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

by Coe, Andrew

  Both Cushing and Fletcher Webster took advantage of this enthusiasm by embarking on lecture tours of the major East Coast cities. Webster, the more entertaining of the two, told of the diplomats’ many adventures, including the “horrors” of their Chinese banquets. He may have realized he went too far in these descriptions, because one reporter in the lecture hall wrote: “Mr. Webster went on to say that he did not mean to ridicule the customs of the Chinese, but that on seeing them for the first time, they of course would strike any one as singular.”10 In his drier and more didactic lectures, Cushing particularly dwelled on the oddness of Chinese customs: “To an American or European, cast for the first time into the midst of Chinese society, everything seems contrary to his own established usages. Not only does he find himself at the antipodes, geographically speaking, but equally so with respect to manners, customs, and morals.” Everything Chinese was spectacularly strange: the costumes, music, and mourning customs; the practice of reading from top to bottom and right to left; and so on. And of course, among those customs was their manner of eating: “Food is eaten with two sticks, and it requires some skill to dexterously pick it up and convey it by their means; every thing is served cut up, in small bowls; and it is considered a compliment to hand a morsel to your neighbor with your sticks, he taking it on his own.”11 In an era before the notion of men from Mars had popular currency, in a sense Cushing’s Chinese filled the role of our era’s space aliens—the perfect opposite of everything Americans considered right and proper.

  It’s impossible to know what picture of Chinese food stuck in the minds of the American audience of 1845. The culinary descriptions passed on by Guangzhou merchants, missionaries, and diplomats were based on firsthand experiences, but they may not have been what Americans remembered. A few months after Cushing returned, at least a dozen newspapers printed this little tale:

  It is said that Caleb Cushing, on being asked to dine with Mandarin Lin, discovered on the table something of which he ate exorbitantly, thinking it to be duck. Not speaking Chinese, and wishing to know what it was, he pointed to it, after he had finished, saying to his host interrogatively, “Quack, quack, quack?” The Mandarin, with equal brevity, replied, with a shake of the head, “Bow, wow, wow.” Mr. Cushing’s feelings may be imagined.12

  Actually, this joke was at least a half century old, with the British ambassador filling the role of Cushing. That didn’t matter to the newspapers, which told their readers that this little yarn was “too good” not to repeat. If the average American knew anything about the food of China, it boiled down to the idea that the Chinese people’s preferred food was dogs.

  The Treaty of Wang Xia was unanimously ratified by the U.S. Senate on January 16, 1845, and signed by President Tyler the next day. For diplomats, it formalized ties to the Chinese government; for merchants and missionaries, it gave them far greater access to Chinese markets and Chinese souls along the Chinese coast. It did not, however, lead to a golden age of understanding between the peoples of the two nations. After a brief era of goodwill, American diplomats soon became frustrated at what they saw as the “arrogance and conservatism” of Chinese authorities. They still were unable to trade and travel through all of China, and they chafed at continued implications that Western culture was inferior to the Chinese. To them, the West’s victory in the recent Opium War confirmed not only its superior military technology but the rightness of its morality—the hand of divine providence had guided the cannon fire against the pagans. On the Chinese side, resentment also increased—over the valuable tracts of Chinese territory foreigners now controlled and the unabated traffic in opium, which was slowly poisoning the populace. The most positive thing the Chinese authorities could say about the Americans was that they weren’t the British, who were at the forefront of the opium trade and would use any excuse to demand, often at gunpoint, further trading privileges in China. Instead, the U.S. diplomats played a kind of double game: they wouldn’t pick a fight with the Chinese, but they wouldn’t hold back the British either. For American merchants and missionaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Qing empire’s gradual descent into chaos meant unparalleled opportunity.

  The speedy opium clippers were western traders’ vessels of choice. As soon as each new treaty port opened up—first in Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningpo, and Shanghai, later in a host of smaller coastal and river cities—the traders built their docks, warehouses, offices, and residences. Back in Guangzhou, they had railed against their confinement to the factory quarter and their isolation from the Chinese city. Now, strangely, they replicated that isolation, although on a more spacious scale, in gated communities well separated from the Chinese cities. The British, the dominant faction among the merchants, set the social tone here. There was to be no mingling with “inferior” races beyond what was necessary for trade. The westerners considered life inside the Chinese walls dirty, smelly, noisy, crowded, overwhelming, and best avoided. The only time they ventured there was when they had business with the local authorities or for the obligatory banquet with a Chinese merchant. As they strode through the crowded city streets, many Europeans would use their canes as clubs, beating a path through the Chinese men, women, and children so they could walk unmolested. The Chinese authorities could do nothing, because they had little authority over the foreigners in the treaty ports.

  The Americans and Europeans preferred to spend time among their own kind, dividing their leisure hours between walks along the waterfront, rowboat excursions, sports like cricket and rackets, riding, drinks at the club, and elaborate meals. Here’s the menu of a typical dinner for western traders in Shanghai:

  rich soup, and a glass of sherry; then one or two side dishes with champagne; then some beef, mutton, or fowls and bacon, with more champagne, or beer; then rice and curry and ham; afterwards game; then pudding, pastry, jelly, custard, or butter and a glass of port wine; then in many cases, oranges, figs, raisins, and walnuts . . . with two or three glasses of claret or some other wine.13

  All of these dishes would have been carried in by armies of Chinese servants, who were hired so cheaply that even the lowliest clerk could expect to be waited on hand and foot. Not until well after 1900 did western merchants admit to actually liking Chinese food or eating in a Chinese restaurant.

  A British trader later summarized the dominant attitude of traders in China: “Commerce was the beginning, the middle, and the end of our life in China . . . if there were no trade, not a single man, except missionaries, would have come there at all.”14 In the twentieth century, this attitude morphed into something called the “Shanghai mind,” which one observer said resembled “a comfortable but hermetically sealed and isolated glass case.”15 Inside that case, western merchants devoted themselves to business and the observance of an elaborate and highly stratified social code, which boiled down to “us,” the westerners, versus “them,” the Chinese. For any European or American to show interest in China or Chinese life beyond trade was social and professional suicide. Unlike the original generation of merchants who lived in the Guangzhou factories, the American businessmen working in late nineteenth-century China rarely thought it worthwhile to write about their experiences.

  Missionaries made up the other main group of American China hands in the decades after the Treaty of Wang Xia. Unlike the merchants, missionaries had to live in the Chinese cities, learn the local dialects, and study local customs to further their goal of saving souls. In order to inspire more Americans to come to China to continue their holy work, many of them wrote books about the country, its people, and their experiences. Perhaps the most influential of these was written by Samuel Wells Williams, the editor and printer of the Chinese Repository. In 1845, Williams had returned to the United States on furlough. He wished to see his father, who was terminally ill, and he hoped to raise money for his China work. Specifically, he wanted the funds to purchase a complete set of Chinese type, so he could publish Bibles, tracts, and other works in Chinese. His backers on the missionary
board were dubious—they actually wanted to cut back on the printing work—but Williams managed to raise $600 from his home church in Utica. Then, like Cushing and Fletcher Webster, he set out to lecture on China in any church or public hall that would invite him. The tour lasted over a year, covering a dozen states. During this time, Williams met, courted, and married his wife Sarah, and decided to turn his lecture notes into a book. He had noticed that many in his audiences thought the Chinese ridiculous—“as if they were apes of Europeans, and their social state, arts, and government, the burlesques of the same things in Christendom.” China hands like himself, he said, were expected to tell tales of

  Mandarins with yellow buttons, handing you

  conserves of snails;

  Smart young men about Canton in nankeen tights

  and peacocks’ tails.

  With many rare and dreadful dainties, kitten cutlets,

  puppy pies;

  Birdsnest soup which (so convenient!) every bush

  around supplies.16

  This quatrain by Lady Dufferin, a popular British poet, was apparently all the rage at the moment. Williams feared that if all that Americans remembered about China were cartoonish images like these—or stories about dishes that went “Bow, wow, wow”—they wouldn’t take seriously the great task of converting China. By the end of 1847, he had compiled The Middle Kingdom, a two-volume, 1,250-page tome that remained the principal American reference work on China into the twentieth century. (Its frontispiece features a perhaps inadvertently insulting portrait of the imperial emissary Qiying that shows him bareheaded and in a costume stripped of all sign of rank.)

  Williams wrote The Middle Kingdom to show that “the introduction of China into the family of Christian nations, her elevation from her present state of moral, intellectual, and civil debasement, to that standing which she should take, and the free intercourse of her people and rulers with their fellowmen or other climes and tongues, is a great work, and a glorious one.” Furthermore, he says, the holy work of converting the Chinese “is far more important than the form of their government, the extent of their empire, or the existence of their present institutions.” He then contradicts this claim by spending most of the two volumes discussing China’s government, empire, culture, religion, and so on with the utmost scholarly rigor. In fact, there’s a strange dichotomy throughout the book between learned investigation and reductive moralizing. For instance, he begins the first volume with a thoughtful discussion of the name “China” itself, which is used in many foreign languages but not by the Chinese themselves. The word may derive from “Qin,” or “Ch’in,” the name of the dynasty that unified China and ruled it from 221 to 206 BCE. During the first millennium of the Common Era, “China,” whose location was uncertain, was the fabled source of the costly fabric, worn by emperors and kings, that came from the East on camel-back along the Silk Road. In the minds of the Christian West, “China” only became firmly fixed as the great empire at the opposite end of the Eurasian continent with the writings of Marco Polo and the other travelers who followed him into Asia. Williams says that over the centuries, the Chinese themselves have called their land “Beneath the Sky,” “All Within the Four Seas,” and the “Middle Kingdom.” (Today, the nation’s formal name is Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo, “People’s Republic of China,” literally “People’s Republic of the Middle Prosperous State.”) But then the missionary in him comes forward to render judgment on these presumptions: “All these names indicate the vanity and the ignorance of the people respecting their geographical position and their rank among the nations.”17

  Figure 2.2. Rice sellers at a military station, c. 1843. In The Middle Kingdom, Williams describes the grain as “emphatically the staff of life. . . . Its long use is indicated in the number of terms employed to describe it.”

  Williams based the information in The Middle Kingdom on Chinese sources, his own observations, and most of all, the first dozen years of the Chinese Repository. He essentially sought to condense that publication into a more palatable form for readers who were not experts on China. We see this in the book’s discussion of Chinese food, in which he mostly follows the outline of his Repository article “Diet of the Chinese,” covering rice and other grains, vegetables, fruits, oils and fats, beverages, meats, poultry, fish, and the three delicacies birds’ nests, sea cucumbers, and sharks’ fins. He notes with care the Chinese revulsion toward western dairy products like butter and cheese. Predictably, he attacks the idea that cats, dogs, and rats commonly appear in the Chinese diet:

  Few articles of food have . . . been so identified with the tastes of a people as kittens and puppies, rats and snails, have with the Chinese. The school geographies in the United States usually contain pictures of a market-man carrying baskets holding these unfortunate victims of a perverse taste (as we think), or else a string of rats and mice hanging by their tails to a stick across his shoulders, which almost necessarily convey the idea that such things form the usual food of the people. . . . However commonly kittens and puppies may be exposed for sale, the writer never saw rats or mice in the market during a residence of twelve years there. . . . He once asked a native if he or his countrymen ever served up lau-shang tang, or rat-soup, on their tables; who replied that he had never seen or eaten it, and added, “Those who do use it should mix cheese with it, that the mess might serve for us both.”18

  Though Williams tones down the harshness of his Repository article’s judgments, he still cannot bring himself to enjoy the food of China. The “repose of putrefied garlic on a much-used blanket” is gone. Now, the food is admired as “sufficient in variety, wholesome, and well cooked,” but it remains “unpalatable to a European from the vegetable oil used in their preparation, and the alliaceous plants introduced to savor them.” He treats only minimally the question of how the Chinese prepare their dishes, commenting that they like to cut up their food into small pieces before stewing or frying. In sum, he reported: “the art of cooking has not reached any high degree of perfection among the Chinese, consisting chiefly of stews of various kinds, in which garlic and grease are more abundant than pepper and salt.”19 One of the world’s great cuisines was reduced to a couple of oily stewpots. Judgments like these would dominate American opinion of Chinese food for many decades.

  Unfortunately, when Williams returned to Guangzhou in 1848, he discovered that the community of Western China hands was no longer interested in that country’s history and culture, except as they furthered their own narrow interests. He wrote home: “the class of merchants here now take very much less interest in China than they used to, and the publication is carried on at a loss.”20 In fact, he soon had to stop publishing the Chinese Repository because subscriptions dropped dramatically. (He spent the next few decades of his life in the U.S. consular service and then retired to teach at Yale University.) He also found that the missionaries who were then arriving in China—those who had answered his call—were a different breed than the earlier generation. The missionary boards back in the United States had grown tired of supporting men like Williams, Parker, and Bridgman, with their printing presses, schools, hospitals, and scholarly work. Now they wanted young, energetic, devout, and single-minded men and women who could concentrate on the task of saving Chinese souls. These turned out to be far more interested in Williams’s examination of China’s moral “debasement,” especially the three pages he devotes to female infanticide, than his scholarship about Chinese life and customs.

  When the new crop of missionaries landed in the treaty ports (usually, to their embarrassment, aboard opium schooners), they settled in Chinese neighborhoods and quickly began the tasks of preaching to anyone who would listen, distributing Chinese-language tracts, and building Christian chapels. This description of the Presbyterian preacher John B. French in his home near Guangzhou clearly shows how these new missionaries viewed the world outside their doors:

  The sides and rear of his little two story dwelling . . . was [sic] closely packed in by
small Chinese houses swarming with heathen life—blocked off by narrow, dark, and filthy foot-paths as the only streets; presented but a dismal home for a man in the freshness of youth and refinement of feeling. Still here he lived alone, with a Chinese boy to bring him water and cook his rice, and a Chinese teacher to aid him in the study of the language. And he was happy and cheerful. He had daily communings with the pure above though surrounded by pagans below—and while every thing around him was dark and filthy, and deafening discord—within his heart all was peace, and within his house all was neatness and order. 21

  The author of that paragraph was William Dean, a Baptist from upstate New York. When he was first recruited for the mission field, he was “tall, broad-shouldered, with muscles hardened on his father’s farm, with dark brown eyes that could sparkle with fun or glow with the fire of determined purpose.” But after preaching to the “heathens” for fifteen years, six of those in China, he was tired out, weakened by tropical disease, old wounds from Malaysian pirates’ spears, and the deaths of two wives in the Far East. Even in convalescence, he retained his faith in his holy work. In 1859, he published The China Mission, a kind of instruction manual for young evangelists. Its four hundred pages include every point he thought relevant about the Middle Kingdom, from geography to religion, as well as inspirational stories about the triumphs of Protestant missionaries—and about their not infrequent martyrdoms. (Many observers noticed that missionary wives seemed to die with particular rapidity in Asia.) He dispatches the cuisine of China in one short paragraph: