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

by Coe, Andrew

  There he found two American missionaries to act as his guides: Charles Taylor (whom we met in chapter 2) and M. T. Yates, both Protestants. They piloted the young writer through the narrow streets of Shanghai’s Chinese city, feeding him “explanations of the many curious scenes” they passed. He visited temples, shops, pawnshops, tea gardens, street vendors, and prisons; he was even invited to a Chinese banquet, whose dishes he found “numerous and palatable, but hardly substantial enough for a civilized taste.” Overall, he was overwhelmed by the “disgusting annoyances of a Chinese city”—the ever-present filth, ragged beggars, and vile smells. Strangely, the encounter that sent him into his greatest outpouring of revulsion was the “absolutely loathsome and repulsive” sight of a prize Chinese flower at a local horticultural show.

  The only taste which the Chinese exhibit to any degree, is a love of the monstrous. That sentiment of harmony, which throbbed like a musical rhythm through the life of the Greeks, never looked out of their oblique eyes. . . . They admire whatever is distorted or unnatural, and the wider its divergence from its original beauty or symmetry, the greater is their delight. This mental idiosyncrasy includes a moral one, of similar character. It is my deliberate opinion that the Chinese are, morally, the most debased people of the face of the earth. Forms of vice which in other countries are barely named, are in China so common, that they excite no comment among the natives. . . . Their touch is pollution, and, harsh as the opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to settle on our soil.17

  Taylor’s missionary guides undoubtedly drew his attention to all those “forms of vice,” probably including female infanticide, gambling, eating dogs and cats, and opium smoking (a practice Taylor himself tried out). Declaring China “the best country in the world—to leave,” Taylor’s widely reprinted travel letters first came out in the New York Tribune and then in many editions of his 1855 bestseller A Visit to India, China, and Japan. For at least the next three decades, his harsh judgments had an outsized influence on the debate over the place of Chinese immigrants in the United States.

  Despite this simmering racism, and occasional outbreaks of violence, the immigrants from the Pearl River Delta were by and large tolerated during the late 1850s and early 1860s. Those who arrived in California during this era were determined to earn their fortunes peacefully and by following the traditions they had long practiced in East Asia. The English adventurer Frederick Whymper, who encountered Chinese in both western Canada and California, writes admiringly of their persistence in keeping their culinary culture:

  In the mining districts, “John Chinaman” is to be seen travelling through the country, carrying his traps on either end of a long pole, in the style depicted on the tea chests familiar to us from earliest childhood. In this manner he “packs” much larger loads than the ordinary traveller. The writer well remembers a Chinaman he met carrying at one end of his stick a bag of rice, a pick and shovel, a pair of extra pantaloons, a frying pan, and a billy-pot [for tea]; whilst from the other depended a coop of fowls and chickens, of which “John” is devotedly fond. In this respect he is wiser than his betters; for while the ordinary “honest miner” is feeding on beans, bacon, and tea, he has eggs and chickens with his rice and is very diligent in searching out and utilising wild onions, berries, and roots. In 1865, a number of Chinamen arrived at intervals, in several vessels, at Vancouver, V.I., and a few hours after landing they invariably found their way into the woods, or on to the sea-beach, where they collected shell fish and many kinds of sea-weed, which they stewed and fried in various shapes.18

  Before leaving China, the immigrants packed provisions for the journey, including rice, dried seafood and sausages, and ceramic jars of condiments like soy sauce and pickled vegetables. Although these provisions ran out quickly after landing in California, the new arrivals did not have to adopt the local, pork-and-beans-based American diet. By the early 1850s, San Francisco was home to a number of Chinese stores specializing in products from the Middle Kingdom, including “hams, tea, dried fish, dried ducks, and other very nasty-looking Chinese eatables, besides copper-pots and kettles.”19 An 1856 directory of the city’s Chinese quarter listed thirty-three stores selling “General Merchandise, Groceries, &c.” These merchants ordered their wares either directly from China or from the big import-export firms that were already established—branches of Chinese companies in Guangzhou or, more likely, Hong Kong that became known as gam saan chung—“Gold Mountain firms.” In 1873, the journalist Albert S. Evans recorded the cargo of a ship whose wares were destined for San Francisco merchants:

  90 packages cassia; 940 packages coffee, from Java and Manila; 192 packages fire-crackers; 30 packages dried fish, cuttle-fish, shark’s fins, etc.; 400 packages hemp; 116 packages miscellaneous merchandise, lacquered goods, porcelain-ware, and things for which we have no special names; 53 packages medicines; 18 packages opium; 16 packages plants; 20 packages potatoes; 2,755 packages rice; 1,238 packages sundries,—chow-chow [probably pickles], preserved fruit, salted melon-seeds, dried ducks, pickled ducks’ eggs, cabbage sprouts in brine, candied citron, dates, dwarf oranges, ginger, smoked oysters, and a hundred other Chinese edibles and table luxuries; 824 packages sugar; 20 packages silks; 203 packages sago and tapioca; 5,463 packages tea; 27 packages tin.20

  This was a culinary bounty that could easily supply a gourmet restaurant like Hong Heong; all they needed to complete their banquets were fresh meat and produce (and even the imported “dwarf oranges,” either mandarins or kumquats, may have been fresh). The San Francisco import-export firms either sold the ingredients on this list to local restaurants and groceries or shipped them to Chinese stores in the new settlements that were arising in the foothills. In Chew Lung’s store in the Chinese mining camp at Camanche, for example, nearly every item—including the scales, cooking pots, bowls, tobacco, rice, tea, sugar, ginger, and cooking oil—came from across the Pacific. The exceptions were the gin and the salt fish, which may have been a local product.

  Immigrants from the Pearl River Delta, with its centuries-old fishing tradition, saw the economic and culinary possibilities of California’s rich sea life very early. By 1855, they had built dozens of Chinese fishing villages around San Francisco Bay and along the central California coast. They caught Pacific salmon and squid, collected red, black, and green abalone in the intertidal zone, and netted shrimp, minnows, and other fish. They even built Chinese-style fishing junks from which they tended their nets. Some of the catch was delivered fresh to markets and street vendors for retail sales, but most of it was boiled in salted water and dried. It could then be shipped into the mountains, where the Chinese miners used it to season their rice, or more likely packed for transport back to China, where the appetite for dried seafood was nearly inexhaustible. By the 1850s, it was estimated that roughly a thousand Chinese fishermen were working San Francisco Bay. Their methods were so efficient and the mesh on their bag nets so fine that the other fishermen complained that they were clearing every swimming thing out of the bay. Enforcement of fishing laws was impossible: the Chinese simply paid their fines or did their jail time and then returned to the same practices. One journalist estimated that $1 million worth of dried shrimp and fish—including sturgeon sinews, a Chinese delicacy—was being shipped back to China every year. Despite these complaints, and competition from Italian and Portuguese immigrants, the junks sailed in California waters until the twentieth century, when the large-scale Chinese fishing industry finally dwindled away.

  From San Francisco’s residential districts to the far-flung mining camps, the Chinese produce peddler was a regular sight on the dusty streets and paths:

  We have Chinese vegetable peddlers, who, braving the vicious boys, wicked men, and ugly dogs, visit every part of the city, and travel far out over the sand-hills to supply their regular customers. These men rise long before daylight and go to the great markets and to the market-wagons, fill their panniers and then return home to breakfast;
after which they sally out, each man on his regular route, to return to their lodging-houses about noon with a few more dimes in their pockets than they spent at the market in the morning. It would astonish some persons should they look into a pair of these panniers, to see what a variety of articles they may contain—cabbage, beans, peas, and celery; potatoes, turnips, carrots, and parsnips; apples, pears, and the small fruits; with fish, and bouquets.21

  Figure 4.2. A painter’s depiction of a Chinese fishmonger with his wares, late nineteenth century. White fishermen complained that their Chinese competitors were stripping San Francisco Bay of all living sea creatures.

  Much of this produce was grown on the small Chinese garden plots that ringed many communities and on larger farms tilled by Chinese owners or leaseholders. Using skills learned on the intensively cultivated plots of the Pearl River Delta, the immigrants had begun to grow vegetables soon after arriving—at first, the greens were for their own use, as they craved fresh toppings for their midday rice. But as they learned the business, and how to grow food crops in the dry but temperate California climate, they came to dominate this agricultural niche; some writers claimed that their labor fed all of San Francisco.

  As in the fishing industry, a cultural clash soon arose over traditional Pearl River Delta farming methods. In Auburn, the “miasmata” arising from Chinese gardens supposedly caused diseases:

  The evil consists mainly in the Chinese mode of cultivation, which is filthy and disgusting in the extreme. Their gardens are made on low grounds, and the soil is stimulated to rank productiveness by the application of the most offensive manures. Large holes are excavated in the ground, which are filled with human ordure, dead animals, and every imaginable kind of filth, water is added, and the feculent mass is left to thoroughly decompose, when it is ladled and scattered broadcast over the garden.22

  The result of these methods was vegetables that “acquire a richness of flavor grateful to Chinese stomachs, but intolerable to most white palates.” In fact, most whites were able to overcome their finer feelings and purchase the familiar corn, squash, peas, tomatoes, lettuce, and the like. The farmers also grew elongated Asian radishes, unfamiliar cabbages, bitter melons, foot-long string beans, and so on, destined solely for Chinese consumers.

  Thanks to their imports, as well as farming and fishing, the Chinese of California clearly had the raw materials to replicate even the finest dishes of Cantonese cuisine. In 1853, a writer for the San Francisco Whig was “escorted to the crack Chinese restaurant on Dupont street called Hong fa-lo, where a circular table was set out in fine style.” This eatery may have been the earliest incarnation of Chinatown’s famous Hang Far Low restaurant, at 713 and then 723 Grant Avenue, which finally closed in 1960. The evening’s host, a merchant named Key Chong, had spared no expense; birds’ nests, sea cucumbers, and mushrooms that cost $3 a pound were among the dishes. The other ingredients included fish, dried oysters, “China lobster,” ducks, “stewed acorns,” chestnuts, sausages, shrimps, and periwinkles. The whites in attendance were often flummoxed as to what they were eating. According to the newspaper, the menu included “Course No. 2—Won Fo (a dish oblivious to us, and not mentioned in the Cook Book). No. 3—Ton-Song, (ditto likewise). No. 4—Tap Fan, (another quien sabe).” Despite the author’s humorous take, he and the other white guests seem to have genuinely enjoyed their meal:

  Figure 4.3. A Chinese peddler sells fruit and vegetables to a San Francisco housewife. These peddlers were a common sight in western cities and towns.

  We came away, after three hours sitting, fully convinced that a China dinner is a costly and elaborate affair, worthy the attention of epicures. From this time henceforth we are in the field for China against any insinuations on the question of diet a la rat, which we pronounce a tale of untruth. We beg leave to return our thanks to our host, Key Chong, for his elegant entertainment which one conversant with the Chinese bill of fare informs us must have cost over $100. Vive la China!23

  It was rare, but not unheard-of, for non-Chinese San Franciscans to initiate a Chinese banquet. In 1857, four “claiming to be white—one a Maj. U.S. Army—two Capts.—and one legal gentleman” decided to enjoy a “dinner got up in the most approved style of the Celestials, laying aside everything like fastidiousness in regard to material or taste, conforming to, and partaking of, the full course, come as it might, whether fricasseed monkey or baked rats made any part of the bill of fare or not.” They invited along Lee Kan, a Chinese newspaper editor who arranged the meal, as well as an important Chinese merchant and the head of the Sze Yap Company. The name and location of the restaurant was not recorded, but it possessed a “sumptuous dining-hall, furnished with all the elegancies and appurtenances believed by the Chinese to be indispensable to such an apartment.” The first course would have done justice to a wealthy merchant’s kitchen back in Guangzhou and included soups of birds’ nest and sharks’ fin, “calf’s throat cut in imitation of mammoth centipedes,” quails, duck feet, fish maws, sea cucumbers, crab balls, and herring heads. The whites attempted to down these delicacies using chopsticks and failed. When they saw that their Chinese guests were way ahead of them, they “felt constrained to resort to knife, fork, and spoon, in self defense.” Then, on to the second half of the meal:

  Tea; cake made of rice flour; water nuts, called in Chinese Ma Tai and truly delicious; preserved water lily seeds; pomelo, a kind of orange, preserved; Chinese plums; jelly made from sea-weed; ducks’ hearts and gizzards with shrimps; cakes of minced pork and other ingredients of doubtful character; fish gelatine; eggs preserved in ley [thousand-year-old eggs?] and oil—very fine; almonds salted and baked; oranges; preserved water melon seeds; two other kinds of cake made from rice flour; cigars; white wine, made from rice; a third proof liquor made from rice; and finishing off with an opium smoke, and Chinese cigaritas.

  Those cakes of “doubtful character” are probably dim sum, which often accompanied Chinese banquets of this magnitude. Three days and nine hours after this unique event, a participant wrote, “We are all alive!” He never indicates whether or not he enjoyed the food, but he does give a warning: the bill was $42, an astronomical sum for post–Gold Rush San Francisco. Nevertheless, he says, it was worth it; the memory, and probably the bragging rights, would “last us as long as we live.”24 Of course, these wealthy diners were an exception. The only Chinese-owned restaurants that most whites entered in post–Gold Rush San Francisco were the myriad cheap cafés where they could chew on a gristly steak or plate of pork and beans, not Chinese food.

  During the late 1860s and 1870s, San Francisco had well over a dozen Chinese restaurants, including three or four elaborate, multistory establishments whose chefs could prepare banquets featuring the same costly ingredients and sophisticated preparations used by Guangzhou’s finest chefs. These did not draw regular customers from the non-Chinese population, as whites picked up on the sentiments first expressed in the Chinese Repository decades earlier, that the dishes were on the whole inedible:

  almost everything has the same taste of nut oil sicklied over all, and few western palates can endure even the most delicate of their dishes. Shark’s fins, stewed bamboo, duck’s eggs boiled, baked and stewed in oil, pork disguised in hot sauces, and other things like these, are the standard dishes of a Chinese bill of fare, though they have an infinite variety of sweetmeats which are really palatable, and of sweetcakes, which are inviting in their quaint, odd forms and decorations, but are ashes and wormwood to taste.25

  Moreover, a rumor spread that the chefs used the same unclean methods as the neighborhood Chinese laundrymen:

  In the preparation of sauces he even surpasses Soyer’s countrymen. The art with which Chinese washermen regulate the fineness and direction of the spray from his [sic] mouth upon the garments, has been a source of admiration to the uninitiated. Their admiration would increase were they to witness the dexterity with which the cook would mix the various condiments by blowing from his mouth the exact quantity neede
d by the dish before him. Many dishes depend entirely on adjuncts for savor; and the taste as a rule inclines to rancid oil and doubtful lard.26

  Behind this disgust was more than simple differences in taste. Agitation against the presence of Chinese in the West was growing, and it became politically and socially dangerous to admit to having a taste for Chinese cuisine.

  In fact, culinary prejudices were so deep that even those few local whites who supported Chinese rights could not stomach their food. The New York–born Methodist minister Otis Gibson had labored for 10 years in Fujian Province. When he moved to San Francisco to continue his mission, he was shocked at the “ignorance, bigotry, prejudice and selfishness” of the anti-Chinese crusaders, who also targeted missionaries like himself. Although his 1877 book The Chinese in America does exhibit old missionary intolerance—“the mass of [Chinese] people are untruthful, selfish and cruel”—he strongly defends the Chinese presence in the American West. His reasons were partly economic (the Chinese were good for business) and partly moral (the Chinese in their sins were no worse than the American masses). Nonetheless, he could not bring himself to enjoy the food, due to the same problematic flavor of “rancid oil or strong butter.” Yet when missionary guests from the East arrived, he set aside his culinary objections and showed them the wonders of the Chinese quarter: