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

by Coe, Andrew

  The one exception to this gloomy picture was the Territory of Hawaii, where Chinese had for decades dominated the restaurant industry. Chinese had begun to arrive in Hawaii back in the late eighteenth century. Between 1850 and 1882 (the advent of the Chinese Exclusion Act), thousands of contract laborers from Guangdong Province were brought to work in the islands’ sugar industry. They were joined by South Chinese entrepreneurs who founded trading companies and stores, many based in Honolulu’s nascent Chinatown. The Chinese Hawaiians were mainly Cantonese from the Zhongshan district (near Macau) of the Pearl River Delta and members of the Hakka ethnic group from eastern Guangdong. Like the Chinese adventurers who traveled to other parts of the New World, they brought their cuisine with them, mainly Cantonese and Hakka peasant fare. In the countryside, they opened general stores that also served Hawaiian and American food. In Honolulu, they owned most of the city’s cheap cafés. For the Chinese themselves, the place to eat was Chinatown, where they could enjoy the rural fare of the Pearl River Delta, mainly various kinds of soups, congees, noodle dishes, and dumplings. The Wo Fat restaurant, opened in 1882, was reputed to be the favorite of a young Zhongshan native named Sun Yat-Sen, who became one of China’s most revered revolutionary leaders. In 1901, at least one Honolulu restaurant existed where one could order more sophisticated banquet food—“preserved chicken, shark’s fin, fresh lotus nest, duck, edible bird’s nest with chopped chicken, preserved yellow fish heads, preserved snow lichen, almonds and fresh turquoise [turtle?], gold coin chicken, [and] Chinese fancy tarts”23—but this was the exception.

  In 1890, 20 percent of Hawaii’s population were Chinese; thereafter, their numbers slowly dwindled due to harsh immigration restrictions. Nevertheless, the Chinese retained an important role in the islands’ life, mainly as farmers, merchants, and factory owners. Many intermarried with local Hawaiians, with an accompanying blending of cultures, and missionaries were pleased to note a surprisingly large number of Chinese converts to Christianity. As tourism from the mainland boomed, the demands and expectations of the visitors necessitated changes in the local businesses: most Chinese restaurants added “chop suey” to their name—Wo Fat became Wo Fat Chop Suey—so that the tourists would know what to expect. Nonetheless, the Chinese Hawaiians relied on their numbers, cultural strength, and proximity to China to keep their traditions alive. In 1941, the Chinese Committee of the Honolulu YWCA compiled a cookbook entitled Chinese Home Cooking; it was probably compiled by Mary Li Sia, a cookbook author and the YWCA’s Chinese cooking instructor. The book’s well over a hundred recipes unabashedly exhibit local Chinese tastes, including gingered pigs’ feet, bitter melon with beef, abalone with vegetables and gluten balls, numerous “long rice” (rice noodle) dishes, and nine varieties of chop suey. Their mode of preparation might not have been exactly what the tourists remembered from back home, but they were outnumbered by the palates and wallets of Chinatown residents. The Chinese Hawaiians retained their distinctive culinary culture far longer than their compatriots on the mainland.

  During the 1930s and 1940s, Chinese Americans continued to rely on restaurants and family laundries for their economic survival. However, they now had competition; big mechanized laundries were putting the Chinese laundrymen out of work. And they had lost their monopoly on chop suey and chow mein as Americans learned to cook the dishes, and with Prohibition over, non-Chinese nightclubs were now crowding out the vast chop-suey-and-dancing halls. There were still twenty-eight Chinatowns across the country, but the only ones where the populations were increasing were those in San Francisco and New York. In a striking reversal, the largest, in San Francisco, was now famous not as a dingy and mysterious ghetto but as a bright, modern tourist trap:

  Indeed, Chinatown today is not only clean but quaint, a sort of permanent exhibit of the Orient, colorful and exotic, set down amid the gray uniformity of American city life. The architectural and decorative embellishments of its buildings are often typically Oriental in color and design. Here are shops which allure tourists with displays of Oriental art, and josshouses on the upper floors of “benevolent association” buildings, where friendly guides sound deep-voiced gongs, burn incense, shake the fortune-telling sticks before the gloriously carved and colored shrine of Kwan-yin, the goddess of mercy, and dispense souvenirs—for a consideration!24

  The main streets of the two most important districts—Grant Avenue in San Francisco and Mott Street in New York—were lined with blinking chop suey signs and curio shops. In the side streets, the Chinese themselves conducted their business—in grocery stores, tea shops, doctor’s offices, noodle factories, printing shops, and bakeries. Indeed the Chinatowns of these two cities were the central manufacturing and distribution points for a wide range of products necessary for Chinese eateries, from imported tea and soy sauce to almond cookies and restaurant menus. These goods were shipped from New York to restaurants east of the Mississippi; San Francisco handled the trade for the western half of the country.

  The Chinatown restaurants of New York and San Francisco were of two types: those catering to Chinese diners and those primarily feeding everyone else. In 1939, the Chinese needed big banquet restaurants as much as the Chinese in 1865 San Francisco had—for events like holidays, weddings, anniversaries, and business gatherings. That year, the Committee to Save China’s Children hosted a fundraising banquet at the China Clipper restaurant on Doyers Street in New York’s Chinatown that featured bean curd soup, brown stewed duck with almonds, diced squab with Chinese vegetables, chicken with “Chinese brown cheese” (bean curd), Cantonese noodles, sweet and pungent shrimp, rice, dessert soup, and lotus wine. This was real Cantonese banquet fare, albeit the relatively restrained Sze Yap version. Meanwhile, at Lum Fong’s over on Canal Street, the mainstays were chop suey, chow mein, egg foo young, yat gaw mein, fried rice, tomato beef, pepper steak, and egg rolls—an item Lum Fong claimed to have introduced to American menus. For a dollar or two more, diners could order moo goo gai pan (chicken with mushrooms), lobster Cantonese, shrimp with lobster sauce, and a few other specialties. Some eateries also listed fried wontons, which they described as kreplach (Yiddish for small, meat-filled dumplings). In other parts of the United States, the Lum Fong’s type of Chinese American menu was the only game in town. If one wanted more interesting dishes, one could usually call ahead and order off the menu. A Chinese family in Omaha, Nebraska, could probably find a reasonable Cantonese meal in that city. But you had to know that possibility existed and want to act on that knowledge. Around the early 1940s, the menus in Chinese restaurants stopped evolving. Their food stagnated into bland and unexciting dishes that were now far removed from the preparations of the Pearl River Delta; and they were losing ground to the competition. The magic and excitement were gone from Chinese food. Unless something changed, Chinese restaurants were in danger of fading away into obscurity.

  Figure 6.5. In 1900, Mott Street’s King Hong Lau served white patrons noodle soups and chop suey, with tea and sweets for dessert.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Devouring the Duck

  In the decades following World War II, Chinese restaurant owners hung on by adapting their businesses to changes in the larger society. They followed Americans out of the center cities, opening eateries in new suburbs like Levittown, New York, and Park Forest, Illinois. There they encountered competition from the new fast food hamburger stands, fried chicken restaurants, and pizza parlors that were catering to hungry, busy Americans. To compete, Chinese restaurants capitalized on one of their longtime strengths: the ability to sell large portions of inexpensive food. The centerpiece of their menus was the “family dinner,” a multicourse meal of Cantonese American favorites for one low price. The cheapest two-person family dinner at New Joy Young in Knoxville, Tennessee, featured four courses: wonton or Chinese vegetable soup, egg foo young or fried rice, subgum chow mein, and egg rolls, all for $3.20. (Some restaurants divided the choices into columns; hence the “one from column A and one from column B” that
many associate with eateries from this era.) For only $1.25, you could enjoy fried rice, one egg roll, and chicken chow mein. You could also order à la carte dishes: lobster Cantonese, moo goo gai pan, American steaks, lobster Newburg, and sandwiches. For better or worse, the cheap, familiar Chinese dinners drew the most customers.

  The trials of the Chinese restaurant business were outlined in a 1958 article in the Washington Post. There were 110 Chinese eateries in the District of Columbia, and for most of them business was not good: “A few restaurants turn a tidy profit; others supply a comfortable income; many furnish a bare subsistence.” The leaders of the local Chinese community considered the restaurant business moribund, an enterprise that had less and less to do with the Chinese-ness of its product. One businessman complained to the reporter about the restaurant owners: “They have to do a job of public relations. They have to improve their food, their service, their atmosphere. A Chinese restaurant should have pleasant Chinese surroundings—not chrome and neon and juke boxes. Why look how Washington has grown. But the Chinese restaurants haven’t.”1 One of the many problems was that young cooks with any ambition refused to work for $4,000 a year, so most of the food was prepared by old-timers whose methods were mired in the past. Some of the larger restaurants had attempted to import trained chefs from Hong Kong or Taiwan but had run into prohibitive immigration restrictions.

  Figure 7.1. Inexpensive “family dinners,” like these offerings at New Joy Young in Knoxville, Tennessee, were the mainstay of 1950s Chinese-American restaurants.

  In a 1954 Mad comic strip entitled “Restaurant!” by the artist Will Elder, Dad decides to take the family for lunch on a typical Sunday afternoon in America.2 Elder packed the piece with what he called “chicken fat,” visual gags that filled every corner of his panels. A lot of these are at the beginning: the nebbishy Sturdley family waits to be seated in a crowded restaurant filled with shouting, fighting customers, pets, flies in the soup, kids running around with chamber pots on their heads, stray characters from other comic strips, and so on. Next come the usual indignities: getting a booth, waiting for the greasy dishes of previous diners to be cleaned away, waiting for the waiter, and waiting for Uncle Smurdley to make up his mind. Finally, the chow mein arrives. Dad savors the aroma of crisp noodles, stewed onions, bean sprouts, strips of chicken, and snowy rice. Just as he’s about to put the first chopstick-full into his mouth, Baby announces that he has to go to the bathroom. Finally Dad is able to eat, but further humiliations ensue, including getting smacked on the head by the cute kid in the next booth. Afterward, the family vows to stay at home, only to find themselves once again—“eyeballs protruding, tongues gently lolling”—waiting for a booth at the same eatery the next Sunday. What’s remarkable about the scene Elder depicts (aside from his manic visual imagery) is how un-Chinese the restaurant is. You have to look closely to notice the red lanterns scattered here and there. Only one of the waiters appears to be Asian, and a peek into the kitchen reveals no Chinese but a bunch of sweaty, unshaven hash-joint cooks. Despite all this, habit—and price—still pulled diners back to the Chinese American restaurants.

  In and around cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, some restaurant owners with deeper pockets experimented with changes in design and new menus. The classic Chinese restaurant aesthetic had not changed in decades: booths along the wall, tables in the center, lanterns hanging from the ceiling, a few cheap Chinese prints on the walls, a counter for the cash register, and a display of cigars and cigarettes by the entrance. In the late fifties, owners began to hire architects to convert their interiors into something dramatic and modern. Sometimes, they became a little too modern; the New York Times described Manhattan’s Empress restaurant as a “distracting” blend of contemporary Danish with Chinese influences: “the walls are of black and scarlet, the banquettes are of gold and the napkins of rich pink.”3 This trend reached a peak in 1973, when the firm of Gwathmey Siegel Associates renovated Pearl’s Chinese Restaurant, then popular with Manhattan movers and shakers. The Times’s architecture critic praised the design’s elegance, sophistication, and simple geometric forms (which made the dining room reverberate with noise). However, at most restaurants where the modern décor was meant to complement the clientele’s taste, the menus remained the same.

  In 1934, an ex-bootlegger and beach bum named Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt opened in Hollywood a nightspot he called Don’s Beachcomber. He served exotic rum drinks—including the Zombie, a concoction he’d invented—from a bar decorated with tropical motifs. Three years later, he revamped his establishment as the Don the Beachcomber restaurant, serving Cantonese food with a few Polynesian touches, mostly on the pupu platter. The concept was so successful that he changed his name to Donn Beach. The buzz about it caught the attention of Victor Bergeron, the young owner of Hinky Dink’s Tavern, a bar in Oakland. He copied Don the Beachcomber’s rum cocktails, tropical look, and Cantonese menu and renamed his restaurant Trader Vic’s. He also added such creations as rumaki, crab Rangoon, and Calcutta lamb curry to his menus. However, the main culinary offerings of both restaurants were Cantonese: egg rolls, wonton soup, barbecued pork, almond chicken, beef with tomato, fried rice, and so on. By the 1950s, branches of Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic’s had opened across the country, followed by a host of imitators, including many with Chinese owners. The Kon-Tiki Club in Chicago advertised: “Escape to the South Seas!” You could also enjoy a complete Cantonese dinner there for $1.85 to $3.25. (The low food prices were offset by bar profits and turnover in the large, often full dining rooms.) This craze for “Polynesian” restaurants with Cantonese food continued well into the 1970s, particularly in suburban New Jersey, where the commercial strips were dotted with colorful eateries like the Orient Luau, featuring a popular all-you-can-eat “Hawaiian smorgasbord.” (Today, the few that remain are patronized largely by senior citizens, baby boomers on nostalgia visits, and devotees of the revived Tiki bar cult.)

  These gimmicks were not enough to save the classic Chinese American restaurant formula. By the 1960s, it was clear that chop suey, chow mein, egg foo young, and the like were ageing along with the Chinatown old-timers. The last of the “bachelor” generation (almost all male), who had grown up during the early decades of the Exclusion Act era and had manned Chinese kitchens across the United States, were slowly dying out. Restrictions had been eased, so new immigrants from China were finally beginning to enter the country. These changes had been incremental. First, the Magnuson Act of 1943 ended Chinese Exclusion and allowed the Chinese people who were living in the United States to become naturalized citizens at last. Alien wives of citizens were admitted in 1946. In 1947, the War Brides Act opened the door to approximately six thousand Chinese brides of Chinese American soldiers. In San Francisco, the number of births to Chinese couples more than doubled. After the Communist takeover in China, further changes were made in immigration laws, allowing some political refugees from China to gain citizenship. In 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished quotas based on national origin and made reunification of families a priority, and thousands of immigrants streamed into the United States from Taiwan and Hong Kong, all of them bringing with them their food traditions. Increased communication between the Chinese American community and their families in East Asia reinforced the economic and cultural ties between the two regions. Slowly at first, Chinese food in the United States began a transformation.

  The first glimmerings that Chinese food consisted of more than a small set of Cantonese American specialties came from a cookbook. In 1945, a Chinese immigrant, Buwei Yang Chao, published a little cookbook, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese. Trained as a doctor, Chao was born in 1889 in Nanjing, a large city in the lower Yangzi basin. She married a professor of philology, and they raised four daughters while her husband held teaching positions in China, Europe, and the United States. By World War II, the family was settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he taught at Harvard, and she began work on the cookbo
ok. She had been raised in an upper-class family and had not learned to cook as a child. In a note, she tells us that she only began cooking while studying medicine in Japan: “I found Japanese food so uneatable that I had to cook my own meals. I had always looked down upon food and things, but I hated to look down upon a Japanese dinner under my nose. So by the time I became a doctor, I also became something of a cook.”4 Accompanying her husband on his research trips around China, she had studied regional cuisines while he studied regional dialects. She says she began to write her cookbook at the urging of a fellow faculty wife, but it’s clear that the suggestion struck some deeper chord within her, because How to Cook and Eat in Chinese is far more than a compendium of favorite dishes she served at faculty parties. With the help of her husband and her daughter Rulan, Chao set a more ambitious goal for herself: re-creating the traditional Chinese way of eating on United States soil.