Program Update-Yong Chen's revised presentation

A Cuisine and a Community: Chinese food and the rise and fall Chinatown as a tourist site

This paper tells a tale of a cuisine and a tale of a community. The cuisine is Chinese food, which has become America’s first national cuisine. The community is the American Chinatown, one of the nation’s most storied ethnic communities. The first part of the paper measures the enormous popularity of Chinese food in the realm of public consumption. The second part charts the four major stages in the development of Chinatown, specially its rise and fall as a tourist attraction. The two stories are intimately intertwined. Chinese food could not have achieved prominence without Chinatown. By the same token, as an important marker of identity and as an important socioeconomic and cultural institution, Chinese food has been extremely vital for understanding the formation and transformation of Chinatown.