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Excerpt from Have You Eaten Yet? – Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World, by Cheuk C. Kwan, Douglas & McIntyre
“Have you eaten yet?”
This colloquial Chinese greeting is akin to asking “How are you?” In a culture where food plays such an important role in life, asking if someone has eaten shows that you care. Because of war, famine and poverty, people in old China did not always have enough to eat. Perhaps that is how these words became an expression of concern for someone’s well-being.
However it evolved, it’s a greeting that you hear worldwide among those with Chinese heritage. And we are truly worldwide. There’s a Cantonese saying: yat wok jau tin ngaai, literally, “journeying to the sky’s edge with a wok.”
You can find a Chinese restaurant everywhere you go.
And the cuisine has morphed, becoming American, Cuban, Jamaican, Peruvian. Or what have you. As Samson Yeh in Kolkata told me when we were talking about Indo-Chinese food, “We adapt to new environments, not the other way around.”
He might as well have been talking about the Chinese diaspora.
I am a card-carrying member. I was born in Hong Kong—a British colony before it was handed back to China—and spent my formative years in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. I attended universities in the US, immigrated to Canada and worked in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, speaking three languages and two Chinese dialects.
In 1976, I travelled westward on a round-the-world route from San Francisco to Toronto, where I would report as an immigrant. It was on that journey that I first ate at Istanbul’s China Restaurant, whose owner—my Let’s Go Europe guide informed me—had “walked from China.” That culinary encounter inspired me to make the Chinese Restaurants documentary series, which brought me back to that very same restaurant twenty-five years later. For four years, I scoured the world for good eats and intriguing stories from the Chinese diaspora. It was an odyssey of more than 200,000 kilometres that took me from the Amazon to the Arctic Circle.
Family-run Chinese restaurants are global icons of immigration, community and good food. They are found in every corner of the world: cultural outposts of brave sojourners and purveyors of dim sum, Peking duck and surprising culinary hybrids. Running a Chinese restaurant is the easiest path for new Chinese immigrants to integrate into the host society. It’s a unique trade where no other nationalities can compete, and it provides work for new arrivals, whether legal or illegal, helping them get on their feet.
But food is just an entry point.
Take a look behind every kitchen door and you will find a complicated history of cultural migration and world politics. The Jade Gardens and Golden Dragons that populate towns and cities from Africa to South America are intricately connected to the social schisms and political movements that propelled the world into modern times.
This global narrative is made from the myriad personal stories of entrepreneurs, labourers and dreamers who populate Chinese restaurants in six continents, and the social, cultural and political forces that shaped their stories.
There are more than 40 million of us in the Chinese diaspora, and it’s serendipitous how we find each other in unexpected corners of the world. As I travelled the world meeting with far-flung members of the Chinese diaspora, one question always came to mind: Are we defined by our nationality or by our ethnicity? Nationality is a legal construct that can be easily given—or taken away—while ethnicity always stays with us. It’s in our blood.
Even though I have held different passports and passed through different cultures, deep down I know that I’m ethnically Chinese. Somehow I have retained my Chinese cultural traits along the way. As second-generation Chinese Canadian journalist Nancy Ing-Ward once told me: “We may no longer speak the language, or embody the culture, but we all carry that invisible baggage of ancestral China on our backs.”
Then she dropped a truism: “Like we always have to have our rice.”
I once met an elderly Chinese man in the city then known as Leningrad, walking on the other side of a bridge that spans the Neva River. After we nodded to each other, I made a point of crossing over to chat with him. He invited me to his Soviet-era apartment. After dinner with his grown daughter and his Russian wife of forty years, he shared the story of how he had come to live in the Baltic city so far from home, and of the trials and tribulations they faced as an interracial couple in the Soviet Union.
Chance encounters like this one are precious moments in our life journeys. We all seem to be interconnected, in so many degrees, across blurred boundaries of geography, history and politics. But as disparate as we are, and as many different dialects and languages as we speak, we all share a set of common values: we believe in the importance of family ties, Chinese culture and education, and, most of all, we share an undying love of Chinese food.
Like, if it tastes good, we will eat it.
Excerpted from Have You Eaten Yet? – Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World, by Cheuk C. Kwan ©. Published in 2022 by Douglas & McIntyre. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
