On a grey Monday in March, I stepped out of the Victoria International Airport wearing my winter jacket and carrying a suitcase. Hours earlier, my husband Anthony and I had boarded a six a.m. flight from our home in Toronto to Vancouver. From there, we had transferred onto a smaller jet that took us to Victoria.
Our plan was to drive across Canada in eighteen days.
Planning for the trip had begun many months earlier. During a story meeting with my editors at The Globe and Mail, I mentioned my interest in Chinese restaurants. I was especially interested, I said, in the “chop suey” style restaurants I saw all over the country.
“There’s tons of great, authentic Chinese food all over the country,” I said. “And yet this ‘chop suey’ stuff—this not-Chinese Chinese is still everywhere. Why?”
One of the editors, Denise Balkissoon, was immediately intrigued. She encouraged me to develop the idea and so over the course of the next few weeks, we brainstormed questions that the story might answer.
I wanted to understand how so many of these “chop suey” restaurants were so astonishingly similar. At the chop suey restaurants I’d visited in BC’s interior, in southwestern Ontario and rural Quebec, “Chinese” somehow looked and felt exactly the same. Somehow, the restaurants all seemed to have the same red vinyl chairs, the same red-tasselled hanging lanterns, the same paper menus, often printed on placemats, always printed in the same font.
I also wanted to know how these chop suey restaurants were doing amid the massive influx of Chinese immigrants to cities like Toronto and Vancouver and their suburbs. The past few decades had introduced Canada to so many different kinds of Chinese—new waves of immigration from all over China, bringing with them very good, very authentic regional Chinese food. No longer was it just Cantonese, but also Sichuan or Fujian or Hakka—so many varieties that it no longer made sense to talk about “eating Chinese.” Instead, it was Malaysian-Chinese, or Shanghainese, or Hong-Kong-cafe Chinese, or congee-and-noodle Chinese, or Chinatown-small-plate-Edison-bulb Chinese.
I was curious what all these different types of Chinese food meant for the chop suey stuff. I wanted to know: with so much real Chinese food available, were people still eating the fake stuff?
I also wanted to know what life was like for those running these restaurants. There was one restaurant that captured my imagination, right from the start. I’d stumbled across it on the Internet, in a blog post titled “I can’t believe there’s a Chinese restaurant in Fogo.” The post was about Fogo Island, the tiny island off the northeastern tip of Newfoundland. The post described a woman living alone, running a Chinese restaurant in the middle of nowhere. For miles around, she was the only Chinese person in sight. Her life seemed about as isolated as I could possibly imagine. I wanted to understand what would compel someone to live a life like hers.
The question I was looking to answer was simple. It was a question I would repeat over and over as I made my way from coast to coast, visiting the many restaurants and explaining the purpose of my visit.
The question was this: How did you wind up here? What brought you here?
I forget when, exactly, but at some point my editors and I decided the trip would have to be a cross-country one. After all, as far as we could tell, every small town across the country seemed to have one of these restaurants.
And so I began planning.
I ruled out flying right away. Flying wouldn’t get me to where I needed to go. I was interested in small towns, not cities with giant airports in them. I liked the idea of a train. After all, the railway was what brought many of the Chinese to this country to begin with. But travel by train would be slow. Plus, it would mean I’d be bound by schedules.
So driving seemed like the best option. There was one problem: I hate driving. But Anthony surprised me by volunteering to come along. By happenstance, he had stumbled upon some free time and was keen to join me on what was shaping up to be a trip of a lifetime. Here was a chance for us to explore together all the nooks and crannies of this country, all the places we might never otherwise think to go see.
He would do the driving, of course. Anthony loves to drive. When we’d first met almost eight years earlier, one of the first things he bragged about wasn’t his job, or his car, or any of the usual stuff. It was about his driving ability. And he’d been right to. I’m stressed and anxious behind the wheel, but he’s calm and collected. His driving is smooth, effortless. Once, when I was working in Victoria for the summer, he drove from Toronto to Victoria and back again. Together, we’d driven through most of the northeastern US, all the way up and down the Pacific coast and across parts of Europe. No matter where we’ve been, he’s always known how to get where we needed to be.
So it was settled. We would do the trip together. And he would do most (or all) of the driving.
We would drive from coast to coast, we decided. I wanted to go north too, but that would have made the trip longer and even more expensive. With my fixation on Fogo Island, it made sense to save that stop for last. So it seemed logical to begin the trip on the opposite coast, in British Columbia. After all, BC was where the first major wave of Chinese men arrived in Canada in search of gold. When the men disembarked from their long boat journeys back in 1858, Victoria would have been their very first glimpse of this new world.
BC was also where I’d grown up—where my own story began. It would be nice to start the trip somewhere familiar.
Outside the airport, Anthony and I waited for the shuttle bus to take us to the car rental office. Even though it was technically already spring, it was cloudy and cool, and I was grateful I’d decided at the last moment to bring my wool coat.
Growing up, I’d visited Victoria from time to time. On school trips, I’d gone on tours of the provincial legislature or to the Royal BC Museum. Later, in my twenties, I spent a summer working as an intern at a local Victoria paper. By day, I’d write news stories about the weather and the local ferry service (the paper loved stories about the local ferry service). And at night I’d hole up in my apartment, sulking about being away from my friends in Toronto. My landlord at the time was an artist whose occasional pot smoke would waft into my apartment through the cracks under the doors, filling the room with the woody, skunky smell.
I’d been struck at the time by how isolated Victoria felt from the rest of the country. I had criss-crossed much of the country by then, visiting all of its major cities in a previous summer job as a flight attendant. But Victoria felt completely removed from what I thought of as the rest of Canada—impossibly far from its centres of power such as Parliament Hill or Bay Street. It felt like a completely different country.
After the shuttle bus dropped us off at the rental car office, we watched as one of the teenaged attendants pulled up in front of us with our car. Instead of the Nissan Versa I had been expecting (the model listed in my reservation), he drove up with a tiny, two-door white Fiat 500.
Anthony and I turned to each other, eyebrows raised.
“I thought I reserved a Nissan Versa?” I said to the woman inside. She glanced at her screen and clicked a few buttons.
“The Fiat is all we have available,” she said. “Anything bigger will cost extra.”
We went back outside to look again at the car. Anthony is six feet tall. Even with the seats moved all the way back, I wondered where he was supposed to put his legs. The trunk, too, looked impossibly tiny. Although each of us had just the one small carry-on suitcase, I doubted we’d fit them both in there.
Anthony walked up to the car and began testing out the configurations. He pulled the driver and passenger seats all the way back and tested the pedals. He put one of our suitcases in the back seat. Finally, he turned to me and gave me one of his characteristic it’ll-be-fine shrugs. “We’ll make it work.”
Inside, the young woman finished her paperwork, punching buttons on her keyboard and preparing the invoice.
“Right now you’re paying—” Her voice trailed off, her eyes widening at the total. She scanned the screen again. “No, that can’t be right.”
I looked at her and sighed. “Yeah, it’s right.” Instead of the hundreds it would normally cost to rent the car for the eighteen days, the rental company was instead charging us thousands. For the service of picking the car up in BC and dropping it off elsewhere—all the way across the country in Newfoundland—the cost was exponentially higher.
“It’s one-way,” I told her. “We’re driving across the country and dropping the car off in St. John’s.”
She looked stunned. “You’re driving all the way to—” She stopped, the wheels in her head turning. “Nova Scotia?”
I didn’t bother to correct her. I was too preoccupied with the astonishment on her face.
Her expression said it all: We were about to drive across the entire country—from one ocean to the next, climbing up mountain ranges and navigating rocky terrain—in this tiny toy car?
The airport is about thirty minutes north of Victoria. We drove south down Highway 17, making a beeline for Chinatown. The forecast called for rain that afternoon and I wanted to have a chance to walk around before it began to pour.
We drove south along Government Street, rounding the corner at a familiar sight, the red-and-gold archway, the Gate of Harmonious Interest. This was where Chinese immigration first began in Canada.
Before continuing on to the Fraser Valley, gold-seekers had to stop in Victoria for a mining licence. Locals weren’t interested in having these men around, so the Chinese set up their own shantytown—crude huts and temporary shacks, sometimes one built on top of another—to stay in until they were ready to continue with their journeys. Over time, some stayed behind to build the area into a neighbourhood of sorts, with services and businesses for these new arrivals: laundries, supply shops and cafes. Chinatown was born.
Decades later, the promise of work on the Canadian Pacific Railway would lure another wave of thousands of Chinese men to Victoria’s port, a new boom of Chinese to the country. The Chinese were paid $1 for every $1.50 to $2.50 the white men were paid, and given the most dangerous tasks, such as using explosives to blast through tunnels. And unlike the white men, the Chinese weren’t given food or equipment. Many died in accidents, but many more simply died from the cold or malnutrition.
Those who stayed behind in Chinatown didn’t have it easy either. Locals saw the cheap labour they provided as a threat. Others blamed the Chinese for what they claimed was an increase in crime and disease. Whether it was out of concern for safety, or for camaraderie and convenience, many of the Chinese men chose to stick together in close geographic quarters as they spread across the country—areas that came to be known as Chinatowns.
In 1887, hundreds of white people led a march through Vancouver’s Chinatown, carrying signs reading “Keep Canada White” and “Stop Yellow Peril,” and rioting and destroying thousands of dollars’ worth of property. In 1907 there was another Vancouver riot, this time with thousands of white men smashing Chinatown windows and again sending residents fleeing.
Responding to these protester’s fears, governments across the country put in place laws to restrict the Chinese. Several provinces outlawed Chinese businesses from hiring white women, claiming it would put these women at risk. Many parks and swimming pools banned the Chinese from entering. And in many parts of the country, Chinese were barred from entering most professional occupations, including medicine, law and engineering. So only a few options remained: convenience stores, laundries or restaurants—what was considered “women’s work.”
We parked and walked over to Fan Tan Alley. Wedged between two brick buildings built just a few feet apart, the narrow passageway led us toward the “hidden” shops and businesses in between. As we wound our way through the alley, a group of tourists posed for photos near the entrance.
During my last summer in Victoria, I had gone on a walking tour of Chinatown with a group of Australian and British tourists. The guide had spent the bulk of the tour here in Fan Tan Alley, conjuring up images of a dark and mysterious society. He’d pointed out the secret passageways, describing how they’d once led to gambling and opium dens—brothels even. “There,” he had said, pointing upward at the second-floor balconies, “is where the Chinese men stood on guard on the lookout for police.”
His description was partly fair. There were brothels and gambling dens in Chinatown—along with all kinds of other businesses.
But what he didn’t fully explain was why. He didn’t explain how the wages the Chinese men earned working on the railway or at Chinatown businesses were barely enough to support themselves and send money home to their families, let alone enough to bring a wife or a family to Canada. So the Chinatowns became bachelor societies, with gambling and opium emerging as some of the main social activities. (The gambling and opium, in turn, made it even more difficult for some of the men to be able to send money home, creating a vicious cycle.)
The few Chinese women who did live in Canada were either the wives of relatively wealthy merchants, or else women who had been sold into servitude, either as domestic servants or prostitutes.
The Head Tax further cemented this gender imbalance. In 1885 the federal government implemented a fifty-dollar tax on every Chinese person who wanted to enter the country. The tax only applied to the Chinese. And in the following twenty years, the tax would only be increased further and further, peaking at five hundred dollars in 1903. The tax sent a very clear message: that Chinese immigrants were not welcome.
Later, in 1923, the Canadian government took the unprecedented step of banning immigration from China altogether. Canada’s Chinese Exclusion Act mimicked a similar policy south of the border. In the US, there was no Head Tax. The US instead implemented a ban on Chinese immigration in 1882 (and eventually repealed that ban in 1943). But Canada took four years longer to repeal its policy—until 1947—and it wouldn’t be until the 1960s that Canada began accepting significant numbers of Chinese immigrants.
We continued east along Fisgard, past painted murals of Chinatown’s history. In one, a family posed stiffly for a portrait. The man in the centre, Lee Mong Kow, was wearing a blue silk robe and black, Qing-era round court hat. He rose to the position of chief interpreter for Canada’s Department of Customs, the plaque read. He was one of the elite few Chinese to have a family in Canada with him. His children, dressed in silk garb, posed in front of him. The boys wore their long hair tied back neatly. I couldn’t imagine what the white locals made of these families, with their brightly coloured robes and pigtails. Or what the Chinese thought of the locals.
Just a stone’s throw away, a stately brick building stood out, with red lanterns hanging off the pagoda roof in neat rows. I squinted to read the sign: “Chinese Public School.” After white locals complained about “unclean” Chinese children attending the same schools as their own, residents of Chinatown set up this school, and it was Lee himself who would serve as its first principal.
The last time I’d visited this Chinatown, I had winced at the carved dragon archways, the little pagodas topping the phone booths and cheap qipao for sale everywhere. I was struck by the shops and businesses that seemed to offer only souvenirs for tourists. It had felt like a museum, rather than a working Chinatown. They were selling the idea of Chinatown, I complained. I pointed at the coloured paper parasols, Hello Kitty knick-knacks and Japanese kimonos. It was all fake Chinese. Even the street signs were printed in that “wonton” font meant to evoke Asia. Meanwhile, the Chinese characters, printed on the street signs on every sidewalk corner, were nonsensical phonetic approximations of the English ones. They looked and sounded Chinese, but didn’t actually mean anything. They seemed like the perfect metaphor for this place.
But this time around, I had mellowed. I understood now the fate of other Chinatowns across North America—how many, including Vancouver’s, had been left struggling in the wake of Chinese immigration moving instead to the suburbs. In the case of Victoria, many of the city’s Chinese left altogether, departing for larger cities such as Vancouver or Toronto. Since the mid-twentieth century, Victoria’s Chinese population had been gradually dwindling. So locals banded together, restoring historical buildings in the area and rebranding the area as a tourist destination.
Now, I could see that the Victoria business owners were just being pragmatic and selling what they could to stay afloat.
As we made our way back toward the western edge of Chinatown, we saw how some of the businesses gave up on the “Chineseness” entirely. We walked past old buildings and storefronts that have been converted into hipster coffee shops and offices for tech start-ups.
On the western end of Fisgard was the restaurant I’d been looking for. Both sides of Fisgard were littered with restaurants and shops, but one had always stood out from the rest, with its retro neon signs and flashy decor. We stopped in front of it, taking in the details. The white sign was designed to look like a paper lantern, with the name “Don Mee” etched in a thick black wonton font. Underneath, in red neon lettering: “Seafood,” “Szechuan,” “Hot Iron Plate.” I’d always been curious about the place.
I left Anthony on the sidewalk and hiked up the flight of stairs to the restaurant. The dining room was sprawling, with dozens of tables covered with white tablecloths. The napkins were flame-folded and stuffed into water glasses. Waistcoated servers wandered around the room. It was late afternoon, after the lunch rush, but there were still a few tables with customers in the large dining room. Some were obviously tourists—white couples with guidebooks lying on the table next to them. But there were a few Chinese families there too, having late afternoon dim sum, huddled over cups of tea.
I picked up a menu lying on the counter by the entrance. The restaurant had all the classics of chop suey cuisine: the crispy spring rolls, kung pao chicken and wonton soup. But they also had all the dishes my parents might order. They sold the shredded jellyfish appetizer I loved—cold, springy strands of jellyfish bathed in sesame oil, chili and vinegar. They also had the fish maw soup my sisters and I hated growing up, not because it was made of fish bladders, which we didn’t even realize, but because the spongy, chewy texture reminded us of dish towels. It was a delicacy, Mom and Dad claimed.
In my mind, a Chinese restaurant had always been one or the other—authentic or not. But Don Mee seemed to be both. The restaurant had weathered over eighty years in Victoria. It had seen many generations of Chinese immigration and many versions of Chinatown. And whether by design or out of self-preservation, the restaurant had reinvented itself over and over again.
The middle-aged woman standing behind the counter eyed me up and down, glancing between my business card and my airplane-rumpled appearance. I spoke to her in English first, then switched to Cantonese when I saw her confused expression. I told her the reason I was there and my plans to cross the rest of the country to visit Chinese restaurants just like this one. She wrinkled her brow, staring at me skeptically.
At last, she spoke. “Everybody here is busy and working,” she said in Cantonese. “Someone will call you.”
The look she gave me reminded me of the young woman at the rental car desk, that mixture of amusement and skepticism. It was clear that nobody was going to call.
As I walked out of the restaurant, I wondered how many other restaurant owners would wind up responding to me in the same way
As a reporter, it was a doubt I was already well acquainted with. It was a question I thought about often—each time I approached a new community and asked to speak with its leaders. A question I thought about each time I asked to speak with someone who had nothing to gain by speaking with me.
And it was a question I knew I would carry with me into every one of these restaurants. When the restaurant owners first set eyes on me, they would see in me someone who looked a little bit like them. But from the moment I introduced myself, they might also see the opportunities I’d been given that they hadn’t. I was born in Canada. I grew up speaking English. I got to go to university, then graduate school. In most cases, we were only a single generation apart. But I had been given so much. And now I was walking into their lives and asking for more.
Who was I to walk in and demand to know people’s stories?