For many of us, Chinese food was our first taste of international cuisine, of something exotic.

There are memories, whether of a pu pu platter or a chow mein sandwich, which still give us a warm and fuzzy feeling. It might have been delivered or picked up or enjoyed in a restaurant with a tropical theme, but it was special every time you had it. Whether we are second generation Italian or first generation from Hong Kong, Chinese was another version of comfort food right up there with Mom’s chicken soup.

It was fast; it was affordable; it was delicious.

America’s love affair with Asian food is the focus of an upcoming two-day conference, “Eating Chinese: Global and Local Perspectives on Food and Memory,” which is jointly sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the John Nicolas Brown Center Public Humanities Program, both of Brown University; and the Culinary Arts Museum of Johnson & Wales University.

There will be panel discussions, film screenings, interviews, a cooking demonstration and two museum exhibitions unveiled. Chow mein sandwiches will be served at one session and tea and almond cookies at another. The events Friday and Saturday are open to the public but some by reservation only. See Page E4 for details.

We’ve taken our own short trip down memory lane and tried to peer into the future for the next wave of delicious food that makes us feel good, too.

There will be serious scholarship on the menu when Brown University and Johnson & Wales University sponsor a series of discussions and exhibitions that explore the topics of Asian food, food memories and ethnic identities.

“Eating Chinese: Global and Local Perspectives on Memory and Identity” is the two-day event in Providence Friday and Saturday. Friday’s events will be at the John Nicholas Brown Center, 357 Benefit St., while Saturday’s are headquartered at J&W’s Culinary Arts Museum, 315 Harborside Blvd.

At 1 p.m. on Friday the topic is What’s Chinese? Food & Identity. There will be screenings of work from Cheuk Kwan, a producer and director of several films based on his documentary Chinese Restaurants. A conversation with the filmmaker as well as Ernesto Martinez of Harvard and John Eng-Wong of Brown will follow.

At 4 p.m. the session is Restaurants, Food and Memory. The participants will include Ellen Leong Blonder, illustrator and author of Every Grain of Rice, and John Chan, restaurant owner of Chan’s Fine Dining, Woonsocket.

At 6 p.m., the chow mein sandwich will be served and discussed for a local perspective.

Those events are free and open to the public, but attendance is first-come, first-served.

On Saturday, two exhibits open at 1 p.m. at the Culinary Arts Museum. One is “Culinary Beginnings — Asia” which provides an introduction to ancient Chinese food, with menus, recipes, images and artifacts. The show features 14 Chinese and Korean antiquities, including objects from the Han Dynasty (206 BC-221 AD). The second is “Illustrations from Ellen Leong Blonder’s Every Grain of Rice. ”At 2 p.m., Globalizing Chinese Cuisine will be discussed with a panel including Kenny Lao, co-founder of the Rickshaw Dumpling Bar in New York; Jacqueline M. Newman, the author of Food Culture in China and editor of Flavor and Fortune, a quarterly publication about Chinese food; and filmmaker Cheuk Kwan.

At 4 p.m., there will be a talk with celebrity chef Martin Yan as well as a cooking demonstration in the Tyson Amphitheater at the Harborside Academic Center at J&W.

These Saturday events are by reservation only. E-mail Sarah Cresta at sarah.cresta@jwu.edu.

For additional information, visit: www.culinary.org.

As a boy in the ’60s, Charles Chin attended Beneficent Congregational Church on Weybosset Street in Providence. After choir rehearsal, he would go off to one of the city’s landmark Chinese restaurants to help in the kitchen. He’d cut up vegetables or do whatever needed to be done for a few hours and a few bucks. It replaced having a paper route, he said. It also prepared him for his future as the owner of the Islander, a Chinese food institution in Warwick, and now the Asia Grille in Lincoln Mall Plaza.

In those days, Providence’s five restaurants stood in close proximity, he said. There was Mee Hong on Westminster Street, Chen’s (on the second floor on Mathewson Street), and Hon Hong, all owned by the Chin family; Luke’s on Eddy Street behind City Hall, owned by the Luke family; and Ming Garden on Kennedy Plaza, which was owned by the Tow family. The Tow family also ran the Port Arthur which was among the first Chinese restaurants, opened in 1926, said John Eng-Wong, a visiting scholar at Brown’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America where he is researching the globalization of Chinese food.

Chin learned something different from each of the head chefs. They all worked differently, Chin said.

He also recalled how each restaurant back then had its own personality. Mee Hong with its art deco style had no liquor license. Ming Garden was designed by Morris Nathanson and had clean, modern lines and their menu was designed by RISD students. The owners were the most progressive and aggressive businessmen, he said. Luke’s had a tropical setting and the bar was downstairs, away from the restaurant.

Later, when he worked at Ming Garden, he would deliver a legendary chicken appetizer to the Tow family’s other restaurant which was nearby but too small to have a full kitchen. It was called the Kubla Khan, and as he delivered the food, he’d hear patrons there saying they just weren’t as good as Ming’s Wings.

Taste perceptions play a role in culinary appreciation, he believes. At one time, Chinese spareribs almost had to glow in the dark for people to believe they were the recipe they liked, he recalled. And coleslaw and pickled beets had to be served with their Chinese food as did bread.

Changes in taste, and lots of urban renewal, spelled the demise of all those downtown spots. People were going to their suburban restaurants for dinner and takeout. Chin named Lee’s Café Terrace, run by five brothers, across from the airport where Legal Seafood stands now, as one of those places.

Before the ’70s, all the early chefs came from Canton and brought their fried rice and blended meat dishes. Chow mein came from Canton, as did many of the early Chinese immigrants in the 19th century, said Eng-Wong. They also introduced chop suey which was more of a mélange of ingredients, much like an Italian antipasto, he said. The dishes were an adaptation using ingredients they would find here.

Chinese food was written about as far back as 1860 with “Americans saying how tasty it is and it established a hold with its flavor,” Eng-Wong said. Woolworth’s even served chow mein at their lunch counters.

Only later did the spicier Szechuan-Hunan change the landscape of what was thought of as Chinese food, Chin said.

Eng-Wong named Louis Yip, the former longtime proprietor of the China Inn in Pawtucket, as the man who revolutionized Chinese cuisine during that era. Yip introduced things like dumplings and scallion pancakes to Rhode Island, he said.

“That style of cooking was not here in the U.S. for more than five or six years when he brought it here,” he said, adding that Joyce Chen was among those who introduced them to Boston.

Through all the evolution, diner’s appreciation of Chinese food is very provincial with tastes varying from region to region, said Chin. “Because you were restricted to use what is locally available, ingredients and flavors could differ greatly.”

Eng-Wong agreed and said “Chinese food in Cuba is different than Chinese food in America.”

A new book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee, notes that today there are some 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S., more than the combined number of McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC stores.

She calls eating Chinese food a ritual for Americans because it is predictable, familiar and readily available.

In researching her book, which takes readers through the culinary, social and cultural history of American Chinese food, she visited Chan’s Fine Oriental Dining in Woonsocket where she learned about the chow mein sandwich. Crunchy Asian-style noodles mixed with a saucy blend of celery, onions and bean sprouts and served on a hamburger bun is not a common sandwich, but it offered a taste of home for those who live in Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts, including its birthplace of Fall River. The Oriental Chow Mein Co., and its proprietor Frederick Wong, started making crunchy noodles when he opened his business back in 1936. A gravy mix followed, and chow mein took off as an inexpensive and tasty meal perfect for take-out.

As for Chan’s, it opened as the New Shanghai in 1905. In 1965, Ben and Ethel Chan purchased the restaurant and nine years later renamed it. Their son John, who was a recent Providence College grad with a passion for jazz joined the family business at the same time. He continues the business today with both egg rolls and jazz as well as chow mein sandwiches. In business for 103 years, it is believed to be the oldest, continuously run Chinese restaurant in Rhode Island, said John Eng-Wong, the Brown researcher studying the globalization of Chinese food.

Today, Chan keeps traditional dishes on the menu, but is considering adding dishes that stem from other Asian cuisines such as California rolls, nime chow, salads and stirfry wraps.

Balancing what longtime customers crave and future diners look for is a must for all restaurants, no matter what their cuisine.

Ask those in the know about Chinese cuisine’s future and they point to an unlikely spot — Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood.

Sophia Ling Cuyegkeng’s upscale MuMu Cuisine, 220 Atwells Ave., with its emphasis on tradition and fine dining is widely considered to represent the next wave of Chinese food in America.

Cuyegkeng was born in Taiwan and owns some 10 restaurants, from New York and New Jersey to Taipei, Shanghai, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Her son Henry Mu opened up Lot 401 in Providence and she moved here because she wanted to expand the local palate for Chinese food.

“We think of fast food as the fashion for Chinese food,” she said adding, “That’s not what we do here.”

As with French cooking, the techniques and the sauces elevate dishes.

“We probably have 14 to 16 different sauces,” she said. “We match each dish with a different sauce.”

They are her recipes and her ingredients and include a light but hot sauce served on fish or her XO sauce, based with garlic and ginger, that pairs with shrimp and scallop.

Beijing-style dining includes lots of small snacks and those are her appetizers which include dumplings but in different shapes and flavors.

More fine dining and gourmet food is also identified as the next wave by John Eng-Wong the Brown researcher studying the globalization of Chinese food.

“Singapore is one of the epicenters of new Chinese food, and a place where new cooks are in training, for example the cook for Hakkasan an upscale London restaurant is Singaporean,” he said. “But economic growth in China has enabled a renaissance of Chinese cuisine. Though I’ve not eaten in more than a few places, there is marvelous food and new directions.”

This direction is also visible in Hong Kong and in Taiwan, he said.

When the “Eating Chinese” event ends this weekend it’s not the end of the dialogue, Eng-Wong said. A second conference is set for October with events including a cooking demonstration by a chef and instructor visiting from Singapore, Eng-Wong said.

Charles Chin, owner of Lincoln’s Asia Grille, just returned from a trip to Malaysia (where his wife Ceci is from) and Singapore. He sees a fusion of Asian dining on the horizon with vegetables from Malaysia, Indian spices and Chinese bean spices and their methods converging eventually in American restaurant kitchens. He also noted that with so much American business being done in China, people return to the United States looking for the food they had while in Asia.

He also said the refined dining of Singapore will have an impact on the cuisine, and perhaps the price.

“People have a perception about Chinese food being affordable,” he said.

No matter how bad the economy might have gotten, pizza shops and Chinese restaurants continued to thrive in America because of their affordability, Chin said.

That pricing concept may well be challenged as the next wave of cuisine is served up across America.