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

by Coe, Andrew

  After anywhere from 12 to 136 courses—the attendees’ accounts differ greatly—the guests retired to the reception room to smoke, stretch their legs, and say goodbye to the heads of the Six Companies, who departed. The remaining portion of the dinner was hosted by the dozen or so leading Chinese merchants. After a “peculiar performance” by a Chinese musical group, everyone returned to the second floor for round two. The diners refreshed themselves with cups of cold tea and strong, rose-scented liquor, and the feast resumed: “lichens and a fungus-like moss,” more sharks’ fins, stewed chestnuts with chicken, Chinese oysters (“yellow and resurrected from the dried stage”), another helping of stewed fungus, a stew of flour and white nuts, stewed mutton, roast ducks, rice soup, rice with ducks’ eggs and pickled cucumbers, and ham and chicken soup, according to Bowles. Speeches of welcome and appreciation were exchanged. The party moved to the third floor again for a “Chinese historical recitative song pitched on a key higher than Mount Shasta.” When they returned, they discovered that the tables had been set for the dessert course, which was limited to a huge variety of fresh fruits. At the end, Richardson made a tally: Governor Bross had tasted every dish; he himself had tried around seventy; and Speaker Colfax had tried forty. “The occasion was curious and memorable. Hereafter, upon every invitation, I shall sup with the Celestials, and say grace with all my heart.”4 The Tribune’s reporter wrote: “For myself I shall always esteem myself peculiarly happy having made one with the party, in which there was so much to see and think of, albeit there was not much which we who speak only the Saxon tongue, could understandingly write about.” But where was Bowles, who had sampled only about a dozen dishes?

  I went to the restaurant weak and hungry; but I found the one universal odor and flavor soon destroyed all appetite; and I fell back resignedly on a constitutional incapacity to use the chopsticks, and was sitting back in grim politeness through dinner number two, when there came an angel in disguise to my relief. The urbane chief of police of the city appeared and touched my shoulder: “There is a gentleman at the door who wishes to see you, and would have you bring your hat and coat.” There were visions of violated City ordinances and “assisting” at the police court the next morning. I thought, too, what a polite way this man has of arresting a stranger to the city. But, bowing my excuses to my pig-tail neighbor, I went joyfully to the unknown tribunal. A friend, a leading banker who had sat opposite to me during the evening, and had been called out a few moments before, welcomed me at the street door with: “B—, I knew you were suffering, and were hungry,—let us go get something to eat,—a good square meal!” So we crossed to an American restaurant; the lost appetite came back; and mutton-chops, squabs, fried potatoes and a bottle of champagne soon restored us. My friend insisted that the second course of the Chinese dinner was only the first warmed over, and that was the object of the recess. However that might be,—this is how I went to the grand Chinese dinner, and went out, when it was two-thirds over, and “got something to eat.”5

  In the 1860s, the white elites of San Francisco had no taste for Chinese food. Once or twice a year, they attended ceremonial banquets like this one, mainly to promote the business interests they shared with the Chinese merchants. They preferred the comforts and pretensions of the city’s best French restaurants. (There, waiters who spoke “French to the American and English to the Frenchman” served them the customary menu of soup, “fish, salad, two or three entrées, vegetables, roast, dessert, fruit and coffee, in their proper order and succession.”)6 These men were, however, very familiar with the sight of pigtailed Chinese on the streets. Tens of thousands of Asian immigrants lived in the city, many in the “Chinese quarter” centered on Dupont Street (now Grant Avenue). Whites patronized Chinese peddlers and laundrymen, bought Oriental curios and furniture at the Dupont Street dry goods stores, and did business with the big Chinese merchants like those who attended the Hong Heong banquet. For sixteen years, the whites and Chinese of San Francisco had been living in uneasy, but mostly peaceful, coexistence.

  It was gold that brought them together on the Pacific coast of North America. During the first half of the nineteenth century, occasional Chinese sailors had turned up in the coastal towns. In mid-1848, a rumor had whispered across the Pearl River Delta, first brought by clipper ships to Hong Kong and then spreading to Macau and Guangzhou, that in a place called California, gold deposits lay so thick that a man could dig two or three pounds of the yellow metal in a day! Every clipper brought fresh details about the fabulous find. The news was discussed on the balconies of the big European trading firms, in the marketplaces, and even out in the country villages under the banyan trees. People from all nations were flocking to California to make their fortunes. There, prospectors became rich with gold but had nothing on which to spend their wealth. They needed food, tools, blankets, clothing, shoes, wood, and stone for houses; furniture, tableware, ornaments for the fine stores and mansions they would surely build; and, of course, food. Those goods took three months or more to arrive from New York or Boston; from Guangzhou, the journey took less than half the time. In the mines themselves and in the burgeoning city of San Francisco, the gateway to the gold fields, adventurous Chinese saw opportunity. So in early 1849, the first few dozen Chinese embarked for the place they called in Cantonese Gam Saan (Jinshan in Mandarin): Gold Mountain.

  Figure 4.1. A Chinese restaurant on Dupont Street, San Francisco, in 1869. From the décor to the chopsticks, nearly all of its furnishings would have been imported from China.

  Departing mainly from Hong Kong, the Chinese adventurers sailed across the Pacific via Manila and the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). When the clippers approached the California coast, the land was usually shrouded in fog, invisible except for a few coastal hills and far-off mountains looming above the white. To arrive at San Francisco, the ships sailed through the strait known as the Golden Gate and turned south into a broad bay. There they found boats from all over the world that had been abandoned by crews eager to find their fortunes in the mountains. As the Chinese were rowed ashore with the other passengers, they had a chance to examine the city, such as it was. At midcentury, San Francisco was mostly a raw assortment of canvas tents and one-story wooden houses connected by muddy streets and sand tracks that led off into the dunes. Three years earlier, this place had been an isolated village named Yerba Buena, population two hundred, occasionally visited by ships looking to load water or cattle hides. Now it was the busiest port on the Pacific coast; every clipper that stopped disgorged passengers and goods. There were no real warehouses, so boxes and merchandise piled up in streets crowded with a motley horde of treasure seekers. They were almost all men, from every state in the East, Oregon Territory, Canada, Mexico, the Pacific islands, Peru, Chile, France, England, Germany, Italy, Turkey, and China. All of them were looking for their best chance. On speculation, many had brought all kinds of commodities, from liquor to East Coast newspapers to mining shovels, which they hoped to unload at exorbitant prices. A ship captain on the Pacific route bought lumber in Guangzhou and hired a team of Chinese carpenters to assemble it into houses in San Francisco. Most of the Chinese who disembarked in 1849, however, were not contract laborers but merchants and adventurers who had purchased their own passage. Like the rest of the crowd on the city’s sandy streets, they hoped to become rich in this new country, either in the gold diggings or by opening stores or other businesses, such as restaurants.

  San Franciscans possessed a lot of ready gold, and they were hungry. Few of these men had real homes, with wives and servants to work in the kitchen, so they customarily took all three meals in restaurants. A young correspondent for the New York Tribune, Bayard Taylor, found the culinary offerings far more diverse than plain American fare. “The tastes of all nations can be gratified here,” he wrote.

  There are French restaurants on the plaza and on Dupont Street; an extensive German establishment on Pacific Street; the Fonda Peruana; the Italian Confectionary; and three Chinese houses,
denoted by their long three-cornered flags of yellow silk. The latter are much frequented by Americans, on account of their excellent cookery, and the fact that meals are $1 each, without regard to quantity. Kong-Sung’s house is near the water; Whang-Tong’s in Sacramento Street, and Tong-Ling’s in Jackson street. There the grave Celestials serve up their chow-chow and curry, besides many genuine English dishes; their tea and coffee cannot be surpassed.7

  The chief attraction of the first Chinese restaurants in North America was clearly the price—all you could eat for $1.00, in the city where food probably cost more than anywhere else on the planet. Even a dish of steak and eggs and a cup of coffee in some grubby tent down by the docks ran $2.50. Another draw was the professionalism of the Chinese restaurateurs:

  I once went into an eating-house, kept by one of these people, and was astonished at the neat arrangements and cleanliness of the place, the excellence of the table, and moderate charges. It was styled the “Canton Restaurant”; and so thoroughly Chinese was it in its appointments, and in the manner of service, that one might have easily fancied oneself deep in the heart of the Celestial Empire. The barkeeper—though he spoke excellent English—was a Chinese, as were also the attendants.8

  Despite the décor, these restaurants clearly served both Chinese and western dishes. The Englishman William Kelly wrote that “they give dishes peculiar to each nation, over and above their own peculiar soups, curries and ragouts.”9 Eager for novelty in a city where everything was new and strange, many diners sampled the Chinese side of the menu. William Shaw, another Englishman, reported: “the dishes are mostly curries, hashes, and fricasees, served up in small dishes, and as they were exceedingly palatable, I was not curious enough to enquire as to the ingredients.”10 Unfortunately, the descriptions of the food don’t get more detailed than that. The “curries” were likely varieties of minced or diced meats in highly seasoned sauces, while the “fricasees” may have been stir-fries. In any case, it’s probable that most diners ordered their dinners from the western side of the menu, where they could find “English food” like mutton chops. In short, the restaurateurs made sure that they served nothing that would shock western palates:

  Do not think, reader, that their larders were furnished as at Hong Kong, or Canton, “with rats and mice, and such small deer,” or that they would compel you to eat rice with chop sticks, or that they would cram you with birds’ nests. I had the curiosity to try them, the hazard notwithstanding, and found, to my gratification, that the viands were served up in true American style, with knives, forks, spoons, and all the other accessories of the table. Their coffee is excellent, and nothing is deficient but their skill in pastry.11

  From the crosscultural sophistication of these establishments—and the fact that their staffs spoke English—we can guess that their owners probably learned their trade in Guangzhou or Hong Kong, catering to the European tastes and vigorous drinking habits of foreign merchants. In San Francisco, they found a location where customers’ desire for good value and service, as well as sense of adventure, helped some restaurateurs amass modest fortunes.

  By 1850, when it was recorded that four thousand Chinese were living in California, some merchants and restaurateurs had already amassed enough wealth to pull up stakes and sail back to the Pearl River Delta. The news of their return, and of the wealth one could acquire in California, sent shock waves through South China, where many caught “gold fever.” For every dozen Chinese who returned, hundreds departed. In 1851, about twenty-seven hundred Chinese arrived in San Francisco; a year later, the number was almost twenty thousand. Chinese men, dressed in their distinctive wide straw hats, loose jackets and trousers, and oversize boots, streamed off clipper ships. Each carried his bedroll, clothes, and provisions (mainly rice, dried seafood, and seasonings) in baskets suspended on a bamboo rod. During the first years of the Gold Rush, the Chinese came from all parts of the Pearl River Delta and represented a wide variety of social classes, from merchant to artisan to laborer. Later, the immigrants increasingly came from the poor district of Sze Yap and traveled not as free men but as contract workers destined to work off the prices of their tickets in the mines. After they passed through customs, they were met by agents of the big San Francisco Chinese merchants, who were all associated with the “Six Companies” representing different districts of the delta. Taking the place of the traditional clan associations, the Six Companies mediated disputes, administered punishments, acted as insurance companies and banks, shipped the dead back home, and negotiated relations between their countrymen and the larger non-Chinese community. These merchants had usually already contracted the immigrants’ labor to American mine owners, and new arrivals spent no more than a few days in San Francisco before they were transported by river boat, wagon, or foot to the harsh terrain of the gold fields.

  In California and eventually the rest of the American West, the mining districts were a scene of intense economic competition. Men were drawn to the region not as pioneers or nation-builders but to get rich as quickly as possible. California’s governmental institutions were hastily formed—the state capital moved seven times between 1850 and 1854—and could easily be swayed by big business or mob rule. Violence seethed just below the surface, with drunkenness everywhere. The crime rate was sky-high; the only justice was frequently the vigilante’s rope. In the gold fields, American prospectors discovered that they had to contend with foreign miners, particularly the more experienced Mexicans, Chileans, and Peruvians. The Americans’ response was to hang a few of the foreign miners on trumped-up charges and expel the rest at gunpoint. Their excuse was that the foreigners were likely criminals, the dregs of their native countries and “innately depraved.” The real motive was fear that the foreigners would outdig the “freedom-loving” American miners. At first, few Chinese worked in the mines; then in 1852, over the space of a few months, “the surplus and inferior population of Asia” appeared at every gold field. Concerns rose that the big mine owners would hire masses of Chinese and overwhelm the independent operators. Americans immediately noticed everything that made the Chinese different, from their “chattering” language to the way they wore their hair in queues to what they ate.

  If there is one class of “nasty furriners” . . . more ill-favored, unfortunate and forlorn among us than another, it certainly must be the Chinese. . . . They are sunk immeasurably lower than the native Indians, in the estimation of the miners. Lower than the beasts that prey upon the flesh of inferior animals, for the bear it is said, will turn from tainted meat, whereas “John” despises nothing of the creeping or crawling kind. Rats, lizards, mud-terrapins, rank and indigestible shell fish, “and such small deer,” have been, and continue to be, the food of the “no ways particklar” Celestial, where flour, beef and bacon, and other food suitable to the stomachs of “white folk” abound.12

  Echoing this sentiment, the authors of the 1855 Annals of San Francisco reported that the “manners of the Chinese are very repugnant to Americans in California. Of different language, blood, religion and character, inferior in most mental and bodily qualities, the Chinaman is looked upon by some as only a little superior to the negro, and by others as somewhat inferior.”13 Newspapers reported that the bill of fare in a San Francisco Chinese restaurant read: “Cat Cutlet, 25 cents; Griddled Rats 6 cents; Dog Soup, 12 cents; Roast Dog, 18 cents; Dog Pie, 6 cents.”14 John Bigler, the governor of California, fanned nativist sympathies in a reelection campaign; he was the first American politician to seize on the anti-Chinese issue, pushing bills to ban contract labor and tax foreign workers. These measures were opposed, with more or less success, by a coalition of merchants (both white and Chinese) and ship owners who saw that the Chinese were good for business, and by missionaries trying to save Chinese souls. Californians’ anti-Chinese feelings nevertheless continued to fester, fueled by a series of articles by Bayard Taylor that were widely reprinted in the local papers. (He had already earned renown with his 1850 Eldorado, or Adventures in the P
ath of Empire, one of the earliest accounts of the Gold Rush.)

  “Tall, erect, active looking and manly, with an aquiline nose, bright, loving eyes, and the dark, ringleted hair with which we endow, in ideal, the head of poets,” Taylor was one of the great Romantic figures of nineteenth-century American literature.15 He considered himself a poet, worked as a journalist and editor, and gained fame as the first bestselling American travel writer. This was the era of Manifest Destiny, when Americans began to explore their place in the larger world. Combining Romantic adventure with a broad sense of cultural superiority, Taylor’s travel writings made him a wealthy man (though his florid poetry did not sell nearly so well). His first travel book, Views A-Foot, on Europe, was only mildly overheated; Eldorado, his second, was a more straightforward journalistic account of his trip to California and Mexico. He described the various races he encountered in San Francisco without bias, and on his return trip via Mexico befriended the portly, smiling Chinese owner of Mazatlan’s Fonda de Canton hotel. In August 1851, Taylor embarked on a journey around the world. On this trip, which he turned into three separate books, he let loose his poetic sensibility. In Syria, for example, he donned a burnoose and a turban, strode through the lowest byways of the native bazaars, and ate “hasheesh,” which gave him hallucinations worthy of Coleridge. With his poet’s eye, he judged the architecture, music, customs, and, perhaps most critically, the physiques of the peoples he visited. His ideal came straight from the muscular symmetry portrayed in Greek sculpture, which he found in Arabs but not in Africans or the Chinese, whom he first encountered in large numbers in Singapore: “Their dull faces, without expression, unless a coarse glimmering of sensuality may be called such, and their half-naked, unsymmetrical bodies, more like figures of yellow clay than warm flesh and blood, filled me with an unconquerable aversion.”16 He nevertheless continued to China, landing first in Hong Kong and then at Shanghai.