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“The Most Modern Dining Hall In The City”: Chinese Immigrants, Restaurants, And Social Spaces In St. John’S, Newfoundland, 1918-1945, Miriam Wright

History Publications

The article looks at Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland, focusing on the restaurants they opened in St. John’s from 1918 through the mid-1940s. For the Chinese immigrants, restaurants were paths to economic stability and, for some, a way to establish themselves as respected members of the community. The restaurants were, however, also contested spaces, as civil authorities, drawing on racial, gendered, and class-based assumptions, saw them – and the social interactions taking place within them – as threatening to the moral order. This history of Chinese immigrants and their restaurants offers a diverse and complex urban history of St. John’s.