Chop Suey Nation: The Surprising History and Vibrant Present of Small-Town Chinese Restaurants from Victoria, BC, to Fogo Island, NL – Ann Hui

Thoughts: My friend Jonathan recommended this book to me, and I’m glad he did: I really enjoyed it, finishing it in less than a day. Chop Suey Nation combines the story of Hui’s multi-week trip across Canada to visit Chinese restaurants to gather stories with the story of Hui’s own parents’ immigration from China to Canada and their experience running a restaurant there. I found it interesting that the opening of the first restaurant in a region was often marked by initial innovation, with the owners quickly adapting traditional Chinese meals to fit Canadians’ sensibilities, but that this initial innovation was frequently followed by replication of a successful formula in nearby restaurants that opened later. The book left me hungry to go out and eat at independent restaurants.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering.)

Hui, Ann. 2019. Chop Suey Nation: The Surprising History and Vibrant Present of Small-Town Chinese Restaurants from Victoria, BC, to Fogo Island, NL. Douglas and MacIntyre.

• 189: “MSG, or monosodium glutamate, is the ubiquitous ingredient in every Chinese kitchen all over the world. It makes everything taste better. But it was a controversial ingredient—a controversy that food historian Ian Mosby traces back to the 1960s, when a medical researcher posited in the New England Journal of Medicine that a variety of symptoms he was experiencing (numbness, weakness and heart palpitations) were due to MSG. This bolstered pre-existing suspicions of Chinese cuisine as ‘unclean’ or ‘unsafe,’ and quickly became known as ‘Chinese restaurant syndrome,’ despite the fact that MSG is used in a variety of foods, including cheese and baby food. And though the idea of MSG-caused discomfort has since been dispelled by science, many mistakenly continue to believe the ingredient is harmful.”