ABSTRACT
Kim Chuy (金水), which literally translates as “golden water” in English, is a Chiu Chow (Teochew)-style restaurant located in the heart of Los Angeles Chinatown. Opened in 1982, Kim Chuy exists as an archive of memory work, a diasporic community’s navigation of Teochew cultural and ethnic identity, and Chinatown’s history. As a community space where residents and tourists gather to eat, Kim Chuy represents a site of identity formation for the geographically unbounded Teochew cultural community. The creation and consumption of the commodities produced in the restaurant offer Teochew people a space to negotiate and construct their notions of diaspora Teochew identity.
Amidst unsettling political and socioeconomic forces of gentrification, foodways in relation to race, culture, and affect provide a framework of analysis that centers the narratives of Kim Chuy and its working-class workers and customers. Centering this intergenerational family-owned restaurant renders highlights the possibility of Kim Chuy’s continued existence in a gentrifying Chinatown where capitalist forces threaten to displace working-class residents and long-term traditional small businesses in favor of residential and commercial projects that cater to a younger, more upwardly mobile and white demographic.
