Eating Chinese: Culture On The Menu In Small Town Canada. Written By Lily Cho

“Eating Chinese: culture on the menu in small town Canada”. written by Lily Cho

Chinese restaurants in small town Canada are at once everywhere - you would be hard pressed to find a town without a Chinese restaurant - and yet they are conspicuously absent in critical discussions of Chinese diasporic culture or even in popular writing about Chinese food. In Eating Chinese, Lily Cho examines Chinese restaurants as spaces that define, for those both inside and outside the community, what it means to be Chinese and what it means to be Chinese-Canadian. Despite restrictions on immigration and explicitly racist legislation at national and provincial levels, Chinese immigrants have long dominated the restaurant industry in Canada. While isolated by racism, Chinese communities in Canada were still strongly connected to their non-Chinese neighbours through the food that they prepared and served. Cho looks at this surprisingly ubiquitous feature of small-town Canada through menus, literature, art, and music. An innovative approach to the study of diaspora, Eating Chinese brings to light the cultural spaces crafted by restaurateurs, diners, cooks, servers, and artists.

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我对你的迷恋穿梭在这广袤的夜空， 你的梦如轻纱，缓缓掠过我满布皱纹的额头。体温隔着房间相互交融，你在均匀地呼吸， 我在寂静中劳作。爱人，这就是幸福。To your infatuation, I travel to and fro in this boundless night sky, your dreams a light muslin cloth that slowly sweeps past my wrinkled forehead. Separated by a room, our body temperatures melt together, you rhythmically breathing, I quietly working. My love, this is happiness.

Yu Dafu (郁达夫), “Loved One, My Insomnia Gives You Tears”  (爱人，我的失眠让你落泪)

Short story writer and poet Yu Dafu was one of the key figures in modern Chinese literature. Initially beginning higher education at Hangchow University, Yu was expelled after participating in a student strike. In 1913, he moved to Japan to study economics at Tokyo Imperial University, where he, along with several other Chinese intellectuals, founded the Creation Society (创造社) aimed towards promoting vernacular literature that emphasized freedom of form, artistic expression, and individuality. The society’s literary magazine, 创造, was one of the first publications to adopt left-right horizontal printing, breaking away from the right-left vertical printing of traditional texts. 

(via sinethetamagazine)

Never had there been a time when sound, color, and feeling hadn’t been intertwined, when a dirty, rolling bass line hadn’t induced violets that suffused him with thick contentment, when the shades of certain chords sliding up to one another hadn’t produced dusty pastels that made him feel like he was cupping a tiny, golden bird. It wasn’t just music but also rumbling trains and rainstorms, occasional voices, a collective din. Colors and textures appeared in front of him, bouncing in time to the rhythm, or he’d get a flash of color in his mind, an automatic sensation of a tone, innate as breathing.

The Leavers by Lisa Ko. 2017. 

One morning, eleven-year-old Deming Guo’s undocumented mother Polly leaves for her job at a nail salon. She never comes home. Deming is adopted by two white professors who rename him “Daniel Wilkinson” and attempt to mold him into a truly “American” boy. Lyrically poignant and bitingly raw, Lisa Ko’s debut novel The Leavers exhumes themes of family and community, intergenerational emotion, and the oft-erased brutality of the immigrant experience. 

Told from the perspective of a growing child, it is at once a bitterly tender bildungsroman and a reflection of structural sociopolitical faultlines in a jarringly torn family. Though Deming’s tale could have been overlaid with heavy themes of immigration and despairing politics, Ko centers the narrative around the child who’s lost a parent—at the end of the day, the perplexity, gravity, and irreconcilable belief of being left and lost is the focus of this elastic, penetrative story.

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(via sinethetamagazine)

thoughts

recently I've been reading snippets of things that were originally written in Mandarin, accompanied by their English translations. and honestly I've never been that interested in Mandarin lol school killed any interest I had in studying it... but now I'm starting to reconsider it? more and more often I find myself mulling over the intricacies of Mandarin, like how heartbreak doesn't quite convey the same feeling as 心碎 (xin sui - heart shattering) (I read this in one of Joshua Ip's posts). 爱 (ai) has no tense as compared to English - love, loved, loving, loves. 爱 is timeless (this one is from something I reblogged). 幸福 (xing fu) translates to "happiness" when it encompasses feelings of not just happiness, but also being lucky, safe, etc. idk I just find it very interesting, so maybe when I have time I'll actually think about it more and possibly write poetry with this train of thought

Sino artists and writers worldwide: sinθ Issue #6 “CLEAR 清” is accepting submissions! 

Sine Theta is an international creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora. We publish quarterly print editions showcasing art and writing by Sino creators from around the globe.

We are now accepting submissions for issue #6, to be released on November 18, 2017. Its theme is CLEAR 清 and the submissions deadline is October 8. Please refer to our submission guidelines for more information on how to become a contributor. We feature a wide range of media, including painting, photography, comics, poetry, prose, film stills, installations, and more.

All submitted works must relate to the theme. Visit sinetheta.net/6 for thematic inspiration and more information relating to this issue! 

We also have a Pinterest board with some visual inspiration.

If you are of Sino (Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Macau) heritage, please consider submitting! If not, tell a friend who is! Sine Theta is an English-language publication accessible to all.

Please email us at sinethetamag@gmail.com if you have any questions!

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when i came out as trans

[ or, toxic masculinity from the perspective of a trans guy ]

when i came out as trans my warm and loving family supported me

but they treated me differently

when i came out as trans my dad asked if he should start slapping me on the back and socking me in the arm instead of hugging me.

when i came out as trans my mom wanted to know if i would still got with her on fun trips to the mall to buy clothes and home decor items.

when i came out as trans my grandfather looked positively startled and overjoyed when i kissed his cheek and told him to drive safe.

when i came out as trans my grandmother asked if it was okay if she hugged me in public or if it would embarrass me.

when i came out as trans my dad told me that he had a lot to teach me— he said this because i told him i thought make up was fun.

when i came out as trans my aunt apologized for kissing me on the forehead.

when i came out as trans my uncle gave me a handshake rather than a hug.

when i came out as trans my cousins hesitated to hug me at the door.

when i came out as trans my family hesitated to show me the casual affection and platonic love they had previously felt free to give.

end toxic masculinity.

show your sons as much affection as you would show your daughters.

let your sons indulge in beauty when they want to and always support them.

do not think for one second that the societal expectation of masculinity is more important than the individual feelings and needs of someone you love.