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

by Coe, Andrew

  Intimate, shared, low-key, and generally nonalcoholic, the Chinese family meal was the daily counterpoint to the occasional banquet. Depending on the region, this main meal was consumed at midday, in the late afternoon, or at night. Until the twentieth century, men and women usually ate separately, and the men often enjoyed the tastiest, richest morsels. Places were set with cups for tea and bowls for soup and fan, along with chopsticks and spoons. In the middle of the table were placed—at the same time, in one large course—the cai dishes, including soup, a vegetable, and, if the family could afford it, a meat dish and a fish dish. Everybody shared, using chopsticks to pluck morsels from the serving dishes and place them on their fan. Greediness was frowned on; children knew that if they did not clean their bowls, they risked marriage to “a wife (or a husband if you are a girl) with pockmarks on her face, and the more grains you waste, the more pockmarks she will have.”20 These family-style meals were also consumed in many workplaces, including at Chinese restaurants. Today, if you visit a Chinese eatery nearly anywhere in the United States between the end of lunch and the beginning of dinner, you will likely see chefs and wait staff sitting down to a tasty, nutritious, highly traditional Chinese meal.

  Restaurants have a very long history in China. At a time when fine food in western Europe was confined to a handful of great monasteries, the Song Dynasty capital, Kaifeng, supported hundreds of commercial food businesses and a rich gourmet culture:

  The men of Kaifeng were extravagant and indulgent. They would shout their orders by the hundreds: some wanted items cooked and some chilled, some heated and some prepared, some iced or delicate or fat; each person ordered differently. The waiter then went to get the orders, which he repeated and carried in his head, so that when he got into the kitchen he repeated them. These men were called “gong heads” or “callers.” In an instant, the waiter would be back carrying three dishes forked in his left hand, while on his right arm from hand to shoulder he carried about twenty bowls doubled up, and he distributed them precisely as everyone had ordered without an omission or mistake.21

  Some of the city’s restaurants were so renowned that the emperor himself ordered out for their specialties; they could also cater the most elaborate banquets, in their own halls or at the homes of the wealthy. Kaifeng’s many eateries also included teahouses where men could sip tea, gossip, and order snacks or full meals, as well as wineshops, which were more popular at night. There, music and singing accompanied wine and food; brothels were often attached to these establishments. Further down the social ladder, workers and poor families could buy their daily food from a huge variety of simple cookshops and street vendors. The offerings included noodles, congees, offal soups, fried and steamed breads, mantou, and many types of sweet and savory snacks. To the poorest, vendors sold boiling water in which they could cook their meager rations.

  China’s vibrant restaurant culture continued unabated through the end of the Qing Dynasty. The English clergyman John Henry Gray, one of the few Europeans with a serious interest in Chinese food, summed up the typical nineteenth-century urban eatery thus:

  The restaurants are generally very large establishments, consisting of a public dining-room and several private rooms. Unlike most other buildings, they consist of two or three stories. The kitchen alone occupies the ground floor; the public hall, which is the resort of persons in the humbler walks of life, is on the first floor, and the more select apartments are on the second and third floors. These are, of course, resorted to by the wealthier citizens, but they are open to persons in all classes of society, and it is not unusual to see in them persons of limited means. At the entrance-door there is a table or counter at which the proprietor sits, and where each customer pays for his repast. The public room is immediately at the head of the first staircase, and is resorted to by all who require a cheap meal. It is furnished, like a café, with tables and chairs, a private room having only one table and a few chairs in it.22

  The upper rooms, generally reserved for the elite, were used for dinner parties and banquets of all sizes. Downstairs, customers could order simpler, less expensive fare, noodle soups and roast meats, for a quick lunch or dinner. All guests, rich and poor, entered the restaurant through the ground-floor kitchen, where they could judge for themselves the skill of the chefs, the quality of the roasted ducks, chickens, and pigs hanging from the ceiling (right above the chopping block), and the facility’s cleanliness. When the Chinese immigrated to the United States, they carried this style of restaurant intact to their new homeland.

  For more casual dining, the Chinese could choose from a variety of establishments. Teahouses were particularly ubiquitous after the spread of tea drinking to every rank of Chinese society. All of them were important social centers where men, in particular, liked to gather to relax, sip tea, crunch on salted melon seeds, gossip, smoke their pipes, listen to singers or storytellers, and perhaps have a more substantial bite to eat. In some teahouses, patrons could order and savor rare and delicious teas; in others, mainly in the South and especially in Guangdong Province, the food predominated. Gray wrote of the “tea-saloons” of the type he knew in Guangzhou:

  Each consists of two large saloons furnished with several small tables and stools. Upon each table is placed a tray, containing a large assortment of cakes, preserved fruits, and cups of tea. A cashier seated behind a counter at the door of the saloon receives the money from the guests as they are leaving the establishment. There is a large kitchen attached to all of them, where cooks remarkable for their cleanliness are daily engaged in making all kinds of pastry.23

  Those pastries were what we now call dim sum, from dim sam, Cantonese for “dot heart,” an expression roughly equivalent to “hits the spot.” As in dim sum parlors today, the bill was totaled by adding up the number and size of the small plates on the patron’s table. The Guangzhou teahouses were strictly segregated by sex—no women were allowed—and often featured early morning songbird competitions in which patrons vied to see whose pet could sing the sweetest tune. For those with less time to waste, a popular option was to purchase food from the itinerant street vendors who traveled across cities much as the coffee and lunch trucks in modern America do. The basic equipment of these traveling kitchens was a stove and a provisions chest, suspended on either end of a strong bamboo stick that the chef shouldered from spot to spot. Wherever a hungry-looking crowd gathered, he would stop to vend his inexpensive but filling food in bowls that were wiped clean between every customer. This simple, highly portable cuisine could also be transported overseas to new settlements throughout Southeast Asia and even across the Pacific Ocean.

  For at least three thousand years, the basic building blocks of Chinese cuisine remained largely the same: ingredients, cooking methods, tools, flavorings (particularly soy sauce, ginger, and scallions), the fan-cai dichotomy, and the interlinked concepts of food and health. Nonetheless, all Chinese did not by any means eat all the same food. For truly “national” dishes, we would have to look to the tables of the elite—the delicacies like sea cucumbers and birds’ nests that were served in similar preparations on banquet tables across China—and to the codified menus for official celebrations. At other times and on other tables, regional food preferences were as different as, say, the cuisines of Italy, Germany, England, Spain, and France. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Yuan Mei and other food writers began to recognize and celebrate the culinary differences among the various regions and cities of China. This topic long fascinated, and bedeviled, Chinese gourmets. (For the sake of simplicity, in the following discussion I limit the main regional cuisines to four, based on the points of the compass—with considerable fuzziness around the edges.)

  Figure 3.3. A “movable chow shop” in Canton, c. 1919. Street vendors have sold noodles and other staple foods since the Sung dynasty.

  Northern cuisine was centered on Beijing and the North China Plain. At the time of the Qing Dynasty, millet was still eaten there, but the grain staples were wheat breads
and noodles. Mutton and lamb were consumed most widely, often with onions, garlic, or scallions or dipped in vinegar or in sweet and savory sauces. Peking duck, especially roasted and dipped in a savory sauce, may have been the invention of a Yuan Dynasty imperial chef. Beijing dining was also heavily influenced by the food of the Manchu, the dominant tribe whose homeland lay to the northeast. This included dairy products and the roast meats Cushing sampled. Eastern cuisine encompassed a huge stretch of China’s richest and most populous territory, perhaps from Shandong all the way down to Fujian. This cuisine was based on fresh and saltwater plants and animals, particularly fish and crabs, flavored with ginger, wine, sugar, and vinegar. Specialties included soups and slow-cooked stews with delicate seasonings. The grain staples ranged from millet and breads in the northeast to rice in the southeast. In treaty ports like Shanghai and Fuzhou, foreign merchants and missionaries tasted these specialties at the homes of wealthy merchants and local officials. In Western cuisine, centered on the inland provinces of Hunan and Sichuan, the food was spicy and oily, often featuring a sophisticated blend of intense flavors. Here rice and noodles were the staples, frequently topped with pork, cabbage, river fish, bamboo shoots, and mushrooms. Americans did not acquire a taste for these highly seasoned specialties for over a century.

  The southern cuisine was centered on Guangdong Province, the region that for decades defined Chinese food in American minds. Here the people mainly spoke Cantonese and had a long history of rebelliousness—this was the last part of China Proper to surrender to the Manchu army. The most important part of Guangdong for this discussion is the Pearl River Delta, home to the cities of Guangzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong. Like the roots of a great tree, the Pearl River’s three main tributaries meet in the vicinity of Guangzhou, where they divide into a profusion of narrower rivers, streams, and canals. This mesh of waterways shapes the rich, swampy soils of the larger delta, one of the most fertile regions of all China. The Pearl River itself, the main trunk of this riverine system, forms near Guangzhou and flows south to its wide mouth on the South China Sea. To the west of the Pearl River, human settlement marks every square inch of the delta; even the low hills are dotted with stone and concrete grave markers. In the mid–nineteenth century, the Pearl River Delta was a region of crowded cities, bustling market towns, and thousands of villages, interspersed with fields of green vegetables, orchards, rice paddies, and fish ponds. Water connected almost all these communities; there are so many rivers and streams and canals that travelers observed that roads were almost unnecessary. Rice, vegetables, pork, duck, fish, and shellfish were the staples of the delta diet.

  The delta’s richest region, Sam Yap, or Three Districts (in Cantonese), which surrounded Guangzhou, consisted mostly of farmlands dotted with smaller cities, towns, and villages. The sophisticated chefs of the provincial capital excelled at seafood, which they prepared as simply as possible, often steaming or gently poaching it. The seasonings were usually soy or oyster sauces, fermented black beans, ginger, and scallions. These chefs also skillfully prepared roast meats, particularly pig and duck, as well as slow-cooked casseroles to be served over rice. In Guangzhou, the tradition of teahouse food reached its apex, with dim sum chefs preparing a vast array of sweet and savory pastry snacks. Outside the city’s walls, the land was flat, fertile, and green; truck gardens, rice paddies, and fish ponds, often bordered with lychee trees, surrounded most communities. The regular markets that crowded into most of the cities and towns specialized in fish, fruit (lychees, longans, oranges), herbal medicines, spices, pearls, and silk grown on nearby farms. The nearby town of Shunde was a noted restaurant destination where many Guangzhou gourmets went on eating excursions—and found chefs to staff their private kitchens back in the capital. The next region south, Zhongshan, which was hillier, ran all the way down the western riverbank to Macau. Here the main occupations were rice growing and fishing; thousands of seagoing fishing vessels crowded the narrow channels that connected Zhongshan with the sea.

  To the west, the Pearl River Delta graded into the more rugged hills of the poorer Sze Yap (Four Districts) region. Here, the largest towns lay along the Tan River; the most important was the city of Xinhui, the center of a fantail palm–growing district, whose inhabitants manufactured ornate fans for the rest of China and abroad. As in Guangzhou, the people spoke Cantonese, but a local dialect of it that the sophisticated residents of Sam Yap found harsh and hard to understand. Away from the river, the countryside was divided between barren, scrub-covered hills and narrow valleys dense with villages and farms that were connected by well-beaten tracks. In each village, several rows of tightly packed houses faced the valley, where lay the village’s fish ponds, water buffalo wallows, rice paddies, and vegetable fields: taro with their giant leaves, beans on trellises, cucumbers, squashes, and gourds. On the hillsides stood the orange, banana, and lychee orchards, as well as the pigpens and manure pits. People’s meals centered around fancai—bowls of rice topped with a bit of vegetable or fish—or mixed stir-fries, made by throwing a bit of everything one had on hand into the wok. Under the broad branches and thick foliage of the village banyan tree, farm families enjoyed the midday shade, processed rice, and conducted meetings. Here the villagers discussed their most pressing issues: how to sustain one’s community and one’s clan in a region where people could barely produce enough food to survive, bandits roamed the countryside, and the provincial government was alternately weak and oppressive.

  For the villagers of the Sze Yap region, the answer was often to seek their fortunes elsewhere—in Sam Yap, Guangzhou, even overseas. For decades, they had joined emigrants from other parts of the South in seeking better conditions elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In 1848, the people of the Four Districts heard of a new and more alluring place of opportunity—across the Pacific Ocean. They would come to call it Gold Mountain.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Chinese Gardens on Gold Mountain

  Kicking up a cloud of dust and dung, a train of carriages pulled up to the entrance of the four-story Occidental Hotel, San Francisco’s finest hostelry, to await the distinguished guests from the East. At six o’clock in the evening, they emerged: Schuyler Colfax, U.S. Speaker of the House; William Bross, lieutenant governor of Illinois; and Samuel Bowles and Albert Richardson, two noted newspapermen intent on publicizing the promise of the American West. They were escorted into the carriages by the evening’s Committee of Invitation, a phalanx of the city’s white elite, and the procession clattered off toward a destination just a few minutes away. In the heart of the city, where in 1865 few buildings were more than twenty years old, 308 Dupont Street stood out—a gaudy assemblage of balconies, banners, colored lanterns, and signs bearing the words “Hong Heong Restaurant.” Here the carriages stopped; their passengers alighted and were ushered through the first-floor kitchen, where the chefs bowed to them, and then up the stairs. In the third-floor reception room, they met their hosts, San Francisco’s leading Chinese merchants and the heads of the six main Chinese associations, commonly called the Six Companies. At least sixty men crowded into the room, half of them Chinese and half European Americans. Their dress and appearance were a study in contrasts: the Chinese dignitaries wore loose robes of blue and purple satin, richly embroidered, and silk skullcaps; their faces were smooth and their foreheads shaven, with long plaited queues hanging neatly down their backs. The Americans were dressed in dark woolen jackets, vests, and trousers; black bow ties and white shirts; trimmed beards and moustaches covered their faces; their thick, unruly hair was plastered across their foreheads. After a round of drinks from a table crowded with American and European liquors, a servant announced “The poor feast is ready,” and the guests descended to the second-floor dining room.

  Everything there had been imported from China—tables, lamps, decorative screens, and place settings. Ornate partitions decorated with colored glass divided the room into three sections, each enclosing three or four circular tables. Six or seven places were set on each
table, with ivory chopsticks and porcelain spoons, bowls, plates, and cups; little dishes for soy sauce, mustard, pickles and sweetmeats; and a large Chinese-style flower centerpiece in the middle. Colfax, the guest of honor, was seated next to the head host, Chui Sing Tong of the Sam Yap Company; the other diners took their seats, and the procession of dishes began. Bowles noted: “there were no joints, nothing to be carved. Every article of food was brought on in quart bowls, in a sort of hash form.”1 During the first course, he recorded fried shark’s fin and grated ham, stewed pigeon and bamboo soup, fish sinews with ham, stewed chicken with watercress, seaweed, stewed duck and bamboo soup, sponge cake, omelet cake, flower cake, banana fritters, and birds’ nest soup. Some of the Americans mastered their spoons and chopsticks; others were given forks with which to sample their helpings of “fish, flesh, fowl and vegetable substances, in a thousand forms undreamed of to French cooks and Caucasian housewives generally.”2 A journalist from the Chicago Tribune liked the shark’s fin and ham—“a nice nutty flavor quite pleasant to taste”—and the bird’s nest soup—“which I assure you is a delicacy.” Bowles was not so enthusiastic: “every article, indeed, seemed to have had its original and real taste and strength dried or cooked out of it, and a common Chinese flavor put into it.”3 The tea, however, was delicious and refreshing.