A Seat at the Table: Placemaking in the Hong Kong-Canadian Diasporic Landscape

Abstract

Gathering is present in every aspect of Chinese culture - its customs, traditions, and celebrations. This act of gathering provides community, a shared strength in celebration, but it also reveals the social nuances of the community. In the North American diaspora, it provides protection against prejudice, community, and the tools to teach and grow, offering opportunities for grandparents to teach grandchildren about their culture. Food accompanies this crucial act of gathering as a vehicle for cultural transfers of knowledge. Bringing a group of people of different ages and lives together over food and conversation is an act of solidarity, of sharing, and an expression of care. It has provided the very foundation for the formation of Chinatowns and their surrounding ethnoburbs, as places to keep an eye out for one another amid exclusion, and it is this very act of gathering over food specifically that provided the first stepping stone in the Canadian acceptance of Chinese culture. The Chinese restaurant provides the arena for food and gathering to take place, a key player in the transfer of cultural knowledge between the generations of Hong Kong-Chinese immigrants that reside in the Greater Toronto Area - namely in Markham, Richmond Hill, and Scarborough. Restaurants are known to adapt and shift with the current times, but in the recent years, through modes of gentrification, an influx of anti-Asian racism following Covid-19, and the aging of the first-generation Chinese immigrants that had in Canada in the late twentieth century, the traditional and beloved Chinese restaurant typology that has anchored neighbourhoods for decades face a much more rapid and drastic change.

Through analysis of Hong Kong settlement patterns across the Greater Toronto Area, this thesis reveals the integral role the restaurant plays in the Hong Kong-Canadian diaspora and its network of businesses. It investigates the often unsaid part of Chinese culture that is intergenerational knowledge sharing, and speculates on what tools may be carried down to the second and third-generation Hong Kong immigrant to imagine what the Chinese restaurant can become. This thesis uses analysis of placemaking and memory, accompanied by interviews and ethnographic drawing studies to come to a written projection of the trajectory of the Chinese restaurant, understanding the ways in which culture defines space and how space can, in return, preserve culture. The research provides an analytical approach to understand the Hong Kong culture that has stood the test of time, through the movement across continents and political upheaval, and speculates on what is needed to maintain its ground against rising threats of financial instability, gentrification, and change in the customer landscape. The Chinese restaurant, a silent yet crucial contributer to the community, may be considered a regular spot today, but is a pillar of Chinese culture, specifically Hong Kong culture, that stands to be preserved.