Exhibit: Soba’s Corner

Soba’s Corner: A Chinese-Canadian Cooking Show
Artist: Snack Witch Joni Cheung

YouTube food channels are online spaces where diasporic communities go to connect with their heritage and stories by recreating foods that they grew up eating or have never tasted before. These platforms provide knowledge that can be easily disseminated between family and friends who physically can’t be together. In these worlds, authors can speak to their connections to dishes they are teaching others to make. However, some narratives need to be re-examined and chewed on.

Motivated by her ancestors’ relationship to food and migration, Soba’s Corner is a video series that unpacks distinct Chinese-Canadian dishes from specific provinces. Posted on YouTube and disguised as a typical how-to cooking show, another conversation and narrative are hidden in the Canadian English closed captions and the “recipe” linked in the description box.