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

by Coe, Andrew

  The American television audience did not see the entire banquet because the networks cut back to their regular programming right after the toasts. Before that happened, the viewers received a message from their sponsors. On CBS, McDonald’s promoted its deep-fried cherry pies to celebrate Washington’s Birthday. Meanwhile, over on NBC was heard the bouncy jingle “East meets West. La Choy makes Chinese food swing American. La Choy makes Oriental recipes to serve at home.” A crisply coiffed nuclear family sat in a spotlessly white dining alcove. A baritone voiceover announced: “Let East meet West at your home. Enjoy La Choy Chicken or Beef Chow Mein. Exotic recipes from scratch? Use La Choy ingredients: Chinese vegetables, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, soy sauce.” The camera closed in on the family smiling down at a serving platter in the center of the white table: a mound of steaming chicken chow mein. Given the moment, La Choy’s ad buyers may have thought this savvy marketing. They did not realize, however, that the coming fad for Chinese food would include everything but chop suey and chow mein.

  Even before Nixon departed, Americans had been going crazy for things Chinese—a reprise of the China fad during Li Hongzhang’s visit. People were swarming to classes in Mandarin and in Chinese cooking; department stores sold Chinese handicrafts (the Mao suits quickly sold out at Bloomingdale’s in New York); publishers rushed books on the People’s Republic into print; and Chinese restaurants suddenly began to fill up. After they saw the images of Nixon eating banquet food in Beijing, customers began to use chopsticks and ask about sharks’ fin soup and Peking duck. In New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., restaurant owners anxious to cash in on the trend quickly whipped up special nine-course menus that supposedly replicated Nixon’s meal with Zhou Enlai. In response, Taiwan’s government flew in a team of chefs to show that they were the true guardians of Chinese culinary tradition. Banquet fever lasted for weeks—the first time Americans chose that most sophisticated format for a Chinese meal. Yet as they threw themselves into new eating experiences, they discovered that they needed a new set of skills to properly enjoy Chinese cuisine. That included ordering the right balance of contrasting (soft vs. crunchy, fried vs. boiled, etc.) dishes, selecting the correct beverage, using chopsticks, eating communally, and making sure that the food was prepared to Chinese and not American tastes. The ability to read and speak a little Chinese couldn’t hurt either. If all else failed, the Wall Street Journal advised: “put yourself in the chef’s hands by letting him decide the menu based upon what’s fresh in the kitchen that day and what he feels like creating. But be sure to let him know you are capable of enjoying his extra efforts. Chinese chefs, perhaps the most artistic in their profession, love appreciative clients.”18

  And diners appreciated the food. During the recession of the 1970s, when many high-end restaurants, including the famous Le Pavillon, went out of business, Chinese eateries flourished and expanded, particularly those serving adventurous new menus. Shortly after Nixon’s trip, the owners of the Shun Lee restaurant empire further jolted the food world by introducing a new Chinese regional cuisine: Hunan, which they advertised as “hot-hot-hot.”

  Their restaurant, called Hunam, immediately earned four stars from the New York Times and was followed by imitators like Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan. In 1974, Henry Chung opened his Hunan Restaurant in San Francisco, probably the first such eatery west of the Mississippi. The original list of Hunan specialties served in the United States included harvest pork, beef with watercress, and honey ham with lotus nuts. Soon diners also began to notice a dish of chicken chunks in a savory, spicy sauce. Shun Lee called it “General Ching’s Chicken”; other eateries called it “General Tso’s Chicken.” The restaurant impresario David Keh told Roy Andries de Groot of the Chicago Tribune a complicated story of how General Tso, a real military hero, had invented the dish in his retirement, when he had “turned his creative energies to the development and improvement of the aromatic, peppery, spicy Hunanese cuisine.”19

  Figure 7.4. In 1972, the Hunam restaurant introduced diners to the “hot-hot-hot” caisine of China’s Hunan province. General’s chicken and Lake Tung Ting Shrimp are now served by Chinese restaurants across the country.

  In reality, however, the chef who invented General Tso’s chicken, Peng Chang-kuei, was then cooking on East Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan. Born in 1919 in the capital of Hunan Province, Peng had been apprenticed to one of Hunan’s most prominent chefs and ended up, after the Communist takeover, in Taiwan. There he met President Chiang Kai-shek, who appreciated his cooking skills and invited him to prepare banquets for VIPs and foreign visitors. During this period, he invented a number of signature dishes, including General Tso’s chicken, made from chunks of dark meat chicken marinated in egg whites and soy sauce. After being quickly deep-fried, the chunks are stir-fried with ginger, garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, cornstarch, sesame oil, and dried chili peppers. Chef Peng named it after the general because he admired this hero from his home province. Many young chefs who later moved to the United States learned how to make his dishes, including Chef Wang of Shun Lee and Uncle Tai. Word of their success reached Chef Peng, and in 1974 he decided to try his luck in New York. His first restaurant, Uncle Peng’s Hunan Yuan on East Forty-fourth Street, quickly went bust, leaving him nearly broke. Unwilling to return to Taiwan in shame, he borrowed from friends and opened the Yunnan Yuan restaurant on Fifty-second Street. Before long, its prime patron was Kissinger, fresh from opening China. Building on this hard-earned success, Chef Peng returned to the Forty-fourth Street location and opened his most famous U.S. restaurant, simply called Peng’s. In 1984, he decided he had proved his mettle and that it was time to return home. He sold his restaurants and moved back to Taiwan, where he started his chain of highly successful Peng Yuan restaurants. His most famous dish had already spread from Manhattan to the suburbs and then across the United States, changing every time a new chef prepared it. Already in 1978, a dish of General Tso’s served in New Jersey was described as “slightly peppery, batter-fried chicken.”20 The adaptation of Hunan and Sichuan food to American tastes was well under way.

  While Americans celebrated their love affair with spicy Chinese food, another great change was taking place. For the first time in a century, waves of Chinese immigrants began arriving in the United States. They came not only from Hong Kong and Taiwan as in decades past but also from Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, and, most significantly, the People’s Republic of China. The Cantonese among them, already linked to the United States by family and clan associations, usually settled in existing Chinatowns—most importantly, in Manhattan and San Francisco. Others sought a fresh start, building Chinese communities in neighborhoods like Flushing, Queens, and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, both a quick subway ride from jobs in Manhattan. On the West Coast, the most vital Chinese district was founded in Monterey Park, a city in Los Angeles County’s San Gabriel Valley. Wherever these Chinese immigrants settled, they opened restaurants. Filled with Taiwanese, Monterey Park was dubbed Little Taipei and boasted dozens of Taiwan-style eateries catering primarily to recent immigrants. Other parts of the country saw the appearance of establishments specializing in dishes from Shanghai, Fujian, Chaozhou, Dongbei (China’s far northeast), Xinjiang, the Hakka ethnic group, and the Chinese communities in Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and even Cuba. Not to be outdone, the Cantonese opened sprawling banquet halls doubling as lunchtime dim sum parlors, like New York City’s HSF (short for Hee Seung Fung). (San Franciscans yawned at this development—they had been eating Chinese tea pastries for a hundred years.) From the 1980s on, Chinese food flourished wherever new immigrants congregated.

  Meanwhile, the owners of the Sichuan and Hunan restaurants improved their business skills, smoothing out the uncertainties. The epicenter of this transformation was “Szechuan Valley” (also known as “Hunan Gulch”), the stretch of Upper Broadway in Manhattan where nearly every block had its Sichuan or Hunan restaurant. Now managers standardized their menus so that they didn’t need a tem
peramental and high-priced artist to make the dishes, just a team of competent Chinese cooks. The offerings at Empire Szechuan, which grew into a chain that covered Manhattan, included not only Sichuan-style dishes like Ta Chien chicken, Kung Pao shrimp, and beef with broccoli but lobster Cantonese, egg drop soup, and chicken chow mein. (By 1993, you could also order sushi, teriyaki chicken, dim sum, and low-fat steamed vegetables with brown rice at Empire Szechuan.) And the recipes were altered once more to appeal to local, non-Chinese tastes. Shun Lee’s Michael Tong noticed that “Americans like anything spicy, anything sweet, anything crispy.”21 At many eateries, chefs now dunked their cubes of meat in a thick all-purpose batter, deep-fried them, and served them in different slightly spicy, cloyingly sweet sauces. In order to maximize trade, owners also began offering delivery, slipping thousands of folded paper menus under apartment doors across Manhattan. No longer did you have to wait in line on a freezing winter night to get a table: one phone call, and the food would be at your door in twenty minutes. Business boomed, but the connection with customers was lost—it was far too easy to eat at home.

  Figure 7.5. Many storefront Chinese restaurants, like this one in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, are run by recent Fujianese immigrants. Like the chop suey joints of the 1920s and 1930s, they serve Chinese food adapted to American tastes.

  In the late 1980s, the restaurant business attracted the attention of one of the largest new groups of Asian immigrants, those from the province of Fujian, just up the coast from Guangdong. After Deng Xiaoping unleashed his free market reforms in the late seventies, the new development zones around the provincial capital of Fuzhou experienced a massive influx of people looking for capitalist opportunities. The economic upheaval caused widespread social dislocation in the region as the old Communist way of life broke down. Like their adventurous South China forebears, many decided to emigrate in order to look for better prospects. Unable to get visas, they paid “snakeheads” tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle them into the United States. Once they landed in New York’s Chinatown, they were steered to a warren of tiny employment offices in the blocks under the Manhattan Bridge, where they found listings for jobs in restaurants throughout the East, from Florida to Maine. After a phone call, they were put on the next bus for Baton Rouge, Pittsburgh, or Winston-Salem, to work as dishwashers and busboys for $1,000 a month. For these Fujianese immigrants, like others before them, restaurants became a stepping-stone to success. After years of working long hours, a family could amass enough money to buy a storefront Chinese eatery in some Alabama town or across the street from a housing project on Chicago’s South Side. Like the chop suey joint owners of the 1920s and 1930s, these immigrants aspired to nothing more than earning a living. Their menus hewed to the formula of the tried and true: spring rolls, chicken lo mein, beef with broccoli, fried rice, barbecue spare ribs, pork chow mein, and so on. Meanwhile, behind the counter, the Fujianese restaurant workers enjoyed their staff luncheons of noodle soup, greens, and a bit of seafood over steamed rice—the traditional South China family meal. Today, these restaurants represent the vast majority of Chinese eateries in the United States.

  The status of Chinese food in the American culinary scene has always been linked, albeit often loosely, to the state of international relations between the two countries. In 1989, the brutal squashing of the Tiananmen Square protest shattered any illusion of China evolving into an American-style democracy. Cultural exchanges ground to a halt; tourists canceled their China trips; and the U.S. government instituted economic sanctions against the Communist government. At the same time, the American culinary world’s attention was directed elsewhere, particularly toward the Japanese and New American restaurants that dominated the white-tablecloth end of the market. These places often paired the French techniques taught at cooking schools like the Culinary Institute of America with Asian or American dishes and ingredients. Still, many in the business believed that Chinese food could continue to draw customers, with a little tweaking. Entrepreneurs started Chinese food franchises like Panda Express (founded in 1973), Manchu Wok, City Wok, and the more ambitious P. F. Chang’s China Bistro. Featuring streamlined Chinese-American menus, they vied for diners’ dollars wherever the storefront Fujianese eateries were not, particularly in places like malls, airports, and train stations. These competed with either fast food franchises like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut or more upscale “casual dining” chains like Olive Garden and T.G.I. Friday’s. With higher ambitions, cooking school graduates began to “update” Chinese cuisine by applying French techniques to classic dishes like Peking duck. The pioneer in this movement was probably the California-trained chef Ken Hom, who wrote the 1987 cookbook Ken Hom’s East Meets West Cuisine. Chinese “fusion” restaurants like Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois-on-Main and Patricia Yeo’s AZ opened on the East and West coasts, featuring food that was adventurously Asian yet accessible. This food was not always very Chinese. The menus at two prominent Chinese fusion restaurants, Susanna Foo’s in Philadelphia and Blue Ginger outside of Boston, listed dishes like goat cheese wontons and sesame Caesar salad with Chinese cruller croutons. Nevertheless, today when gastronomes want to splurge on a “Chinese” feast, they often gravitate toward these more culturally familiar choices rather than the nearest Chinatown.

  In August 2008, when an army of American athletes, journalists, and fans descended on Beijing for the Summer Olympics, the world media focused on China once again, reporting on not just the sports but on the nation’s people and culture. For the Chinese government, the Olympics was far more than an athletic event: it was a show of political, cultural, and economic might by a country whose exports of manufactured goods now exceeded those of the United States. The stunning new venues for the Olympic events, designed by the world’s top architects, were just one symbol of China’s arrival as a world power. The integration of China into the world economy meant that to visiting American athletes and tourists—unlike the New England traders who landed in eighteenth-century Guangzhou—the culinary landscape was somewhat familiar. McDonald’s was the official restaurant of the Summer Games, and Kentucky Fried Chicken already had almost fifteen hundred franchises across China. Nevertheless, cultural barriers remained, particularly that language. Few Americans spoke Chinese, and tourist menus in local restaurants contained literal translations of fancifully named dishes like “husband-and-wife lung slices” and “chicken without sexual life.” This increased the visitors’ tendency to see Chinese cuisine as a collection of absurd and exotic dishes, an inclination that was magnified by visits to the Wangfujing Night Market, where grilled scorpions, lizard tails, and horse stew were among the offerings. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel ran the headline “From Pig’s Liver to Sheep Penis, Authentic Chinese Food Is Tough to Stomach.” A small contingent of aficionados did scurry down the hutong alleyways to find the best local dumplings and restaurants serving obscure regional cuisines unheard-of in the States. But for most, it was enough to eat burgers at the McDonald’s next to the hotel and sample the bland options on display in the Olympic Village canteen. Operated by the American food service giant Aramark, the canteen offered a rotating menu of 460 dishes from all major cuisines, including Chinese. At the start of the Olympics, three hundred roast ducks were delivered every day. The number was raised to six hundred when they began selling out by early evening. Somewhat unexpectedly, it seemed that the whole world loved Peking duck.

  Figure 7.6. With hundreds of locations across the country, P.F. Chang’s offers upscale Americanized Chinese food in an exotic “Chinese village” setting. Its menu includes dishes such as Singapore street noodles, “Sichuan from the Sea” scallops, and a “Great Wall of Chocolate” dessert.

  Over two centuries have passed since the Empress of China sailed up the Pearl River and American traders sampled their first bites of Chinese food. How much has changed in that time? Since 1789, numerous waves of Chinese immigration and cultural influence have profoundly affected American life. Today, more than forty thousand
Chinese restaurants dot this country and are a routine part of the American environment, as exciting as the corner gas station or the Super 8 Motel down by the highway entrance. Supermarkets sell an array of Chinese ingredients, from soy sauce and ginger to Napa cabbage, bean sprouts, green tea, and rice noodles. Communities with large enough Chinese populations are also home to markets like the West Coast–based 99 Ranch Market chain, selling a huge variety of products aimed at immigrant cooks and eaters. Many American diners can handle a pair of chopsticks and aren’t afraid to use cooking techniques like stir-frying and steaming in their home kitchens.

  Despite this progress, one also sees an incredible resistance to Chinese food—at least as it’s served in China. The editor of Chinese Restaurant News has estimated that 80 percent of those forty thousand or so eateries serve a limited Chinese American menu—a short roster of dishes like Kung Pao chicken, hot and sour soup, egg rolls, beef with broccoli, and General Tso’s chicken. Americans have the same taste for spicy, sweet, crispy food that Michael Tong remarked on back in the 1980s, and, just as in the days of chop suey and chow mein, expect Chinese food to be priced low. More adventurous tasters can find alternatives to that menu in the other 20 percent of the restaurants, usually located in immigrant communities. In places like Flushing and the San Gabriel Valley, the food can be exciting, meticulously prepared, even expensive. Think Shanghai soup dumplings made with foie gras.