Chow Chop Suey, by Anne Mendelson (prologue)

CHOW CHOP SUEY Food and the Chinese American Journey Anne Mendelson

⅗㞯☁ (Pronounced “chau tsap sui” in Cantonese, “chao za sui” in Mandarin) Stir-fried (⅗) jumbled (㞯) fragments (☁), a phrase garbled by latenineteenth-century English-speaking patrons of Chinese restaurants into “chop suey,” with the crucial word “chau” or “chao” omitted.

Prologue A Stroke of the Pen

Lyndon Johnson might have ordered the weather himself on the sunny Sunday afternoon of October 3, 1965. He had ordered the stage backdrop. After canny presidential carrot-and-stick persuasions had successfully pushed one of his most cherished bills through Congress on Thursday, the fiat had gone forth to transfer the signing ceremony from the White House to the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Several days of rapid scurrying in Washington and New York had gotten all the necessary props and security measures in place and dispatched boatloads of politicians, reporters, and onlookers across New York Harbor in time to greet the chief executive.

Among the officeholders watching the White House helicopter bear down on Liberty Island under brilliant autumn skies were four men who cared as deeply about the new legislation as Johnson himself. For senators Robert Kennedy and Edward Kennedy, the signing ceremony marked the triumph of a cause dear to their fallen brother, the late president John F. Kennedy. For Brooklyn representative Emanuel Celler, it spelled the end of a stubborn, often thankless campaign begun during his freshman term more than forty years earlier and finally brought to fruition with the co-sponsorship of an ally who personified the liberal conscience of the age, Michigan senator Philip Hart. H.R. 2580, the Hart-Celler Act, had eventually carried both houses of Congress by wide margins as the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965.

The helicopter doors opened to disgorge Johnson, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and their wives. A gaggle of functionaries followed, among them the new White House press secretary, thirty-one-year-old Bill Moyers. Cameras zeroed in from different angles at 3:08 p.m. as Lyndon Johnson, the statue towering over him, marched to the podium to deliver a speech mostly drafted by Moyers.

Surviving photographs show scarcely a non-Caucasian face in the audience. “The bill that we will sign today is not a revolutionary bill,” the president announced. “It does not affect the lives of millions. It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives, or really add importantly to either our wealth or our power.”

No American politician has ever been more deeply wrong about anything—nor more deeply right—than was Johnson as he went on to say that the new law was nevertheless “one of the most important acts of this Congress and of this administration,” adding, “For it does repair a very deep and painful flaw in the fabric of American justice. It corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.” The wrong in question had been hammered into law in 1924, over the opposition of young Manny Celler, by the joint efforts of Washington State representative Albert Johnson and the equally racist senator David Reed of Pennsylvania. In response to a powerful nativist mood then sweeping the land, the Johnson-Reed Act (or National Origins Act) established the general ethnic makeup of America in 1890—that is, before the greatest influxes of “refuse” from such “teeming shores” as Italy and the Jewish Pale of Settlement—as a template to set future quotas of immigrant labor. Certain people could argue for exemption: merchants, skilled artisans with demonstrable mastery of a trade, students, and professionals like doctors or lawyers. But the numbers of people in these categories who wanted to come to America were fairly limited. Johnson-Reed was meant to (and did) prevent masses of unskilled workers from anywhere in the world except northwestern Europe and the British Isles from competing with birthright Americans. One section broadened the existing provisions of the overtly Sinophobic 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to apply to other Asians, thus imposing especially vigilant barriers to keep out manual labor from the Far East. The 2

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new law never achieved 100 percent success in heading off newcomers deemed to be the scum of humanity, but it would drastically remold the course of immigration for forty-plus years.

Manny Celler’s stance against locking out unskilled immigrants on the basis of where they had been born began to attract influential allies in the decade after World War II. In 1952 Congress roused itself to pass the McCarran-Walter Act, no thoroughgoing repudiation of JohnsonReed’s exclusionary intent but at least a tentative break with a whitesupremacist rationale that had governed all immigration policy since the 1790 Naturalization Act. In 1958 rising Democratic star John F. Kennedy (whose family knew something about anti-immigrant prejudice) wrote an essay titled “A Nation of Immigrants” on behalf of the AntiDefamation League. Reform of the nation’s immigration laws was one of the Kennedy causes that Lyndon Johnson had most sincerely embraced on entering the White House. As with the denial of voting rights to black citizens, he saw both an opportunity and a moral imperative to right an historic injustice.

The ceremony at Liberty Island passed entirely unnoticed by anyone writing about American food and cooking. At the time, few Americans had ever had occasion to consider Chinese food anything but an odd scrap of cultural wallpaper in the nation’s attic. Forty years after the Johnson-Reed Act had slammed the door on immigration from most of the world, people had generally stopped expecting further chapters to unfold in the story of immigrant cooking. Not even culinary snobs had reason to suppose that the new law would ever affect anybody’s ideas of what to have for dinner in Minneapolis, Tallahassee, Boise, Spokane, Houston, or New York.

In 1965 all large American cities, most mid-sized municipalities, and some fairly small towns had either a sprinkling of Chinese restaurants or at least one. Except in cities with Chinatowns big enough to supply hired labor, virtually all were small, family-owned businesses built on the unending drudgery of every member old enough to chop vegetables or wash dishes. (The only difference in larger restaurants was at least nominal wages for equally grueling, generally nonunionized toil.)

What is worth pondering is that outside of Chinatown—and often even there—the target clientele was, and long had been, almost wholly nonChinese. Few people stopped to wonder why.

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The reasons lay eighty or a hundred years in the past. They were as good as invisible to most well-meaning Americans in 1965. The ease with which the Hart-Celler Act had been carried suggested that politicians expected it to produce little more than a peaceful sprinkling of new faces to tell the rest of us how big-hearted we were. The public at large had managed to mislay memories of the inflamed xenophobia originally responsible for the 1882 and 1924 bills, not to mention many other exclusionary measures written into law during the long reign of “America for Americans” rhetoric that really meant “America for Decent White Protestant Americans.”

True, race relations were again erupting into violent confrontation— but in most of the country the very concept of race relations had shrunk to include only two home-grown cohorts, blacks and whites. Earlier controversies over immigrant labor had faded so thoroughly from the national awareness that many otherwise well-educated citizens had no idea of how the Chinese had been treated. The subject was a gigantic blank in public-school curricula and not much better covered in college American history courses.

It took several decades for most Caucasian Americans to notice that the racial makeup of the United States was being profoundly transformed, or to rearrange their mental images of certain groups that the Old World’s teeming shores had sent us generations earlier. Who exactly were the Greeks, Italians, Poles, or Russian Jews who crossed the Atlantic to America’s East Coast before 1924? We can now recognize that they were greatly misperceived for decades—yet never as misperceived as the Chinese who crossed the Pacific to the West Coast during the same period. Even today few white or black Americans know anything about the circumstances that originally dispatched more than two hundred thousand men and a handful of women to this country in the late nineteenth century from one small corner of China.

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