Chop Suey Nation

by Ann Hui

  I hoped I might find a similar phenomenon in Canada—a single place that connected all of our Chinese restaurants. A single place that could explain how a woman like Ms. Lin had wound up in Vulcan, or Ms. Xie in a place like Drumheller. Already I had lurked around the Chinese travel agencies in Vancouver’s Chinatown, looking for signs of Chinese restaurant workers buying bus tickets. Each time I saw a bulletin board at a Chinese restaurant or store, I stopped to scan for job listings. I scoured the Chinese newspapers, looking for restaurant postings.

  Earlier in my research, Henry Yu, a University of British Columbia (UBC) history professor, had warned me not to get my hopes up.

  “The bus depot is ephemeral,” he said. “It could be a bus depot, or a port, or a Chinatown.”

  Here in Canada, he said, the spread of restaurants didn’t happen in a straight line. “It’s nodal,” he told me. Major cities became main nodes for the early Chinese immigrants—cities with convenient coastal locations, like Victoria or Vancouver. With the railway, those Chinese communities pushed farther east too. Often entire villages or families would wind up in specific areas: the Chows from Hoiping settled in Vancouver; the Tsangs settled in Toronto; the Wongs in Kenora, and so on and so on.

  And then, from each of these cities, the restaurants spread too. One family would start a restaurant in Edmonton. Their cousins, sometimes with the assistance of their family in Edmonton, would move just outside of the city, to Spruce Grove. And then to Spring Lake. Then Carvel. Then Duffield.

  Across decades, the restaurants spread and spread. First it was just men from the siyup counties, but eventually they came from all over China. There was no limit on the number of young men and women who wanted to take a chance at working for themselves.

  They spread and spread, until there was a Chinese restaurant in just about every town across Canada.

  Initially it happened through word of mouth—letters sent via air mail and carefully timed long-distance calls. Now, much of it has moved online. After talking to Professor Yu, I grew curious and searched online for “Chinese restaurant for sale.” The search turned up ad after ad, many of them on sites like Craigslist and Kijiji, for restaurants priced anywhere between tens of thousands of dollars (for the business and not the building) to half-million-dollar businesses near major cities.

  “SOLID BUILDING,” read an ad for the Szechuan Garden in Windsor, ON. “GOOD AND STEADY INCOME. CLOSE TO UNIVERSITY.” In Gibsons, BC, a restaurant with red vinyl booths and white plastic tables was selling for $105,000. “Plenty of local traffic,” the ad said. “4.3 stars on Google Reviews.” And in Prince George, BC, a “Chinese/Western restaurant” was for sale. “Could be customized to a Japanese restaurant to accommodate new business.”

  Often the ads emphasized a lifestyle for the entire family—good schools nearby, safe communities or grocery stores. What they were advertising were not restaurants, but new lives.

  In Glendon, AB, we met Lan Huynh, a Vietnamese woman selling “Chinese pierogis” in the mostly Ukrainian town of under five hundred people. (We ordered both the fried “Chinese” dumplings and regular Ukrainian perogies, served with a side of sauerkraut.) Her Vietnamese-Chinese husband had persuaded her to come to Canada, where his mother was already running Thai Woks N’go cafe. Ms. Huynh introduced us to her son, a boy with a shaved head and round face who looked about ten.

  Half an hour east, we met Jeff Deng at Panda Garden in Bonnyville. He had moved first to Edmonton. But when his uncle decided to open a restaurant in Bonnyville, he followed. As we spoke, Mr. Deng’s two daughters, Vivian, ten, and Vanessa, five—two mischievous-looking girls with long hair and round faces—got ahold of my notebook, and sneakily drew doodles on the lined sheets. The two girls had a bed set up in the back of the restaurant, behind the bar, where they played and took naps while their parents worked.

  Ms. Lin in Vulcan, Mr. Li in Drumheller, Ms. Huynh in Glendon, Mr. Deng in Bonnyville—they were all modern-day Gold Mountain men and women. They’d all come for the same reasons. And through their network, whether it was a brother, or a sister, an aunt or a family friend, they’d wound up in these tiny towns, running these tiny restaurants. Over 150 years after the Cariboo gold rush, the Gold Mountain system was still intact.

  * * *

  On the sixth day of our trip, we woke up in Brandon and set out for a small town about an hour south called Boissevain.

  In addition to understanding how these restaurants spread, I was still curious about why so many of them seemed to look and feel exactly the same. Already we had seen evidence of this on our trip. The same vinyl booths. Menus printed in the same font, with the same categories, and the same dishes. The same Wing’s brand plum sauce.

  Many of the restaurants even had the same names. (David Chen, a blogger, would later write me to share the results of a study he’d conducted on Chinese restaurant names in the United States. He found that there are over 1,770 separate, independent restaurants in the US with the exact same name: “Panda Express.” Another 511 were named “China Wok.” Here in Canada I was able to find, just by googling, at least seven separate restaurants sharing the latter name in southwestern Ontario alone.) These were restaurants separated by thousands of kilometres, built well before the invention of the Internet made the sharing of ideas quick and easy, yet these restaurants somehow all wound up doing things almost identically. Why?

  In my early research, I had found mention of the 1,600-person town of Boissevain and of Chinese laundries built there as early as 1891. I had seen photos of Boissevain’s local Chinese restaurant, with its classic chop suey menu and wood-panelled walls. It seemed like the quintessential chop suey restaurant. I thought I might find some answers there.

  We drove into town along one of its main streets, past an old grain elevator. We passed the town’s main attraction, an eight-and-a-half-metre-tall fibreglass turtle with a green shell and orange belly named Tommy Turtle. The turtle clutched in one of its limbs a Canadian flag, and in the other an American flag, a gesture to the town’s proximity to the US. Not to be outdone, the wildlife museum right beside Tommy had a giant bear statue out front, staring straight at the turtle.

  We rounded the corner, past a giant lumber yard and a trucking yard, and around the corner again toward a pink and grey building with a bright yellow sign—Choy’s Restaurant. As soon as I walked into the restaurant, a young woman wearing a hoodie and sneakers greeted me. I wasn’t sure what to make of her. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she grasped her hands shyly in front of her. She looked about eighteen years old.

  “Does your family run this restaurant?” I asked her in Cantonese.

  She nodded yes.

  I paused for a moment, taking in the scene around us. The dining area was split into two rooms. The back room looked just as it had in the photos, with wood panelling and tables and chairs in neat rows. Perched on a ledge at the back, three familiar-looking figurines were set up. They were the three Chinese gods, or san xing, which I recognized from just about every Chinese household I’d ever been in growing up. The one in the middle, with the long black beard and holding a gold nugget, represented fu, or fortune. The one on the right held a scroll to symbolize lu, or status. And the one with the long white beard, carrying a lucky peach, represented shou, immortality or a long life.

  But the room we were standing in looked more like a family room. There was only a single dining table. And on the table were remnants of what looked like the family’s breakfast: some crackers, a few slices of toast and some cut-up cucumber. There were also what looked like a toddler’s drawings—a child, I realized, who was likely hers.

  “Are you the owner?”

  She nodded again, this time a little shyly, and introduced herself as Su Fen Li.

  It turned out Ms. Li was actually thirty-two years old, more or less my age. She had a four-year-old daughter, and the family treated the restaurant as an extension of their living room. She nodded to the front counter, where a gold maneki-neko,
or “lucky cat,” sat beside a flat-screen television. That was where she spent most of her time.

  Ms. Li seated the two of us at a table in the dining room in the back. As we talked, I noticed her peering back and forth between Anthony and me several times, curious, as if trying to make sense of the two of us. I wondered what she thought of this person in front of her, Chinese but barely able to speak it, and her white husband. I thought how strange I must have seemed to her.

  We ordered a few dishes—a Cantonese chow mein and, at her suggestion, a plate of sesame chicken. She disappeared into the kitchen to deliver the order to her husband. Then she came back out to chat with us while we waited for the food.

  They had been in Canada about ten years, she said. She spoke in Cantonese, but with a heavy Toisan accent. I did the math. That would have meant she was just about twenty when she came here. She nodded. She had been running a small clothing stall in Guangzhou. Her husband was fixing air conditioners. But their relatives convinced them to come to Canada. Her husband’s sister was already living in Canada, in Brandon. Her uncle, too, lived in Canada.

  They worked a variety of jobs when they first arrived in Brandon, in restaurants and at the local Maple Leaf Foods pork processing plant. They also tried Toronto, where she worked for a commercial laundry company. But after an entire year there, she received only a twenty-five-cent raise—bringing up her hourly wage to $8.75. Plus the cost of living was high and the traffic was terrible. So they moved back to Brandon.

  There, they settled into a string of restaurant jobs. She continued waitressing and he cooked, first at a food-court Chinese restaurant at the mall, and later at a restaurant called the Golden Dragon, where she waited tables. It was her boss at the Golden Dragon who first told her about the restaurant in Boissevain. The couple who had run it for over twenty years were retiring and looking for a new couple to take over. Were they interested?

  They took a trip out to Boissevain to see the restaurant. They rounded the corner at the grain mill, drove past Tommy Turtle and turned to find the short grey building with the bright yellow sign.

  She pulled her hands into the sleeves of her hoodie and shrugged. “We decided to try,” she said.

  When I asked her about what was on my mind—about why so many of these restaurants were so similar—she laughed. It was something she had thought about before.

  Choy’s was just like all of the other Chinese restaurants, she said. When they bought Choy’s, they were buying the entire business, including the furniture, the equipment and all of its recipes. What the Choy family was selling them was not just a restaurant, but all of their expertise in running the restaurant. For the first month, Mr. Choy stayed with Ms. Li and her husband at the restaurant to show them how to run the business exactly the way he’d done in the past.

  He spent entire days in the kitchen with Ms. Li’s husband, showing him the right way to wrap a spring roll, or the right amount of batter for sesame chicken. He also handed them a dust-covered binder filled with all of the recipes they would need to cook every single item on the menu. This binder and these recipes had been passed down from the previous owner, and the previous owner before that.

  At the front counter, he showed Ms. Li how to run the front of house the same way it had always been done. He showed her how to fill out a cheque to properly bill a customer. How to punch in an order on the cash register. How to order new take out menus from a supplier. Changing anything, including the name, would cost money. And the Choys had already proven their way of doing things could be successful, she said. The more he showed them, the more it became clear that it would easiest and cheapest to keep things exactly the same. And if they were ever to open a Chinese restaurant elsewhere, they’d likely do things exactly the same there too.

  Now, it had been almost a year. She wasn’t sure whether they would stay long-term in Boissevain. I asked if she’d had a chance to see the nearby provincial parks or lakes, or gone to the US, with the border nearby. But she just shook her head and sighed.

  “We’re always working,” she said. “There’s no time to stop.”

  The number of hours they spent at the restaurant didn’t seem to be adding up with the amount of money they were taking home. Each morning they opened the restaurant at nine and stayed until past closing twelve hours later. Her parents looked after their daughter.

  Ms. Li figured she and her husband were taking home maybe two thousand dollars each month.

  “For this kind of money we may as well work for someone else.”

  Another idea was to head out to a bigger city, like Edmonton. They’d heard stories of restaurant owners taking home profits that seemed unimaginable—four or even five thousand dollars each month. But again she shook her head, as if to say she could never be so lucky.

  “Life is made up of many decades,” she said eventually. “We’ll do this for now.”

  Chapter Ten

  Guangzhou, China.

  1966–74

  By the time Dad was fifteen, schools had shut down entirely.

  The revolution had reached the streets of Guangzhou. He watched as the Red Guards—some of them former classmates of his, no older than he was—descended on their teachers and other “intellectuals.” There were street fights. Riots. Signs of violence everywhere.

  The scenes were horrifying, but he kept quiet. His own parents were abroad and thus, defectors. That made him a target too.

  “Were you afraid?”

  “We couldn’t show our feelings,” Dad said.

  “But did you ever try to stop things?”

  “We didn’t know who was right,” he said. “Nobody knew.”

  So he kept his head down. Most days, he and his best friend, Dsee Dai, holed up in Dsee Dai’s apartment, avoiding the chaos and trying to stay out of the fray.

  As he walked toward Dsee Dai’s house one morning, he heard people speaking in hushed tones. They said something about a disturbance on Wende Road, where he was headed. He considered turning around and going home, but he was almost there. He paused for a few moments, listening for signs of trouble—the familiar sounds of people shouting or gunfire. But he heard nothing. So he kept walking.

  As he turned the corner onto Wende Road, he saw what everyone had been whispering about.

  About one hundred metres ahead of him, dead bodies, hanging limply like rag dolls from a tree. About a dozen of them.

  He froze, unable to breathe or even look away.

  Then he turned around and ran all the way home.

  After that day, Dad and Sook Gong were sent back to Jingweicun.

  Up until then, he’d held out hope he might one day become a teacher. It was a lofty goal for a kid from Jingweicun. But until then, it had still seemed possible. Ye Ye’s money from Gold Mountain, the money that had allowed him to continue with schooling, had made it so.

  Dad was a diligent student, naturally clever and hard-working. He was quiet and well-liked by his teachers. He looked up to them too—these men and women with their smart clothes and thick books. In his free time, he read poetry. His favourite was the famous poet Li Bai. On scrolls, he would practise calligraphy with these poems, one character after another, perfecting his strokes. He imagined one day he could be like his teachers—far, far away from the gruelling work in the fields.

  But with the start of the revolution, that dream went out the window. There were no more classes, no more school. His hard work studying for exams, his careful efforts to get good grades—none of that mattered anymore. Even if the schools eventually reopened, even if things went back to normal, too much time had passed. He’d missed too much.

  Now he was back in Jingweicun, back on the farms where he had begun. What small privilege he once had no longer mattered. The luxury he’d once had, the ability to dream of something better, had slipped away.

  He felt insignificant. Vulnerable.

  “We were all like weeds twisting in the wind,” he said.

  * * *

  In the b
asement of his house in Burnaby, Dad sat on the floor surrounded by legal boxes stuffed full of papers. He was sorting through the boxes in hopes that some of the old documents and photos might be helpful to me. As he sorted, he talked.

  A few years after the incident on Wende Road, things eventually calmed down in Guangzhou, he said. The schools reopened and Dad was able to move back to the city. But it was already too late. He had seen how quickly everything could be taken away. His life in China now felt fragile, and meaningless.

  He picked up a photo from the floor. He studied it for a few minutes, then handed it to me. It looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it before.

  This was a photo that arrived a few years after Ah Ngeen had left, he said. It came in the mail when he was about thirteen. It was the first he’d heard from her.

  I looked at the image. It showed Ah Ngeen posing stiffly in front of a curtain, wearing a form-fitting dress and high heels. Standing next to her was Ye Ye, stern-looking in a button-up shirt and dark slacks.

  “This is the first time I ever saw my dad,” he said.

  Those words struck me. “The first time I ever saw my dad.” Ye Ye had left when Dad was just one year old. So until that photo arrived, he’d only been able to imagine what his father looked like. I imagined Dad, as a young man, studying the photograph, taking in the image of the man standing stiffly next to his mother. The man dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. Trying to read Ye Ye’s blank expression.

  “What did you think?” I asked.