Chinese Diaspora - Tumblr Posts
“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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my mother was an English teacher who'd been working in Beijing for about 8-9 months when Tiananmen Square happened
some background: my mother was 25- almost straight out of college she left the Virginia US suburbs and went to China. and not the city we know now- it was populous, sure, but there was next to no technology, everyone was still travelling on bikes, and everything was still under heavy government control. it was mostly concrete, gravel, and dirt.
and the country was so cut off then that people hadn't seen foreigners before. my mother (just a European American white lady) was stared at in the streets because there was no travel in and out of China. why? because the government wanted the people under its control. they refused to allow them to travel and see even Hong Kong, with its high buildings and greater development.
whenever she talks about it, my mother always reminds me that the protests weren't from nowhere- for weeks before 6/4 everyone knew something major was going to go down. the city was basically under martial law.
and still those students chose to protest for the country they believed China could be. because they were BRAVE. because they loved the country that did not love them back.
my mother taught kids who were killed. some of them were her age, others years younger. one of them (who'd managed to escape the slaughter) she gave her bike and said "Get out of the city. Ditch the bike at the train station."
she hadn't been in the country long, but she'd travelled all over it: to Harbing up North with its city made of ice, to Hainan island's sandy beaches, and everywhere in-between that the train took her. my mother loved China. and still loves the Chinese people (she ended up marrying one, after all)
and she was in Beijing then- when she and another American coworker leaned their heads out their windows to see a young man running away from an armed soldier in an alley- the soldier shot at them, too. she says she understand why people say bullets sing when they go by your ear. after she was evacuated by the American embassy (she wants to emphasize how lucky she was to be evacuated), she cried herself to sleep every night for the next year.
my father was very lucky a student at the time, was in my mother's class (they're the same age! she taught English to adults at university) and had just finished his English program the previous semester.
however, unlike the other students in his class, he didn't trust the government AT ALL. because he wasn't just any student in Beijing. he was born there, sure. he biked into class and he spoke flawless Beijing Mandarin. but he'd left the city at age 8 to go to Hong Kong with his parents and little brother. because my grandparents were treated terribly by the Chinese government.
you see, back during the Cultural Revolution, there was a call sent out to all Overseas Chinese (ethnic Chinese who lived in other countries) to "Come back and rebuild the motherland!" and so they left their lives in Indonesia and went back. but they were treated like spies. never given a citizenship in China. their Indonesian passports confiscated. not even my father or my uncle were given Chinese citizenship DESPITE being born in Beijing.
so the government wanted them out. they gave them one-way tickets out of the country and sent them on a train to Hong Kong. still didn't give back their Indonesian passports.
what I mean by all this is: the students who protested did so because they trusted the CCP. because they grew up in an environment where they believed it was their friend- it looked after them. except it turned out the government was not a caring older sibling, but the big brother of nightmares.
no one in my family trusts the CCP. we worry about the Chinese people- our family- our countrymen. we lose sleep over Hong Kong.
when people in the news complain about China- you need to remember THE GOVERNMENT is at fault. they control EVERYTHING. and they haven't had a legitimate election.
the people of China are just people trying to survive. to not get disappeared. to LIVE, to LOVE, to EXIST. many young people don't realize the extent to which they're being lied to. many adults can't believe it. all the elders know if they say anything they're done for.
with love, a member of the Chinese diaspora is hoping for your safety <3
25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.