From Labour to Love: How Food Speaks on Film
Ryanne Kap examines meditations on food in A SWEET & SOUR CHRISTMAS, hosted as part of the Reel Asian Roundtable as a double feature with Chop Suey Nation, SIXTEEN and BUNNY MAN, both part of the Nine Courses shorts programme at the 23rd Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival.
This essay is published as part of the Youth Critics Initiative, a collaborative program between Reel Asian and TACLA.
When I realized the Toronto Reel Asian Film Festival was headquartered in Chinatown, I was thrilled. I imagined catching a screening in the morning, then reflecting over a bowl of phở or ramen in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the constraints of having a full course load at school and living in Scarborough meant that I usually just grabbed a couple of pork buns from my favourite bakery on the way back.
There was, however, still plenty of time to reflect. As I looked over my itinerary, I realized that food was clearly always on my mind. The Nine Courses shorts programme consisted of nine films that integrate food in one way or another, and the Reel Asian Roundtable featured a reading of Chop Suey Nation by Ann Hui, which documents Chinese restaurants in small-town Canada, and a screening of A SWEET & SOUR CHRISTMAS (directed by Aram Siu Wai Collier and produced by Betty Xie), a short documentary about a family running a Chinese restaurant in Kitchener.
These works explore food as a source of comfort, a marker of culture, a nexus of labour and love, and more. Through their visual representations of food — whether placed in the background of a discussion or highlighted in close-up shots — food becomes its own medium, with varying connotations and degrees of expressiveness. This essay seeks to understand the connections between food and labour, culture, and identity, and how this might illuminate the questions that each poses for the viewer.
Let’s dig in.
A few months after she finished her cross-country tour of Chinese restaurants, Globe & Mail reporter Ann Hui discovered that, unbeknownst to her, her parents had owned two of them. This changed everything. After interviews with strangers all over the country, it was time to unearth her own family’s history. While all of the interviews reinforced the connection between food and history, specifically within the context of Chinese immigration to Canada, the story of Hui’s family added a strikingly personal dimension that expanded on food’s complex ties to labour and migrant workers.
It’s this grounded element that also makes A SWEET & SOUR CHRISTMAS so compelling. The short documentary follows the Ho family (Ken, Corodi, and their daughters Rachel and Lori), who own and run King Wok Restaurant in Kitchener, Ontario. The tension of the documentary is immediately clear — what is a luxury for some families during the holidays is difficult labour for others, and that difference is closely tied to issues of race and immigration. Both Ken and Corodi immigrated from China as young adults, and the restaurant was their way of making a living for themselves. To further highlight this tension, the documentary opens with a party in a white, middle-class home before shifting to the Ho family at the restaurant. Rather than resting and socializing during the Christmas holidays, they’re hard at work on one of their busiest days of the year.
The relationship between food and labour, specifically within the Chinese-Canadian context, can sometimes be overlooked in mainstream Western media. Chinese restaurants are a staple in North America, but on film, they tend to serve as the background to the primary (usually white) characters — the most recent example that comes to mind is IT: CHAPTER TWO. White characters may eat Chinese takeout, but there isn’t generally attention paid to the long, gruelling hours that go into preparing that food and operating the restaurant. As Chop Suey Nation in particular illustrates, the food industry is one of the primary work opportunities available to newly arriving Chinese immigrants; within the diasporic Chinese community, there’s a long history of food not only being a cultural marker, but also a site of intensive labour.
A SWEET & SOUR CHRISTMAS certainly doesn’t shy away from exploring the amount of hard work and dedication behind every takeout order. Running a restaurant is constantly demanding and often gruelling. Rachel and Lori share how growing up, they were constantly missing out on social activities as well as time with their parents because of the restaurant. For Ken and Corodi, who both immigrated from Hong Kong, it’s just a reality of paying bills and keeping their family afloat. As Ken says, “I need the money, so I am working.”
Yet King Wok also becomes a site of joy and kinship when the Ho family hosts their annual Christmas party there. In anticipation, the Hos prepare more traditional Chinese foods like fish belly soup and scallops with baby vegetables. In a touching sequence, each dish receives a special close-up you can see on any cooking show, giving pork knuckles and mushrooms the same respect and attention as any filet mignon.
Shots of the Christmas party convey the great love the Ho family has for each other, and in his talking head, Ken explains that it’s become a “priceless” tradition. Of course, food is the centrepiece of the event. Laid out in aluminum trays and eaten in Styrofoam containers, the meal is quintessentially Chinese-Canadian.
Perhaps one of the most representative moments is when Ken discusses fish belly soup. He explains that people don’t normally make it at home, so “it’s good that we make this for them.”
Food is a labour of love in all manners of the phrase, and the Ho family has lived it out for years.
As an adopted Chinese-Canadian, I’ve never quite been in touch with my Chinese heritage. Unlike some adopted kids, I didn’t take Mandarin classes or immerse myself in Chinese culture. I visited Chinatown a couple of times with my family, went to a lantern festival once. As a kid, that was enough for me. My culture was HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL and Taylor Swift and everything white kids liked. I didn’t grow up with a strong connection to Chinese culture, nor was I a part of any diasporic Chinese community. But all of that wasn’t apparent to the strangers who asked where I was from, really from, or made comments about my supposedly inherent love of rice. The older I got, the more I wanted to know about my background. It was a defence system, a rejection of every microaggression.
For me, that journey began with food. When I moved to the east end of Toronto, Chinatown was suddenly a whole lot closer. I delighted in eating pan-fried dumplings and steamed pork buns down that long stretch of Spadina, and although I knew it wasn’t as simple as Chinese culture on a plate, it felt like a step in the right direction. Chinatown was where I imagined finally connecting to my heritage, or at least learning how to start.
Following the screening, director Aram Siu Wai Collier (a mixed-race Asian Canadian/American) shared, “I don’t have language, I don’t present as Asian to some people. Food is all I have.” It’s a sentiment that I understood immediately, and one that I felt was somewhat reflected in two other short films from the Nine Courses programme. In both SIXTEEN and BUNNY MAN, food is coded in connection with identity and culture, but rather than being conflated with them, it opens up an avenue to visualize the complexities of Asian-Canadian experiences, particularly the sense of being caught in-between Chinese and North American cultures.
SIXTEEN, directed by Maddy Chang, captures the awkwardness and anxiety of being caught between two cultures through teen protagonist Nora. As a second-generation Chinese-Canadian, she experiences a tension between her Chinese heritage and Canadian culture, expressed through a decision to either celebrate her sixteenth birthday with a dinner with her parents or attend a party her (white) friend is throwing. She chooses the party, but when the experience proves to be isolating — even bringing her to tears as she leaves — she returns home.
Even before she makes the choice, Chang illustrates Nora’s cultural dissonance through a handful of subtle moments. At lunch she sits with the aforementioned white friend, claiming she hasn’t brought anything to eat while longingly watching a group of East Asian girls enjoy their food across the room. Beside her, the friend eats a peanut-butter sandwich. Then a quick cut shows Nora standing outside hastily eating a bowl of noodles before class. At home, when her parents suggest eating at their favourite Chinese restaurant for her birthday, the idea seems grating compared to the party her friend is throwing.
However, the film doesn’t simply pit Western-coded food against Eastern-coded food and have Nora choose one over the other. Rather, Nora’s arc appears to be more about embracing her heritage instead of viewing it in opposition to her Western surroundings. When she returns home, her parents reveal that they’ve brought home mango cake, her favourite dessert. Mango cake doesn’t represent her heritage just because it comes from a Chinese restaurant. But unlike her rushed lunch, she doesn’t have to hide or minimize elements of Chinese culture that may differentiate her from her white friends; in this moment of comfort and security, she reconciles with them.
This closing scene also visualizes the importance of having spaces free from the scrutiny of predominantly white culture. In this safe and loving environment, Nora isn’t Othered or marked as a racialized minority because of what she chooses to eat. She’s simply a girl enjoying dessert, and the joy and relief of this moment is the sweetest note to end on.
Athena Han’s BUNNY MAN is much easier to summarize but in many ways more difficult to discuss. The film centres on an increasingly heated conversation between four Taiwanese friends as they debate the categories of CBC (Chinese Born Canadian) and FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) over a meal in a Chinese restaurant. At one point a strange figure in a head-to-toe bunny costume arrives and sits in the booth across from them. Throughout the film, the bunny refuses to interact with or acknowledge anyone else in the restaurant, choosing to remain still and silent. In the climax, the four friends confront the bunny, urging it to reveal its identity. After it fails to respond, two of them attempt to unmask it themselves. When they finally do, ripping off the head completely, there’s nothing inside but cotton.
While the bunny provides quite a spectacle, the setting and use of food draw subtle but significant parallels. The Chinese restaurant looks like any small-town joint, and the fare is typical of Chinese-Canadian cuisine — fried rice, steamed leeks, and chicken wings with sweet and sour sauce. As Ann Hui notes in Chop Suey Nation, Chinese-Canadian food is often dismissed as a cheap imitation. But its history as an improvised cuisine and its significance to the Chinese-Canadian community lends it authenticity in the ways that matter most. It’s fitting, then, that Chinese-Canadian food is the background for the friends’ debate on the authenticity of different Chinese-Canadian identities. As they discuss FOBs versus CBCs, they frequently switch between Taiwanese and English. They’re obsessed with boundaries even as they slip between them.
Furthermore, their supposed authority in labelling and qualifying others is disrupted by an indefinable figure whose existence defies their rules of categorization. Much like the Chinese food they’re eating, the bunny undermines preconceived notions of legitimacy and reduces their intellectualized gatekeeping to a primal, violent, and ultimately empty gesture. There is literally nothing inside the bunny, and for all their supposed knowledge of what kinds of people fit into what kinds of boxes, the characters are left shocked and dismayed by their futile attack.
Author Carrianne Leung once reminded me that as Chinese Canadians, our stories exist outside of Chinatowns. Although many narratives focus on these places, we are a multifaceted community that deserves to share experiences beyond them. Similarly, the dynamics and properties of food that these works explore are also represented in and felt by many other cultures in many other spaces. When we attend to our relationship to food, to others, to ourselves — when we film traditional dishes with love, when we acknowledge the pain of being torn between two cultures only to discover reconciliation when we question the categories we unwittingly enforce — we become part of a more universal conversation.
The work of these films — and this festival — is to acknowledge, explore, and celebrate the specificity of Asian experiences, but it’s also to connect with others, bridge gaps and borders, and in these three films, use food as a platform to say something refreshing and true as much as something familiar and understood.
When it’s done well, nothing could be more satisfying.
Ryanne Kap (She/Her) is a Chinese-Canadian writer from Strathroy, Ontario. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in Grain Magazine, Scarborough Fair, Ricepaper Magazine, Feelszine, and The Unpublished City Volume II. After studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough, she will be pursuing an MA in English at Western University.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryannekap
