Found in the home, in the basement, in the back of closets, in the attic, even in dust-covered boxes piled high in the garage, the archival materials of Chinese restaurants are the traces of lives spent behind in the kitchen, at the front in the dining rooms, of nights “slumming” in Chinatown while chowing down egg rolls and chop suey, of festive or special occasions, of petty disputes, legal notices, break-ins, hold-ups, and even murder. My collection of Chinese restaurant memorabilia took shape at around the same period when I began making artwork using the Chinese restaurant as a subject, prompted by my parents’ decision to sell their restaurant. As a way of trying to hold on to a place and environment I grew up in, I began to document our restaurant through photographs, videos, drawings, etc. I produced artwork based on Chinese restaurants and at each place where I presented this work, I would connect with the local Chinese community and collect their stories, memories, family photos, and souvenirs of their time running restaurants. Over the years, I have augmented my collection by asking restaurants, retirees, friends and relatives for any spare menus or restaurant memorabilia, and purchasing matchbooks, postcards, newswire photos, and cookbooks off eBay. In some small way, I wanted to contribute and to capture the history and experiences of the restaurant communities I have come across.

Perhaps in collecting and creating an archive of these materials, not considered to be important enough to make it into an official version of history yet, they can be seen as counter-archives and acts of resistance to what has been erased, left out, and interpreted in public histories. As souvenirs of an ‘exotic’ place and of an experience of such spaces, these restaurant objects stand in for the absent racialized bodies and communities, raced by their location and purpose. In the storefront windows of the Chinese restaurant, there is a simultaneous seeing in and seeing out of what is on display and what is offered up to gaze. In re-presenting the ephemera in the the SIGHTINGS cube, a site not dissimilar to the exhibition vitrines and art displays at international airports where individuals are in transit and in between places, they are given a new life and can offer the chance to construct new meanings and new stories. Whether public or personal, collections and archives of these souvenirs can prove to be effective aids to comprehending the historical spaces of Chinese restaurants.

In choosing to examine places of commerce where the exotic has been domesticated and served up to meet the desires and needs of the visitor-tourist, I offer a gesture towards the reconceptualization of a dominant discourse (or a lack of it) on these hybrid Chinese places, and towards redressing the underrepresentation of Asian Canada in historic scholarship and archives. How may a collection such as this be linked to the neighbourhood surrounding Concordia University that has a large Asian presence? How did the menus and other printed materials change to reflect the demands of the time? What can be gleaned from materials like menus and postcards about restaurants and nightclubs? What can be read into the text, language, and imagery used? How can the collecting of restaurant souvenirs, photographs and ephemera expand Lily Cho’s notion of the “archives of Chineseness” and act as remnants and evidence of the overseas Chinese restaurant culture as well as the building of a diasporic identity? Although most of the larger and more successful establishments could afford to promote themselves with newspaper ads, television commercials, postcards, matchbooks, etc. all of which now provide physical evidence of their existence in the Canadian and American foodscapes, smaller restaurants might not be able to compete at the same level. Menus, business cards, and a listing in the phone book or city directory might be the only trace of their existence. What is worth or what should be preserved? What is left out or left unheard and unseen is as important politically as who can produce, create, and distribute archival content.

Karen Tam