About an hour and a half after leaving Vulcan, we reached the Canadian Badlands. Surrounding us in every direction were rocky canyons. Thousands of years of erosion revealed clay-coloured stripes. According to the signs, coal and dinosaur bones had been discovered here going back to the nineteenth century.
Anthony squinted as he drove, taking it all in. “Can you imagine settling in this place?” he said. As a history buff, he’d always been fascinated by the Prairies and by the pioneers who first headed west to build this “western front.” The Ukrainians and Poles came in large groups, lured by promises of cheap land and a new beginning.
We took in the gnarled rock formations off in the distance.
A few minutes later, we saw the town signs for Drumheller. Like Vulcan, this town had found its own brand to draw tourists. In this case, it was dinosaurs. Drumheller’s welcome sign was concrete, with the town name engraved in thick block letters and flanked by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Capitalizing on the dinosaur bone discoveries in the Badlands, Drumheller now calls itself the “dinosaur capital of the world.” We drove through the town, taking in the dinosaur figurines that greeted passersby from street corners, park benches and bus stops.
Hovering over the entire town was a giant green Tyrannosaurus rex, twenty-five metres tall. We climbed the staircase built into the spine of the T. rex, up into the observation deck built into its jaw. Looking out, the town sprawled in front of us, with tidy-looking parks and homes, and the Badlands in the distance.
Back in the car, we drove down Centre Street, passing a seniors’ centre and a thrift shop. The town had the nostalgic feel of a summer town from the 1970s, with faded gift shops, laser tag and a small movie theatre. But as we made our way around, I realized the only other cars we had seen were the ones parked in the parking lots. Some of the storefronts appeared shuttered. And there wasn’t a single person walking on the sidewalks. It was a town of about six and a half thousand—large enough for its own Wal-Mart and McDonald’s—but its town centre felt even quieter than Vulcan’s.
We parked in front of Diana Restaurant on Centre Street. Sandwiched between an Econo Lodge and a salon, the restaurant didn’t look like much. It was housed in a plain beige-brick building that could have been a dentist or medical supply office. But inside, it was like a 1960s film set that had since gone untouched. This was the glamorous Chinese restaurant from Hollywood movies, all dim lighting, wood carvings and beaded curtains. The walls were covered with heavy, brocaded wallpaper and Chinese watercolours. The banquettes were bright red and plastic. Paper dragons with golden beards and long red tails hung from the ceiling. An empty buffet table sat abandoned in the corner.
By that time, it was mid-afternoon and the restaurant was near-empty. We’d already had lunch back in Vulcan and were too full for a second meal. But I still wanted to order something. Behind the counter, I spotted a poster advertising bubble tea. Perfect.
A woman who looked to be in her thirties, with short, neat hair, approached. I ordered a taro bubble tea to go. She nodded, then disappeared into the back. A few minutes later, she returned with my drink.
“You’re the owner here?” I asked her in Mandarin.
She nodded quietly. She was shy but seemed intrigued when I explained why I was asking.
We chatted politely for a few minutes as I sipped my drink. I’d chosen quickly, defaulting to taro flavour only because it had been my favourite as a teenager. When made fresh from the root and mixed with milk, taro becomes sweet and fragrant. But the drink I’d been handed was clearly made from a powder. It was sweet and dessert-like, but dense and chalky.
Her name was Linda Xie, she said. In China, she had worked as an accountant. She was quiet and reserved, and seemed like she’d be happy sitting behind a desk crunching numbers. She and her husband, Peter Li, had come to Drumheller ten years earlier, from Datong, a city in Shanxi province in China. Peter’s uncle was already running a restaurant in Drumheller, and offered to sponsor them.
A few minutes later, a man with a Buddha-like face and build walked into the restaurant. It was Peter. At first he was puzzled to see the two of us sitting there, but as soon as he heard my (very poor) Mandarin, his face quickly gave way to a puckish grin. Unlike Ms. Xie, Mr. Li was boisterous and outspoken.
He sat down with us, leaning back against the seat like he could sit all day. “What do you want to know?” he asked. “I’m happy to tell you everything.”
Ms. Xie, who had dutifully put up with my questions, seemed grateful for his arrival. She quickly stood up and excused herself.
There was only one table that was otherwise occupied—a family of four having a leisurely lunch. They glanced up curiously at us from time to time, looking from me to Mr. Li and back to me again before returning to their food.
Back in China, Mr. Li said, he was a budding chef. As in the brigade system in European kitchens, the most lavish Chinese restaurants relied on highly regimented systems. He spent years training in yue cai, Cantonese cooking, refining his skills in some of the biggest restaurants around Beijing. These were restaurants with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of seats. (A restaurant called Xihulou in Hunan is often described as the largest restaurant in the world, with 5,000 seats and over 300 chefs). The restaurants had multiple dining rooms, spread across multiple floors and escalators in between.
Mr. Li worked in some of these huge restaurants, with their multiple kitchens, alongside hundreds of other cooks. Each cook had honed their skills for several years in each specific function. One would wash the vegetables. Another wielded the steamers. Yet another was in charge of stir-fries. Others simply ran back and forth between those cooks, fetching spoons or dishes or fresh ingredients. It all came together in a finely tuned system to ensure each and every dish came out precisely the way it had for hundreds of years.
In China, authenticity wasn’t the question. It was just about tradition.
Then Mr. Li arrived in Drumheller. Suddenly he had to grapple with a new world: a new language, a new country and a new city. He knew he’d have to learn to do things all over again. But he hadn’t expected cooking to be one of those things. In his cooking skills, at least, he’d been confident.
But when he arrived in his uncle’s kitchen, he said, he was befuddled. He barely recognized any of the dishes on the menu. He watched, puzzled, as his uncle and the other cooks used techniques that would have gotten him fired from any kitchen in China—deep-frying seafood, or covering fresh vegetables with heavy sauces. He watched the cooks call these new dishes “lemon chicken” and “chop suey.”
At first he pushed back. He tried to introduce dishes like mapo tofu or laziji to the menus. Some customers were polite and would at least try them—their grins melting into grimaces as soon as he looked away. This was a blue-collar town not known for adventurous diners. Most of his customers had lived in Drumheller all their lives and worked on farms, or at the nearby oil fields, or at the Drumheller Institution, a medium-security prison in town. (According to Statistics Canada, over half of all adults in Drumheller have no post-secondary education, with a high school diploma or less). Most of them stuck with what they knew.
Each day, he’d pack up the leftovers, boxes and boxes worth, to bring home. Gradually, he stopped trying. “Chinese food”—now he was talking about the authentic stuff—“it’s very hard to make,” he said. “If they don’t like it, I don’t want to waste too much time on it.” So he, too, learned how to deep-fry seafood and slather dishes in thick sauces. It’s what the people want, he figured. Might as well give the people what they want.
By this point, we’d been talking for almost half an hour. The dining room was entirely quiet now, after the last of the lunch crowd had asked for their cheques and left. In the back of the dim dining room, Mr. Li’s father-in-law’s head was craned toward the TV news, set to mute.
Mr. Li sighed. He’d just returned to China for a visit, he said.
“In China right now,” he said slowly, choosing his words carefully, “It’s really good.”
In the time since he and Ms. Xie left, many of their old friends had risen to China’s new middle class, carried by a booming Chinese economy. Mr. Li’s old friends were now in cooking positions at five-star hotels and famous Beijing restaurants. They lived fast-paced lives in China, surrounded by modern conveniences and modest luxuries. Many of them owned brand-new flats and carried around the latest smartphones. They lived comfortable lives.
Here in Canada, meanwhile, they had arrived just as Alberta’s economy began to sink. One by one, their customers were losing their jobs. Each day, the dining room was quieter and quieter. The cost of food kept rising.
Here they were in this town, Mr. Li said, switching to English: “Nothing too exciting. Every day, same same.” He held his arms in the air, gesturing around the restaurant to illustrate.
Their timing had been all wrong.
As he spoke, Ms. Xie reappeared at his side. I asked her if she had friends in town, and she nodded yes, though not convincingly. “Some of the customers here are very nice,” she said, quietly.
Were there other Chinese-speaking families living in the city? People she could speak with comfortably?
She counted in her head.
“I think—seven or eight?” she said.
“Seven or eight families?”
“Seven or eight people.”
Her response stunned me. I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. (Later, when I looked up the census figures for Drumheller, they showed that, of 6,400 or so residents in the city, only ten listed Chinese as their first language.)
“Is it lonely?” I asked.
She stayed silent for a long time.
“Of course, when we first came here, it felt very lonely,” she said.
A few moments, she added, as if it were an afterthought, “Now, we feel better.”
She didn’t seem convinced. I knew I wasn’t.
By the time I was getting ready to leave the Diana, Anthony had come into the restaurant to wait for me. He’d gone for a walk around the town, but found that most of the streets were empty. We walked out together toward the car, and as we drove away, I thought about what Mr. Li had said, about how confused he’d been by the “Chinese” food he’d found in Drumheller. It was the same reaction I’d had to my Chinese New Year lunch all those years earlier.
It was clear this was a made-in-North-America cuisine. But who had created it? And how much of it was Canadian?
At the Diana, one of the dishes on the menu had caught my eye. I had noticed it back at Amy’s too. There, the chafing dish labelled “ginger beef” had been almost completely empty, which I took as a sign that it was a popular item. Before coming to the Prairies, I’d never before heard of ginger beef. But from what I could tell, it was a Prairie specialty.
I thought it might help me understand the origins of this “chop suey” cuisine, especially the Canadian kind. So I called up the Silver Inn Restaurant in Calgary, where ginger beef had allegedly been invented. Kwong Cheung, the restaurant’s owner, picked up the phone. He chuckled when I asked about the dish. He was used to telling the story.
The Silver Inn Restaurant was first opened in Calgary in 1975 by Mr. Cheung’s sisters, Lily and Louise, he told me. It was a chop suey restaurant, like almost all Chinese restaurants at the time. At the Silver Inn and at Chinese restaurants across North America—in Chinatowns in San Francisco, or New York, or Vancouver—there were only so many Chinese customers. Survival was dependent on winning over white customers. And despite an interest in “exotic” foods, many non-Chinese customers at the time still wanted flavours and ingredients that were somewhat familiar: sweet or salty or a little bit sour. They weren’t ready for tongue-numbing spices or slimy textures. They were adventurous, but only a little.
Many of the first chop suey restaurant owners were used to thinking on their feet. Most of those restaurant owners weren’t even trained chefs. Many had only started restaurants because they had no other options, because the work didn’t require formal training or much English, and also because until the mid-twentieth century, they had been barred from other professional occupations. These cooks had learned through improvising and by copying others.
Even if they wanted to create authentic Chinese food, many of the ingredients they would have needed—spices, sauces or varieties of fresh produce or seafood—were difficult to find in North America anyway. So again, they improvised. Based on the ingredients available to them, they concocted new dishes they thought might appeal to Western audiences. They borrowed from the recipes and flavours they remembered back home, but added healthy doses of soy sauce and ketchup and sugar to appeal to Western tastes.
Thus was born chop suey—in other words, “bits and pieces” or “scraps.” The dish was the only constant you would find in every chop suey restaurant from coast to coast. It could vary from place to place and city to city. Some used green cabbage while others had napa. Others substituted carrots or celery. Sometimes it was beef chop suey, or chicken chop suey, or vegetable chop suey. The only ingredient that was always there was bean sprouts. Bean sprouts could be grown anywhere so long as there was water. As long as you have water and a bucket, you can grow bean sprouts.
Chop suey. In other words, whatever happened to be available.
Gradually, this ad hoc cuisine became standardized. One dish would become so popular that customers would start asking for it everywhere. And then suddenly every restaurant was serving the same dish. The most popular American chop suey dishes, many of them created in San Francisco’s Chinatown, spilled over the border to Canada, like chop suey itself, and General Tso’s chicken.
But there were important Canadian contributions too.
Mr. Cheung explained. Ginger beef was created in the mid-1970s by his brother-in-law George Wong, he told me. It came to him while brainstorming new menu ideas.
Mr. Wong was running the restaurant with his wife, Lily (Mr. Cheung’s sister), and business was decent. But like any restaurant owner, he knew he’d have to increase alcohol sales to be profitable. So he hoped that new menu items, such as smaller dishes and snack-type plates, might help.
Mr. Wong was originally from Hong Kong and had spent several years working in Peking-style restaurants. There was one Peking-style dish in particular that came to mind: a beef dish that was sweet and chewy, almost like beef jerky. It was popular back in China, often eaten as a snack. He put the dish on the menu with high hopes.
But the reactions were lukewarm. Most of the customers were white. Most were accustomed to tender Alberta beef. To them, the idea of chewy beef seemed odd. And the spices, the ginger and chilies and garlic Mr. Wong had used, were too intense for the Calgary palates.
So he went back to the kitchen.
After testing out a few different recipes, Mr. Wong had a moment of inspiration. His customers loved fried foods. “He thought, ‘Why not make it a French fry?’” said Mr. Cheung.
So Mr. Wong tried it: he coated thin strips of beef in a thin batter, then deep-fried the strips to create a crisp outer layer. He was careful to avoid overcooking, so the inside of the meat stayed tender, highlighting the fresh, local beef. Then he tossed everything in a sweet chili-ginger-garlic mix, toning the spices down just a bit from the original version.
It was, like all good chop suey dishes, the perfect combination of sweet, salty, tangy and crunchy. It had some of the “exotic” Chinese flavours the customers were looking for, but blended with familiar “Western” ideas.
As soon as customers tried it, they loved it. It was an instant hit.
Thanks in large part to the popularity of the dish, the Silver Inn became massively popular. And like any good idea in a Chinese restaurant, its signature recipe was replicated.
As the dish spread across the Prairies, there was one key difference between the copycats and the Silver Inn original. At the Silver Inn, the dish was simply known as “deep-fried shredded beef with chili sauce.” But though many customers tried and loved it, few could remember its name. There weren’t many others cooking with chili at the time, so the customers didn’t recognize the flavour. They mistook the spiciness for ginger, and began asking Chinese restaurants across the Prairies for “that beef with the ginger stuff.”
Thus “ginger beef” was born.
Mr. Cheung runs the Silver Inn now, and in the decade since the dish was created, he said the restaurant cycled through about a dozen cooks. He’d recruit a qualified cook from Hong Kong, apply for the cook to come to Canada and teach him the full repertoire of Silver Inn recipes, including ginger beef. But each time, within about six or seven months, the cooks would leave.
“They’d say, ‘This is popular. I can make money. Why am I cooking for you?’” said Mr. Cheung. And each time, the cook would go off and start his own Chinese restaurant featuring ginger beef.
Within years, there were Peking-style Chinese restaurants all over Calgary, all of them serving ginger beef. And soon, there was ginger beef all over the Prairies.
I told Mr. Cheung how so many of the Chinese restaurants we’d visited in the Prairies had ginger beef on the menu.
He chuckled.
“In hindsight, we should have patented that name,” he said. Mr. Wong was initially “a little bit bitter” about the whole thing. But eventually, he and the entire family changed their thinking. Now they’re proud of their contribution to history. “It’s a uniquely Canadian dish,” Mr. Cheung said.
“Never mind whether there’s something kind of like it in China or Hong Kong or England. There’s no other country I know of that serves ginger beef the way we serve it,” he said.
“Ginger beef is uniquely Canadian.”