I am in Toronto Chinatown, investigating restaurants Shanghainese, Yunnanese, Cantonese, a smattering of Sichuanese, one Manchurian, two Xinjiang halal and some half-hearted Peking. So obviously I started with a Mongolian hotpot. Services in the church are two parts Mandarin to one part Cantonese. Signage, as is common in Canada and around the world, tells one story to Chinese readers and another to Anglos. Yesterday was the Chinese collection at the Royal Ontario Museum; today I’m off to see the monument to the Chinese workers on the Pacific railroad. Me the north, as they almost say here.

I’ll leave you with a Ming-dynasty figurine of one of Hell’s Torturers. No, really.