Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and other stories from Canada's Chinese Restaurants by Ann Hui

Chop Suey Nation is part memoir, part travelogue, and part cultural history. It follows journalist Ann Hui as she travels across Canada to find out the untold stories behind Chinese Canadian restaurants, especially those in small towns and rural areas. The book starts with Hui's surprise at finding out that her parents used to own a Chinese restaurant, something she had never known. This personal revelation leads to a road trip across the country, where Hui visits dozens of family-owned businesses and meets the people who have kept them going for decades. By combining these stories with her own family's history, Hui turns the common "chop suey restaurant" into a complicated place of survival, adaptation, and belonging instead of a cultural stereotype.

Hui's main goal is to fight against the idea that "chop suey" is just a food joke or a sign of something that isn't real. As she says, the phrase often brings to mind "greasy fluorescent-lit diners with menus laminated into stickiness" (p. 12), but this kind of shorthand leaves out the lives and struggles of the people who work behind the counter. Hui shows that these restaurants were never about "authentic" Chinese food in the strictest sense. Instead, they were about making something that would sell in a market that was very racially divided, while still giving people a sense of cultural connection. In places where there weren't many Chinese people and the law and policy were against them, the chop suey restaurant became a way to make a living and a way to stay alive.

Hui puts these restaurants in the context of the longer history of Chinese people moving to Canada, starting with the arrival of workers for the Canadian Pacific Railway in the late 1800s. She remembers that a lot of immigrants who were shut out of other job opportunities because of systemic racism found a small opening in the restaurant business. One restaurant owner tells her, "Cooking was the only thing we were allowed to do," and even then, "they didn't really want us here" (p. 68). Chinese families in small towns from Newfoundland to the Prairies had to deal with racism, social isolation, and long work hours. The restaurants were often also homes, and kids learned to peel carrots and deliver food in the snow.

Hui talks about the emotional toll of this kind of work: "They lived in towns where they were sometimes the only Chinese family for hundreds of miles, and their kids learned early on to ignore the taunts" (p. 142). But she also shows how proud, resourceful, and stubbornly hopeful these families were, which helped them not only survive but also leave a mark on Canadian towns.

One of Hui's most powerful points is that these restaurants are like informal family archives. Faded photos, handwritten calendars, and certificates are often hung on the walls. These are signs of a life lived in two worlds. Hui sees a black-and-white wedding photo taped above the cash register in a Saskatchewan restaurant. The bride is wearing a cheongsam and the groom is wearing a Western suit. "Their smiles looked both shy and unshakable" (p. 156). These places hold the many stories of migration: the people who left and the people who came, the deals made to survive, and the memories that have been passed down through recipes that have changed over the years.

Hui's discovery of her parents' secret restaurant past is what gives the memoir its emotional core. Her mother, who was practical and didn't say much, had never brought it up. When Hui asks for more information, the answers are few and vague. Her mother says, "We did it for money, and then we stopped" (p. 33). This withholding is part of a bigger pattern of silence between generations in many immigrant families. They don't want to talk about their problems, especially those that have to do with racial discrimination or money problems. Hui not only writes down the histories of other people on her journey, but she also starts to take back her own.

Chop Suey Nation is often warm and funny, but Hui doesn't want to turn the chop suey restaurant into a cute symbol of multiculturalism. She is clear about the racism that pushed many Chinese Canadians into this line of work in the first place and the fact that it is still not very stable today. At the same time, she respects how strong and flexible these spaces are. "This is our Canada," one of the old owners says to her. "It may not look like Canada on TV, but it's ours" (p. 213).

Hui uses a mix of personal memoir, oral history, and cultural analysis to tell a different story about Canadian food and multiculturalism than the one that is usually told. She says that the chop suey restaurant is a way to look at migration, belonging, and the process of figuring out who you are.

In the end, Ann Hui's Chop Suey Nation is more than just a book about food. It's a map of how Chinese Canadians have survived, made with highways, neon signs, fortune cookies, and Styrofoam takeout boxes. It shows that even a simple dish like sweet-and-sour pork can have a long history of being left out, changing, and quietly fighting back. By putting the voices of the people who built and ran these restaurants at the center of the story, Hui gives dignity back to a tradition that is often mocked or ignored.

In doing so, she shows the hidden structure of Chinese Canadian life, and by following these paths again, she finds her own place in it. The end result is a piece that is as much about finding home as it is about recording history. It reminds us that sometimes the most important records are right in front of us, in the corner booths of small-town cafes all over the country.