Chop Suey Nation

By: Ann Hui

Narrated by: Ann Hui

In 2016, Globe and Mail reporter Ann Hui drove across Canada, from Victoria to Fogo Island, to write about small-town Chinese restaurants and the families who run them. It was only after the story was published that she discovered her own family could have been included - her parents had run their own Chinese restaurant, The Legion Cafe, before she was born. This discovery, and the realization that there was so much of her own history she didn't yet know, set her on a time-sensitive mission: to understand how, after generations living in a poverty-stricken area of Guangdong, China, her family had somehow wound up in Canada.

Chop Suey Nation: The Legion Cafe and Other Stories from Canada's Chinese Restaurants weaves together Hui's own family history - from her grandfather's decision to leave behind a wife and newborn son for a new life, to her father’s path from cooking in rural China to running some of the largest "Western" kitchens in Vancouver, to the unravelling of a closely guarded family secret - with the stories of dozens of Chinese restaurant owners from coast to coast. Along her trip, she meets a Chinese-restaurant owner/small-town mayor, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in a Thunder Bay curling rink, and the woman who runs a restaurant alone, 365 days a year, on the very remote Fogo Island. Hui also explores the fascinating history behind "chop suey" cuisine, detailing the invention of classics like "ginger beef" and "Newfoundland chow mein", and other uniquely Canadian fare like the "Chinese pierogies" of Alberta.

Hui, who grew up in authenticity-obsessed Vancouver, begins her journey with a somewhat disparaging view of small-town "fake Chinese" food. But by the end, she comes to appreciate the essentially Chinese values that drive these restaurants - perseverance, entrepreneurialism and deep love for family. Using her own family's story as a touchstone, she explores the importance of these restaurants in the country’s history and makes the case for why chop suey cuisine should be recognized as quintessentially Canadian.

©2018 Ann Hui (P)2020 Heraclon Publishing Canada

Critic reviews

Winner of the 2019 Dr. Edgar Wickberg Book Prize for the Best Book on Chinese Canadian History

Winner - Gourmand World Cookbook Awards for Canada - Chinese cooking and food writing

Longlisted for the Toronto Book Awards

Should be mandatory reading

Anything I could say will downplay the way I feel about this book but I will try.... This was an enlightening and adventurous treasure hunt that affected me emotionally throughout. It's immersive in a way that I feel like I could have been in the back of their Fiat (although physically that would have been uncomfortable). Delightfully consumable.

A Read 📚 for Book Club - Struggled to finish

It is difficult to find a lot of positive things to say about both the story and the narration. Firstly this is a personal family memoir wrapped around a newspaper article. Lots of "reporters" are not actually good writers per say. This story jumped around a fair bit. Author reads her own story, choppy in places, not alot of inflection makes it flat. Never should a been a book. Food editor that doesn't know the difference between a egg roll or spring roll? Sad.