Top Quotes: “Chop Suey: a Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States” — Andrew Coe

Introduction

“The rise of Chinese food in America’s gastronomical landscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is one of the greatest epic stories of cultural exchange in world history. The arrival of Chinese food on American shores injected a refreshing air of diversity to a country long dominated by Anglo culinary monotony that many have lamented since the nineteenth century. By 1980, Chinese food had become the country’s most popular ethnic cuisine. The spread of Chinese restaurants facilitated a quiet but revolutionary change that enriched America’s palate. More important, it marked the country’s socioeconomic transformation, turning dining out into a democratic experience.

Making the epic story even more extraordinary, this colossal transpacific migration of cuisine did not involve the political power of government or the financial muscle of big corporations. Rather, it was engendered by a politically disfranchised, culturally despised, economically marginalized, and numerically insignificant group of people: individual Chinese immigrants. In their adopted country, these immigrants combated not only Anglo culinary conservatism but also unrelenting animosity toward Chinese food, pushing it into non-Chinese neighborhoods in cities across the nation. They did so with the only tool at their disposal in the early years: their labor. In the process, they created some of the most recognized dishes — such as chow mein — in the national food-consumer market without training or a marketing budget. Chop suey, in particular, came to epitomize the Chinese food that prevailed in the American restaurant market.”

“Underprivileged groups, such as marginalized Anglos, African Americans, and Jews, formed the primary customer base for American Chinese food in the initial years. The Chinese restaurant, in turn, offered an economically and socially accessible public space that was denied to them elsewhere.”

“This explains why the American dining public embraced the Chinese food characterized by simple and inexpensive foods like chop suey but largely rejected China’s haute cuisine represented by exquisite dishes such as shark’s fins. To those marginalized Americans, Chinese food has largely remained an inexpensive dining-out opportunity. Simply put, chop suey was the Big Mac of the pre-McDonald’s era.”

“In 1988 there were more than 21,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States and Canada, employing 240,000 people, or one-tenth of the Chinese population in these two countries. In 2008, according to Jennifer 8 Lee, “there [were) some forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States — more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.” My own survey of Chinese restaurants in 62 cities across the nation in the summer of 2007 indicates that their number exceeded 30,000.”

“The motion of Chinese eating rats became so embedded in American culture that in the early twentieth century, when Chinese food began to gain increasing appeal, prospective consumers still harbored anxiety about rats on their plate. Lucien Adkins observed “Tale a friend to Chinatown for the first time and watch his face when the savory chop-suey arrives. He looks suspiciously at the mixture. He is certain it has rats in it, for the popular superstition that the Chinese eat rats is in-bred.” Adkins continued: “He remembers his schoolboy history, with the picture of a Chinaman carrying around a cage of rats for sale.””

“It was not until after World War Il that the wealthiest European countries attained the meat-consumption levels that the United States had reached more than century earlier.”

“In the American West, the despised race was Chinese, and they increasingly became domestic servants in both private homes and the public-service sector. Other immigrants took similar service jobs. For Europeans like the Germans, Irish, and Italians, however, domestic service was more of a temporary position, and it involved only certain segments of their communities. For the Chinese, however, it was a predominant and lasting occupation.

The rise of Chinese restaurants is a logical extension of the Chinese presence in domestic service. The shortage of servants helped to spur the growth of the restaurant industry. “As it became increasingly rare for middle-class families to have full-time, live-in servants,” Andrew P. Haley writes, “restaurants offered an alternative to eating and entertaining at home.”

“The labor force in the nation’s service sectors never became entirely Chinese, but the Chinese themselves became largely a service-worker population, setting them apart from European groups such as the Irish, Germans, and Italians. For these, domestic service was mainly for certain segments of their communities, especially young women. In 1910, for example, the female:male ratio was almost 18:1 among native white servants; it was nearly 24:1 among children of immigrants and more than 14:1 among white immigrants. Among African Americans, domestic servants also tended to be women, for whom the ratio was 5:1.75 For the Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants, the situation was reversed: the ratio was more than six men for every female servant. Among the Chinese alone, the ratio was undoubtedly even higher. The same pattern was also apparent in another type of per- sonal service: laundry work — a predominantly female occupation among whites and African Americans but that became almost entirely a male line of work for the Chinese.

Moreover, for white immigrants, including young Irish women, servitude was often a temporary position. An Anglo employer remarked: “It is true that our piquant damsels from the Emerald Isle are very ambitious, but it is in the style of our chignon, and the liberties of the free and equal American citizen, that they would emulate. That these peculiar aspirations do not add to the harmony of our home is a notable fact .. Our German girls, after becoming intelligible, are recaptured by young Hans to care for his cabbages. “By comparison, the possibilities of career upward mobility available to Chinese servants were much more limited, which is one reason that they tended to stay on their servitude jobs. In other words, the Chinese were designated as servants of the empire.

By 1940, almost the entire Chinese population had been relegated to the service sector. The laundry business and restaurant work had become the two principal occupations of the Chinese, a fact that contemporary Chinese were keenly aware of. In a 1930 investigative report series “The Present and Past of Chinese Restaurants in New York” published in a New York-based Chinese. language newspaper, an author by the name of Tiexin noted that job opportunities of the Chinese lay mainly in these two areas.” Well-educated Chinese were no exceptions. A Chinese man, who received his doctorate in history in 1950, could not find a job in his profession because “Americans thought every Chinese was either a laundryman or a cook.””

The 19th Century

“The appearance of Chinese restaurants was noted by others. In 1849, Bayard Taylor traveled to California on assignment to report on the Gold Rush for the New York Tribune. In Eldorado, Taylor mentioned three Chinese restaurants: Kong-Sung’s house near the water, Whang-Tong’s on Sacramento Street, and Tong-Ling’s on Jackson Street. Besides, he added, “in Pacific street another Celestial restaurant had been opened.” These early establishments did not merely cater to the Chinese but also were “much frequented by Americans,” serving “their chow-chow and curry as well as excellent tea and coffee.”

San Francisco was a critical Gold Rush gateway, which swelled from a quiet small town of one thousand people in 1848 to a booming city of thirty-five thousand in 1850. Public eating places popped up to feed this mobile and predominantly young and male population — in 1849, only 2 percent of the population in the city was female, and most of them were between the ages of twenty and forty.”

“William Shaw, an Englishman who visited San Francisco in 1849, believed that the Chinese restaurants were the finest in town: “The best eating houses in San Francisco are those kept by Celestials and conducted in Chinese fashion. The dishes are mostly curries, hashes and fricassee served up in small dishes and as they are exceedingly palatable.” Evidently, these restaurants had white customers and served Chinese food.”

“Chinese eating places followed the steps of Chinese immigrants to small towns and provided a magnet for the community. One such town, Hanford in central California, owes its existence to the arrival of Chinese who worked for the Southern Pacific Railway. To serve these workers and, later, Chinese laborers in the fields, a Chinatown emerged, known as China Alley. One of the early residents was Shu Wing Gong (Henry Wing, the grandfather of the famous restaurateur Richard Wing), who catered to Chinese railroad workers shortly after his arrival in the early 1880s. Then he opened a Chinese restaurant, selling noodles to Chinese customers for as little as 5 cents a bowl.”

“Slalom swim hundreds or thousands of miles in the open water to return to their river home by following smells.”

“This transformation took place on three fronts. The first was the disappearance of Chinese communities in small-town America. For many people, the word “Chinatown” invariably invokes the Chinese settlement in large cities. But for years after the Gold Rush, the American Chinatown existed in both small towns and big cities. Things changed quickly after the early 1870s, when the anti-Chinese movement became more intense and violent, and garnered widespread support throughout society. Signaling the beginning of a long-lasting wave of anti-Chinese violence, an anti-Chinese riot broke out in Los Angeles in 1871, resulting in the deaths of nineteen Chinese.

In what Jean Pfaelzer insightfully calls “the forgotten war against Chinese Americans,” the anti-Chinese movement did not succeed in eradicating the entire Chinese presence, but it destroyed about two hundred Chinatowns in the Pacific Northwest and drove out their residents by the end of the 1880s. The Rock Springs massacre in 1885 reveals the level of anti-Chinese brutality and the acquiescence it received. In one of the worst racial riots in American history, fifty-one Chinese laborers, who worked in the coal mines along the Union Pacific Railroad in Rock Springs, Wyoming, were killed. While the perpetrators went unpunished, the survivors of the ruined Chinese community were forced to leave. In 1887, more than thirty Chinese miners perished in another massacre that took place in Oregon’s Hell’s Canyon Gorge on the Snake River. The criminals, who “robbed, murdered, and mutilated” the Chinese victims, remained free of convictions.

As the survivors of such attacks in small towns moved to Chinese communities in cities in both the West and the East, Chinese America began to be urbanized. In 1880, those Chinese living in cities with a population of at least 100,000 represented only 21.6 percent of the Chinese population. That amount grew to 71 percent in 1940. For the Chinese, then, the transformed Chinatown in the American metropolis was no longer merely a cultural socioeconomic center within Chinese America. It had come to epitomize Chinese America.

The second significant change in Chinese America was its occupational concentration in the service sector of the economy. This was largely because the anti-Chinese forces that ravaged small-town Chinese communities also pushed the Chinese out of the more profitable occupations, such as mining and manufacturing. By 1940, restaurant jobs had become one of the two main lines of work for the Chinese.”

“Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the sense of danger and the intensity of enmity regarding Chinatown began to subside, replaced by growing curiosity because the perceived threat of the Chinese had been curbed and controlled. The various exclusion measures, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), had virtually shut the door on Chinese immigration. Showing the effect of such measures, in 1890 the Chinese population in the United States started its long downturn. In 1904, when Congress made Chinese exclusion a permanent policy, even the notoriously anti-Chinese Democratic Party in California felt — for the first time in its history — no need to mention the Chinese issue in its platform. The anti-Chinese forces simply cleansed Chinese settlements from the open space of small-town America. Now safely contained in the confines of a few urban blocks in major cities, the Chinese community became a pleasurable site and a tourist destination for those eager and curious to see and taste the Orient.

America’s curiosity about China was not a new development and had often associated Chinatown with China and all things oriental since the early 1850s. For Easterners, in particular, Chinatown represented a unique feature of the American West before its creation in East Coast cities. A. W. Loomis suggested in 1868 that people would learn about how the Chinese lived “without the trouble and expense of a voyage by sea” by visiting Chinese stores and restaurants in California.” During their visit to San Francisco in 1873, a group of Philadelphians took a tour of Chinatown, which “they regarded as good as a trip to China.”

Beginning in the 1880s, there was a new development: Chinatown as a specimen of China became its predominant image and social utility. Contemporaries noticed a “remarkable” change: the softening of the popular prejudice against the “once hated and despised” Chinese. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the first Chinese settlement to emerge as a significant urban travel destination. From time to time, Chinatown residents would spot VIP visitors. When Rutherford B. Hayes visited the city in 1880–the first U.S. president to do so — he took a trip to Chinatown. In 1881, a group of “distinguished French visitors” paid a visit to the city’s Chinese quarters “under the escort of the Chief of Police.” In September 1882, during his stay in San Francisco en route to British Columbia, the Marquis of Lorne, governor-general of Canada, and his wife made a trip to Chinatown, where they watched a performance in a theater for a half hour before heading to the Pen Sen Lan restaurant for Chinese food and tea. Prominent domestic travelers also visited Chinatown. In June 1885, the editor of the New York Tribune toured Chinatown, accompanied by members of the city’s board of supervisors and “the usual escort of detectives.” By the 1890s, as tourism traffic increased, visiting Chinatown was no longer primarily for special occasions (such as the Chinese New Year) but occurred more regularly, and tour guides had replaced police escorts.”

“In their eyes, Chinatown stood in sharp contrast with white society: progress versus stagnation, vice versus morality, dirtiness versus hygiene, and paganism versus Christianity. A French visitor to Chinatown put it bluntly in 1880: “We have seen to night what we have never seen before, and what we hope never to see again.” Clearly, touring Chinatown gave some visitors a feeling of superiority. For this purpose, Chinese scenes or “mini-Chinatowns” were staged by the budding tourism industry not just in New York but also. in other cities like San Francisco to magnify the moral inferiority of the Chinese. In 1910, New York City closed one such make-believe Chinatown that had long been on Doyers Street when it became too unsanitary. Nonetheless, the fake opium den continued to exist there for many years.”

The 20th Century

“Part of the appeal of Chinese restaurants to the slummers and the like is that they stayed open late into the night. A newspaper report of Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia in 1890 stated that “they flourish in their chief glory after night falle, and from dark until two o’clock in the morning the flavor of Chinese hot soup fills the air,” In the many Chinese chop suey joints in Brooklyn at the beginning of the twentieth century, “there is nothing doing until after midnight.” The Chinese restaurants in Washington, D.C., also did most of their business in the evening and at night. A report by the police chief of Los Angeles in 1906 indicated that “theatrical and sporting people” and other “night owls” had developed a “remarkable hunger for chop suey.” In San Francisco, Chinese restaurants had long been known to stay open late. These restaurants were also filled with noise from customers chatting and sometimes from the loud music played.”

“At another Sacramento Chinese restaurant, one William Donnelly showed up looking penniless. When asked to pay in advance, he broke windows and beat the Chinese waiter. Finding him guilty, a white judge also declared that “any white man who would patronize a Chinese restaurant ought to be confined in jail on general principles.” If the judge’s principles were to be followed, American cities would soon have run out of jail space because the popularity of Chinese food continued to grow among whites. It also caught on among non-white groups, most notably African Americans, and Jews. Patronage of Chinese restaurants by rebellious youth and bohemians involved a relatively limited number of people and was confined largely to Chinatown in major cities. And this represented a trend with a limited life span. Slumming in New York, for example, tapered off by the late 1910s and early 1920s, as police crackdowns intensified. In 1918, the New York Sun already referred to its heyday as the “old slumming days.” African Americans and Jews, by comparison, created a much bigger and far more sustainable customer base for Chinese food.”

“A large exodus of Jews from eastern Europe started in the late nineteenth century. From 1880 to 1920, 2.5 million eastern European Jews left Europe, and probably as many as 90 percent of them emigrated to the United States. Many settled in New York, where the Jewish population increased from 80,000 in 1880 to 1.25 million — or more than 25 percent of the city’s population — in 1910. By the end of the nineteenth century, going to Chinese restaurants had become a routine for many Jewish families.”

“The most fundamental motivation for E. European Jews to eat at Chinese restaurants stemmed from their desire to be American. This is not simply because Chinese food appeared American or cosmopolitan, it was that Chinese food represented a divergence, often a deliberate one, from traditional Jewish ways.”

“In the early twentieth century, dining out became an increasingly imperative part of the white middle-class lifestyle and a very American thing to do in the eyes of the Jews. Eastern European Jews harbored strong aspirations to move up the social ladder and, in fact, achieved the highest rate of upward occupational mobility among all new immigrant groups. It is not surprising that more and more Jews also wanted to live like middle-class Americans and join the expanding American dining-out crowd.

Nonetheless, their options were limited. French food was too expensive, and some found it too rich. By the 1930s, Italian restaurants had entered some Jewish communities, such as Vicky’s childhood neighborhood in the Bronx; in addition, Italian food was cheap, like Chinese food in the 1940s and into the 1950s as several informants remembered. But a number of factors caused Chinese food, rather than Italian, to become Jews’ chosen ethnic cuisine.

First, with a much larger ethnic consumer base, Italian restaurateurs did not have the same need to branch out as the Chinese did. In 1910, for example, there were more than 340,000 natives of Italy but only 3,904 Chinese immigrants in New York City. And for the small Chinese community, with virtually no other occupational options beyond the few service industries like the laundry business, the budding restaurant industry, which offered better pay than laundry work, looked like a golden opportunity. The Chinese made strenuous and successful efforts to capitalize on the new trend, turning Chinese food into an extremely popular cuisine throughout the nation in spite of a continued decrease in their population.”

“The next three factors are simpler: Chinese restaurants carried much less dairy food; they stayed open on Sundays and Christmas Day; and they had no Christian iconography and no anti-Semitic antagonism.

Another factor is perhaps the most important and complex: Jews could feel “American” in Chinese restaurants more than they could in Italian establishments. The Irish, who faced strong ethnic prejudice on the East Coast, migrated to the West and “whitened” their ethnicity by positioning themselves as the opposing “other” of the racial minorities there, especially the Chinese.” The Jews became American in Chinese restaurants. They never harbored the same anti-Chinese hostility as did the Irish, and no evidence suggests that large numbers of Jews went to Chinese restaurants as a so-called whitening act. But for many, eating Chinese did indeed represent an acculturating and Americanizing experience. If Chinese food stood as “safe treyf” to Jewish eyes, then Chinese restaurants offered a safe social space. Here Jews could feel secure and American in the presence of the Chinese, who seemed to speak less English and certainly did not resemble white Americans.”

“Although Wong never owned a restaurant, he was Chinese food’s first ambassador. A media heavyweight, who commanded a rate of $500 per public lecture by the 1880s, he drew considerable public attention to Chinese food. Respected as an “authority” on Chinese food, his comments and articles appeared, sometimes repeatedly, in numerous newspapers throughout the country. Besides introducing the basic features, popular dishes, and utensils in Chinese cookery, he also defended it against prevailing negative perceptions, offering a $500 reward for hard evidence of Chinese eating rats and cats.”

“While non-Chinese customers did not go to Chinese restaurants to explore China’s haute cuisine, the majority of Chinese restaurateurs did not regard themselves as uncompromising culinary missionaries. In fact, few Chinese restaurant cooks and owners had any previous training or experience in kitchen work. Most of them learned to cook in America in order to make a living. This in part explains why even the “high-toned” Chinese restaurants in San Francisco in the 1870s were ready and eager to serve non-Chinese food. They “kept knives, forks, plates, table-clothes, and napkins.””