Abstract
This article revisits and reevaluates the role that “stasis” can play as a literary technique in diasporic Chinese Canadian writing. To these ends I read Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates’s debut novel Midnight at the Dragon Café (2005) as an important and intimate map of the social geography of a small Canadian town that illuminates how diasporic Chinese life is both constructed and constricted by the institution of the Chinese restaurant. I propose that having a narrative of restaurant life that centres around Chinese Canadian waiters and cooks exposes how socioeconomic institutions reproduce dominant social relations by limiting movement and representational possibilities for immigrant populations.
In the book, sedentariness is presented alongside the social and political institutions that generate these diasporic subjects, which, I argue, creates a scene of stasis — where diasporic subjects work to achieve an equilibrium between competing cultural regimes. Bates’s book is remarkable insofar as it maps the unevenness brought on by diasporic globality but in a very "fastened" way — showing how the characters’ global outlooks are shrunk and slowly withered away by the small-town space. This article considers, then, what writing about diasporic stasis achieves in an age that is often characterized by global mobility.
Keywords
Despite the introduction of multiculturalism as official federal policy in 1971, and its promise to promote “creative encounters and interchange among all cultural groups” (Trudeau, 1971: 8546), there was a considerable delay in non-white authors gaining a foothold in the Canadian literary establishment. Chinese Canadian authors, in particular, struggled to publish throughout the 1970s and 1980s, having few venues that promoted their writing. 1 It was not until the 1990s that Chinese Canadian writers gradually received some critical notice; but, in receiving this attention, they had to simultaneously demonstrate the literary worth of Chinese Canadian writing and introduce nuanced portraits of Chinese Canadian people to audiences that were unaware of the particulars of Chinese Canadian life. This led an early generation of Chinese Canadian authors like Paul Yee, Judy Fong Bates, Evelyn Lau, SKY Lee, Fred Wah, and Wayson Choy to create novels, short stories, memoirs, and poetry that told of complex characters, histories, and social situations — illustrating the trials of coming-of-age in Canada, while identifying the racial barriers that they, and other Chinese Canadians, had to face. These narratives challenged the view of Canada as a unilaterally welcoming nation, gesturing towards a problematic racist past in order to contest the completeness of the multicultural present. 2
However in 1998 Maria Ng wrote an article, “Chop Suey Writing”, criticizing Chinese Canadian writing for creating a “limited cultural landscape” (1998: 171) that did not adequately reflect the social changes that had occurred in the Chinese Canadian community. In exploring “the apparent stasis in the representations of Chinese Canadians”, Ng voices displeasure about the relegation of Chinese Canadian characters to the roles of “seamstresses, waiters, and cooks” in these works, arguing that placing them in these labouring environments reinforces “established stereotypes of cultural identities” (1998: 171–172). While fully acknowledging Ng’s significant concerns about this formative period of Chinese Canadian representation, in this article I wish to revisit and reevaluate the role that “stasis” can play as a literary technique in diasporic Chinese Canadian writing. To these ends I read Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates’s debut novel Midnight at the Dragon Café (2005) as an important and intimate map of the social geography of a small Canadian town that illuminates how diasporic Chinese life is both constructed and constricted by the institution of the Chinese restaurant. I propose that having a narrative of restaurant life that centres around waiters and cooks exposes how socioeconomic institutions reproduce dominant social relations by limiting movement and representational possibilities for immigrant populations. Specifically, Bates’s intimate portrayal of a small-town Chinese restaurant illuminates a process where a steady flow of incoming immigrants is positioned at the crossroads of culture and economics, supplying the Canadian landscape with a renewable source of labour and identity.
Midnight at the Dragon Café follows a family of recently migrated Chinese Canadians toiling over a version of “Chinese food” that is prefigured by Orientalist expectations, as they contort their bodies, cuisine, and restaurant to meet the disciplining whims of a small town’s aesthetic taste. It is the stultifying demands of this restaurant economy that produces dramatic conflict, where the smooth flow of capital accumulation becomes stunted by contradictory intergenerational desires. When the commercial and racial pressures of the small-town restaurant space are coupled with changes to the family’s social structure, they cope by retreating towards food, dining, and cooking, whereby a surplus of meaning becomes condensed into the gastronomic form — a surplus that, at times, even usurps linguistic communication. However, despite potential narrative opportunities and readerly expectations, here, food does not become an elixir that gently coalesces multiple generational, national, or ethnic affiliations, nor is it tool used to move into a flexible biculturalism. Rather the abundance of attention Bates pays to sensuality and cuisine directs the characters’, and subsequently the reader’s, gaze back to the stifling small-town restaurant space itself — highlighting how the institutional stasis of the small-town Chinese restaurant reproduces limited and circumscribed opportunities for each wave of these particular diasporic subjects as they settle in Canada.
When compared to Chinese Canadian work written in the 1990s, Midnight at the Dragon Café suffers from a relative absence of critical attention due, in part, to Bates’s plain uncomplicated writing style, but also the book’s thematic distance from migrant tales that address the challenges of integrating into modern city life. However, decentring Chinese Canadian experience from lively urban Chinatowns to languid small-town settings is valuable, as it interrupts a narrative of progress that assumes a linear transition from national to global commerce — where “new” migrant entrepreneurship seamlessly adds another stitch to the social fabric of an increasingly profitable multicultural Canada. Indeed, in his 2007 reappraisal of the field, Diaspora journal’s founding editor Kachig Tölölyan issues a warning that assumptions about progress and movement often “attach themselves inappropriately to discussions of diaspora” (2007: 654). Specifically, Tölölyan is concerned with the celebration of mobility by diasporic elites who do not consider the cost of such movement, neglecting the experiences of those in the diaspora who are now yoked, both socially and economically, to what he describes as a “sedentary” existence (2007: 654). The advantage of turning to the small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant is that its isolation from the circuits of other Chinese businesses clearly shows how these institutions remain and continue to sit at the crossroads of diasporas old and new (Cho, 2010: 161).
When this sedentariness is presented alongside the social and political institutions that generate these diasporic subjects, I argue, the reader encounters a scene of stasis. As explored in the work of Tina Campt, stasis connotes both an emplaced stillness and a sense of equilibrium that balances between various societal forces (2017: 158). The restaurant space, then, illustrates the labour these diasporic subjects perform to achieve an equilibrium between competing cultural regimes, feeding the social body through a careful management of space and mobility. In this sense, Bates’ book reveals less of how these diasporic nodes serve transnational interests or creative culinary play, and instead focuses attention on how these diasporic institutions support and sustain the cultural logic of the small town.
The table “setting”
Lily Cho, in her Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small Town Canada (2010), revisits Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1975) to argue that the relegation of the non-urban to the non-modern in Canada sublates, or even forgets, an ongoing structure of hardship and labour that underwrites modern cosmopolitan industry (2010: 161). Building on Cho’s line of thinking, I propose that Bates dramatizes this process of relegation, humanizes this consignment of the non-urban to the past, challenges the completeness of the modern, and records hardship and labour in an attempt to guard against such forgetting. While Cho’s study identifies the small-town Chinese restaurant as a particularly resonant and productive site for Chinese Canadian writers, she assesses Bates’s novel as follows: Although [W. O.] Mitchell and Bates do set their stories in small town Chinese restaurants, the restaurants in their writing function as a backdrop for human drama. Canadian literary representations of Chinese restaurants tend to use them as settings in which human drama unfolds. They are places where the stories happen. What might it mean for the restaurants themselves to be understood a dynamic part of the story? (2010: 132)
Admittedly Cho uses this paragraph as a springboard into the undeniable dynamism found in the poetry of Fred Wah; however, in doing so she underestimates the power and presence of the Chinese restaurant space in Bates’s novel. She is certainly correct that Bates’s Dragon Café is not a dynamic space, yet I propose that this lack of dynamism, or stasis, generates the human drama. The novel form allows Bates the opportunity to map the position of the restaurant in relation to the constricted space of the small town, and the human drama specifies how the economic, racial, gendered, and intergenerational pressures produce rigidly defined roles for diasporic actors. Far from a limp backdrop, then, the restaurant is an ominous presence in the book, becoming both a retreat and a pressure cooker for the Chinese Canadian characters, and, as Bates meticulously details, shapes the horizon of their everyday lives.
Set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Midnight at the Dragon Café is a Bildungsroman chronicling a young girl’s experience growing up as the daughter of the only Chinese family living in Irvine, a fictional small Ontario town. Driven from China to Canada by the threat of the communist revolution, the story unfolds around the girl, Su-Jen, and her mother in the culturally isolated setting as they become involved and embroiled in her father’s business of running a Chinese restaurant. Initially encouraged when encountering a substantial Chinese population upon her arrival in Toronto, Su-Jen’s mother sinks into a deep depression as she travels to the remote location of Irvine and realizes the life she will have to endure as a service worker in the small town with her elderly husband. Things seem to change, however, when Su-Jen’s handsome half-brother, Lee-Kung, arrives, challenging both the power structure of the family and the business model of the restaurant. Forming a romantic alliance with Su-Jen’s mother, Lee-Kung’s new ideas of commerce and innovation clash with his father’s values of sustainability and consistency, and this conflict between old and new provides the central tension for the narrative. Moreover, this fight over the restaurant is, at its core, a battle to articulate Chinese Canadian identity through this small rustic space. Nevertheless, by the end of the novel it is clear that, despite culinary and personal innovation, the determined place and function of the restaurant in the social fabric of the small town overwhelms any cultural advances.
In this story of small-town Chinese Canadian experience Bates stresses how historical conditions determine and limit the choices of the central characters in the novel. While, as per the conventions of the Bildungsroman, the young protagonist’s development is tightly yoked to her environment, here Bates illustrates how larger political structures and institutions significantly influence the economic and cultural welfare of Su-Jen’s entire family. Su-Jen’s father, it is made clear, emigrated to Canada around 1940 (we are never provided an exact date), had irregular work upon his arrival, and struggled to earn enough money beyond subsistence living. He consistently reminds the family that because of these difficult working conditions it took many years for him to scrape together enough money to buy the Dragon Café with Su-Jen’s “Uncle” Yat and, eventually, to bring the other members of the family over from China. We are told that “[t]hey considered it a good buy, as it was already a Chinese restaurant, with woks in the kitchen and a rectangular sign with gold Chinese-style script above the front window” (Bates, 2005: 5), 3 illustrating how the Chinese restaurant was a ready-made enterprise, already fully equipped with the tools, both material and aesthetic, to allow these two inexperienced entrepreneurs to slip into the social fabric of the town.
However, without the requisite amount of capital needed to purchase a restaurant in an urban setting, the family is required to live outside Toronto and, in turn, far from a Chinatown with valuable infrastructure for material and social mobility. For instance, Chinatowns can help new migrants gain upward class advancement through economic networks, as culturally specific business associations can extend capital loans, while ethnic media provide the opportunity to market products and services in familiar languages to an ethnic clientele. An urban setting also offers a more diverse labour market for the particular cultural and language skills that a new migrant is equipped with. With this greater flexibility the worker could, in theory, demand higher wages and shorter hours, or at least move to another job if conditions were dire. Instead, as Su-Jen’s father and Uncle Yat can only afford to start a business in Irvine, they are left out of the circuits and circulations of urban diasporic Chinese culture, and are forced to interact with a white populace in their everyday lives that permits only a singular place for Chinese migrants in the social order.
This cultural isolation is dramatized in the novel through Bates’s manipulation of the claustrophobic space of their home. These tight quarters are often depicted through an uncomfortable corporeal closeness, with Bates squeezing the family together in their sleeping arrangements, described by Su-Jen as follows: “[It was] unbearable lying in the bed between my parents, our bodies so close together, the air weighing us down like a hot, invisible blanket” (94). In addition to the spatial metaphor, the psychological pressure of having to serve as the arbitrator between her father and mother becomes manifest through the tactile image of a “hot, invisible blanket”, suggesting a presence that is unseen, enveloping and weighing down the entire family. Bates does not leave the reader solely with this esoteric image, however, noting precisely that the underlying source of this physical discomfort, the air, arises because “[t]he second floor seemed to absorb all the heat from the kitchen below” (94). With the workspace bleeding into the upper unit so that it becomes a stifling environment, the emotional conflicts, then, are “cooked up” by the material proximity of the business below. This spatial manipulation foreshadows, and also concretely identifies, that the influence of the business will increasingly make the family’s private spaces intolerable.
With these environmental pressures at play, for much of the story, Bates pushes the family out of the cramped dilapidated upstairs and into the restaurant proper. Without the benefit of multiple rooms for living space each character comes to inhabit a different part of the restaurant, with Su-Jen usually sitting in the back booth to provide physical mediation between her father stationed at the counter in the front of the shop and Su-Jen’s mother and Lee-Kung cooking and tending to their romance in the back. With the clientele providing an omnipresent backdrop to whatever family drama is occurring, commercial demands often take precedence over emotional resolutions. This is something readers witness on numerous occasions when Su-Jen’s father or mother has to leave a family dispute in order to tend to a customer’s needs. Bates’s stylistic decision to have the characters’ personal lives unfold in plain view of the customers illustrates the collapse of private and public space in the small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant and creates a determined spatial tension where the family must always live “on display”.
The clientele are not the numerous families that populate and hold key positions in the town but the anonymous workers from the tanning factory, as well as nameless teenagers hanging out late into the evening. Su-Jen mentions that late at night she is not allowed to serve the workers who come in to drink at the restaurant and that her mother is often harassed by these men. Describing them as “sei doo mow gweis — dead drunken ghosts”, these unnamed members of the town make visible the dark repressed desires and behaviours of the community, leering at Su-Jen’s mother while talking openly about “ordering chink food” (245). The social makeup of the clientele makes evident that this establishment does not hold a privileged place in the community. For the community at large, the restaurant is a venue for those who enjoy participating in abherant behaviour, serving as a place for vice and individual indulgence, where the customers can eat or drink alone without the regulating eye of the town watching. Indeed, because the adult members of Su-Jen’s family are not entirely fluent in the English language, the proprietors are less likely to circulate and tell stories of what goes on in the restaurant and the clients enjoy a small escape from the normal surveillance networks of the small town. The family, then, becomes part of a space that sits outside the regular town circuits and, as an institution, remains perpetually foreign, hidden on the fringe yet somehow still in plain view.
It is precisely the family’s social isolation — looked at, but not spoken to — that produces a sense of stagnation amongst the older characters, which, ultimately, ends up upsetting the balance of this tight order. Communal advancement is difficult for this Chinese Canadian family as the remoteness and estrangement of both language and culture confines the adults to the grease-splattered space of the business. The adults in the story are rarely seen in the town, and again Bates presents the restaurant as their sole habitat, with Su-Jen noting, “how small their world must have seemed, never extending beyond the Dragon Café” (47). However, the ballooning complexities of their lives become packed into the small restaurant — a pressure cooker that ends up twisting and withering the familial roles. This smouldering segregation produces the romance between Su-Jen’s mother and Lee-Kung, anchored around a dream of escape as they lean over the balcony railing smoking cigarettes, peering longingly at the outside while still safely clinging to the fringe of the restaurant space. Without the social network that Toronto’s Chinatown could provide, the two are squeezed into an unconventional sexual union that crosses generational lines, which upsets linear structures of filial piety and produces an illegitimate son. If they had lived in Chinatown, Lee-Kung would have explored more options in finding a bride (a central tension in the story), and could have found, married, or at least dated, a “suitable” woman sooner, which would have allowed for a linear progression of generational advancement. Instead, at the end of the book the arrival of their illegitimate baby signifies the breaking up of the family, and Su-Jen, her mother, and the child are sent away to Toronto where this small unsavoury history will, they hope, be forgotten in the swirl of the big city.
Cultural stasis and food
For Su-Jen’s family, social isolation stunts their ability to develop their Chinese language, limiting their forms of expression. Far away from a population that uses Chinese in an everyday context, their spoken language calcifies and does not grow to incorporate new vocabularies of political terms, fashion, or slang. Instead they can only communicate with each other, and as such, the language becomes an increasingly banal secret code that merely allows them to speak and live out their private lives in front of others, gazed at, without being fully understood. Su-Jen’s mother slowly stops communicating with her husband and even finds very little to speak of with Su-Jen herself. The language has no room to expand and find itself proper representations for this dull, new, isolated existence, and hence Su-Jen’s mother, while still being able to talk, cannot express her experience to others. Su-Jen, on the other hand, being bilingual, is able to traverse both the spaces of the town and the space of the restaurant, even though she finds herself increasingly distanced from her parents as she slowly loses dexterity with her mother tongue (61). Language in this setting, then, delineates a very clear inside and outside world for the family, where circuits of communicable experience are highly dependent on finding new forms of expression, and the inability to do so distorts language circulation even inside the home.
In lieu of direct verbal exchanges Su-Jen’s family increasingly communicates through cooking and food. The Dragon Café, as a business, serves mostly “white” food and mutant egg rolls, yet when the family sits down to eat in the living space, a common transition in the book, Bates is vigilant in documenting what and how they eat. Throughout the first part of the story, when the family unit was still intact, they constantly mention the terrible “Chinese” food that the white people eat, whereas consuming “their” version of Chinese food cements the family’s bonds with each other in opposition to the outside town (83). While other forms of communication breakdown, food never loses its resonance as a marker of their commonality and, indeed, love. As the story unfolds, circuits of intimate communication are produced through culinary gift-giving, as during times of crisis Lee-Kung prepares Su-Jen’s mother’s favorite foods in order to soothe her (304). Furthermore, while Su-Jen’s mother becomes distant from everyone except for Lee-Kung, she continues to greet Su-Jen with a query as to whether she has eaten. 4 This repeated questioning, while read by Su-Jen as rote nagging, is one of the few ways that her mother can communicate and display that she is still present in Su-Jen’s life. Despite her isolation, Su-Jen’s mother can contribute through this essential everyday routine, holding on to the culinary connection even when feeling distanced from her daughter’s education, interests, and values. The importance she puts on this one remaining ritual is evident when Su-Jen mentions, “since moving to Canada, my mother’s concern with what we ate had grown into an obsession. Cooking was the only thing here that gave her real pleasure” (64). Cut off from language, community, and other forms of commerce, Su-Jen’s mother can use food to demonstrate her worth and express creative value, which distinguishes her from another replaceable labouring body. Indeed, Lee-Kung and Su-Jen’s mother often enjoy experimenting with Chinese food together and take great pains to prepare elaborate dinners for the family, while reserving the privileged dishes for each other — a perceptible, yet subtle, display of their bond that does not explicitly upset the family hierarchy or business (138). Hence, through cooking Su-Jen’s mother gets to create different forms and combinations, experiencing the pleasures of open experimentation without having to shape the end result to fit commercial needs.
Food in the diasporic context, then, can provide an important site for cultural innovation that is not enclosed by essential racial qualities or binaries of native and other. Through individual gustatory taste one can express uniqueness, and by demonstrating cultural culinary knowledge one can also try to redefine roles within in the family and/or community. One of the advantages that cuisine offers as a marker of ethnicity is that it is not a stable, locatable construct, as it literally disappears into the body during consumption and demands another act of creation in order to experience the taste again. As it is constantly being recreated through the adaptation of cooking practices to the environment, as well as the telling and retelling of food stories, the shaping of ethnic food traditions is for the most part left in the hands of the subjects themselves. David Wu explains the importance of the continual reconstruction of Chinese cuisine for migrants: It is not a result of the often-assumed global process of a direct flow of cultural traditions from the centre to the periphery; nor is it characterized by the diffusion of capitalized cooking industry pushed from the Chinese homeland by professional chefs and restaurateurs. Rather, Chinese cooking overseas demonstrated re-creation, invention and representation of cooking, especially in restaurants. Immigrants who are self-taught cooks improvise both cooking materials and how they present the dishes, to satisfy the imagination of a Chinese eating culture compromising both Chinese migrants and host (non-Chinese) populations. (2002: 56)
Hence, for Wu, cooking Chinese in North America under a new set of material and historical conditions is not a priori a failed attempt to achieve a lost authenticity, but rather the continual “re-creation” of Chinese cuisine is a practice that works to shape their subject position to multiple populations. Without the tools and ingredients to reproduce the former cuisine exactly, instead, the diasporic restaurateurs and home-cooks alike must represent Chinese cooking through inventive means. This does not condemn migrant dishes to exist in perpetuity as poor facsimiles of the past cuisine, however, for these iterations of Chinese cuisine can be read as expressive documents that tell of the Chinese migrant experience, tracing a path from the past through to the present.
Yet the institutional history of the small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant limits the inventiveness of cuisine and thus the possibilities for self-representation, as the menus and expectations surrounding décor, prices, and social function stay relatively the same even with diverse new waves of Chinese migrants entering the country. The small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant dates back to the Gold Rush boom, where with racial tensions pronounced, explicit, and often violent in British Columbia, Chinese Canadian labourers increasingly turned to the railroad to make their money. Without the safety of a moderately tolerant (or at least distracted) urban populace many Chinese Canadians were forced to move far across the country, dispersing across the frontier. This dispersal, in combination with the enacting of stringent immigration laws, created conditions where there was not a critical mass of Chinese Canadians to patronize Canadian Chinese restaurants, and many of those who did open restaurants across the prairies served primarily inexpensive “Western-style” food in small towns (Roberts, 2002: 153). These small-town operators were, for the most part, not trained to be professional cooks, but rather, conceived of themselves as entrepreneurs, seizing an opportunity to own their own businesses with a predictable income that was not subject to the whims of white bosses. The restaurateurs, then, relied heavily on the template model of Chinese restaurants, exchanging ideas, dishes, and even workers, with the ultimate arbiter of culinary worth being that which sold. And indeed, this template came to define the workers themselves, with Lily Cho offering that “[t]he expectation of a kind of sameness, a regularity to the experience of the menu speaks not only to the rise of Chinese restaurant as an institution, but also the institutionalization of a certain kind of Chineseness” (2010: 66). Therefore, if cuisine can be considered an expressive document of the history of migration, the fixity found in the small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant menu suggests that repetition and standardization became the dominant cultural practice, rather than innovation and dialogue with the host populace.
The small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant has often served as a bridge, providing new migrants with temporary employment and housing, functioning as a place to live and work. As Wu suggests, the profit motive, while important, is at times weakened in this context as the imperative of the business is merely to sustain itself and help others survive, rather than expand and propagate. The goal is economic and social stability, allowing for family members to acclimate to the new culture while their progeny acquires a Western education, providing them with enough cultural capital eventually to leave the business behind (2002: 64). Therefore, aesthetically, the small-town Chinese restaurant in Canada is not encouraged to expand or push the limits of what it already is as an institution, for this might upset the stability presented by this tenuous foothold in the new country. A primary tenet of this business model is that future family members are not necessarily assumed to take over the restaurant and, as such, the site must stay aesthetically similar so that another immigrant wave can fill the role of the previous proprietors. We see here, then, a strategic and inherently forward-looking reason why a restaurateur would work to maintain a prefigured Orientalized image of Chinese food and restaurants — as this allows another group of immigrants to slip right in, in many ways, unnoticed. The restaurateurs’ cultivation of the interchangeability afforded by broad stereotypical images is an opportunity to consider Rey Chow’s call to “engage, rather than simply dismiss, the contradictions embedded in everyday social practices, whereby people defy the rationale of enlightened academic critique even as such critique is intended to address the historical injustices they suffer” (2005: 21). Indeed, the institutional stasis is instrumentally effective, as long as the business functions only as a temporary station for each incoming wave.
This strategy of temporary stasis imagines that a martyr-like sacrifice made by the first generation will underwrite an indeterminately profitable future for generations to come. This vision of endurance and stability, however, comes to chafe against real-world desires and limitations triggered by the stimulus, racism, and routinization found in the new land — which is especially disquieting for those of the second generation who did not play a part in developing this plan, but may have to bear the brunt of its failure. Furthermore, many did not fit neatly into the generational divide and, thus, did not have a privileged role to play in the advancement of the society. Brides and female relatives eventually brought over by early bachelor communities were especially prone to being left behind in the restaurant space, facing an unplanned and unpleasant life of hard labour in an unfamiliar, isolated environment. As such, while at first the unusual aesthetic demands of the non-Asian populace may draw a family and/or ethnic community closer, this unity can slowly fray as gendered and generational gaps create new desires that cannot be serviced through this model of temporary stasis.
Staying power?
While it may be economically profitable to keep things the same, some may resist the stasis strategy when thinking about the long-term future of the community and the diminished positions allocated to Chinese Canadians. This is dramatized in Bates’s book when Su-Jen becomes upset at her father shrugging off the customers’ sexual comments about his wife or hailing him as “Hop-Sing”, as, for Su-Jen, this perpetuates the image of “Oriental” subservience that she will continue to be limited by if she stays in this small town (245). Even when the romance between Su-Jen’s mother and Lee-Kung threatens to overturn the internal family structure, her father remains resolute that the business and their public presence must always remain the same. Su-Jen’s father construes this as just another form of sacrifice, noting that as long as the customers pay their bills and contribute to the commercial enterprise they can behave however they want. Meanwhile, Su-Jen anticipates this surrender of symbolic worth will not easily be left behind with the passing of time or with economic gain. However, despite Su-Jen’s concerns, this strategy of stasis continues where, by playing their pre-determined role in the community, the family reinforces their own social imperceptibility. Su-Jen herself notes that: To the people of Irvine, we must have seemed like the perfect immigrant family. We were polite, hard-working, unthreatening, and we kept to ourselves […]. Even when things went wrong, we blended so seamlessly into their everyday life, we remained invisible. (112)
In the small town the public imagination has direct material effects on the sustainability and function of the restaurant for current and future generations. Yoked to commercial pressures, cooks and restaurateurs actively produce the imagination of both the Chinese migrant and non-Chinese population. Therefore, with the family being socially invisible, unreadable, and unknowable outside of the restaurant, the self-Orientalizing practices of the family elders underline that representative expression must correspond with the broad images of Chinese identity that allow them to remain, unnoticed. 5 Yet, although the family does have a hand in shaping the image of Chinese Canadians in the town, their actions are consciously fashioned to the commercial and aesthetic principles of the dominant population. For, as her phrase “we blended in so seamlessly into their everyday life” suggests, the town’s imagination is not developed through an equal mutual accord, as the readership of their bodies — the white townspeople — are seen to recode any symbolic intervention through pre-figured conceptions that perpetuate Chinese invisibility. In this story the hegemonic class, which is invested in maintaining and reproducing social relations, dictates the social production of space to maintain their dominance. Thus, while individual Chinese Canadians may even be permitted to leave and “move on” from this outpost, for those who stay the place of Chinese Canadians must remain the same.
Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, in her seminal Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, cogently identifies food-related enterprises as industries in which new Asian migrants are historically placed. She argues that all Asian American populations have at one time worked as cannery workers, farmers, farm workers, fisherman, or grocery store owners, while noting that the restaurant trade “has the greatest staying power” (1993: 56–57). However, in Bates’s representation of a small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant “staying power” is more about being stuck than possessing a plucky vitality. While for Wong the restaurant can “install itself at the interstices of major economic trends” (1993: 57) Bates does not produce the longue durée necessary to see institutions or characters develop with such agential motivation, and nor are larger economic “trends” meaningfully apparent to the individual actors in the book. A more dynamic story of Chinese Canadian history can be found in SKY Lee’s swirling multi-temporal Chinese Canadian novel Disappearing Moon Café (1990), where various generational voices reverberate in the restaurant space alongside a rapidly developing city, and the narrator’s uncovering of this long history helps her disrupt a cyclical and destructive form of Chinese Canadian identity formation. But while briefly beginning and ending with a narrative frame, Midnight at the Dragon Café is rooted within a singular time and place, and no such character development or catharsis is evident in the text, which forcefully limits the reader’s horizon to the small-town restaurant institution and its remains.
Similarly, Paul Yee’s 1984 short story “Prairie Widow” is another tale of Chinese migration to a small Canadian town that examines cultural stasis — although in this instance the story is told from the perspective of an older female character who comes to Canada after living much of her life in China. The story takes place as the protagonist, Gum-may, weighs up her options after her husband has died. Not unlike Su-Jen’s mother Gum-may is a bride who was brought to Canada after her husband had laboured for many years and started his own small-town restaurant. As Gum-may sifts through a series of papers and her memories, Yee indexes the social problems that her diasporic social standing in the small town has brought to this point. For example, as she awaited her migration to Canada she grew apart from her husband in terms of life experiences, cultural expectations, and economic desires; she endured the personal isolation of living in a town where “she spoke to no one and no one came to visit” (1990: 335); and watched her children “depreciat[ing] daily” (335) in a setting that provides little opportunity for social advancement.
The central drama in the story involves a decision that Gum-may faces. Her cousin has offered Gum-may the opportunity to move out to Vancouver, a large cosmopolitan city, to start life anew with her boys. This provides her with a possible escape from the stultifying life that she and her children have had to endure. Yet Gum-may decides to stay, despite the bulk of the story consisting of the protagonist realizing the future in this small town portends, at best, stasis. While this decision means that she will continue to live amongst townspeople who “had watched [her husband] with distant, guarded eyes for twenty years” (335), when faced with the prospect of moving she can only imagine the café and the “routine she had lived for six years” (340). Describing her mood as “weary and energized”, in the final paragraph Yee presents Gum-may as worn out by a lifetime of change and movement, but “more than ready to show everyone her determination to succeed” (343). For Gum-may, who, like the elders in Su-Jen’s family, had little English language or other professional expertise, the culmination of her experiences meant that “within the four walls of the café […] she had finally arrived at a place she understood” (343). Thus Yee provides psychological depth that explains the decisions made by those of Su-Jen’s father’s generation who chose to stay in these limiting small towns, as the horizon of prejudice and social placement at least provided those who had suffered the uncertainty of migration over many years a familiar routine to follow. For them, they gradually accepted, through a sense of weariness, that this was their “place”.
As a relatively powerless figure nearing the latter stages of her life, Gum-may concerns herself with practical and immediate matters at hand, rather than the Chinese Canadian future, and indeed accepts that her space is limited to the Chinese restaurant. And while Yee provides psychological texture in this portrait of one Chinese Canadian actor, the length of the short story does not allow him the time to thoroughly illuminate the future of the restaurant space, multiple characters, or the role that the restaurant places in the small town. By contrast Bates expands the scope of her Chinese Canadian story to highlight the features and character of the small town through an authorial strategy that Sau-Ling Wong refers to as “map-making” (1990: 130). In a reading of Carlos Bulosan’s transnational narrative of Filipino American migration America is in the Heart, Wong argues that Bulosan systematically lists and sequences the cities that he was forced to move to in order to survive economically in the xenophobic US, providing the reader with an Asian American map of the new country. The chaotic disorienting blur of place names that we find in America is in the Heart contrasts sharply with the few places Su-Jen’s family visits. I propose, then, that instead of using this technique to demonstrate “unrelieved [n]ecessitous mobility” (1993: 135) spoken of by Wong, Bates turns mapping inward, concentrating her efforts on a detailed spatial mapping of Irvine that plots the limited and degraded commercial opportunities offered Chinese workers in the town. As opposed to other settlers, these diasporic Chinese actors struggle to transform the place that they ended up in, for as Eleanor Ty astutely notes, “The fact that the child Su-Jen can remember and catalogue every establishment on the street shows the small size of the town, and the rigidity of places in society […] [T]he Chinese settlers do not conquer their landscape or name towns after them or the places they came from; rather, often their surroundings refigure them” (Ty, 2010a: 175). It is conspicuous that the town is anchored both economically and aromatically by a tannery — a place where immigrant labour certainly could be put to use — however, this business is never mentioned as a place of possible employment for any of the family members, nor for any other Chinese Canadian. Bates, instead, highlights how the town accords the family the one space of the restaurant, and from their interactions with the school, customers, and even the police, it is clear they are only permitted one physical role to play.
Ty suggests that with contemporary Asian Canadian women writers a “pre-occupation with the land and with the great outdoors is largely absent”, where their work concerning “the arrival and ‘settlement’ of Chinese Canadians tend[s] to focus on interior rather than exterior scenes [and] on psychic states rather than on physical landscapes” (2009: 163). I would add that Bates builds on her intense interior description of the confining Dragon Café restaurant by mapping other spaces in town in a similarly sensual manner, detailing the contours of Irvine’s buildings from the inside out through Su-Jen’s discerning eyes, ears, and nose. The spaces of businesses are described before the owner’s characteristics are introduced, foregrounding the difference between the Dragon Café and these other institutions, and, then, by analogy, Su-Jen’s family from the other inhabitants of the town. For instance Dooley’s Bakery is provided with an olfactory introduction where its wafting scent, described as “mouth-watering, sugary, comforting, dry”, draws the reader into the bakery proper, replete as it is with a “giant-sized mixer with a round-tub that came up to my chest”, and “high ceilings and long tables and huge mixing bowls big enough for me to hide in” (38–39). With a sweet sensorial lure, Bates introduces the overwhelming grandeur of the privileged business space in a way that literally dwarfs Su-Jen’s bodily presence, making the décor of the Dragon Café seem subdued, drab, dated, and insignificant by comparison. By contextualizing and rooting these buildings sensually, Bates succeeds in describing how the racial and economic imbalances manifest physically and psychically in living bodies. While a book like Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill (1996) performs exercises of linguistic elasticity to capture the exact rhythms, aromas, and textures of the Chinese Canadian restaurant, Bates’s plain prose simply shifts attention to how bodies move through space and demonstrates the effect prosaic restaurant life has on them. Hence, whereas Wah’s Diamond Grill tends to pop, bubble, and spit, to capture and transform how the Chinese restaurant is imagined, in Midnight at the Dragon Café Bates is content to let the smell of stale grease linger and hang in the air.
Conclusion: Fastening diaspora
While Midnight in the Dragon Café is set in the past, Wenying Xu’s assertion that “a healthy and secure community does not agonize over its cuisine and rituals” is a reminder that Bates’s book speaks to a continuing anxiety about the place of Chinese Canadians in the present (2008: 18). The Canadian multicultural project, in particular, is often seen as producing constricted and sanctioned places for “ethnic” expression, with Dionne Brand offering, “I think what it does essentially is to compartmentalize us into little cultural groups who have dances and different foods” (1990: 274) and Hamani Bannerji adds “[t]hey decide where and how we may become ethnic” (1990: 146). As Smaro Kamboureli has argued, multiculturalism has “a tendency towards the management and commodification of ethnic difference” (2000: x), and through characters like Su-Jen’s father, Bates’s book displays the internalization of this management and commodification; an affectation that predates and predicts the commercial aspirations that lurk within official multicultural policies. 6 Indeed, the characters’ anxiety over the production and display of ethnic space is evident throughout this bleak portrayal of this marginal small-town Chinese Canadian restaurant, where, as Raymond Williams has explained, the residual culture and its attending cultural forms are aligned to provide some form of use-value for the dominant culture (1978: 115–121). While often times conceived of as vestiges of the past, these cultural institutions endure in the Canadian landscape, reminding us of, and reinforcing, social relations that persist into the present—where broad images of Chinese Canadians (or of other ethnic groups) are required for ethnic businesses to thrive. But these broad images can impede cultural growth, spurring intergenerational and gendered conflicts; and when these commodified physical spaces are further aestheticized through newspaper reports, television programmes, and literature these representations influence the cultural imagination and debates surrounding the place of migrants, visible minorities, and workers in Canada.
