Stir Fried: Jamaican Chinese food gives island classics new horizons

Asians are good at math. The stereotype that haunts many AA+PI readers was, in fact, the saving grace of Chinese immigrants to Jamaica from the 1930s to the 1970s, where many families like that of Cheryl Chin survived as shopkeepers in the Black Jamaican community and contributed to the potent Creolized identities that their children grew into.

Like much of Asian immigration to the West Indies, the first waves of predominantly Hakka migrants arrived on Jamaica’s shores in the 19th century as indentured servants contracted to work on sugar plantations in an effort to replace African slaves. A second wave came in the first half of the 20th Century seeking business opportunities, and there was a third wave of Hong Kong businessmen in the 1980s and 1990s who arrived to set up textile factories.

From 1910, Chinese immigrants were required to pay a deposit and pass a written test demonstrating their ability to write 50 words in three different languages. By 1947, there were at least 12,394 Chinese residents in Jamaica—the second largest Chinese population in the Caribbean behind Cuba—which included those who were Jamaica-born, China-born, and of mixed Chinese and African descent. In the 1970s, thousands of Chinese Jamaicans fled the rising racial tensions on the island and clustered in Toronto, Miami, and New York City. They put scotch bonnet in their dumpling sauce and stewed their ham choy with pork belly. They brought with them yearnings for manzana de agua and memories of childhood fishing trips.

For this month’s column, I profiled two generations of Chinese Jamaican restaurant owners on opposite sides of North America about the memories their food continues to serve.

Keeping the legacy alive

Cheryl Chin (back, left) and her family.

Courtesy of the Chin family

Cheryl Chin, who owns longtime Miami neighborhood staple Jamaica Kitchen with her husband Anson, is as Jamaican as it gets. While telling me a colorful story over the phone about a recent neighborhood incident, the gregarious lady drawled in a thick Kingston accent, “I may look Asian, but I’m Jamaican. And I’m pissed.”

For more than four decades, the Chins have been serving up classic Jamaican staples like curried goat, spicy beef patties, and jerk pork fried rice, as well as dishes reflecting their Hakka background such as fu gua (stuffed bitter melon) and stir-fried pork and mok di (wood ear). The restaurant and its convivial owner have been featured in a variety of local news outlets as well as on Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, and boasts celebrities such as Tyson Beckford, Joshua Uche, and reggae producer Don Corleon among its clientele.

“I’m clueless, but my son gets excited. He puts photos up on Instagram,” Chin laughs.

Chin grew up the third-generation Jamaican Chinese daughter of a shopkeeper in Kingston and moved to Miami in 1986 for university. She holds a masters degree in business management and was well on a corporate track before meeting Anson and marrying into the restaurant business. Three of her grandparents came from China, and one of her grandmothers was mixed Jamaican Chinese and born on the island. Back in the mid-20th Century, Chinese immigrants mostly occupied the role of community shopkeepers.

“Every payday was Thursday, right, and so the Chinese used to have these tiny little shops everywhere and sell staples—sugar, salt, flour—in small amounts,” she says. “They would trust them out to people, and then on payday the people would come and pay.”

Most of the food they ate growing up was Jamaican, with occasional Chinese Jamaican dishes like pork and ham choy (pickled mustard greens) that they serve on their menu today, but Chinese ingredients were also standard for Jamaicans of any color.

“Pork belly stewed with ham choy is a very popular dish in Kingston,” Chin tells me.

An old photo of the Chin family.

Courtesy of the Chin family

Soy sauce is also a common replacement or addition to Jamaican browning sauce, a Caribbean condiment made of brown sugar and water used to add color to stews and jerks, which are a mainstay of Jamaican cooking.

“Soy sauce is a staple ingredient in every Jamaican household. If they don’t have soy sauce they’ll use browning to get the gravy brown…and oyster sauce,” says Chin, who also tells me that both cuisines incorporate a lot of fresh ginger and garlic.

At Jamaica Kitchen, Anson also uses Jamaican rum in the sauce for their Cantonese-style roast duck. Anson, who is also Chinese Jamaican, was fascinated with cooking from a young age. He skipped school for nearly a year to watch a family friend, who owned a bakery, make “the most beautiful cakes and pastries.” Later in life, he was able to take a pastry course.

Now in her 60s, Chin still works in the restaurant with her husband, where she’s happy to “be able to go to work in shorts and slippers,” and spends the rest of her time visiting family across the country and relaxing on cruises. The Chins remain active in Miami’s vibrant Jamaican Chinese community and continue to support various Jamaican Chinese organizations which help send money to high schools in Jamaica.

“Most of the Chinese Jamaicans are very prosperous from humble roots, but my mom always said, ‘never ever forget where we came from.’”

Expanding the meaning of fusion

Chef Craig Wong of Patois in Toronto.

Ian Brown Photography

“Patois” is a distinct jargon composed of various languages and cultures mixed, matched, and turned upside down. As the name implies, chef Craig Wong opened Toronto restaurant Patois to do just that with what he knew best: food. Born in Toronto to Chinese Jamaican parents who immigrated to Canada in the 1970s, Wong grew up in a multicultural mix heavily peppered with West Indian influence. His background is in French haute cuisine, and the classically trained chef spent years working in Michelin-starred restaurants in France before deciding to open Patois in 2015.

“I was cooking in these restaurants and doing a good job cooking other people’s food, it seemed like there was something lacking. There was a part of me I wanted to share. That’s where I started to feel like a bit of a storyteller,” Wong tells me over Zoom.

At Patois, which calls itself “Caribbean meets Asian Soul Food,” Wong serves his own story on a plate. Jamaican patties, oxtail, rice and peas with oxtail gravy, and jerk chicken chow mein give a nod to his island heritage. He came up with the idea of crispy wok stir-fried lobster nuggets in jerk butter when eating Cantonese lobster in Chinatown with a table of chefs at 2 a.m. His Chinese Canadian childhood is on display in the Chinese smashburger he serves, featuring a double smash burger with oyster sauce mayo and hickory sticks—skinny, smoky, fried potato chips every Canadian kid grew up on—on a Cantonese pineapple bun.

Patois' Chinese smashburger, on a pineapple bun.

Nashish

Wong credits his love of food to his maternal grandmother, a legendary cook who ran a canteen back in Jamaica. When she moved to Canada, she continued to serve up huge meals for her six children, 12 grandchildren, and their spouses, five days a week, into her 80s.

“The biggest takeaway I got from her was that the lines between cuisines are meant to be blurred,” says Wong. “There was this resourcefulness that I learned from her about how to coax flavors, to gain this or that from different peppers. If she was making a traditional Chinese dish, she would incorporate a little of Jamaican thyme, or adding a little scotch bonnet for a bit of heat. It wasn’t uncommon for us to have Cantonese-style dumplings with soy sauce sweetened with cane juice or scotch bonnet.”

“The biggest takeaway I got from her was that the lines between cuisines are meant to be blurred...It wasn’t uncommon for us to have Cantonese-style dumplings with soy sauce sweetened with cane juice or scotch bonnet.”

Unfortunately, his grandmother passed a month after Patois opened, and never got a chance to eat at the restaurant. However, the creativity with flavors that Wong inherited from her lives on in dishes like the jerk lobster nuggets. The dish was partially inspired from family visits to Jamaica as a child, when Wong’s uncle would hire a fisherman and pay him for the entire catch for the day if he would cook for them.

“This one time, he took a whole fish, gutted it, and stuffed it with a mix of butter, jerk paste, and Jamaican water crackers. The mix of those flavors and the fattiness mellowed the jerk paste, and as it cooked on the fire, the juices from the fish would mix with those flavors, and the crushed up dry water crackers would soak up the fish juice, the jerk butter, and make like a stuffing,” Wong reminisces. That childhood memory, in conjunction with Cantonese lobster, became the story behind his lobster dish, which fittingly uses tater tots in lieu of Jamaican water crackers.

“My 6-year-old son loves art and talks a lot about how he can see the colors and sounds of music,” says Wong. “For me it feels the same way with flavors and food.”