My project is about how Chinese food is affected by the political environment of American society. I want to do a comparison between large cities and small towns to see how the evolution trends differ. My goal is to generate more thoughts on how one culture adapts to another through looking at the evolution of Chinese restaurants in the United States.
I want to accomplish three parts in this project. The first part is to finish a timeline of the historical events from 1850 to present, and show how it relates to the development of Chinese restaurants. My sources for this part come from the books and documentaries. The second part is to investigate the restaurant menu data sets. I will come up with more ideas once I look deeper into the source. The third part of the project will be a local interview. I will interview five restaurant owners in lewisburg: Pandaly, Sushihanna, Fuji Steakhouse, Yung Ting, and Peking Garden. I will ask about their own restaurant stories to create a sense of community for my project.
I found a similar project out there that addresses my research questions (http://www.newbookdigitaltexts.org/dh-fall2018/exhibits/show/chinese-cuisine/timeline) This project builds a timeline on Americans’ attitudes towards Chinese food. It mainly provides people’s commentaries on Chinese food pertaining to each historical event. My project will build upon that, adding more statistical evidences on how Chinese restaurants are affected by the historical events. My project will also diverge from this one in the way that it provides personal stories from local people. The interviews will make my project more convincing and appealing. The stories will reveal people’s feelings behind each decisions they’ve made, to indicate the process of “adjustment” on another level. In other words, my project is not limited to only Chinese food, but to look at “Chinese” as a culture adapting to the American culture.
My plan for the project after the fellowship is to hopefully continue on in the form of honor thesis. I will show Professor Murray my project after summer, and he might help me to continue work on it. He is doing a research project on comparing Chinese and Japanese restaurants menus. My project might contributes to some aspects of his research. My project will also be preserved online. I’m willing to share my experiences with digital scholarship program to encourage more people to join this new way of conducting researches.