Toronto Chinatown Bilingual Signage

Across the store front, a business advertises its products and services through outdoor signs, window displays, and digital boards. Ideally, the message is direct, straightforward, and conducive to sales and profits. Yet a conundrum inhabits Toronto Chinatown bilingual signage that augurs three self-contradictions: a Sinophone Chinatown embedded within (in bed with?) an Anglophone, quintessentially Western, city of Toronto; the duo languages dueting, dueling on street and store signs, jostling like a married couple estranged, irreconcilable, untranslatable, let alone the xiaosan (小三 “Little Three” for a young, homewrecking mistress) of graffiti spray painted nightly; lastly, signages in Chinese that do not speak to non-Chinese tourists and shoppers other than an empty form, even if artistic, decidedly ornamental, Oriental, incommunicado, rarely grasped, instantly forgotten. The two-dimensional signage bifurcates into, on the one hand, a rabbit hole of infinite puns, homophonic wordplay, affective association, and gustatory nostalgia for Chinese consumers and, on the other, a flattened, rudimentary peddling of food and drink and trinkets for non-Chinese. The depth of a rabbit hole resembles a taproot sunk into a home culture no longer around in Toronto, indeed, no longer extant, as fantastical as Alice’s fall. Let us take a walk to read semiotically the spectrum of bilingual signages in and around Toronto Chinatown, from the most Chinese to the least, from those catering to Sinophone speakers to those servicing Anglophone speakers. What to a Chinese is a homecoming invoking body memories since perhaps childhood morphs into an exotic escapade to go Chinese, to eat Chinese, along Toronto’s digestive tract of Spadina Avenue. Our ethnic slumming, noodle slurping begins with Figure 1 near Spadina Avenue and Dundas Street:

Figure 1: On the left, the store front signage of “China Lanzhou Beef Hand-pulled Noodles,” translated verbatim.

The establishment on the left identifies itself as 中國蘭州牛肉拉面Zhongguo Lanzhou niurou lamian, which in and of itself already suggests a clash between the traditional Chinese characters used in Hong Kong and Taiwan and the simplified Chinese characters used in the People’s Republic of China. Needless to say, Toronto Chinatown has been dominated by Hong Kong migrants as a result of not only the Commonwealth connection between the island and Canada but also the 1997 crisis of the British colony’s retrocession to China. The incumbent Toronto mayor Olivia Chow, for instance, arrived from Hong Kong at the age of thirteen. Whereas 國 and 蘭 are in traditional scripts rather than their simplified doppelgangers of 国 and兰, the last word 面in the self-naming of eight traditional characters abruptly code-switches to the simplified script instead of the traditional script of 麵. The eight characters comprise two units of four characters each, in concert with the linguistic and cultural habit of four-character idioms, funneling down from the country to the city to the product specifications, subscribing to yet another “Chinese characteristic” of moving from the big picture to the minutiae, from the whole to the parts. Accordingly, Chinese postage addresses go from the country to the city to the district to the street to the apartment numbers rather than the other way around as in English.

However, stylistic consistency would call for the traditional script of 麵 instead of面, which trims off the entire left radical of mai (麥wheat). Retaining the sound of mian, the simplified script dispenses with the raw material of wheat. 面, meaning “face,” bumps off its soundalike 麵for noodles. Whereas the face, the person, is sustained by the noodles one takes in, noodles made primarily from wheat, the simplified character dispenses with etymological subtleties and differences, rendering extinct traditional characters with too many strokes. Or is it one too many words that the PRC has felt compelled to banish, to disappear? Given the eight-character signage, how to read this flip, this Freudian, PRC slip in its “last (simplified) word”? Should the northern China foodstuff be truly hand-made by northern Chinese, as the noodles appear to be genuinely so, despite way too much MSG, then the flip is likely a subconscious flaunting of the mother tongue/script of the PRC after the conscious choice of the stepmother tongue/script to appeal to Hong Kongers. The irony lies in the fact that the Hong Kong traditional scripts are the mother scripts. 

Although I have never been to Lanzhou and witnessed the brand name in situ, I can well imagine a scenario where the bulk of traditional characters consists of a sales pitch conjuring up the Old China, a throwback to the hand-pulled noodles’ turn-of-the-last-century, pre-PRC, and legendary origin by a commoner Ma Baozi in Lanzhou. The scripts of old testify to the noodles’ authentic pedigree. The form of the signage outside the store is further corroborated by the content of a wall-sized mural inside the store (Figure 2). Mounted inside near the door, across the expanse of a whole wall, are hundreds of traditional Chinese characters, including a five-character, sixteen-line poem, all in the classical style of vertical lines from right to left, complimented by illustrations in the style of dynastic chapter novels on Qing dynasty figures with hair queues, helping themselves to bowls of steaming noodles at the roadside. Words and graphics together, they detail the noodles’ genesis by the inventor Ma Baozi. While the proof of the pudding is in the eating, that of the noodles lies as much in consuming the old taste as consuming the old tale cast in traditional characters and images.

Figure 2: The wall mural inside the restaurant on the genesis of Lanzhou noodles. 

Lanzhou is the capital city of the Gansu province, near the starting point of the famed Hexi Corridor that ends at Dunhuang, the site of the wonder of Buddhist sculptures in stone caves, on the threshold into the province of Xinjiang. Heavily influenced by the Moslem minority culture and its preference for beef and mutton somewhat shunned by the Han majority population, Lanzhou’s hand-pulled beef noodles have grown from a local to a national delicacy, if not global. Niurou lamian or hand-pulled beef noodles pales into “Homemade Ramen,” a shorthand in English totally wrong-headed. While “homemade” does suggest that the noodles are handcrafted rather than store-bought, machine-made, it fails to highlight the chef’s labor-intensive kneading, cutting, and pulling the dough into strings of varying sizes in accordance with customers’ orders. The process is on display at the back of the store, open to the public. If only the English signage had not misled customers with “Ramen,” equivalent to instant noodles in crinkly foil package, Asia’s version of fast food! 

“L.L.B.O” resembles a baseball closer designated to conclude English signages all across Chinatown, repeating itself from street to street, oftentimes down to the exact details of three periods after the first three initials, but not for the fourth letter “O.” L.L.B.O is the abbreviation for “Liquor Licence Board of Ontario,” the defunct regulatory agency issuing liquor permits, in charge of the sale, service, and consumption of alcoholic beverages in Ontario. The agency was in operation from 1947 to 1998. That Chinatown businesses continue to clone an obsolete term of the last century signals how alienated, ghettoized the ethnic enclave is from its host nation’s laws and policies. Even when Chinatown beckons to English-speaking customers that it offers alcohol, it does so in an acronym in English long deceased, just like the shadow of China stalking while animating Toronto Chinatown. 

The store right next to Homemade Ramen in Figure 1 is Spicy Celery (辣風芹lafengqin), a national chain restaurant tracing its origin back to Xinjiang-style mala fried vermicelli or rice noodles. Meaning “spicy and numbing,” the cuisine of mala hails, of course, from Sichuan, famous for its use of hot pepper and peppercorn, the latter inducing a numbing sensation in the mouth. Xinjiang appears only in fine print in Chinese above the logo, which pictorializes hot pepper rather than peppercorn. The missing province and the missing ingredient in the English signage suggest . . . 

What precedes is the short essay I originally submitted to the “Close Looks” section of Full Bleed: A Journal of Art & Design published by the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The journal editor exhorted that the piece be not stopped mid-sentence, signaled by the ellipsis. On behalf of the journal’s art staff, the editor also asked for a complete picture of Figure 1’s signage, which shaves off the upper left corner of the hand-pulled noodles restaurant and the right end of the Spicy Celery sign. Personally, I rather like the jarring halt of a closure that accentuates the three-pronged disjunction and incompatibility of bilingual signages advanced at the outset of this piece. What began as fragments ends as fragments. The look of Figure 1 further arrests exquisitely, tilted Dutch angle and all, the happenstance of taking the photograph on a bustling sidewalk, right beside a noisy, congested Spadina Avenue. Aiming to please like Chinatown services, though, I managed to revisit Toronto, fully intending to take a more balanced, more satisfactory picture for the sake of art. Just as Chinatown businesses cater to Anglophone customers’ taste buds, I do so as well for Anglophone readers’ taste or sensibility. Any existence—business for profit-making or publication for meaning-making—entails negotiation between the service provider and the one served.

To my dismay, Spicy Celery is no more, rendering it a moot point to flesh out the omissions over the double disappearances of the province and the peppercorn, now that Spicy Celery itself is kaput. I realized that Chinatown is a living organism that evolves, some stores (and their stories) folded, others coming into being. Any freeze frame of bilingual signage enables close reading, whose sole existence henceforth may be discursive, in relation to the freeze frame itself. The real thing is nowhere to be found, only a reel thing in digital format. Rather than making up a good ending to do away with the ellipsis, I decided on a metanarrative with a caesura in between to evoke one Chinatown living in memory and the other living in its place, which means dying, eventually, in that location.

Serendipitously, the textual gap above from the ellipsis to the ensuing wide space epitomizes the crack through which any Chinatown bilingual signage falls through, reaching only half of each viewer. This piece is halved, just as any viewing of the signage is. The eyes and brains of the Sinophone as opposed to the Anglophone customers would gravitate, instinctively, to what comes naturally to them. The unfamiliar or unfathomable Chinese half belongs to exotica to attract Anglophone tourists, who are captivated by ideographic strokes divorced of meaning other than an encrypted artform, if that. Its meaning lies in its meaninglessness. Alternately, the English flattening is to be ignored, endured by the Chinese, much as how they tune out the host society and its strange ways, for example, the acronym L.L.B.O., with or without the final dot. Toronto Chinatown is a forked-tongued organism that modulates its voice in reaction to two different clienteles.

Figure 3 is Figure 1 retaken or reincarnated in December 2023, with the xiaosan graffiti at the very top of the building, spray painted late at night that disturbs the uneasy bilingual cohabitation one floor below of the hand-pulled noodles restaurant. That top floor graffiti was not there the first time I took the photograph, or I would have captured it to demonstrate my opening reference to the home-wrecking xiaosan. In between, the second floor housed a Tech Salon, which my previous analysis failed to address, although the glass door leading upstairs as well as the vertical signage in Figure 1 pointed as much to Spicy Celery jostled side by side as to Tech Salon stacked up on top. Even while I parsed the bilingual signage missed by all, I also missed what was hiding in plain sight—the hairdresser. The full bleed of all three figures suggests that Chinatown signages bleed off-frame, side scrolling and top scrolling like a videogame to adjacent businesses. 

Figure 3: China Lanzhou Beef Hand-pulled Noodles and Banbudian Bistro in December 2023.

Spicy Celery is now replaced by Banbudian Bistro, whose Chinese avatar on the left reads Xianqi banbudian xiao jiuguan (先启半步顛小酒館), a national chain store in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and elsewhere, specializing in Sichuan cuisine. The marketing of nostalgia via the pre-PRC traditional scripts of the signage once again clashes with one single simplified script, one Freudian slip, of启, which should be 啟 for consistency. Eerily, the tie to Sichuan is shared by erstwhile Spicy Celery and current Banbudian Bistro, while one’s existence spells the doom of the other. Totally nonsensical to English-speaking customers, Banbudian means “half step tipsy,” implying that one is instantly taken, intoxicated, and staggered by, supposedly, the delicacies. The out-of-this-world experience is pictorialized by the leaning wine gourd, its contents spilling over. Such gourds traditionally accompany martial artists in their stories of knight errantry. Jackie Chan made the gourd famous in Drunken Master (1978) when he perfected his boxing skills only if he continuously downed the contents of the gourd. Yet even without the cultural literacy of wandering swordsmen and kung fu masters with wine gourds dangling from their belts, customers would seize upon that graphic as the anchor to decode, if not the eight ideograms, then “Bandudian Bistro” right beside it, rightly or wrongly. The first two words of xianqi (first begin) is skipped, apparently to streamline foreign words in Romanization. The Chineseness of the last three words Xiao jiuguan (Little Wine Shop) in its name is Westernized, detoxed as “Bistro.” Chinatown signages collate into a bilingual edition of a fiction serialized in space and in time; we have just perused the book cover at Spadina and Dundas twice over. Chinatown is an open book few could read, and a closed book to most who flip through it for fun.

Photo by Patrick Baum on Unsplash.