Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States

by Coe, Andrew

  Chop Suey

  Chop Suey

  A Cultural History of Chinese

  Food in the United States

  Andrew Coe

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  Copyright © Andrew Coe 2009

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  The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Coe, Andrew.

  Chop suey : a cultural history of Chinese food in the United States

  / Andrew Coe.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-533107-3

  1. Cookery, Chinese. 2. Food habits—United States—History. I. Title.

  TX724.5.C5C64 2009

  641.5951–dc22 2008054664

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  TO JANE

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  List of Illustrations

  1 Stags’ Pizzles and Birds’ Nests

  2 Putrified Garlic on a Much-used Blanket

  3 Coarse Rice and Water

  4 Chinese Gardens on Gold Mountain

  5 A Toothsome Stew

  6 American Chop Suey

  7 Devouring the Duck

  Photo Credits

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This journey into the less-charted realms of Chinese and United States history could not have been accomplished without the assistance of many individuals and institutions. During the seemingly endless research phase of this project, I depended on the collections, staff, and resources of the New York Public Library: the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, particularly its Asian and Middle Eastern Division, and the Chinese Heritage Collection at the Chatham Square Branch Library. I also consulted the Nixon Presidential Library, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland, and the magnificent Dr. Jacqueline M. Newman Chinese Cookbook Collection housed in the Special Collections and University Archives of the Frank Melville Jr. Memorial Library of the State University of New York, Stonybrook. I am indebted to a Linda D. Russo Grant from the Culinary Trust for allowing me to visit the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Chinese Historical Society of America. The exhibition “Have You Eaten Yet? The Chinese Restaurant in America” at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas was one of the inspirations for this book. During the writing phase of this project, I relied on the staff and workspaces of the New York Mercantile Library’s Writers’ Studio and the New York Society Library. For assistance during all phases of this project, I am grateful to Richard Snow, Magnus Bartlett, Andrew Smith, Anne Mendelson, Harley Spiller, Jakob Klein, Anthony Chang, Charles Perry, H. Mark Lai, Madeline Y. Hsu, Harold Rolnick, Stella Dong, Paul Mooney, Eileen Mooney, Kenny of the Bronx’s Golden Gate restaurant, Jacqueline Newman and Flavor & Fortune, Aaron and Marjorie Ziegelman, and, for technical support, my father, Michael D. Coe. Dwight Chapin, Charles Freeman, and Winston Lord generously granted me interviews on which I drew for the section on Nixon’s China trip. Joanna Waley-Cohen and John Eng-Wong were indefatigable readers who gave me greatly needed perspective. At Oxford University Press, my editors Benjamin Keene and Grace Labatt were painstaking and patient. And thanks to my sons Buster and Smacky for loving Chinese food and usually letting me work.

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1.1. Samuel Shaw (1754–1794), supercargo of the Empress of China and a pioneer of Chinese-American trade

  1.2. A western view of Chinese exotica: A toast at an aristocratic dinner party

  1.3. Large flags proclaim the western presence in the “factory” compound on the outskirts of Guangzhou

  1.4. An engraving from The Chinese Traveller depicts men catching water fowl

  2.1. Caleb Cushing, the U.S. Commissioner to China from 1843 to 1845

  2.2. Rice sellers at a military station, c. 1843

  2.3. An American missionary with her Chinese converts in Fuzhou, c. 1902

  3.1. Bronze cooking vessel from the Shang Dynasty, c. 1600–1046 BCE

  3.2. Two kinds of steamed dumplings

  3.3. A “movable chow shop” in Canton, c. 1919

  4.1. A Chinese restaurant on Dupont Street, San Francisco, in 1869

  4.2. A painter’s depiction of a Chinese fishmonger with his wares, late nineteenth century

  4.3. A Chinese peddler sells fruits and vegetables to a San Francisco housewife

  4.4. A lavish San Francisco banquet restaurant, c. 1905

  5.1. This second floor Port Arthur restaurant attracted wealthy white “slummers” to Mott Street in New York’s Chinatown

  5.2. Li Hongzhang’s 1896 visit to New York stimulated a craze for Chinese food

  5.3. The Latest Craze of American Society, New Yorkers Dining in a Chinese Restaurant

  5.4. A 1950s postcard advertises an upscale Chicago Chinese restaurant

  6.1. Elsie Sigel’s unsolved 1909 murder, dubbed the “Chinatown Trunk Mystery” by the national media, reinforced misgivings about the exotic world of that neighborhood

  6.2. From 1938 to 1962, San Francisco’s Forbidden City nightclub featured performances by Asian-American musicians, dancers, strippers, and magicians

  6.3. The 1916 menu for the Oriental Restaurant in New York’s Chinatown

  6.4. Started in 1959, Bernstein-on-Essex on New York’s Lower East Side was the pioneer of Chinese-kosher cuisine

  6.5. In 1900, Mott Street’s King Hong Lau served white patrons noodle soups and chop suey, with tea and sweets for dessert

  7.1. Inexpensive “family dinners,” like these offerings at New Joy Young in Knoxville, Tennessee, were the mainstay of 1950s Chinese-American restaurants

  7.2. President Richard Nixon shares a meal with Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972

  7.3. Adroitly wielding her chopsticks, Mrs. Nixon enjoys some spicy eggplant on her visit to the kitchens of the Peking Hotel, February 1972

  7.4. In 1972, the Hunam restaurant introduced diners to the “hot-hot-hot” cuisine of China’s Hunan province

  7.5. Many storefront Chinese restaurants, like this one in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, are run by recent Fujianese immigrants

  7.6. P.F. Chang’s offers upscale Americanized Chinese food in an exotic “Chinese village” setting

  Chop Suey

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stags’ Pizzles and Birds’ Nests

  On a frigid morning in February 1784, the Empress of Chin
a set sail from New York harbor. It was embarking on the most ambitious expedition yet attempted by a United States vessel. At the helm stood Captain John Green, a pugnacious six-foot-four-inch veteran of the Continental navy, with many passages to Europe and the Caribbean under his belt. For this trip, he couldn’t count on that experience. His only guide would be a British pilot’s manual that listed what little was known about the reefs and shoals, ports and trade winds his ship would encounter on the journey. If she survived, Captain Green estimated the voyage would take over a year, perhaps as much as two. The Empress of China was setting out on the first American trip to China, the era’s equivalent of the 1969 journey to the Moon.

  As the ship emerged onto the open Atlantic, its timbers creaked and groaned under the weight of its cargo. Barrels in the hold carried almost $20,000 in Spanish silver and thirty tons of dried ginseng root from the mountains of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The Empress’s owners, some of the young nation’s most powerful businessmen, hoped to trade the silver and the ginseng for the tea, silks, and porcelain of China. To sustain the ship’s forty-two-man crew, Captain Green had filled every remaining space both below and above deck with food and drink, enough provisions to last 14 months at sea. This included enough fresh water to last five months and 48 barrels’ worth of alcoholic beverages, mainly white Tenerife wine, strong Madeira wine, brandy, and “old Jamaica spirits” (rum). The wine and brandy were reserved for the officers; the thirsty crew had to make do with the throat-scorching rum.

  The Americans on board the Empress of China carried their culinary traditions with them. On their journey to the other side of the globe, they ate the food of the pan–North Atlantic tradition, from the United States to the British Isles, adapted for the ocean voyage. Their staples were salt beef, salt pork, potatoes, and bread. The food eaten by the officers and the food eaten by the crew were of distinctly different quality. Coops filled with chickens and pens of sheep, pigs, and goats were lashed onto the decks. While this supply of livestock lasted, they provided fresh meat for the officers’ cabin. The bread for the officers was soft and baked fresh by the ship’s cook; the crew had to gnaw on rock-hard, worm-infested ship’s biscuit. Dinners at the officers’ table could include butter, pea soup flavored with bacon, roast meat, meat pies, boiled potatoes and cabbage, cheese, apples, condiments, and cake or pudding for dessert. As they embarked in the dead of winter, fresh vegetables were almost totally absent. For the sailors, meals were a monotonous round of salt meat, potatoes and biscuit, interspersed with peas or beans. All of this was washed down with weak beer that was brewed on board. Three times a week, the crew enjoyed their rations of rum, and on Saturdays they were given the treat of a raisin and molasses-sweetened pudding. Both officers and crew were served a nautical specialty called lobscouse, a stew of salt beef, sea biscuit, and potatoes—though again, the sailors had to chew on the butt ends of the meat while the officers had the best cuts stewed with cabbage and carrots as well as potatoes. Everybody on board seasoned their food with vinegar to keep scurvy at bay.

  A month into the voyage, the Empress landed at the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa. Leaks in the side were caulked, and the crew loaded more water and fresh food for the officers: chickens and goats, two pigs, and some oranges. The next leg of the journey lasted three months and 18 days, during which the men hardly sighted land or other ships. It was “one dreary waste of Sky & water,” the purser wrote. Toward the end, the men were so starved for fresh meat that they captured and threw in the pot some booby birds that appeared and flew around the ship. Samuel Shaw, an officer, noted that they “were lean, very fishy, and but indifferent food.” The crew also attempted to snare an albatross, but it broke the line and escaped.

  Shaw was the Empress’s periwigged supercargo: its business agent, and the second most important man on the ship. Aged twenty-nine, he was a native of Boston and from an early age had been “destined for commercial pursuits.” In 1775, he had enlisted in the American army and risen to the post of aide-de-camp to one of George Washington’s most important generals. At the war’s end in 1783, Shaw had been recognized as a young man to watch. According to his biographer, “the judgement, fidelity, and capacity for business, which he had displayed in the American army, attracted attention and general interest; and an association of capitalists, who had united for the purpose of opening a commercial intercourse between the United States and China, offered to him the station of factor and commercial agent for the voyage.”1 Ambitious, and with barely a penny to his name, he had accepted immediately.

  Figure 1.1. Samuel Shaw (1754–1794), supercargo of the Empress of China and a pioneer of Chinese-American trade. Shaw’s journals chronicle the first American encounters with Chinese cuisine.

  In mid-July, the men finally sighted Java Head, the tree-covered promontory on the Sunda Strait, the channel between the islands of Java and Sumatra. Their ship dropped anchor in Java’s Mew Bay, where it was met by Muslim natives in two canoes proffering chickens, fish, turtles, vegetables, fruits, coconuts, and even live monkeys for sale as sailor’s pets. Already at anchor in the bay were two French ships, including the Triton, which was also heading to China. The bonds of friendship between French and Americans were then particularly strong, thanks to the French backing of the Americans’ side in their war for independence. Shaw and the other American officers were invited to dinner aboard the Triton—“as elegantly served as if we had been at an entertainment on shore.”2 The French captain offered to guide the Empress on the last leg of the journey, a proposal the Americans gratefully accepted because of the many islands and uncharted shoals between Java and China. Just before they set sail, the French and Americans spent a day planting Indian corn, oats, peas, beans, and potatoes on a nearby island. At the end of their work, they toasted the success of their garden, which they hoped to harvest on the return voyage, with bottles of Madeira wine and French champagne.

  On August 23, 1784, after six months at sea, the Americans finally came within sight of the Chinese mainland. They had arrived at the coast of Guangdong Province, at the mouth of the Pearl River in southeast China. Here they encountered a Chinese fishing boat, crewed by the first Chinese they had ever seen, and for $10 hired its captain to guide them up the river. After maneuvering past some rocky coastal islands, the Empress of China and the Triton anchored off the city of Macau, on the river mouth’s western banks. Administered by Portugal since the sixteenth century, this settlement had a distinctly southern European aspect, with large whitewashed houses, narrow winding streets, and green trees and gardens. The Empress fired a salute of greeting, which was soon answered by a salute from the city’s fort. Shaw had the honor of hoisting the red, white, and blue colors of what was then called the Continental flag, the first “ever seen or made use of in those seas.” Early the next morning, a silk-robed Chinese customs inspector climbed aboard and took down the particulars of the boat and where it was from. He then impressed a piece of paper with the large seal that gave the Empress permission to travel further into China. After he left, the American ship was swarmed by little Chinese boats whose owners offered eggs, sugar, and breadfruit for sale. Two days later, the Empress raised anchor and set sail up the Pearl River for the city of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, sixty miles to the north.

  The journey from Macau to the anchorage at Whampoa, twelve miles down the river from Guangzhou, was a favorite subject of the era’s travel writers. This two-day passage gave European and American voyagers their first real encounter with the people and sights of one of the world’s most fabled lands. As they sailed north, the river was increasingly crowded with all kinds of boats, including odd-shaped fishing boats, enormous flat-bottomed cargo boats, and the war junks of the Chinese navy. Some of the boats were evidently home to whole families and the flocks of ducks they tended. Others were piloted by fishermen who used tame cormorants to catch their fish, preventing the birds from swallowing their prey by fastening iron rings around their throats. The Western shi
ps sailed past Chinese forts whose gun emplacements were painted with fearsome tigers and demons. As the land flattened out, the sailors saw bamboo and banana trees and then miles and miles of rice paddies as far as the eye could see. After two days, they arrived at Whampoa, the furthest upstream a deep-drafted ship could travel, where a line of tall masts was already waiting.

  The Empress of China anchored at Whampoa on August 28, 1784, and fired a thirteen-gun salute to the other ships already riding there. French, Danish, Dutch, and English boats all returned the salute. Soon Shaw and Captain Green were visited by the officers of these ships, starting with the French, who assisted the Americans in getting moored and arranging their passage into Guangzhou. For anyone who hadn’t yet heard of the American victory over the British, Captain Green carried copies of the articles of peace and the treaties between the United States and the various European powers. Two days later, the American officers took a Chinese “chop” boat into Guangzhou. As they approached the city, the sights and sounds and smells—the culture shock of being in China—would have overwhelmed them, as they passed pagodas nine stories high, temples, rice paddies, orange plantations, more forts, and hundreds or even thousands of boats painted with glaring colors. Every now and then they would have heard the crash of cymbals and gongs the Chinese boats used instead of cannons to greet each other.