Diasporic still life: Midnight at the Dragon Café and the cultural politics of stasis

This article revisits and reevaluates the role that “stasis” can play as a literary technique in diasporic Chinese Canadian writing. To these ends I read Chinese Canadian author Judy Fong Bates’s debut novel Midnight at the Dragon Café (2005) as an important and intimate map of the social geography of a small Canadian town that illuminates how diasporic Chinese life is both constructed and constricted by the institution of the Chinese restaurant. I propose that having a narrative of restaurant life that centres around Chinese Canadian waiters and cooks exposes how socioeconomic institutions reproduce dominant social relations by limiting movement and representational possibilities for immigrant populations. In the book, sedentariness is presented alongside the social and political institutions that generate these diasporic subjects, which, I argue, creates a scene of stasis — where diasporic subjects work to achieve an equilibrium between competing cultural regimes. Bates’s book is remarkable insofar as it maps the unevenness brought on by diasporic globality but in a very "fastened" way — showing how the characters’ global outlooks are shrunk and slowly withered away by the small-town space. This article considers, then, what writing about diasporic stasis achieves in an age that is often characterized by global mobility.