Cheuk Kwan opens his new book Have you eaten yet? the chronicle of Chinese restaurants in an unexpected place. At a local restaurant in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, the hungry documentary filmmaker is introduced to what is widely regarded as the adopted national dish of the African island nation: Chinese soup. Translation: Chinese soup.
until Chinese soup may not sound inherently exciting, Kwan’s description took me back to my childhood in Malaysia, eating the same thing: a simple broth topped with scallions, onions and a little pepper for heat. For Kwan, the opening scene represented an aha moment. “I never knew the Chinese were in Madagascar until I got there,” he says, “and then I realized, ‘Wow. They’ve been there for five generations.”
Later in the book, Kwan meets chef Miday Chan, a second-generation Malagasy Chinese teacher who swapped the classroom for the kitchen. Her grown son returned to Madagascar with his wife and baby after completing his education and military service in France. As Kwan unfolds the layers of the lives of the first Chan, her son, and his French bride, textured narratives of migration begin to erupt, forming the core of Have you eaten yet?
“There is a very intimate and close relationship between the Chinese and their food,” explains Kwan. “It’s a fantastic way to explore Chinese culture through restaurants.”
Explore he does. Kwan travels from the frozen Canadian prairies of Outlook in central Saskatchewan, the home of animated Chinese cafe owner “Noisy” Jim Kook, to the shores of Haifa, Israel, where Kien Wong, his wife and four daughters found refuge in the Land of Holy. after escaping the Vietnam war on a fishing boat.
Have you eaten yet?
The director also travels to Brazil, India, Mauritius, Norway, Turkey and many other destinations, where he is treated to feasts featuring popular Chinese dishes, often with a local twang. Case in point: steamed whole Norwegian hawthorn and online Brazilian tofu chili chili pepper. The minced pork and tofu stew features Szechuan peppercorns, which add a numbing and tingling sensation. Prickly pear was banned in the United States from 1968 to 2005 to protect the country’s citrus industry.
Kwan says his book was inspired by his background growing up in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan before moving to the US and eventually settling in Canada. “I’ve lived a very diasporic life,” he says. “I lived in three countries before I was 18 and I’ve traveled a lot since then, so I’m very aware of the migration of people around the world.”
Chow Fong and “Noisy” Jim Kook at the New Outlook Cafe in Saskatchewan.
Inextricably, migration provides a fundamental stability for people forced to reinvent themselves in new places. Kwan says many of the chefs he profiled ended up in the restaurant industry because it was the only job they could find, especially if they didn’t speak the local language to begin with. “Cooking Chinese food is not only a necessity to survive in the host country,” he says, “but also a way to assimilate into society.”
The title of the book refers to a familiar and comforting phrase for an ethnic Chinese, myself included. “Have you eaten yet?” is a common greeting that replaces “How are you?” As Kwan writes, “In a culture where food plays such an important role in life, asking if someone has eaten shows you care.”
Fresh crabs at Ling’s Pavilion in Mumbai, India.
The ubiquity of this phrase makes its role in Asian culture particularly poignant. At Great Wall Soong Restaurant in Trinidad and Tobago, Hong Kong Restaurant in Kenya and Casa China in Argentina, places where readers of have you eaten will be closely known, these words sound every day as if connected by an invisible linguistic thread, a cultural connection with a homeland.
While the featured restaurants and their owners are geographically dispersed, they share some traits. “Whether you’re two or three generations removed from China, and even if you don’t speak Chinese at all,” says Kwan, “there are aspects of what I call ancestral culture that you carry with you: the family unit, resilience and sacrifice .”
Gerald Tan is a Washington, DC-based food writer, television host, and author of Tok Tok Mee: A Portrait of Penang Street Food. Follow him on Twitter @GeraldoTan.
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