HAVE YOU EATEN YET?

Family-run Chinese restaurants are global icons of immigration, community and good food. They dot even the most remote landscapes, as cultural outposts of brave sojou rners, the bringers of dim sum and unimagined culinary hybrids. But food is just an entry point.

A deeper look inside reveals a complicated history of cultural migration and world politics. The Jade Gardens and Golden Dragons that populate towns and cities from Africa to South America are intricately bound up in the social schisms and political moveme nts that propelled the world into the twentieth century and beyond.

In Have You Eaten Yet? Cheuk Kwan draws out this global narrative by linking the myriad personal stories of chefs, entrepreneurs, laborers and dreamers who populate Chinese kitchens worl dwide. At the core of this
exploration is the examination of an intriguing paradox which characterizes almost all Chinese communities. That is, how at once Chinese immigrants have resisted (or have been prevented from) complete assimilation into the social fabric of their new homes and maintained a strong sense of cultural identity, but at the same time, how the engine of their economic survival, the Chinese restaurant, ha s become seamlessly woven into it.

CHEUK KWAN was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. His five films from the Chinese Restaurants series bring together his love of food and travel and appreciation of the Chinese diaspora culture worldwide. Kwan speaks English, Japanese, French, as well as Cantonese and Mandarin, and is based in Toronto.