American Chinese Restaurants

Society, Culture and Consumption

Jenny Banh, Haiming Liu, Jenny Banh, Haiming Liu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429938894
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Food Industry
• Index: Business

With case studies from the USA, Canada, Chile, and other countries in Latin America, American Chinese Restaurants examines the lived experiences of what it is like to work in a Chinese restaurant.

The book provides ethnographic insights on small family businesses, struggling immigrant parents, and kids working, living, and growing up in an American Chinese restaurant. This is the first book based on personal histories to document and analyze the American Chinese restaurant world. New narratives by various international and American contributors have presented Chinese restaurants as dynamic agencies that raise questions on identity, ethnicity, transnationalism, industrialization, (post)modernity, assimilation, public and civic spheres, and socioeconomic differences.

American Chinese Restaurants will be of interest to general readers, scholars, and college students from undergraduate to graduate level, who wish to know Chinese restaurant life and understand the relationship between food and society.

Part I
Social Analysis

1
Creating and Negotiating "Chineseness" Through Chinese Restaurants in Santiago, Chile

Carol Chan and Maria Montt Strabucchi

Introduction

One of the oldest industries in which the Chinese have been involved and known for in Chile is the food industry. Indeed, as a relatively recent ethnic Chinese migrant to Chile, Carol was regularly asked by her Chilean kin, friends, and colleagues about the kinds of food she cooked or ate at home, in comparison with what was offered at local Chinese restaurants. Whenever she found herself in smaller towns in the country, local residents would assume and ask if she was the daughter of the Chinese family who ran a restaurant nearby. In some Chinese restaurants, waiters and restauranteurs would offer her “real tea” (té de verdad)— made from Chinese tea leaves—as opposed to the generic Jasmine teabag, and check if she wanted white rice (which the restauranteurs and Chinese customers often preferred) as opposed to chaufan (fried rice), which was more popular with Chilean clients. Where available, Carol would be offered a separate menu mainly reserved for Chinese clients. In contrast, whenever Chilean-born and raised Maria went to Chinese restaurants reputed to have two menus—one for Chinese persons and another for local Chileans—she would ask for and regularly be refused to be given the “Chinese menu.” We begin this chapter with these brief anecdotes to reveal that Chinese restaurants are not simply commercial spaces. They also involve the subtle production, consumption, and negotiation of expected “cultural” tastes and behaviors between Chinese restauranteurs and their Chilean or Chinese clientele.

This chapter examines the dynamic ways in which “Chineseness” and contemporary Chinese identities are being articulated and contested in these Chinese restaurants, with dialogues with historic representations and perceptions of Chinese persons in Chile in cultural media. Although Chinese persons have been present in Chile for more than a century, the term “chino” is still used in everyday speech to mark certain foreignness. Colloquialisms such as to speak “chino”— incomprehensibly—or to “work like a Chinese” (trabajar como chino) must be contextualized within the historic and systematic exclusion of ethnic Chinese on the continent and decades of their forced labor after the abolition of slavery.¹

By drawing on archival and qualitative research data, we look at how ethnic Chinese persons and their families in Chile reproduce and/or subvert enduring and changing representations of Chinese persons and businesses in Chile. Data are based on participant observation of Chinese restaurants in Santiago, semi-structured interviews, and follow-up informal conversations with 20 ethnic Chinese women, men, and youths working in these restaurants.² Research was conducted between October 2016 and April 2018, and participants vary according to age, place of origin, gender, class, nationality, migrant status, and length of time spent in the country.

We highlight the diverse experiences of the ethnic Chinese and their restaurants within the contemporary political and socio-cultural context, where their historical and current presence is marginalized in charged public discussions about migrants in Chile today. “Ethnic” restaurants in general and Chinese restaurants in particular constitute a key but underdeveloped theme in scholarship on diasporic identity.³ Daniel Parker has argued, for example, that Chinese take-aways in Britain constitute “diaspora-space,” where “multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed, or disavowed.”⁴ Studies of overseas Chinese restauranteurs highlight how they learn to present their food and culture as “foreign, but not too foreign.”⁵ Mu Li’s research in Canada demonstrated how Chinese restauranteurs carefully negotiated the addition of Chinese decoration in their restaurants over the twentieth century, in response to the increasing social acceptability of Chinese persons and businesses.⁶ In Chile, the framework for negotiating Chinese identities is, however, shifting in the new era of Trans-Pacific relations, marked by China’s geopolitical growth. As Monica DeHart demonstrates, what it means to be Chinese is articulated by shifting global regimes of value, where the Chinese in Latin America may now be positioned as brokers of increasingly significant cross-cultural relations.⁷

Chinese restaurants, like Chinatowns, can create a restrictive delineation of space, associated with a narrowly conceived cultural tradition, evoking limited images of Chineseness.⁸ Yet, Chinese restaurants can simultaneously challenge understandings of Chineseness by creatively repackaging “Chinese food” or aesthetics. Conversely, some well-known Chinese restaurants in Santiago are not evidently Chinese, with names such as Danubio Azul and New York. This chapter argues for the significant discursive role that restaurant aesthetics and cuisine play in engaging with multidimensional evocations of Chineseness.

Although we embrace a diasporic, anti-essentialist approach to Chineseness, we acknowledge the diverse ways some interviewees articulate and define “authentic” and “inauthentic” Chineseness, even as others seek to subvert the exclusiveness of such binary thinking. Additionally, we acknowledge that intra-ethnic divisions are rife, and our study is necessarily limited to Cantonese-Chinese persons, who are known for dominating the restaurant industry in Chile. Thus, we do not claim to represent a homogenous and bounded “Chinese” community in Chile, but agree that “quests for either an essence of ‘Chineseness’ or boundaries to it are bound to fail.”⁹ Instead, we take a discursive approach to Chineseness, which entails “a disruption of the ontological stability and certainty of Chinese identity,” an approach which “does not, however, negate [the] operative power [of Chineseness] as a cultural principle in the social constitution of identities as Chinese.”¹⁰ Focusing on Chinese restaurants, their histories, and actors within them, we thus investigate how this Chineseness operates in practice, such as how self-identified ethnic Chinese persons articulate their subjectivities—such as through presenting food and talking about tastes—vis-à-vis other Chinese or Chilean persons. This chapter sheds light on the relevance of ethnicity, nationality, and cultural and financial capital in the power dynamics of reproducing or contesting meanings and practices associated with Chineseness or being “Chinese” in Chile.

In the following sections, we first contextualize the historical presence of Chinese persons and their restaurants in Chile, alongside a brief note on the changing and enduring representations of Chineseness in Chilean cultural productions. Drawing on interviews with Chinese restaurant owners and workers in Santiago, we then explore how they articulate “Chileanness,” “Chineseness,” and other indices to “foreignness” in dynamic ways, in order to adhere, negotiate, and contest their belonging to Chinese and Chilean communities. Finally, we briefly discuss how the social imaginaries of Chineseness are shaped by their (dis)connection with the local community and their histories, politics, social identities, and transnational networks.

Contextualizing Chinese Presence and Businesses in Chile

Chinese presence in Latin America should be contextualized in terms of Chinese vulnerability and resilience to racial discrimination and marginalization throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jason Chang notably argued for viewing the hundreds of Chinese restaurants in Mexicali, Mexico as “symbols” of the historical eviction of naturalized Chinese citizens from their agricultural property and exclusion from national economic reforms.¹¹ In contrast to Chinese economic diversity in the early twentieth century, Chang argued that their current “isolation within the marginal niche market of ethnic food service” evidences how thoroughly “the Mexican state organized economic resources along racial lines” over decades.¹² While Chinese restaurants are ubiquitous in Chile, the Chinese in Chile arguably adopt more complex and diverse socioeconomic positions. Despite a growing presence and knowledge of the centrality of Chinese businesses and residence to Chile’s cultural landscape and economic development, literature on the topic is scant, both in academic work,¹³ and nonacademic outlets.¹⁴

Significant Chinese presence in the Americas can be traced back to the years 1840–1900, when 2.5 million Chinese arrived in California to work in gold mines. Many others—mainly from Guangdong—arrived in Peru and Cuba as “coolies” or contract labor.¹⁵ “Coolies” worked primarily in sugar plantations, agriculture, and mining; historians have argued that their living and working conditions were akin to slavery in all but name.¹⁶ Documented Chinese presence in Chile dates from the 1850s, possibly resulting from Chinese movement or escape from Cuba and Peru, and the establishment of a Chilean consul in Guangzhou in 1845. The latter intensified economic exchange between Chile and China, associated with the maritime traffic between both countries.¹⁷ Attracted by the growing nitrate industry, some Chinese in Chile settled in the province of Tarapacá in northern Chile, after the end of the War of the Pacific (1879–1884). They worked both in manual labor and service industries related to the nitrate boom.¹⁸

These Chinese in northern Chile in the nineteenth century were mainly traders, although in census documents many were also identified as cooks (cocineros).¹⁹ By the 1920s, some Chinese residents were street vendors; others established minimarkets (almacenes), butcheries, and bakeries.²⁰ Some also established coffeeshops (cafés chinos), which Diego Lin Chou described as “improper” businesses due to activities such as prostitution.²¹ One of the early descriptions of Chinese restaurants in Chile is of Cantón, a hotel and dinner venue offering Cantonese food established in 1920 by Guillermo Wong. Another was Chung Wha, run by Roberto Chaisan, which also offered typical Chinese cuisine and hosted banquets.²²

The dispersal of the Chinese to other parts of Chile—especially Santiago— began after many Chinese businesses closed in northern Chile, when nitrate production violently declined due to the invention of synthetic nitrate.²³ Shortly after the 1930s depression, Chinese attempts to establish food and meat businesses in the north led to conflicts with local (Chilean) businessmen.²⁴ Racialized and nationalistic discourses were employed against the Chinese, who were not only accused of “unfair competition,” but associated with unsanitary living and working conditions. Local elites called to restrict their migration in order to not “weaken” the Chilean race.²⁵ During this time, the initially dominantly male Chinese community in Chile began to grow and diversify, partly due to the second generation.²⁶ Responding to persistent Sinophobia, some Chinese established networks of solidarity to defend their interests as a group, establish a formal presence in the country, and work on reducing racial violence against them.²⁷ The Chinese were a heterogeneous group: some nevertheless enjoyed great economic success despite anti-Chinese sentiments. The businessman Chau, for example, owned a building which included a restaurant, a brothel, two hairdressing saloons...