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

by Coe, Andrew

  Nevertheless, the first account we have of Americans eating Chinese food does not appear until 1819, thirty-five years after Shaw’s visit. It was written by Bryant Parrott Tilden, a young trader from Salem who acted as supercargo on a number of Asia voyages. In Guangzhou, he was befriended by Paunkeiqua, a leading merchant who cultivated good relations with many American firms. Just before Tilden’s ship was set to sail home, Paunkeiqua invited the American merchants to spend the day at his mansion on Honam island. Tilden’s account of that visit, which was capped by a magnificent feast, is not unlike the descriptions Shaw or even William Hickey wrote a half century earlier. First, he tours Paunkeiqua’s traditional Chinese garden and encounters some of the merchant’s children yelling “Fankwae! Fankwae!” (“Foreign devil! Foreign devil!”). Then Paunkeiqua shows him his library, including “some curious looking old Chinese maps of the world as these ‘celestials’ suppose it to be, with their Empire occupying three quarters of it, surrounded by nameless islands & seas bounded only by the edges of the maps.” Finally, his host tells him: “Now my flinde Tillen, you must go long my for catche chow chow tiffin.” In other words, dinner was served in a spacious dining hall, where the guests were seated at small tables.

  “Soon after,” Tilden writes, “a train of servants came in bringing a most splendid service of fancy colored, painted and gilt large tureens & bowls, containing soups, among them the celebrated bird nest soup, as also a variety of stewed messes, and plenty of boiled rice, & same style of smaller bowls, but alas! no plates and knives and forks.” (By “messes,” Tilden probably meant prepared dishes, not unsavory jumbles.)

  The Americans attempted to eat with chopsticks, with very poor results: “Monkies [sic] with knitting needles would not have looked more ludicrous than some of us did.” Finally, their host put an end to their discomfort by ordering western-style plates, knives, forks, and spoons. Then the main portion of the meal began:

  Twenty separate courses were placed on the table during three hours in as many different services of elegant china ware, the messes consisting of soups, gelatinous food, a variety of stewed hashes, made up of all sorts of chopped meats, small birds cock’s-combs, a favorite dish, some fish & all sorts of vegetables, rice, and pickles, of which the Chinese are very fond. Ginger and pepper are used plentifully in most of their cookery. Not a joint of meat or a whole fowl or bird were placed on the table. Between the changing of the courses, we freely conversed and partook of Madeira & other European wines—and costly teas.20

  After fruits, pastries, and more wine, the dinner finally came to an end. Tilden and his friends left glowing with happiness (and alcohol) at the honor Paunkeiqua had shown them with this lavish meal. Nowhere, however, does Tilden tell us whether the Americans actually enjoyed these “messes” and “hashes.”

  In 1830, American missionaries joined the traders in Guangzhou and Macau. The United States was then decades into a religious awakening that had spread from New England west to the frontier. A key tenet of this evangelical Christian movement was the solemn duty to spread the Protestant gospel to every corner of the nation and the globe. One of those who caught the fervor was a Massachusetts farmer’s son named Elijah Coleman Bridgman. After devoting his life to God at a local revival meeting, he was eventually ordained as a “minister to Christ, and as a missionary to the heathen.” When he learned that more heathens lived in China than any other country on Earth, Bridgman took a berth on the next boat to Asia. Soon after he landed in Guangzhou, he took a tour of a Chinese temple and was invited by the priest to share some food. With the help of a translator, he quizzed the priest about his beliefs over Chinese tea and “sweetmeats,” probably candied fruits. At the end of this repast, Bridgman “thanked and rewarded him for his hospitality, and left him as we found him, a miserable idolater.”21

  Bridgman soon concluded that the Middle Kingdom was the most morally debased land on Earth: “Idolatry, superstition, fraud, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression everywhere predominate, and iniquity, like a mighty flood, is extending far and wide its desolation.”22 To make matters worse, the Chinese were deaf to his gospel-spreading efforts. Guangzhou authorities refused to allow missionaries to proselytize in the Chinese city, and the local Chinese in Macau showed little interest in his message of salvation. After twenty years of preaching, Bridgman and his fellow American missionaries could count literally no Chinese converts; the few who had embraced the Christian faith had all reverted to their heathen ways!

  With his dour and implacable faith, Bridgman was adept at conveying his vision of China to anyone who would listen. In 1832, he became the Guangzhou tour guide of Edmund Roberts, an American diplomat on a round-the-world journey to improve trade ties. Roberts published a long account of his voyage that is filled with virulent xenophobia. Of the Chinese he writes:

  In their habits they are most depraved and vicious; gambling is universal and is carried to a most ruinous and criminal extent; they use the most pernicious drugs as well as the most intoxicating liquors to produce intoxication; they are also gross gluttons; every thing that runs, walks, creeps, flies, or swims, in fact, every thing that will supply the place of food, whether of the sea, or the land, and articles most disgusting to other people, are by them greedily devoured.23

  His outrage about Chinese culinary habits may have been particularly spurred by the fact that his window in the American factory overlooked the afternoon dog and cat market in Old China Street.

  Other missionaries who joined Bridgman in Guangzhou included Peter Parker and Samuel Wells Williams. Parker, another Massachusetts farmer’s son, had been educated at Amherst and Yale at a time when these schools produced more lawyers and ministers than anything else. A classmate described him as short, fat, and sluggish, but “quick as a toad” when he wanted to be. After Parker decided that he, too, wanted to save the Chinese heathens, his advisors suggested that he study medicine as a backup. Stymied in his missionary efforts in Guangzhou, Parker opened a clinic to treat the Chinese for eye disorders. Samuel Wells Williams, the only one of this group who wasn’t ordained as a minister, was the son of a devout printer in Utica, New York. Williams considered becoming a botanist before his father secured him the job of running the missionary printing press in Guangzhou. Shortly after landing, he wrote to his father:

  I have been here a week, and in that short time have seen enough idolatries to call forth all the energies that I have. . . . To take a circuit thro’ one of these streets about eventide, and see the abominations practiced against the honor of Him who has commanded, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and not be affected with a deep sense of the depth to which this intellectual people has sunk, is impossible to a warm Christian man.24

  Williams joined Bridgman in writing and printing a monthly journal, the Chinese Repository. During its lifespan, the Repository became an encyclopedic compilation of Western knowledge about China, including its culinary customs.

  Four months after arriving in Guangzhou, Williams was invited to his first Chinese meal—“it should be more properly termed a gratification of curiosity than any pleasure”—the obligatory banquet at a merchant’s house:

  At 7 p.m. the dinner began with a soup of birds’ nests which we ate with chop sticks; these we used somewhat clownishly at first, as it required a little practice to eat a soup with two ivory sticks. Then followed dishes whose names and contents were unknown, but which tasted pretty much all alike. They were all in cups about the size of tea-cups, and when given to each guest always eaten with these same chop-sticks. In eating liquid dishes, as soups, the mouth is put down to the edge of the dish and the contents shoveled in. They will eat rice as fast again in this way as I could ever manage with a spoon. Some of the dishes we had were birds’ nests, lily roots, pigs’ tongues, fishes’ stomachs, sharks’ fins, biche-de-mer, fishes’ heads—and others to the number of fourteen. After this a European dinner was served, but rather inferior.25

  The main difference between these American
missionaries and the traders in Guangzhou was that Bridgman and his compatriots were actually interested in the lives of the Chinese. This curiosity was driven by their mission work, because they realized they couldn’t convert their audiences unless they knew something about their history, beliefs, and customs. Bridgman and Williams researched a wide variety of aspects of Chinese life, from weights and measures to grammar to the practices of the imperial court, and published all their findings in the Chinese Repository. These articles were reprinted in many United States periodicals and avidly read by merchants looking for information they could use in the China trade.

  In 1835, Williams wrote a long essay for the Repository, on the “Diet of the Chinese.” His scientific background shows itself in his thorough investigation of every aspect of his subject. He admits that due to the restrictions on foreign travel within China, his article gives only a fragmentary look at the country’s cuisine: “in endeavoring to ascertain the sources from whence food for so great a population is derived, and the various modes which are employed to fit it for use, we shall resort to all means of information within our reach. Our inquiries, however, must be confined chiefly to those persons who have come more or less in contact with foreigners.” Using travelers’ accounts as well as his own observations in and around Guangzhou, Williams first gives a long description of the grains, vegetables, fruits, oil plants, fish, domesticated animals, birds, insects, beverages, and liquors the Chinese consume. He then turns to Chinese kitchens, cooking methods, and meal customs and mentions the huge numbers of “taverns, eating-houses, and cook-stalls” in the cities. Of the larger restaurants, he remarks that “we should suppose that they were much patronized, but by what particular class, or whether by all classes, we do not know.” The edict forbidding foreign entry into the city still held, so no foreigner had ever dined in a Guangzhou restaurant. About halfway through this article, Williams lets slip his unvarnished opinion about Chinese food. Here we finally learn what all the traders really thought about the weird dishes served at the banquets across the river at Honam:

  The cooking and mode of eating among the Chinese are peculiar. . . . The universal use of oil, not always the sweetest or purest, and of onions, in their dishes, together with the habitual neglect of their persons, causes an odor, almost insufferable to a European, and which is well characterized by Ellis, as the “repose of putrefied garlic on a much used blanket.” The dishes, when brought on the table, are almost destitute of seasoning, taste, flavor, or anything else by which one can be distinguished from another; all are alike insipid and greasy to the palate of the foreigner.26

  It’s unclear how the Chinese dishes could be both insipid and stinking of garlic, onion, and rancid oil. In fact, Westerners smelled that aroma everywhere. Even outside the dining room, this was what many Americans and Europeans apparently thought the Chinese smelled like—garlic, onions, and body odor.

  By the late 1830s, relations between the Chinese and the barbarians had grown strained. The westerners were tired of being cooped up in Guangzhou and Macau; they ached to sell their goods in the whole of China. Americans and Europeans had also grown weary of Chinese arrogance, of what Bridgman saw as China’s “absurd claim of universal supremacy.” To them, any nation that rejected Christianity could not claim to be the center of human civilization. On the Chinese side, the Daoguang Emperor and his top officials believed that the barbarians must be reined in, if not kicked out of the Middle Kingdom altogether. They had good cause. For decades now, the British had been smuggling opium into China from India. This was against Chinese law (and western morality), but the profits were too great for the Crown to stop: income from opium helped Britain maintain its status as the dominant seagoing power. Tired of trading in sea cucumbers and birds’ nests, American merchants began shipping in their own opium from Turkey. By the early nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese had become opium addicts, a situation that ruined lives and weakened local economies. Half the officials along the South China coast had become corrupted by bribery. Finally, in 1839 Daoguang Emperor ordered the blockade of Guangzhou and the arrest of the principal traffickers. This action precipitated the disastrous Opium War of 1840–42.

  The emperor thought it enough to strengthen the Guangzhou harbor blockade and set up cannons along the Guangdong coast. The British fleet bypassed Guangzhou and sailed up the east coast of China bombarding cities. They then doubled back to Guangzhou and encircled the city, forcing its officials to capitulate and hand over a large ransom. In 1842, when the rest of the British Asia fleet arrived from India, the combined force included dozens of fully armed warships and ten thousand soldiers. They sailed up the China coast again, capturing the major port cities and even threatening Beijing. Chinese resistance was fiercest along the Yangzi Valley, but the British weapons and soldiers proved unstoppable. The western army marched up the Yangzi, one of China’s richest districts, destroying any opposition it met. As his military evaporated, the emperor vacillated, unable to decide whether to surrender or fight on. Finally, he summoned his trusted aide Qiying, who like himself was a Manchu and a direct descendant of the Qing Dynasty’s founder. Qiying had seen the awesome power of the British military machine up close and advised the emperor that a policy of appeasement was the only option. Realizing that the war threatened the survival of his dynasty, the emperor agreed to sue for peace. In August 1842, Qiying signed the Treaty of Nanking aboard a British battleship. The Chinese agreed to have full diplomatic relations with Britain, to cede Hong Kong to the Queen, to open four more ports to trade, and to pay a massive indemnity. It was China’s most humiliating defeat at the hands of barbarians since the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Putrified Garlic on a Much-used Blanket

  The white sails of the U.S.S. Brandywine, a frigate carrying forty-four guns, appeared off the coast of South China in February 1844. Its most important cargo was the first United States ambassador to China: Caleb Cushing, bearing a letter from President John Tyler to China’s emperor. A large party assembled at Macau’s docks to welcome him ashore, while a marine band played and cannons roared a salute from the Portuguese fort. As the boat carrying Cushing, rowed by a dozen American sailors, hove into view, his costume appeared first: he wore a white ostrich feather atop a large, navy blue hat, a blue coat covered in gold buttons, white pantaloons with a gold stripe down the side, tall boots, and spurs—the uniform of a major general. Some of the women tittered behind their fans; the European merchants whispered wry comments to each other. When Commissioner Cushing alighted and the crowd caught sight of his face, the snickering stopped. He looked the model of the nineteenth-century authority figure—tall, with a strong chin, a stern mouth line, and a flowing moustache. His deep baritone voice could fill the largest meeting halls. In fact, the only thing that had kept him out of the highest political posts was his aloof and uncompromising disposition—he lacked the common touch. As Cushing shook the hands of the dignitaries at the dock, the people could sense the seriousness with which he took his mission. After sailing halfway around the world at some risk to his life (one of his boats had been destroyed by fire), Cushing was determined to do whatever it took to formalize a treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and China—even if it meant eating at a Chinese table.

  In the aftermath of the 1840–42 Opium War, the United States was intent on increasing its influence in East Asia. President Tyler and Secretary of State Daniel Webster knew the terms of the Treaty of Nanking and had heard that British merchants were at the forefront of opening up new markets in China. The letter to the Chinese emperor that Cushing carried (which introduced its bearer as “Count Caleb Cushing, one of the wise and learned men on this country”) proposed opening a new era of “peace and friendship” between China and the United States. Tyler’s terms for this friendship included full diplomatic relations, trading privileges for American merchants that were at least as favorable as the Treaty of Nanking
’s, and permission for American missionaries to live and proselytize among the Chinese. Over the next few decades, American diplomats, merchants, and missionaries would indeed have much greater access to Chinese officials and to China’s 300 million customers and souls. However, the post–Opium War years did not necessarily usher in a new era of friendship between the two peoples—with direct consequences for the American experience of Chinese food.

  In the decades before the Opium War, the relations between the two countries had been purely commercial. The American merchants in Guangzhou had actively rejected the idea of a U.S. treaty with China, not wanting to upset their lucrative status quo. This attitude had changed during the blockade of Guangzhou, when American traders had asked for the intervention of American warships to protect their lives. The war started before the ships could be sent out. As a result, in 1841 Parker had traveled to Washington to make the case to Tyler and Webster for a formal U.S.-China agreement. Parker was deeply afraid that the conflict would cause China to close its doors to the West. Not only would American business suffer; the heathens might lose the “moral benefits” of the missionary enterprise. Parker’s choice to lead the first U.S. diplomatic mission to China was ex-president John Quincy Adams, who had already given a rabble-rousing speech on the Opium War. The war’s real cause, Adams had said, was not the opium trade but “the pretension on the part of the Chinese, that in all their intercourse with other nations, political or commercial, their superiority must be implicitly acknowledged, and manifested in humiliating forms.”1 He went on: “it is time that this enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations, should cease.”2 If negotiations with the Chinese didn’t work, Adams, like Parker, was quite prepared to enforce American claims to trading rights with a fleet of warships.