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

by Coe, Andrew

  From the river, the Americans could just barely glimpse the city itself. The view was blocked by a seemingly interminable line of one-story buildings, mostly warehouses that crammed the waterfront. Here and there between these buildings, the Americans would have glimpsed the crenellated city wall and behind it an occasional rooftop, a distant pagoda, and the roofs of some of the larger temples of the city, all topped with tile roofs. During their four months in Guangzhou, Green and Shaw were never allowed to enter the city proper. Instead, they landed on a wharf attached to a twelveacre compound on the riverfront at the southwest corner of the city wall. Here the Chinese had built thirteen two- and three-story warehouses with white facades and columned verandas fronting the river. These buildings were called “factories” because they both housed and provided work spaces for the foreign “factors,” the business agents of the European trading companies. According to imperial edict, this compound was the only place in China where Western nationals could come and go more or less freely.

  After he returned to the United States, Shaw presented a report about his venture to John Jay, the U.S. secretary of foreign affairs (precursor to the secretary of state). Unlike many European travelers, Shaw did not feel that he could discuss Chinese life and culture:

  In a country where the jealousy of the government confines all intercourse between its subjects and the foreigners who visit it to very narrow limits, in the suburbs of a single city, the opportunities of gaining information respecting its constitution, or the manners and customs generally of its inhabitants, can neither be frequent nor extensive. Therefore, the few observations to be made at Canton cannot furnish us with sufficient data from which to form an accurate judgment upon either of these points.3

  This statement was something of an evasion, particularly considering Shaw’s status as leader of the first American expedition to China. Numerous writers with even less direct experience of China than Shaw penned extensive works both before and after his visit. It’s more likely that he was actually not that interested in China itself. He was the first representative of the group that dominated American contacts with China for the next half century—the canny but narrow-minded New England traders. The vast, complicated, exotic, and ancient country of China lay just outside the door, but all they focused on was making a profit. Indeed, Shaw’s description of his time in Guangzhou begins: “to begin with commerce,—which here appears to be as little embarrassed, and is, perhaps, as simple, as any in the known world.”4

  The Guangzhou factories were owned by a small group of wealthy Chinese merchants who had received imperial permission to trade with foreign trading firms. The most powerful of these, the British East India Company, also known as the “Honorable Company,” occupied a sprawling factory in the heart of the compound, right on the central square; the Union Jack flew out front. British traders and Chinese authorities had a complicated relationship. Each side accused the other of arrogance. Backed by the mighty British navy from its base in Calcutta, the East India Company had established trading ventures throughout South and Southeast Asia. In China, however, the emperor limited their business to Guangzhou, cutting them off from the rest of the vast China market, and refused to meet with their representatives or even the English king’s own emissaries. In Guangzhou, British traders occasionally vented their frustrations by beating any coolies who had the misfortune to bump into them on one of the compound’s crowded streets. On the Chinese side, the main advantage of trading with the East India Company was the substantial revenues it brought to the emperor’s personal coffers. The main disadvantage was, as the Chinese saw it, that the foreigners were crude and quarrelsome, pushy and utterly unwilling to adapt to Chinese customs. The emperor believed that letting them come any further into his empire would only upset the harmony of Chinese society. For now, the trade continued because it was profitable, although both sides could see the possibility of conflict further down the road.

  Shaw’s sympathies lay naturally on the European side of this relationship. However, as a newcomer to the region, and from such a young country, he wasn’t exactly in a position to take a stand. His first concern was the business at hand: selling his ginseng. The Americans first stayed in the factory rented by the French but soon secured their own place of business. The first floor of their factory was divided between a warehouse, a counting room, and a treasury; the American living quarters were on the second floor. The landlords provided a phalanx of Chinese servants, from cooks to porters, to carry the Americans’ goods and cater to all of their needs. In order to communicate with both these servants and the merchants, the Americans had to learn the crude local trade jargon known as pidgin Chinese.

  The word “pidgin” probably derives from the word “business,” and appropriately so, because it was primarily used for commercial transactions. Pidgin was a unique combination of Portuguese, English, and Cantonese, with a few words from India thrown in. The jargon had evolved from necessity; the disparate trading communities from the Bay of Bengal to the western Pacific needed a way to communicate with one another. “Go catchy chow-chow” meant “fix something to eat” in pidgin, which sounded very much like a parent talking to a recalcitrant and somewhat deaf child. Neither the Chinese nor the Europeans had bothered to learn their trading partners’ native tongues, so pidgin was used in all interactions between them. (In a sense, both sides were talking down when they used pidgin. However, in contemporary English and American accounts of life in Guangzhou, we only hear the Chinese side of the conversation. To readers, this has the affect of infantilizing the speakers; it’s hard to respect someone who talks in such an ungainly manner.)

  For Shaw, his first problem was explaining to the Chinese exactly who the Americans were:

  Our being the first American ship that had ever visited China, it was some time before the Chinese could fully comprehend the distinction between the Englishmen and us. They styled us the New People, and when by the map, we conveyed to them an idea of the extent of the country, with its present and increasing population, they were not a little pleased at the prospect of so considerable a market for the productions of their own empire.5

  Shaw was also insecure about how the European contingents in Guangzhou would treat the Americans. After all, the United States was barely eight years old, a toddler on the world stage, and had recently waged a bloody war with Britain, the world’s rising imperial power. He was gratified to find that “the attention paid us at all times by the Europeans, both in a national and personal respect, [was] highly flattering.”6 This was expected from their French allies, but even the British went out of their way to shower the Americans with attentions. During their first few weeks in Guangzhou, each of the foreign factories invited the American party to elaborate meals in their personal quarters.

  Shaw doesn’t say it, but attending those dinners must have caused him great anxiety. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a man’s character was very much tied up with his manners. The more refined his social graces, the more civilized he was thought to be. One’s behavior in public was a matter of performance, constantly judged by those present, and the most crucial of such performances was the meal. As Dr. Johnson said, the hour of dinner was the most important hour in civilized life. In the United States, Shaw had dined at the tables of American generals, but he had never before ventured abroad and had no experience of foreign customs. All that was said about dinner-table etiquette in Lord Chesterfield’s Advice to his Son, on Men and Manners, the only etiquette book then published in post-revolutionary America, was that every gentleman should “study to acquire that fashionable kind of small talk or chit chat, which prevails in all polite assemblies” and also learn the art of carving: “a man who tells you gravely that he cannot carve, may as well tell you that he can’t blow his nose; it is both as easy and as necessary.”7

  In Guangzhou, Shaw would have been acutely aware that his social status was, at best, unsettled. His hosts were worldly Europeans, direct heirs to centuries
of courtly tradition. Shaw and the American party were provincials, almost frontiersmen, living in a land at the edge of the wilderness and very, very far from the heart of European civilization. It was crucial for them to behave with grace and good manners, because a misstep would not only bring shame on them personally, potentially harming their China endeavor, but also dishonor their country.

  The invitation that gave Shaw the most trepidation was probably his dinner in the sumptuous quarters of the East India Company. In accordance with their commercial dominance and their role as the de facto representatives of the world’s rising imperial power, the British traders lived in regal luxury. On the second floor of their factory, they enjoyed a library, a billiards room, a chapel, and an enormous dining room called the Great Hall. When Shaw stepped into this room, it would have been decorated with crystal chandeliers, with portraits of the king and various directors of the Company on the walls. Doors opened onto a terrace overlooking the Pearl River. The long dinner table, set for thirty, glittered with silver candlesticks and cutlery and the finest porcelain. The guests were seated strictly according to rank, with the chief British trader acting as host and Shaw sitting next to him as the guest of honor. Although the meal was prepared by Chinese cooks, the food was strictly elite European cuisine. In the eighteenth century, this meant a strong French influence, the remnants of medieval spicing (including clove and nutmeg), and probably an Anglo-Indian curry or two. There would have been two courses of at least ten dishes each, from a cream-based soup to roast teal and blancmange, followed by a dessert of fresh and dried fruits and walnuts. Copious amounts of imported alcohol would have been poured throughout, including red, white, and Madeira wines. Frequent toasts, during which all the diners would stand, would have been made to the king, the U.S. president, the emperor of China, the success of the diners’ business ventures, and so on. The richest men of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia could not have provided a more elaborate feast.

  Apparently, the Americans’ behavior at the dinner was a success, and they passed the social test. After the meal, the chief British trader pulled Shaw and Green aside for a little private talk. Over another bottle, he apologized for the Americans’ reception in Guangzhou. He had meant for the British, not the French, to give the first reception for the newcomers: “For trust me, gentlemen, that we would not designedly have put you in such company.”8

  During his four months in Guangzhou, Shaw saw as much of the city as Europeans who had been trading there for a dozen years. In other words, he was mostly confined to the twelve-acre compound that held the factories and the three narrow thoroughfares that ran beside them—Old and New China streets and Hog Lane. These were lined with stores selling souvenirs, including silks and hand-painted porcelain, and grog shops dispensing rotgut liquor to the sailors. Beyond the compound, the streets into the city were blocked by gates that were manned twenty-four hours a day. The only way a foreigner could travel further was with official permission and in the company of a Chinese interpreter. Shaw made only a handful of trips outside the western compound. One of these was across the river to the island of Honam (also called Henan), where most of the Chinese merchants who traded with the foreigners kept sprawling homes and gardens. In the company of some French merchants, Shaw and Green were invited to dine at the house of Chouqua—the trade name of Chen Zuguan, a member of a prominent merchant family. Shaw was particularly impressed with Chouqua’s gardens: “Much art and labor are used to give them a rural appearance, and in some instances nature is not badly imitated. Forests, artificial rocks, mountains, and cascades, are judiciously executed, and have a pleasing effect in diversifying the scene.”9 He tells us much less about what they ate. What struck him was that “on these occasions, the guests generally contribute largely to the bill of fare. . . . At Chouqua’s . . . the French supplied the table furniture, wine, and a large portion of the victuals.”10 This was common practice during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because most western merchants in Guangzhou were not culinary adventurers. The French brought the “table furniture” because they couldn’t use Chinese spoons and chopsticks, the wine because they preferred that to hot Chinese rice wine, and the “victuals” because they couldn’t stomach the dishes prepared by Chouqua’s chef.

  One of the exceptions to this rule was an English rake, William Hickey, who had been shipped east in 1769 to find his fortune—and to keep his hell-raising escapades from further blotting the family name. Unfortunately, he was more interested in fast living and sleeping with Chinese prostitutes than knuckling down to work. During his stay in Guangzhou, he and some other Englishmen were invited to a series of banquets at a Honam mansion. On the first night, the meal was served “à la mode Anglaise, the Chinamen on that occasion using, and awkwardly enough, knives and forks, and in every respect conforming to European fashion.” On the second night, “everything was Chinese, all the European guests eating, or endeavouring to eat, with chop sticks, no knives or forks being at the table. The entertainment was splendid, the victuals supremely good, the Chinese loving high dishes and keeping the best of cooks.”11 By “high,” Hickey probably meant that the dishes were rich and luxurious. (Another meaning of “high” is slightly rotten, as in the aged game dishes preferred at many English aristocratic tables. The Chinese, however, liked their meat absolutely fresh-killed.)

  Figure 1.2. A western view of Chinese exotica: A toast at an aristocratic dinner party, with musicians and entertainers in the background.

  After four months in China, Shaw finally sold his ginseng at a good price. It turned out that the quality of his product was better than anything his European competitors had brought. The Chinese merchant with whom Shaw sealed this transaction complimented him for not behaving like a rude, difficult Englishman: “But you speak English word, and when you first come, I no can tell difference; but now I understand very well.” Nevertheless, he doubted that the American’s polite behavior would last very long: “All men come first time China, very good gentlemen, all same you. I think two three time more you come Canton, you make all same Englishman too.”12

  By the end of December 1784, the Empress of China’s hold was packed with hundreds of chests of bohea and hyson tea, yellow nankeen cloth, silk, and porcelain. The customs authority issued its “Grand Chop,” which gave the Empress permission to leave China, and on December 28, she raised anchor and set sail for the United States. Other American ships were already heading east across the Atlantic, around the Cape of Good Hope and then on to China. Shaw and the crew of the Empress had inaugurated the era of the China trade. For the next sixty years, traders from ports like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Salem, Massachusetts, would set sail for the other side of the world, lured by the chance to become rich by trading for the tea and finished products of one of world’s largest and oldest nations. These traders’ adventures led to one of the most remarkable—and unlikely—culinary exchanges of the last few centuries.

  In 1784, the United States and China were, respectively, the youngest and oldest countries on Earth. The Americans were then still working out the most basic principles of government (the Constitutional Convention would take place three years later) and just beginning the process of deciding what made their culture distinct from England and the rest of the Old World. The Chinese, in contrast, had become one country over two millennia earlier and could trace their lineage as a culture back to the dawn of history. Unlike the new nations of Europe who could not ignore the achievements of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, China had almost always been the dominant culture in its region, East Asia. As a consequence, many Chinese thought of their country as the “Middle Kingdom,” the center of human civilization. It was thanks to some of their legendary rulers that humankind had first learned to use fire, to hunt and to fish, to sow crops and build houses, to treat illness with medicine, to write, and to mark time with calendars. The Chinese had also developed a highly complex system of government, at whose apex stood the emperor, ruling under wh
at they called the Mandate of Heaven: as long as the emperor remained virtuous, Shangdi, the supreme ruler of Heaven, would give him command over all humanity. In 1784, China was governed by the great Qianlong Emperor of the Manchu-dominated Qing Dynasty. He wielded power from his throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony in Beijing’s Forbidden City, which was off-limits to all except his closest retainers.

  Expanding outward from this point, the Chinese traditionally divided the world into a series of five concentric circles, based on an ancient plan ascribed to the legendary Yü Emperor. First came the royal domains, meaning all the lands within the borders of China directly ruled by the emperor. All Chinese were, by definition, civilized. The core of these domains was what Westerners called China Proper: the eighteen provinces extending from what is now Hebei in the northeast to Hainan Island (then part of Guangzhou Province) in the south and to Sichuan in the west. Just beyond China’s borders lay the lands of the tributary royal princes: the kingdoms of Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Tibet, Mongolia, and others. Made humble by the presence of the Chinese behemoth next door, their rulers had decided that it was usually far better to accept Chinese supremacy in East Asia than fight it. They learned Mandarin Chinese, converted to the Chinese calendar system, and at regular intervals donned Chinese costume and traveled to the court at Beijing to give costly tribute to the emperor. In return, he would invite them to an imperial Manchu banquet, sixth grade. Beyond these tributary kingdoms lay the zone of pacification, where the people were in the process of adopting Chinese civilization. For some, this process was remarkably rewarding. The ancestors of the Qing Dynasty’s Manchu emperors were Jurchen tribesmen, seminomadic farmers and hunter-gatherers in northeastern China. Over the centuries, the Jurchen chiefs carefully studied the Chinese imperial system. When the Ming Dynasty fell apart in the early seventeenth century, the Jurchen roared down from the north and occupied Beijing. They renamed themselves the Manchu and founded the Qing Dynasty, on a basis of strict obedience to the Chinese imperial system, in effect becoming more Chinese than the Chinese.