”

  Thus “ginger beef” was born.

  Mr. Cheung runs the Silver Inn now, and in the decade since the dish was created, he said the restaurant cycled through about a dozen cooks. He’d recruit a qualified cook from Hong Kong, apply for the cook to come to Canada and teach him the full repertoire of Silver Inn recipes, including ginger beef. But each time, within about six or seven months, the cooks would leave.

  “They’d say, ‘This is popular. I can make money. Why am I cooking for you?’” said Mr. Cheung. And each time, the cook would go off and start his own Chinese restaurant featuring ginger beef.

  Within years, there were Peking-style Chinese restaurants all over Calgary, all of them serving ginger beef. And soon, there was ginger beef all over the Prairies.

  I told Mr. Cheung how so many of the Chinese restaurants we’d visited in the Prairies had ginger beef on the menu.

  He chuckled.

  “In hindsight, we should have patented that name,” he said. Mr. Wong was initially “a little bit bitter” about the whole thing. But eventually, he and the entire family changed their thinking. Now they’re proud of their contribution to history. “It’s a uniquely Canadian dish,” Mr. Cheung said.

  “Never mind whether there’s something kind of like it in China or Hong Kong or England. There’s no other country I know of that serves ginger beef the way we serve it,” he said.

  “Ginger beef is uniquely Canadian.”

  Chapter Six

  Jingweicun, Guangdong, China.

  1952–60

  With Ye Ye away in Canada, Dad was sent off to live in Guangzhou.

  The schools in cities were better than the ad-hoc village ones, Dad told me. The money Ye Ye sent back from Canada gave him the luxury of continuing with his studies. So as soon as he was old enough, they sent him off. There, he lived with his grandfather, Ah Gong, and with Sook Gong, who was technically his uncle, but just two years older, and more like a brother.

  Ah Gong had eventually stopped travelling abroad for work and settled in the city, where construction work was easier to find. Still, it wasn’t enough to support a family, so Bak Bak and Ah Ngeen stayed behind on the farm in Jingweicun.

  After a few years, Dad was used to his routine. During the school year, he was in Guangzhou. And during the summers and holidays, he and Sook Gong would return to Jingweicun. At first, Dad would look forward to these visits back to Jingweicun. In the city, he shared a hundred-square-foot bedroom with both Ah Gong and Sook Gong. The house itself they shared with another family, the Laus. All their meals were cooked in a shared kitchen and the house didn’t have a washroom, so both families had to walk several minutes to get to the nearest public toilet.

  But in Jingweicun, Bak Bak and Ah Ngeen had their own house. It was a mud-brick home with dirt floors and walls made of packed earth and it was dark inside no matter the time of day, but it was no better or worse than everyone else’s around them. And it was all theirs—no sharing.

  Outside, there was no limit to how far Dad and his friends could run. There were green rice fields as far as the eye could see, and neighbours’ farms they could spend all day exploring. Dad’s family’s property was about one-tenth of an acre. In front of the house, facing the main dirt road, Bak Bak grew big leafy bundles of bok choy, choy sum and spindly stalks of sweet peas. Out toward the fields, she grew the chalky brown yams they ate with almost every meal. And a plot of land about ten minutes away was filled with waist-high peanut plants.

  The trips home to Jingweicun for Chinese New Year, in the dead of winter, were less idyllic. None of the houses had heat and most people couldn’t afford meen laps—handmade winter coats padded with cotton. So everyone would gather outside their houses each morning, sitting with their faces turned toward the sun to stay warm. “Winter suntanning,” they called it.

  At least at Chinese New Year there was chicken. It would be flapping its wings, terrified, when Bak Bak rounded it up, grabbing both feet in one hand. She would butcher the bird herself, plucking out its feathers and cleaning it before poaching it whole—head, feet and all—in simmering water. Bak tseet guy, it was called. “White cut chicken.” The meat, served with ginger-scallion sauce, would be plump and juicy. And the poaching water would later be served as soup.

  But the summers. Summers in Jingweicun meant sweet, juicy longan, a tree fruit similar to lychee, with a soft brown shell you peel off before biting into the musky white flesh. And sugar cane, which grew in tall green stalks on the neighbours’ fields. Dad would spend hours with Sook Gong, gnawing on the stalks, spitting out the gristly bits and sucking greedily at the syrup.

  Summers meant swimming in the lake. Together with the other kids from the village—about four of them in total—they would march off to the lake each morning. Once there, they would take turns sticking their feet in the water, moving them in circles in search of clams.

  “Wun do!” they would scream when their foot landed on one. “Wun do ah!” The others would dive headfirst into the water to retrieve it. Sometimes the clams were as big as dinner plates. Other times, they were so puny they’d throw them back in. The good ones went into a bucket to bring home and make into soup. Some days they would catch several. Some days, none.

  Other days, they’d spend hours at the edge of the lake, digging their hands and feet into the mud in search of catfish. Any fish bigger than a few inches long they’d take home—a prize. Dad’s relationship with Ah Ngeen always felt distant, likely because of all the time he spent away. But dinner was a time they spent toget
her, and he was proud when he had something to contribute.

  But the summer when he was eleven, Dad learned Ah Ngeen, too, had left.

  Normally he would arrive to find Ah Ngeen in the house waiting for him. But this time when he walked around—through the kitchen and bedroom and back outside—she was nowhere to be found.

  He turned to Bak Bak.

  “Where’s Ah Ma?” he asked.

  “Away,” was all she said.

  “Away for how long? Where?”

  It took a while before she finally said it. “Gold Mountain,” she told him. “To join your father.”

  He pressed her for more details, but she was vague in her response.

  Something about paperwork, she said. Something about separate applications and separate residences. Something about Ye Ye’s documents. None of it made much sense to him.

  * * *

  I studied Dad’s expression as he recalled this. We were sitting on the floor of the basement, surrounded by boxes of old photos and documents. His face was blank. His eyes unmoved. He described it all so matter-of-factly.

  I couldn’t understand it. I thought back to my own memories of Ye Ye and Ah Ngeen. We didn’t see them often growing up. Our relationships had always been distant owing to language and to Dad’s stiffness around them. But I had seen that they cared. I had seen it in the dishes Ah Ngeen cooked for our visits, and in how Ye Ye always seemed to have sugar cane on hand to treat my sisters and me with. I’d seen how overjoyed Ah Ngeen had been when my aunts Jennie and Janice had their own kids—how her face lit up with delight around her new grandchildren.

  I couldn’t see how they could have left Dad behind by choice. But he wasn’t offering any explanations.

  So instead, I asked about him.

  I thought back to being eleven years old, of being ferried around to piano lessons, to swimming lessons. At that age, I followed Mom around everywhere. I was completely dependent on her for everything.

  “Weren’t you upset when you found out she’d left?” I asked.