ABSTRACT
Chinese restaurants can be found in almost any city around the world. The image of Chinese food and cuisine, especially in the past, has been invariably associated with the image of Chinatown. This brief chapter will focus on how a still-changing, overseas Chinese cuisine has evolved, and how Chinese restaurants in overseas communities have spread, and have manifested the change in the cuisine. The discussion is based on field data collected at two field sites, Papua New Guinea and Hawaii, where fieldwork was conducted in the early 1970s and, for Hawaii, in the summer of 1997. For the case of Chinese in Hawaii, I also speak from my own experience of living in Honolulu for more than 30 years.
