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Why Chinese restaurants are sites of innovation and resilience around the world

By Ann Hui, The Globe and Mail, JANUARY 31, 2022

In 1976, Cheuk Kwan had dinner at the Cin Lokantasi, or “China Restaurant,” in Istanbul. There was no pork on the menu – a staple of most Chinese cuisine. The owner, he later learned, was a Muslim-Chinese man who had fled Mao Zedong’s China, travelling through Pakistan and Iraq, before eventually settling in Turkey.

This experience led Kwan to the realization that, no matter where you are in the world, there’s a Chinese restaurant. That was the thesis behind his 2005 documentary series Chinese Restaurants, which follows the filmmaker from Israel to Kenya, and Argentina to Brazil, visiting Chinese restaurants across 13 countries. Read more…

Cheuk Kwan, author of Have You Eaten Yet?

Luck, love, life: Beloved author Wayson Choy had always lived to perfect his stories, again and again

ANTANAS SILEIKA, THE GLOBE AND MAIL, APRIL 30, 2019

Wayson Choy and I were both English teachers at Humber College in Toronto when he published his first book, The Jade Peony, in 1995. He was 56 at the time, a late-breaking author. I had published my own first book the year before and I said to him over lunch in the staff dining room, “Enjoy the attention, Wayson. It doesn’t last.”

The book, about a gay boy growing up in Vancouver’s Chinatown of the thirties and forties, went on to be a bestseller for 26 weeks and shared a Trillium Award with Margaret Atwood. If Chinatown was practically invisible in the Canadian consciousness at the time, a gay boy in such a setting was a revelation of a reality too long ignored. He later received many more honours, including a Giller nomination and the Order of Canada. Read more…

Author Wayson Choy in the Random House Publishing office on April 1, 2009. JENNIFER ROBERTS/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Vancouver searches for ways to preserve ‘legacy’ businesses in Chinatown, other areas

FRANCES BULA, DECEMBER 10, 2017

The Gain Wah restaurant in Vancouver’s Chinatown is small and unremarkable from the outside, with its battered red canopy covered with yellow Chinese characters.

But Andrew Leung and his wife make their barbecue pork the old-fashioned way – marinated overnight. And they hand-cut the pork for their wontons, the way they’ve always done it at this restaurant since it opened in 1981.

The Gain Wah is the kind of business that Vancouver planners are looking at these days in an effort to figure out how to support and preserve what are being called “legacy” businesses, starting with Chinatown but eventually in other parts of the city. Read more…

The Gain Wah Restaurant in Vancouver’s Chinatown, as photographed on Dec. 10, 2017. RAFAL GERSZAK/RAFAL GERSZAK

A new battle for Chinatown

KERRY GOLD, June 2 2017

Back in the sixties, they battled a freeway. Today, it’s pricey condos that threaten to wipe out Vancouver’s historic enclave. Suelina Quan and Larry Chan’s heritage house at 658 Keefer St. represents the survival of the Strathcona neighbourhood in which it sits, as well as neighbouring Chinatown. Read more…

Residents fear a gentrifying path of condos will erase the ‘heart and soul’ of Vancouver’s Chinatown.
RAFAL GERSZAK/THE GLOBE AND MAIL

In Vancouver’s Chinatown, tailor Bill Wong sewed his way to success

JUDY STOFFMAN, 19 May 2017

After the Second World War ended, Bill Wong graduated from the University of British Columbia as a mechanical engineer along with his brother Jack, a civil engineer. A recruiter from City Hall came to the campus to offer jobs. What he said when he addressed the class in 1948 was crushing to the hard-working Wong brothers, and they never forgot it: “Tell the Chinese boys in the back not to bother applying or we’ll all be embarrassed.”
Instead of applying elsewhere to work as engineers, they retreated to Modernize, the thriving tailor shop their father opened in Vancouver’s Chinatown in 1913. Having worked there part-time since they were teenagers, they were on familiar terms with its ancient Singer sewing machines, antique button-hole maker and enormous steam iron. In its heyday, the shop employed 20 people and stocked hundreds of bolts of high-quality suiting material. Read more…

Bill Wong sits at his sewing machine in the Modernize tailor shop. Mr. Wong died of heart failure last month, aged 95, after a decades-long tenure at a family business that became a Vancouver institution. COURTESY OF MAURICE WONG

CHOP SUEY NATION

by ANN HUI, Monday, Jul. 04, 2016

About an hour-long ferry ride off the northeast coast of Newfoundland, where the frigid waters of the Atlantic Ocean crash onto a jutting granite shoreline, is the tiny island of Fogo – a place so remote that conspiracy theorists believe it to be one of the four corners of the Earth. And in a small village on this island – where wooden houses and clapboard sheds dot the shore like Monopoly pieces – is Kwang Tung Restaurant, Fogo Island’s very own Chinese café. Read more …

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: BEN BARRETT-FORREST/THE GLOBE AND MAIL/ISTOCK PHOTO

Vancouver developers and community activists debate Chinatown’s future

by FRANCES BULA, Jun. 14, 2016

The lot near the corner of Keefer and Quebec streets is no historic gem. Once the site of a garage, it is now covered with gravel and a smattering of parked cars.
But it has turned into a Waterloo for Vancouver’s Chinatown, with a wide range of groups viewing whatever is built there as the indicator species for the future of this small historic neighbourhood. Read more …