Chinese restaurants that overcame barriers

One of the best of many great lines in the 1992 US comedy My Cousin Vinny comes when New Yorkers Vinny Gambini and his girlfriend Mona Lisa Vito first arrive in the small rural Alabama town where the story takes place.

Looking around at a setting that makes rural Mayberry R.F.D. look like a metropolis, Mona Lisa says: "I bet they don't got Chinese here."

In many parts of the US, there are more Chinese restaurants than all of the Burger King, KFC, McDonald's and Wendy's fast-food outlets combined. More than 40,000, estimates Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar Heather Lee, whose book in progress - Entrepreneurs in the Age of Chinese Exclusion - explores how an enclave ethnic business was transformed into one of the largest mass consumer industries in the US.