Chow Chop Suey, by Anne Mendelson (introduction)

CHOW CHOP SUEY Food and the Chinese American Journey Anne Mendelson

(Pronounced “chau tsap sui” in Cantonese, “chao za sui” in Mandarin) Stir-fried ( ) jumbled ( ) fragments ( ), a phrase garbled by latenineteenth-century English-speaking patrons of Chinese restaurants into “chop suey,” with the crucial word “chau” or “chao” omitted.

Introduction

There is a Chinese phrase rendered as xiang banfa in today’s official Mandarin romanization system, seung bahnfat in the Cantonese equivalent.

It is invoked when people find themselves facing any kind of difficulty and means something like “find a solution” or “come up with a plan.”

“Xiang banfa !” urges a mother listening to a child’s complaints about playground aggressors. A MacGyver of any race or nation who improvises a desert-island fix for an outboard motor out of duct tape and old bicycle parts is a xiang banfa practitioner. So was the defier of former laws prohibiting Chinese laborers from entering the United States who more than a century ago hid secret instructions for establishing a fake identity inside a banana skin. In 1970s Indianapolis, a young girl saw her immigrant parents confront the terrible absence of Chinese tofu, tell themselves “Xiang banfa,” and arrive at an excellent homemade version based on ground soybeans and calcium sulfate. The instinct was well developed among the Chinese peoples before a few hundreds, then many thousands of men—but almost no women—started sailing across the Pacific to the land they called “Gold Mountain.” Nearly all were Cantonese, meaning natives of Guangdong Province in the far south.

The phrase xiang banfa was just one of many things I’d never heard of when I set out to write a book on the history of Chinese food in America from the Gold Rush to the end of the Cold War. What I planned was a cook’s eye view of a remarkable immigrant cuisine. For the purpose,

I expected to draw on my knowledge of English-language Chinese cookbooks and experience of the Chinese American restaurant scene— admittedly a narrow experience, since my Chinese-language skills extend only to reading some food-related characters and looking up terms in Chinese–English dictionaries.

This plan went astray almost at once. To my surprise, I became convinced that Chinese American food was not an immigrant cuisine on terms comparable to any other. How could it have been, when for about a century and a half virtually all Chinese-born people who had made it to America were specifically banned from becoming immigrants, in the sense of people who can exchange birthright citizenship in one country for adoptive citizenship in another? The shadow of threatened deportation hung over the community until World War II, when for the first time Chinese-born residents were explicitly allowed to apply for American citizenship.

The cooking that white and sometimes black Americans fell in love with after about 1895—still popular today among millions who happily ignore culinary snobberies—did not accompany the Chinese across the ocean. It did not enter American foodways in the natural course of an immigrant group’s incorporation into this nation’s life. The Chinese themselves concocted it for non-Chinese patrons, equipped with a phenomenal insight into the American palate that I discovered to be a crucial part of the story in its own right.

In effect, the late-nineteenth-century restaurant pioneers invented a new quasi-Chinese culinary idiom often summed up as the food of the chop suey era. They did this during a time of great and often deadly threats visited on them under the law barring Chinese workers from entering the United States, the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. It was an extraordinary instance of the xiang banfa instinct deployed at the moment of greatest need. The new cuisine itself stands as a historic turning point in race relations, improvised to please a white majority that could not have foreseen itself ever becoming a minority (an event now predicted to occur in less than two generations). White reviewers and gourmets pronouncing judgment on all-the-rage Chinese restaurants for the benefit of other whites failed—and often still fail—to notice the oddity of the underlying racial dynamic, or the fact that it isn’t some unchanging historical given.

XVI

In t r o du c t i o n

Any adequate history of Chinese American cooking must begin with the principles of Chinese cuisine as understood by the Cantonesespeaking men who first arrived here from Guangdong Province—a place, for nearly all Chinese, almost synonymous with excellent food. It must describe the more recent arrival of Mandarin-speaking newcomers and their impact on the late-twentieth-century Chinese culinary scene in America. It must explain why the entire system of Chinese cooking has historically been so difficult for non-Chinese to grasp, and how it came to be somewhat intelligibly “translated” for the American mind during the twentieth century. It also has to point out just what differentiates the made-up chop suey cuisine from Cantonese or any other version of Chinese cooking.

But this is not a story that can be adequately presented in measuringspoon or restaurant-menu terms. Eventually I saw that I would have to devote a great deal of space to realities of the Exclusion era that have nothing to do with cooking, troubles that deeply stamped the lives of the men who kept Cantonese food culture alive among themselves through the worst of times.

It may seem unnecessary for a food historian to rehash events that have been abundantly chronicled by political and social historians. But I believe that readers of a book on Chinese American food will be well served by being asked to recognize these matters. There is great food for thought in—among other things—how the Cantonese in America came to be an almost all-male society hindered from forming family ties on American soil, what large roles opium and prostitutes played in the community, and how murderous persecution eventually drove many thousands into Chinatowns throughout this country. In addition, it is important to frame the Chinese American story within the context of geopolitical questions such as civil strife in China before and after the fall of the Qing Empire, or U.S. relations with the Nationalist regime on Taiwan during World War II and the Cold War. Rivalries between the Cantonese American community and later Mandarin-speaking arrivals also deserve to be taken into account.

In short: The story when finished had almost nothing to do with the one I had thought I was going to write.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, in which historical incidents play the more prominent role, broadly covers events from the In tr o du cti on

XVII

mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth century, moving from Qing-era China to areas of Cantonese settlement on the American West Coast.

The second focuses more extensively on culinary issues as reflected in Chinese American restaurants and English-language Chinese cookbooks from the late 1890s up to roughly 1990. But culinary and political history are interwoven throughout both sections.

A brief road map may be in order. The opening chapter suggests some of the remarkable qualifications that equipped people from southern Guangdong for fortune seeking on Gold Mountain. The second examines the features of Chinese cuisine that made it so deeply incomprehensible to Westerners while the Cantonese, for their part, learned to reproduce Western cooking with uncanny skill. The next two chapters follow the growing Cantonese community in America from hopeful early years marked by impressive San Francisco restaurant success to an era of savage persecution. The incipient American labor movement whipped up a racist campaign that ended by drubbing Chinese manual labor out of the U.S. labor market, with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act as principal weapon.

Using any means they could find in the struggle to survive, the Cantonese became pioneers in West Coast fishing and produce gardening.

Before being blacklisted from manual employment, they did the swamp clearing that made the beginnings of California agribusiness possible and completed the transcontinental railroads that linked industrialscale farms with eastern and midwestern markets. In the true xiang banfa spirit, many found jobs cooking for white employers while others evaded legal strictures against laborers by reinventing themselves as self-employed persons conducting small businesses, with laundries being the usual choice for a few decades.

It was during this period that America’s Chinatowns were formed, Chinese American culinary professionals started to invent the allimportant “chop suey” cuisine as an irresistible draw for a white clientele, and restaurants gradually supplanted laundries as the preferred bulwark against deportation. The community’s one great legal victory, the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision in which the Supreme Court declared on Fourteenth Amendment grounds that a child born to Chinese parents on U.S. soil is automatically an American citizen, laid down the later foundation for converting an almost wholly male XVIII

In t r o du ct io n

Chinese-born population to something resembling a community of true immigrants.

Part 2 opens with a chapter describing both the important features of “chop suey” cuisine as a construct deliberately tailored to non-Chinese preferences and the further changes wrought by white enthusiasts who tried (with muddled understanding) to teach other fans how to cook “chop suey.” As I explain, the phrase originated as a garbled English rendering of “chow chop suey,” with “chow” indicating the stir-fry method.

Though the term “chop suey” later went on to a freewheeling life of its own in non-Chinese minds, in early days it clearly stood for the general category of Chinese dishes cooked by stir-frying—a technique that at the time was wholly unintelligible to American cooks and could not have been explained in English. Had white patrons of late-nineteenthcentury Chinese restaurants happened to latch onto “chow” rather than “chop suey” to identify the most popular class of dishes, everyone would have been spared much later confusion. Non–Chinese Americans would then have accurately used terms like “chow duck,” “chow clams,” and so forth instead of ignorantly inserting the phrase “chop suey” where it made no sense.

The next chapter describes how improved understanding between educated Americans and American-educated, Chinese-born Chinese led to the first truly insightful English-language Chinese cookbook: How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945).

The last three chapters survey the changing American restaurant and cookbook-publishing scene from the aftermath of World War II until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Chapter 7 focuses on prominent and influential restaurants; chapter 8, on prominent and influential books as well as cooking schools. Taiwanese–American relations are crucial to this part of the story. Thanks to the U.S. alliance with the Nationalist government-in-exile on Taiwan, a comparative handful of Mandarin-speaking, non-Cantonese restaurateurs and teachers acquired a commanding position as interpreters of Chinese cuisine to American diners and cooks during the Cold War. Cookbook publishing on Taiwan also helped set the stage for some important developments in English-language Chinese instruction here. Chapter 7 focuses on a Chinese restaurant vogue that reached its height during the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 8 covers a corresponding vogue of Chinese cooking schools and increasingly In tr o du cti on

XIX

ambitious cookbooks, partly foreshadowed by similar developments on Taiwan and in burgeoning stateside Taiwanese communities.

The concluding chapter shows Chinese cuisine fading somewhat from the American media limelight just as the Chinese culinary presence on U.S. soil was about to be lastingly transformed by the Hart-Celler immigration reforms of 1965 and many Far Eastern geopolitical convulsions. Between about 1970 and 1990, surprisingly self-reliant enclaves of Chinese immigrants from diverse geographical backgrounds began appearing in and beyond the old American Chinatowns—and producing restaurants that didn’t need white patronage to survive and prosper.

In a pattern hinting at deeper changes that are predicted to strengthen when whites become an American racial minority by about 2060, these establishments owed their existence to clienteles of new ethnic Chinese immigrants who shared the owners’ regional origins, particular languages, and culinary frames of reference. Meanwhile, the old—and often very inequitable—racial-exchange models of the Chinese restaurant business that many white (and black) people grew up on were gradually disappearing, and have continued to do so. Strange though it may sound, there are many things that young or middle-aged Chinese Americans with unfettered access to any career from astrophysicist to news reporter would rather do for a living than go on cooking to please outsiders.

It remains to be said that the historiography of Chinese American food is also destined to grow in the near future—in fact, is growing swiftly at this moment. I know of half a dozen important research projects now in progress or about to be published. A tremendous new factor is coming into play: a generation of bilingual historians with serious scholarly training who, unlike me, can comb through original Chinese-language sources. Such quarries might include newspapers from California or Hong Kong, importers’ business records, store inventories, or the letters and diaries of people who lived the Cantonese American experience during Exclusion. This previously untapped material constitutes a whole new Gold Mountain of potential evidence. I can confidently predict that in a very few years, readers interested in this story will have access to broader and deeper accounts than anything yet published.

XX

In t r o du c t i o n

Praise for

CHOW CHOP SUEY “Chow Chop Suey is an eye-opener, a book that will give everyone a deep appreciation of the exquisite skill required to produce authentic Chinese food and the sweep of history that brought Chinese cooking to America. Anne Mendelson’s prodigious research has given us a highly respectful, insightful, refreshing, wonderfully written, and utterly compelling account of the role and plight of Chinese restaurant workers in this country. I learned something new on every page.”

—MARION NESTLE, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and author of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) “Well written and impeccably researched, Chow Chop Suey is a beautiful ode both to the history of Chinese Americans and the intriguing ways in which China’s rich food culture continues to take root in the United States and flourish. Mendelson’s section on Chinese American cookbook writers is nothing less than a classic, for she brings sense and order to a long overlooked field with her customary clear perspective and dry wit. Mendelson is one of my favorite food writers, and I’d expect nothing less, but this time she’s outdone herself.”

—CAROLYN PHILLIPS, author of All Under Heaven: Recipes from the 35 Cuisines of China and The Dim Sum Field Guide “What makes Chow Chop Suey unique is how it integrates cooking styles with American and Chinese cultural contrasts. Mendelson never loses sight of the food and how Chinese restaurants and American ‘experts’ of various sorts shaped a cuisine that is both exotic and irresistible.

No one has discussed in such a fascinating and authoritative way the American misunderstanding of basic Chinese culinary principles, the importance of several key cookbooks and restaurants, and the gradual awakening of American palates to something resembling actual Chinese food in the postwar decades. Fun to read, judicious, and above all authoritative.”

—PAUL FREEDMAN, author of Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination “A well-written and insightful guide to the Chinese food scene in America. In a field full of myths, Mendelson’s book is accurate and detailed. A delightful read!”

—EUGENE N. ANDERSON, author of Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China “Mendelson brings together political and culinary history, showing that by inventing quasiChinese dishes that titillated American palates, Cantonese immigrants found a way to survive anti-Asia persecution. Gripping, authoritative, and timely.”

—RACHEL LAUDAN, author of Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History C O L U M B I A U N I V ER S I T Y P R E S S / N EW YO R K

cup.columbia.edu

P R I N T E D I N T H E U. S . A .