At first glance, Chinatown seems an innocuous space to experience and explore Chinese culture. Rather, I see Chinatown as spaces cultivated by the external discourse in which Chinatown only figures as an object. Chinatown has never projected or promoted a Chineseness that reflects me as a person from Northern China. In Chinese history, a central binary is the northerner-southerner divide, a cultural rift that has fueled various historical dreams of reunification from Han dynasty to the founding of People’s Republic of China.

Chinatowns were initiated solely by immigrants from the Pearl River Delta in the southern Guangdong province in the early 19th century. Until the mid-20th century, southerners comprised the overwhelming majority of Chinese emigrants—only recently have northern Chinese emigrated in any substantial number.

For me, Chinatown, as a distinctly Cantonese space, has always embodied the myth of a unified Chinese culture. If Chinatown refers to Chinese people, I read ‘Chinese’ as a hollow term, perhaps better relegated as an indication of othering for both Chinese people and Westerners, than as a word signifying a mix of nuanced regional identities.

On Chinese Culture and Food

Chinese food offers a model to observe the slippage between Chinatown and Chinese people. As Chinese nationalism only started around the 1890s with thinkers led by Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, a food culture that predates national identity is a strange disjuncture. The Chinese term for Chinese food originated from immigrants to distinguish their cooking from Western cuisine. The blanket term ‘Chinese food’ would only arrive in the Chinese vernacular at a much later date than it did in North America.

Just as there isn’t a unifying Chinese culture, there isn’t a unifying Chinese cuisine. The connotative base of Chinese food in North America is exclusion and difference. In China, food is more productively defined by regional cuisines. In North America, Cantonese is the most well-known and widespread due to origins of the first wave of immigration. These immigrants however first served chop suey, an enduring icon in the Western world, but a dish that Chinese people vehemently deny as being Chinese.

Only since the mid-20th century have there been more representative Chinese cuisines, but this sudden surge seems to overwhelm Western food critics. In a poem in The New Yorker called “Have they run out of provinces yet?,” Calvin Trillin expressed his feeling of bewilderment that China—the most populous and third-largest country in the world—has multiple regions with distinct cuisines. As Chinese food has largely come to signify Chinese people, Chinatown—prominently known as a gallery of Chinese food—becomes a reductive symbol of Chineseness. Further inquiry of Chinatown offers insight into its failure to be a representative Chinese space.

Cheng Qian, owner of the restaurant 西安小吃 (Xi’an Xiao Chi) on the intersection of St-Laurent and Rue de La Gauchetière, spoke about how the regional divide in Chinese cuisine makes it difficult for him to fit into Chinatown.

“I didn’t feel at home eating the food in Chinatown because it is almost exclusively Cantonese-made and cooked for Westerners,” he said. “There was a time when if you didn’t speak Cantonese, [restaurant workers] wouldn’t even treat you like a Chinese person. There wasn’t a place for me in [Chinatown]. As a northerner, there were no options, which is understandable as our food might not suit white people.”

Assistant Professor Jeremy Tai, of McGill’s Department of History with a specialization in modern China, remarked on intra-Chinese divisions.

“These regional splinters have been built into Chinese people for centuries,” he said. “Kinship and native allegiances strengthen community bonds, but here in North America, it also manifests as exclusionary tensions among regions.”

For Chinese immigrant communities, regional identities become important ways of preserving a link to home.

“When [Chinese people] immigrate, [they] expect other Chinese people to put aside these backgrounds and histories just because we’re all from this nation-state of China, but it’s not fair to ask people to just let go of their identities,” Tai said. “Community is too strong a value to be ceded and realigned, even in the advent of immigration and othering. The bonds are just too strong to dissolve on call.”

Discourses on Montreal’s Chinatown

In Montreal, Chinatown appears as an orientalist dream, away from the city’s diptych of constant construction and #mtlmoments. From the various Chinese restaurants, to the drum-seat chess tables in Place Sun Yat-Sen, Chinatown at the very least offers a visual diversity to the European and industrial scenery of Montreal.

One of the most iconic features of Montreal’s Chinatown are the four Paifangs (arches) that welcome visitors. In traditional Chinese architecture, a Paifang symbolizes a fortuitous entry into a benevolent time and space. Redwood represents enduring fortune, while the sturdy frame signifies strength and protection.

Since this summer, the Paifangs have been under construction, with little signs of progress. The City awarded the construction contract to St-Denis-Thompson who won with the cheapest bid. Earlier this year, the Chinatown stretch of St-Laurent was torn up. Almost a year has passed since Chinatown last appeared unshackled of grid-fences or fluorescent pylons.