Eating Chinese in Kingston, Nova Scotia (Population: 5174)
Sweet and sour pork has always been on the menu. It has always tasted like this. It always will…[Its] story functions as…the genesis of fake Chinese food. It would be the story of the creation of Chineseness specifically for Western consumption…The story of sweet and sour pork suggests the creation and circulation of a Chineseness that is a substitute for the authentic, timeless, and unchanging other of settler colonial consuming desires.
—Lily Cho, Eating Chinese: Culture on the Menu in Small-Town Canada
“Oh, I don’t actually eat this stuff,”
the waitress responds to my question of
“what’s your favourite dish?”
(Her word is “stuff” but the intonation is “shit.”)
Then: “I take it you’re an expert?”
Gum snaps, I stammer. Mom smiles.
Bao Loc: where piercings and pink shirt
read as urban attitude,
where a fat food-lover tries,
gingerly, to order light,
where the white waitress
must bring peanut butter sandwiches
for dinner each night.
It reopened this week with new management,
new paint, one new menu item.
We hem and haw, Mom and me,
but go for the new one: “the pad thai, please.”
The one Thai supplement to the maple-leafed
catalogue of Chinese:
onion rings, fluorescent-sauced meat,
perennially sweet but never actually sour.
We wait half an hour for egg rolls
while the new owners pace, sweat, stare.
We’re in Kingston, where the highway exit
and entrance are on opposite sides of town.
A tourism strategy or a warning to kid queers:
to get out, you’ve got to go through.
Must drive past Bao Loc, must drive past
two-ton statue of a bull with balls.
Last week we bought pork belly from the farm up the old road.
Bulk-buying pork is kosher in a town
where the civic festival is a cow roast.
(Three cows, actually—
and the one that leads the festival parade
never sees it coming.)
Bao Loc used to be called Me Kong.
Fried rice, battered chicken, curtained VLTs.
Before that, it was an apartment. The side door
has a screen and is tied shut with rope.
The owner of our village’s non-chain grocery store
hung himself in 2003, between his local apples
and the bananas. It’s dog eat dog
and the new Sobeys carries fish sauce
(though this pad thai has none).
It has lime, soy, and more than enough sugar
to candy-coat the unknown truths
about what life might be like off the grid
of the old Acadian Lines bus routes.
Out there, people think they already know us.
But this place and these noodles withhold
like empty fortune cookies
held to the ear to hear the ocean.
