Chop Suey Nation

Fascinating series of interviews with restaurant owners across Canada with the author's own family history woven in. I learned a lot about food and Canada (I wish there had been more about the buffets in Quebec because that is where I first came into contact with “Chinese food” ) such painful silences can exist in family history - see also Jessica Lee's Two Trees Make a Forest

Chop Suey refers to the uniquely Western take on traditional Chinese food born out of necessity, a paucity of authentic ingredients, and narrow local taste palates. It's General Tso chicken, Egg Foo Young and Ginger Beef. It's what I've always referred to as fake Chinese or “Average Asian” - a guilty, delicious pleasure finished off with a fortune cookie.

In Chop Suey Nation Ann Hui, the Globe and Mail's national food reporter, along with her husband embark on an 18 day trek across Canada from Victoria BC to Fogo Island Newfoundland. Their mission? To sample small town Chinese restaurants across the country and discover the hidden DNA of these MSG-laden establishments.

With Anti-Chinese laws preventing the earliest Canadian immigrants from working in anything other than laundries and restaurants the stage was set for the proliferation of Chinese restaurants. Then the Chinese Exclusion outright banned Chinese from coming to Canada at all. When doors eventually reopened, the restaurant business was still seen as a viable way to make a living in Canada. Immigrants learned from owners and carried that knowledge to the next city - taking into consideration what worked (Chop Suey Chinese) and what didn't (traditional Chinese fare). In this way, repeated from town to town and immigrant to immigrant, did this brand of Western Chinese food take root.

This works as a great long form piece that ran in the Globe and Mail but I wished for more in book form. Still it's a warm look at the long and surprisingly Canadian tradition of Chop Suey Chinese.