![]() ![]() And there was no parking - essential, given the Newfoundland winter weather. It had a bad reputation among locals because of the previous owners, they learned. So the family moved to Corner Brook, where Mr. They heard through acquaintances that Newfoundland was a nice place to live. What did it matter that there was a Chinese New Year parade when they didn’t have time to go see it? Competition was stiff, so they had to work all the time. But there were already so many Chinese restaurants there. They liked Vancouver, with all of the amenities for Chinese immigrants. It was the Goldilocks approach that had led them to Deer Lake, he said. He needed to earn money right away to support his family. He’d been a high school science teacher in China, but when he arrived in Vancouver, he didn’t have the luxury of going back to school to get the credentials he needed to continue teaching. He was from Toisan and had moved to Vancouver in his twenties. The wings were on special, either deep-fried in batter or drenched in honey-garlic sauce.Ībout 10 minutes later, Mr. I studied the menu, a mostly familiar collection of classic chop suey dishes (egg rolls, chicken guy ding, sweet and sour pork), along with “Canadian” ones (fish and chips, liver dinner and T-bone steak). And every few minutes, the door would open and in would walk another guy in a flannel shirt and work boots, ordering take out for lunch. A handful of other families and couples were there too. In the middle of the room was one long table with over a dozen people seated around it, mostly seniors having their lunch. The door frames and trims were painted red. The walls were white with green wainscoting. The dining room itself was huge, split into two levels, with about 30 tables. So I sat at a table near the front of the room, watching as he hurried back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room. But if I didn’t mind waiting, he could come talk to me once things died down.īuy Chop Suey Nation this week at Amazon or Powell’s. He was right in the middle of the lunch rush, he said apologetically. He introduced himself in Cantonese as Richard Yu, the owner of the restaurant. His hair was neatly trimmed, and he wore a smart-looking zip-up vest over his plaid shirt. Despite the stained apron around his waist, he had a professorial look to him. Inside the Canton Restaurant, a middle-aged man greeted me from behind the counter. “Chow mein on our menu is cabbage,” it read. As I pulled open the door, a handmade sign caught my eye. There was a pizza place down the road, he said. My husband Anthony needed another break from Chinese. Next to it, the Chinese simplified characters for “Guangdong.” The word “CANTON” was painted in big block letters in red on the side of the building. ![]() Just off the highway, sandwiched between an A&W and a Subway, was a white trailer-style building. There was only our car and the highway.Ībout three hours into our drive, we stopped in a town called Deer Lake, about 30 minutes past Corner Brook. It felt like we were the only ones on the island. From the Trans-Canada Highway, we took in the snow-covered rock that seemed to stretch on forever. We drove off the ship, past a small cluster of homes painted blue, red, and yellow. ![]() In this excerpt, Hui meets a restaurant owner in Deer Lake, Newfoundland, and learns that chop suey cuisine isn’t, in fact, all the same. It’s part travelogue, part memoir, and as Hui tells the stories of Chinese restaurant owners in places like Vulcan, Alberta (home to a replica of the starship Enterprise and fewer than 2,000 people), she discovers her father’s own similar story. Hui chronicles their journey in Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada’s Chinese Restaurants. ![]() To answer these questions, Hui and her husband rented a Fiat and drove from British Columbia to Newfoundland, stopping in small-town chop suey restaurants along the way. And yet, Hui wanted to know how Canada’s chop suey restaurants - each with the same menu of egg rolls and sweet-and-sour pork - came into existence and, more specifically, how the Chinese families who run them wound up in the country’s tiniest towns. These restaurants serve the kind of food that journalist Ann Hui used to dismiss as inauthentic. There’s a chop suey restaurant in every small Canadian town. ![]()
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