These Ottawa restaurants are vying for a prestigious national list of Chinese eateries

The noise came from behind the mission. It sounded like a cat. I’ve imagined it countless times. At about half past eleven, the night watchman pulled his car around the back of St. Joseph’s Mission, one of the Indian residential schools in British Columbia where my family was sent to unlearn our Indian ways. The four-storey building was all white and right angles. Unadorned, save for a big cross looming over the entrance and blue-green trim that, from a distance, made the campus look like a hunk of mouldy cheese plopped in the middle of the valley. In my mind’s eye, his carburetor is...