"Chicken fried rice, sweet and sour pork, and an order of onion rings, please."

Chinese restaurants in small town Canada are at once everywhere - you would be hard pressed to find a town without a Chinese restaurant - and yet they are conspicuously absent in critical discussions of Chinese diasporic culture or even in popular writing about Chinese food. In Eating Chinese, Lily Cho examines Chinese restaurants as spaces that define, for those both inside and outside the community, what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be Chinese-Canadian.

Despite restrictions on immigration and explicitly racist legislation at national and provincial levels, Chinese immigrants have long dominated the restaurant industry in Canada. While isolated by racism, Chinese communities in Canada were still strongly connected to their non-Chinese neighbours through the food that they prepared and served. Cho looks at this surprisingly ubiquitous feature of small-town Canada through menus, literature, art, and music. An innovative approach to the study of diaspora, Eating Chinese brings to light the cultural spaces crafted by restaurateurs, diners, cooks, servers, and artists.

Dr. Lily Cho is the current Associate Dean, Global and Community Engagement for the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies at York University. July 2023, she will join Western University as its new vice-provost and associate vice-president (International). She is also appointed as professor in the department of English and writing studies within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Dr. Cho has published books on Chinese restaurants and the relationship between human rights and creative expression. Her book Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens (McGill-Queens) won the Association for Asian American Studies 2023 Book Prize for Outstanding Achievement (Multidisciplinary).

Lily Cho's profile page

‘Eating Chinese makes a major contribution to Chinese diaspora studies through its attention to small town Canada.’

Journal of Asian American Studies vol 15:2:2012

‘Eating Chinese is powerful and rare work of criticism… This book generously points us forward, inviting us to imagine how acts of remembering a past that is not yet past could help clarify “work that has yet to be done”.’

Canadian Literature 219 winter 2013

‘Eating Chinese challenges scholars of post colonialism and diasporas to consider how diasporic culture is forged beyond the limits of the cosmopolitan metropolis, at intersections of the past and the present… Her insightful readings of ostensibly disparate narratives enable her to carefully peel back their layers to reveal how identities and structures of power are constituted in and around what some might take to be the most unlikely of places.’

Jaclyn Rohel , <em>Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies; vol26:2011</em>

Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada is a fascinating look at the ways in which Chinese immigrants related to mainstream Canadians through the food they prepared and served ... Cho is an engaging, lively writer ... There is much for the general reader to enjoy in the book.

Bruce Ward, <em>The Ottawa Citizen</em>