During the holiday season, it’s always comforting to know that Chinese restaurants will be open as a place to share a family meal should one not want to cook.
“Have You Eaten Yet?: Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World,” a new book by Canadian filmmaker Cheuk Kwan, covers the global phenomenon of the Chinese restaurant and the long journeys endured by many of the people who start them.
Kwan spent four years visiting and filming restaurants as far north as Tromsø, Norway, and as far south as Cape Town, South Africa. The Chinese restaurateurs and their families have similar, often moving, stories of migration, of seeking a better life for their children, and of overcoming racism to become part of the societal fabrics of their new home countries. Along the way, Kwan and his film crew get to eat delicious Chinese food all over the globe.
“Have You Eaten Yet?” is similar to Anthony Bourdain’s “A Cook’s Tour,” though Kwan’s writing is more equanimous than Bourdain’s. For instance, when Kwan interviews Ken Hom, the famed Chinese American chef and author who has hosted hit TV shows and has appeared on several specials on the BBC since the 1980s, Hom has harsh words about the racism he experienced in his birth nation. In response, Kwan is surprisingly sanguine:
“Hom’s native country is reeling from anti-Black and anti-Asian racism these days, and he says he feels lucky to have moved to France where, he believes, they don’t have the same history of racism as in America. He was also lucky that his entire adulthood in the U.S. was spent in Berkeley. … So it came as a shock to him when, on his first book tour in the U.S., people would say to him, ‘How come your English is so good?’
“ ‘We all get that, all the time,’ I say to assuage him.
“ ‘Nobody in France says that,’ he replies.”
Kwan describes the racism his subjects experience primarily through a historical lens, without digging very deeply into the implications of structural racism today. Readers will learn about injustices they likely weren’t aware of, like how India forcibly interned Indians of Chinese heritage during the Sino-Indian War of 1962, echoing what the Americans did to Japanese Americans during World War II.
In the early 20th century, in order to hide from racist, violent white people, Chinese railroad workers in Western Canada dug a network of secret tunnels in which to hide. These tunnels were then used by Chicago mobsters running liquor during Prohibition in the 1920s. Al Capone was rumored to have hidden in them.
Poignant as these immigrant stories are, they blur together over the course of the book. Even the dishes Kwan and his crew enjoy are repeated; Kwan says they are delicious, no matter how they’ve been adapted to suit the tastes of locals.
“Have You Eaten Yet?” isn’t the most provocative read, but it will certainly leave you hungry for Chinese food.
Have You Eaten Yet?: Stories from Chinese Restaurants Around the World
By Cheuk Kwan
(Pegasus Books; 218 pages; $16.95)
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