Being ChineseIn New York, ‘Chinese’ doesn’t begin to capture our many tastes

In a somewhat unexpected way, moving to New York broadened my perspective on China’s vast linguistic and culinary differences

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People go for skewers during a Zibo barbecue festival in Wuhan, Hubei province in 2023. As Chinese food reinvents itself overseas, different food cultures are coming to the surface of the uniform concrete-and-glass facades of Chinese cities. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 9:30am, 21 Mar 2026

Most of us have fielded the question: “So where are you from?” To say I’m not a fan of this question would be an understatement, considering how my response – “I’m Chinese” – is often met with palpable disappointment. Unfortunately, I don’t have a rare nationality, like Bruneian, nor am I a fun Korean. But before I can spiral into an identity crisis, my appetite always anchors me in the comfort of being Chinese.

My Chineseness surfaced in embodied and reassuring ways when I first moved overseas a good decade ago. It was in how I instinctively rejected iced water, obsessed over fresh-cut fruits and cooked leafy greens, and made a weekly pilgrimage to Manhattan’s Chinatown for dim sum and groceries.

In a somewhat unexpected way, New York introduced me to more Chinese delicacies than I could count, from roujiamo, the Chinese answer to a burger popularised by the now ubiquitous Xi’an Famous Foods, to tieguodun, a generous Northeastern stew cooked in a massive wok, corn bread lining its sides.

Indeed, as New York’s Chinese food scene expanded beyond the golden trinity of Cantonese, Shanghainese and Sichuanese to include Hunan, Shaanxi, Yunnan and more, the signifier “Chinese” began to feel inadequate. Lumping these regional cuisines together makes as much sense as calling Portuguese, French and Georgian cuisines simply “European”.

To be fair, most of these regional restaurants cater largely to the Chinese diaspora concentrated in the tri-state area and only occasionally to a few adventurous outsiders. Behind the scenes, in kitchens and among restaurant staff, an unexpected harmony often emerges. Mandarin, the language mandated by the government back home and learned with varying degrees of success, has proved more useful in New York for communicating with their compatriots than it ever was back in China, where they would be surrounded by people speaking their native dialect.

A single kitchen can employ Chinese from cities as varied as Fuzhou, Wenzhou, Wuhan, Shanghai and Shenyang. Different strains of Mandarin inflected with regional tongues mingle in the thick air, some dropping retroflex sounds and others merrily rolling their suffixes. Amid the sometimes dizzying medley of tones, everyone manages to understand each other, for all are fluent in the hustle and flow of an immigrant restaurant in Flushing. In these moments, there is strength in numbers.

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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}In a somewhat unexpected way, moving to New York broadened my perspective on China’s vast linguistic and culinary differences

In a somewhat unexpected way, moving to New York broadened my perspective on China’s vast linguistic and culinary differences