Cheuk Kwan's Chinese Restaurants
By Alden E. Habacon, Founder of SchemaMag.ca

I have been following the success of the documentary series Chinese Restaurants since it hit the film festival circuit in 2005. Back then it was a "festival gem" and it continues to be a festival favourite five years later. This series, the brainchild of Toronto-based director Cheuk Kwan, journeys to the Amazon, Argentina, Bombay, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Delhi, India-Calcutta Israel, Madagascar, Mauritius, Norway, Peru, South Africa, Trinidad and Tobago and Turkey in search of both the food and the families behind Chinese restaurants around the world.

By now, this fifteen-part series has touched the imaginations of so many film buffs and foodies alike, that it should really be part of the Canadian collective psyche. Back in 2005, in a review in SchemaMag.ca, I wrote that "[Canadians] should intuitively know why [this] documentary series would be relevant to our local cultural experience ... If you’ve ever trekked across Western Canada into the prairies, you know Chinese restaurants, diners and cafés are a Canadian institution.”

I stand by my statement. Chinese restaurants, diners and cafés are a Canadian institution. They're part of the Canadian landscape, history and culturescape, not unlike grain elevators and the transpacific railway. We know that in even the most remote rural places of Canada, we will find a Chinese restaurant, run by a family with a heroic story of migration.

In that interview, Kwan describes that, "Most of the restaurant owners were not professional chefs and did not have knowledge of Chinese cooking, but were forced to start up their own businesses due to the discrimination and racism in their adopted homeland."

Unlike other food series, such as Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (Food Network), food is not really the focus. It's certainly captivating to see how each Chinese restaurant has adapted its menu and decor to fit the sensibility of the local population, but the real focus is on family (immigrant) story behind each restaurant. As a collection, it is a testament to both the adaptability and resilience of Chinese culture.

I first learned about this series in 2003 when I first met Kwoi Gin, the director of photographer, who described to me in detail the surreal experience of filming Chinese-looking Cubans dancing topless in their Caribana parade. That's just not the image that we, as Canadians, tend to have of Chinese people. Chinese Restaurants has stretched all of our preconceptions of Chinese-ness and Chinese identity. What is clear from the documentary is that there are as many different kinds of Chinese as there are countries in the world that Chinese have migrated to. As much as Chinese identity is intuitively international, the films remind us that Chinese identity around the world, Canada included, is also very localized. And yet, what Chinese Restaurants also shows us is that all the variations of Chinese identity are somehow connected through a familiar dumpling, noodle and a general sensibility around food and family.

My only wish is that this series had been made now, where HD and image stabilization are so common and relatively cheap compared to the early 2000s. The series is far from having the gloss and travel-series-know-how and flow of the visually enticing television series Departures (OLN). On the other hand, in a media landscape where all the travel journalists on television are white, this remains one of the few examples of a travel documentary that doesn't orientalize Asian culture in Asia and around the world. My hope is that this will inspire all those in-the-closet Asian Canadian filmmakers, who are still IT professionals, bankers and investment analysts to go out there and make their own travel-food series.

Chinese Restaurants screens in Toronto on Aug 21 2010, 5:00PM at Harbourfront Studio Theatre (York Quay Centre). Free admission to the general public.