Cheuk Kwan

Cheuk Kwan was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan. After earning his master's degree in systems engineering in the U.S., he immigrated to Canada in 1976 where he embarked upon a successful career in information technology.

His international upbringing gave the multilingual Mr. Kwan — he speaks English, Japanese, French and several Chinese dialects — an early start in world travel and opportunities to meet people from several countries. His career later brought him to the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and back to Japan and Hong Kong.

Back home in Canada, the community activist founded The Asianadian, a magazine dedicated to the promotion of Asian Canadian arts, culture and politics in 1978. The following year, he helped lead a nation-wide fight for equality for Chinese Canadians.

Mr. Kwan took a film workshop at New York University in 1998 before establishing his own production company, Tissa Films. His first three films, Song of the Exile, On the Islands, and Three Continents, are based on his Chinese Restaurants series and bring together his personal experiences, love of travel and appreciation of Chinese culture worldwide.

Press Review

"If you are planning to see any of these movies, make sure you make a reservation at a Chinese restaurant for post-screening conversations. Believe you me, these docs will give you an appetite..."
- Mark Harris, The Georgia Straits

"Whenever Cheuk Kwan travels, food is never far from his mind. What happens is that after a few days on the road, he can no longer take the usual fare of hamburgers, pizza and pasta..."
- Kevin Griffin, The Vancouver Sun

"Kwan created a film that explores the lives of Chinese restaurant owners and their families in countries throughout the world. These people live in more than one country, speak more than one language, and identify with more than one culture..."
- Kathleen Haley, Ricepaper

"Kwan was fascinated by the ways in which different waves of Chinese emigration had influenced world culture over the centuries. Thinking with his stomach, he knew the best way to approach the topic was by starting with the cuisine the Chinese brought with them..."
- Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly

"Fluent in five languages, Kwan took a two-person crew and his "love for Chinese food" to countries as diverse as Trinidad, Madagascar and South Africa. He spent his own money to make the digital-film series, which he hopes will land on television in the U.S...."
- Rebecca Louie, The New York Daily News

"Of all the places in the series serving Chinese cuisine, "Cuba was the worst", Mr. Kwan says. "My best meal was in Madagascar." Amazingly, the owner was a third-generation Malagasy Chinese..."
- Jan Wong, The Globe and Mail

"All these stories highlight the fluidity and highly personal nature of identity, and the human impulse to connect both with the past and with those amongst whom we find ourselves in the present..."
- Nicholas Keung, The Toronto Star

"In his travels captured on film, Kwan has unearthed fascinating stories about families that are, paradoxically, ordinary and remarkable. Their tales range from the clichéd to the astonishingly bizarre..."
- Andrew Sun, Hong Kong South China Morning Post

"The foregrounding of external relations and displacements of a 'culture' is apparent in Kwan's films. In particular, he makes heavy use of contextualizing his participants within a political-historical framework... " - Angela Choi, Chinese Restaurants: Memory, Histories and Diasporas through Film

The Globe and Mail, Wednesday, November 24, 2004, National Ed page A2

THOSE EGG ROLLS TELL A STORY

By JAN WONG

When Cheuk Kwan backpacked through Europe in the 1970s, he often craved a bowl of steamed rice. In Istanbul, he headed for the China Restaurant recommended in his guidebook. "It said it was the only Chinese restaurant in all Turkey, and the owner had walked from China."

In a rush, Mr. Kwan didn't chat up the owner and learn his story. But ever since, he dreamed of telling the global tale of Chinese migration through restaurants.

"It's the icon of the Chinese diaspora," says Mr. Kwan, now 53, who came here from Hong Kong in 1976. More than any ethnic group, he noted, Chinese immigrants would gain a toehold in a new land through their cuisine. Restaurants provided jobs for relatives, required minimal language skills and were windows onto the communities. And apparently, no matter what the country, there was always an appetite for chicken balls in bright red sauce.

"You can fool a lot of people with fake Chinese food," Mr. Kwan says. His 13-part documentary series titled Chinese Restaurants was shown this year at film festivals in San Francisco, Hong Kong, Vancouver and Pusan, South Korea. In Toronto next Saturday, three 30-minute episodes, on Mauritius, Trinidad and Cuba, will premiere at the Reel Asian International Film Festival.

His series tells the sometimes sweet, sometimes sour stories of Chinese restaurant owners in such countries as Brazil, India, Norway, South Africa and, of course, Canada. Toronto, with its 1-in-10 Chinese population, provided the perfect base of operations. To find a restaurant contact in Mauritius, for instance, Mr. Kwan began by asking his Chinese-Canadian friends from Mauritius.

"They'd say, 'Oh, go see my sister-in-law,' " he says. He found his restaurants in Buenos Aires that way and even the original one in Turkey. Mr. Kwan found the original owner's widow, Fatima Wang, still running the China Restaurant in Istanbul. The story he coaxed from her is one of the more affecting in the series. She and her husband, the governor of Xinjiang, China's Muslim northwest border region, walked to Pakistan with their children on the eve of the Communist victory in 1949. Eventually, they got to Istanbul, where they opened the China Restaurant.

Mr. Kwan was born in Hong Kong, raised in Singapore and Japan, and educated in the United States. His wife is the daughter of Dutch immigrants to Canada. He speaks fluent English, French, Japanese and two major Chinese dialects, Mandarin and Cantonese.

A former systems engineer, he quit his job as a project manager for a Mississauga engineering company in 1995. He took an unpaid job as executive director of Harmony, a non-profit group that promotes diversity in Canada. He had the financial means -- he had an inheritance and made a pile working in Saudi Arabia during the eighties.

In 1998, he took a 10-week workshop in production techniques at New York University's renowned film school. "Of course, I was the oldest guy in the class," he says.

Israel was his first foreign destination. In Tel Aviv, Mr. Kwan found lots of Chinese restaurants, but most were ersatz -- owned by Jews, with Thai cooks in the kitchen. Then he drove by Yan Yan Restaurant in Haifa, on the West Bank. "I noticed the Chinese writing was very authentic."

The owner was Kien Wong, an ethnic Chinese from Vietnam who arrived in 1978 with his wife and four young daughters after an Exodus-style voyage of boat people.

Today, the Wong daughters' strongest language is Hebrew. One became the first Chinese to serve in the Israeli army and now works as a flight attendant on El Al. Mr. Wong became an evangelical Christian and holds prayer services for Chinese migrant construction workers in Israel each Friday.

In Outlook, Sask., (population 2,129), Mr. Kwan discovered "Noisy Jim," the gregarious proprietor of the New Outlook Café. Like so many others, Jim Kook used the birth certificate of a dead Canadian to come here, in spite of the 1885 Chinese Immigration Act, more commonly called the Chinese Exclusion Act.

His café soon became a popular meeting spot. Mr. Kwan filmed customers letting themselves in before dawn to make their own coffee and fried eggs -- and depositing payment in a box on the counter. When Mr. Kook died in 2002, Mr. Kwan was there to film his funeral. Virtually the whole town turned out to say farewell.

Of all the places in the series serving Chinese cuisine, "Cuba was the worst," Mr. Kwan says. "My best meal was in Madagascar." Amazingly, the owner was a third-generation Malagasy Chinese who had never been to Asia, but had studied cookbooks by Lisa Fong, the Betty Crocker of Hong Kong.

On this evening, however, Mr. Kwan is going to a death-by-egg-roll buffet in Mississauga. It's his son, Nicholas's, birthday. "We're taking him to China King Buffet. He's turning 14. He gets in for free."

Synopsis

Chinese Restaurants: On the Islands tells story of the Chinese diaspora told through its most recognizable and enduring icon - the family-run Chinese restaurant. Filmmaker Cheuk Kwan takes us on a tour of restaurants in Mauritius, Trinidad, and Cuba, showing us Chinese communities that have become an integral part of these sensual and seductive islands in the sun.

In the middle of the Indian Ocean, Colette, an innovative self-taught chef, serves up inventive new dishes combining Chinese, Creole and Indian flavors in her Mauritian restaurant. Colette, together with other members of the Hakka Chinese community, gives us insights into the Hakka Chinese and their conservative traditions and values.

In San Fernando, we find a rags-to-riches story of restaurant owner Maurice whose passion for quality and service has won him widespread affection and respect while members of his family dance to the infectious beat of Trinidad's annual Carnival.

In Havana, Alejandro runs a home for Chinese elderly and supports it by operating a restaurant on the side. Meanwhile, we go beyond the 'Chinese Fantasy' the Cuban government has created in Chinatown to discover a community that has now become truly Cuban.

Together, these community and personal histories illustrate the wider story of Chinese migration, settlement and integration and celebrate the resilience and complexity of the Chinese diaspora today in these interracial and multicultural island melting pots

Photos