Have You Eaten Yet by Cheuk Kwan

The title is the universal greeting in China, supplanting "how are you" with a focus on food, which is central to the culture. This is a memoir about eating and experiencing Chinese food in restaurants run by ethnically Chinese people with a multitude of backgrounds and reasons to be where they are and what they serve. There are quite a few subtexts within, but the text is what is authentic Chinese food, what is the essence of home and culture, and what happens when you take it on the road. Across more than a dozen countries, Kwan searches for flavors that remind him of home as he samples the best Chinese food that Havana, Darjeeling, Mombasa and other locales have to offer. Home, too, is not so simple for him, as he claims links to six places: his family’s ancestral village in China; Hong Kong, where he was born; Singapore, where he grew up; Tokyo, where he spent his adolescence; Berkeley, Calif., where he learned about identity politics; and his current home, Toronto. The nomadic nature of the book brought me back to an experience my spouse and I had early in our relationship of eating at a very familiar feeling Chinese restaurant in a rural Bolivian town that was nothing like what was familiar to us.