Change, Interchange, and the First Successful “Translators”
Chinese America and Post-Imperial China
During and after the final Qing decline on the western side of the Pacific, Chinese restaurants offered an economic lifeline to thousands of people—an aging population of bachelor “sojourners” along with a younger, family-based contingent—on the eastern side. With a growing generation of birthright citizens, the Chinese community gradually began to achieve a less hazardous footing in U.S. society. But the distorted perspective through which other Americans viewed Chinese food has never wholly disappeared. Indeed, the food that restaurateurs successfully invented for white patrons helped perpetuate a sort of culinary astigmatism. From time to time, English-language writers tried to arrive at a better understanding of Chinese culinary principles and practice—unfortunately without tools of communication intelligible to both parties. Little means of real instruction existed until new intellectual movements and political turmoil, apparently unconnected with culinary issues, arose in China itself.
From their vantage points in North American cities and towns, Chinese-born and American-born members of the Chinese community anxiously watched the unhappy last decades of the moribund Qing Empire. A progressive wing in which the diplomat-soldier Li Hung Chang—he of the durable American chop suey legend—played an internationally renowned role for more than thirty years counseled a national “self-strengthening” agenda through selective adoption of Western business methods and technology. Li and his allies sought to modernize China’s army and navy, transportation system, and industrial facilities. They induced the young Guangxu Emperor to think seriously of establishing a constitutional monarchy; they planned sweeping reforms to replace the ancient and much-hated examination system for admitting candidates to the top-heavy, outmoded imperial bureaucracy.
Much of the reformers’ agenda was stymied by the emperor’s aunt, the empress dowager Cixi, a tireless intriguer who managed to send him into detention in an 1898 coup. But one measure that took hold between the early 1860s and the final toppling of the empire in 1911 was educational reform. All knew that it was a necessary prelude to restructuring the bureaucracy.
Government-sponsored schools offering instruction in foreign languages and some elements of Western university curricula (e.g., modern sciences and mathematics) were set up in Beijing and several of the treaty ports. Some counterparts were founded for younger boys—and even girls, since improving the status of women was a major reformist goal. A number of Western-founded private schools addressed the same needs. Thus it happened that a growing class of outward-looking young men and women already existed in the dying empire when American politicians, businessmen, and intellectuals began acquiring an enlarged view of China’s place on the geopolitical stage. As a certain amount of educational interchange developed, Chinese-born students and teachers became a more familiar sight on American campuses in the years between the world wars. By 1930 many universities offered not only courses in Chinese history but actual instruction in Mandarin and perhaps one or two other Chinese languages, sometimes under the auspices of an “Asian Institute” or “Department of Oriental Studies.” Further interchange came from an unexpected direction.
The anti-Western, antimissionary Boxer Rebellion that broke out in China in 1900 was savagely suppressed by an alliance of many foreign powers and ended in a humiliating treaty requiring the imperial government to pay large sums of money to all the foreign signatories. Several years later, the United States found that it had actually been paid much more than the stipulated indemnity. The administration of President Theodore Roosevelt was persuaded to dedicate the surplus to a scholarship program for Chinese students at American universities. Between 1909 and 1930, about 1,300 students traveled to the United States through “Boxer Indemnity” scholarships. Many of them would later return to become political figures, scientists, and well-known writers.
Among the first scholarship recipients were a strong-willed young woman who decided to turn hers down and the young man whom she would later marry. Yuenren Chao (Yuen Ren Zhao or Zhao Yuen Ren in pinyin) traveled to the United States in 1910, returning ten years later with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Cornell, a PhD in philosophy from Harvard, and an insatiable interest in both China’s many languages and the strange byways of English. Back in China, fate threw him into the company of the girl who had declined her indemnity scholarship. She was now Dr. Buwei Yang or Yang Buwei, owner of a degree from Tokyo Women’s Medical School, champion of birth control, and director of a small gynecological/obstetrical hospital that she and a female colleague had founded in Beijing.1
Dr. Yang was a resourceful, self-taught cook who loved rising to the challenge of any meal, simple or elaborate. After her adoptive father’s death, she had astonished her family by producing thirty-three all-vegetarian dishes for the prescribed mourning banquet. Like Mr. Chao, she came to have a great disbelief in outmoded Chinese rituals—for instance, weddings. One day in June of 1921 they invited two friends to an informal four-course meal cooked by Dr. Yang and waited until after tea to produce a statement drafted by Mr. Chao, bearing a legal stamp and affirming that they were man and wife. In fact, the only officially binding formality they needed was to have the guests sign the document as witnesses.
By the time of this anticeremony, the Qing Empire had vanished in a series of great convulsions following the deaths of the Guangxu emperor and the empress dowager within a day of each other in 1908. Already, supporters of reform had jockeyed for more than a decade with advocates of revolution. The overseas Chinese, who shared their compatriots’ shame and fury at successive military defeats and diplomatic insults such as the United States’ harassment of Chinese nationals, included members of both factions.
Many people in American Chinatowns had long supported the best-known champion of revolution, the self-exiled, Guangdong-born Sun Yat-sen (Sun Zhongshan). Sun cultivated liaisons with the secret societies operating out of American cities. He successfully brought some of the fiercer San Francisco tongs into an international nexus of plots for the overthrow of the “foreign” Qing—Manchu usurpers, not true Han Chinese, as Sun never tired of pointing out—and the defeat of the constitutional-monarchy party, the “Emperor Protection Society.” Restaurants were sometimes drawn into the fiscal affairs of one or the other faction. The 1906 opening of the huge, ambitious King Joy Lo in Chicago represented $150,000 or more in contributions from many members of a Chinese businessmen’s league dedicated to the aims of the Emperor Protection Society and its chief spokesman.2 The launch of King Joy Lo would become one of many fiscal scandals surrounding the society; it seems doubtful that most of the money ever went further than the pockets of the manager, the flamboyant restaurateur Chin F. Foin.3 In any case, the reformers’ cause gradually staggered into disarray.
The American Chinese community hung on every news dispatch from China, where several disjointed uprisings in October of 1911 at last coalesced into an armed revolt strong enough to topple the Manchu Empire. But joy at the formal proclamation of the Republic of China early in 1912 was short-lived. The revolutionaries were obliged to arrange terms with the army general Yuan Shikai, a powerful long-time ally of the late empress dowager who installed himself in the presidency of the new republic and within a few years was scheming to advance from lifetime president to emperor.
A few months after Yuan’s inauguration, Sun Yat-sen and the thwarted revolutionaries formed a parliamentary opposition titled the Nationalist Party or Guomindang, usually abbreviated to GMD (Kuomintang or KMT in the old Wade-Giles romanization system). But Sun was not destined to preside over the enlightened modern republic he had dreamed of. On Yuan’s death in 1916, China fell into an epoch of fragmented scrimmages under local warlords or glorified bandits. Many competing voices—some belonging to Boxer Indemnity scholarship students returned from America—introduced the citizenry to anarchism, socialism, and defiant new artistic and cultural movements founded in a rejection of Confucian institutions. The Chinese Communist Party, formed in 1921 with the aid of the young Soviet Union, powerfully spoke to a disaffected generation.
From a precarious southern power base in Sun’s native Guangzhou, the GMD gradually managed to build a creditable army under the leadership of the ambitious Jiang Jie-shi or Chiang Kai-shek (a romanized version of the Cantonese pronunciation). Sun died in 1925; by the end of 1927 Chiang’s forces had conquered enough of northern China to establish a GMD government with Nanjing as capital. For the next two decades the regime’s nemesis would be an alliance forged between the Chinese Communist Party and what remained of the GMD’s former left wing after a course of bloody Chiang-ordered purges.
As the post-imperial era unfolded, the American Chinese community vicariously lived through shock after shock. Overseas sojourners had already seen almost a century and a half of mortifying blows to China’s pride and self-determination. Their treatment on Gold Mountain had long testified to the Middle Kingdom’s inability or unwillingness to protest affronts to its subjects abroad. Thousands of Chinese nationals suffering under Exclusion in San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and lesser cities had dreamed that the end of Qing rule would mean China’s emergence on the global stage as an independent modern power among other powers. Rejoicing at (as they thought) newly recovered national honor, they cut off their queues—a symbol of centuries-long Han subjection to alien Manchu decrees—and exchanged Chinese for Western dress. Some came to acknowledge that daughters might deserve a certain autonomy as citizens of twentieth-century societies, an idea vigorously championed by reforming educators in China and strengthened here by passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919. But all who cared about China and Chinese–American relations soon understood that in some ways Chinese-born people in the land of liberty were men and women without a country.
Many in America’s Chinatowns, especially members of the more violent tongs, had detested the Manchu rulers and even plotted for their overthrow. Still, a reigning emperor had never quite ceased to be a unifying symbol of national identity. Had the last emperor been replaced by any plausible constitutional head of state, the overseas Chinese might have found an object of honor to rally around. As it was, they saw their homeland crippled by civil war while a ruthlessly expansionist Japan hovered across the East China Sea, preparing to pick off chunks of territory to add to its seizure of Taiwan in 1895. The GMD, in the eyes of opponents, was more interested in trying (vainly) to destroy the Communists than preparing any defense against the Japanese.
Some rearrangement of loyalties was inevitable. Violent anti-Chinese hostility had partly cooled in the United States since the Chinese had been successfully drubbed out of the manual labor market. Newcomers still contrived to enter the country from China by using the “paper son” ruse, sneaking across borders, or claiming exempt status as students, professionals, or businessmen. Meanwhile, the steady increase of the community through the birth of children cemented the parent generation more securely to the adoptive country.
The children themselves regularly acquired a fluency in English that had eluded most of their elders, as well as some grounding in American culture. They might grow up unhappy at being made to attend the special classes that were necessary for many to master standard (Guangzhou) spoken Cantonese or written Chinese. Such was the case with bright little Pardee Lowe, born in San Francisco in 1904. He applied himself to the challenges of a very good public school with a single-mindedness inspired by a first-grade teacher’s ringing declaration to a multiethnic class of boys and girls, “And every single one of you can be President of the United States someday!” He was cured of this error at the age of thirteen, when he went knocking at the doors of ten business firms that had advertised summer office-boy positions. After all ten were slammed in his face, he bleakly acceded to his father’s alternative program of improving his Chinese.4
The truth was that no amount of education—not even a college degree—offered immigrants’ children any reliable escape from the employment ghetto of laundries, restaurants, grocery shops, importing firms, and a few other niche occupations regularly filled by Chinese. Their suspension between two national identities was more painful and more difficult than that of other second-generation immigrants. Unlike their elders, these young men and women had never been threatened with deportation or outright statelessness. But they still remained helpless in the face of racial and cultural prejudice. Their birthright citizenship was in fact second-class citizenship.
At the same time, young Chinese Americans often demurred at or flatly rejected their parents’ and grandparents’ sense of an identity derived from a particular Pearl River Delta village peopled with owners of the same surname. Some classic Cantonese values—for instance, the importance of returning to a family’s “own” hamlet in old age so as to be buried there, or the sacred duty of shipping back the bones of clan members who had died abroad—were less deeply ingrained in them than in men and women born in the Three or Four Counties. Many might well have called themselves proud Americans if America had not furnished them with so many reasons to the contrary.
Transcultural Exchange and the John Day Company
Thousands of bright, well-educated, young American-born Chinese continued to work in family-owned businesses like laundries, restaurants, and groceries simply for lack of any alternative. But the situation slowly changed for a few others through new developments in higher learning and the general American intellectual climate. The growth of sociology and allied disciplines set professors and students to examining the details of immigrants’ lives. As graduate students at major universities (especially the University of Chicago), some second-generation Chinese Americans produced master’s or doctoral theses based on field work in their own communities. (Louis H. Chu’s study of New York City Chinese restaurants, written as a New York University master’s thesis in 1939, is among the best-known.5) White colleagues acquired at least marginal respect for the importance of such work.
Whites were a critical part of other shifting equations during the 1920s and 1930s. Among those who began studying Mandarin (less often Cantonese or other Han Chinese languages) in college language departments were young people inspired by either the glory of Chinese civilization or the prospect of business opportunities in the Far East. (400 Million Customers, a breezy survey of warlord-era Chinese society’s marketing possibilities by the American-born Carl Crow, a veteran advertising executive long resident in Shanghai, was a 1937 best seller in the United States and England.6) Others were attracted to Chinese history and archaeology. As specialized instruction in several aspects of Chinese studies expanded, small interracial and interdisciplinary fellowships of scholars grew up on some campuses. In addition, programs formerly affiliated with Christian missions to China were often reinvented in a secular context (e.g., the Yale-China Association, originally founded in 1901 as the Yale Foreign Missionary Society). Harvard and some other universities established partnerships with sister schools in China.
Such changes also hinted at a broadening interest in Asian affairs on the part of a middle-class American public. China filtered into popular awareness through such dubious channels as the Fu Manchu movies and fashions in brocaded silk dressing gowns but also through general-interest magazines and books. A glossy monthly magazine titled Asia, catering to a growing vogue for exotic travel, regaled a posh demographic with accounts of treks to beauty spots or remote fastnesses anywhere from Japan to India. From the mid-1920s, most issues bore spectacularly gorgeous art deco covers testifying to an American hunger for sultry, striking images of the mysterious East.
At about the same time, the Harvard-educated writer and editor Richard J. Walsh founded a book publishing house, not at the outset dedicated to any specialized focus. (By coincidence, he had been a classmate of Earl Derr Biggers, creator of the Charlie Chan mysteries.) The New York–based venture, the John Day Company, had trundled along for a few years without any great breakthrough when Walsh accepted the manuscript of a novel in which a young man appalled his family in China by returning from America with a white wife. The author, a missionary’s daughter raised in the east coast province of Zhejiang, clearly knew the society of which she wrote. (In fact, she had grown up speaking the local language more readily than English, and always mentally translated her own work from Chinese to English.)
In 1930 the book appeared to favorable reviews and good sales as East Wind, West Wind. The next year saw the publication of her still better-received second novel, the story of a Chinese peasant and his slave-wife trying to wrest a living from his ancestral farm. The Good Earth made Pearl S. Buck a household name and the most bankable star in John Day’s stable of writers.7
What mattered most to Buck about the sudden fame of The Good Earth (and the Pulitzer Prize that it won in 1932) was having acquired a national bully pulpit for a supremely important purpose. She harbored no deep illusions about her real abilities as a novelist but rightly thought that she was a born educator. Partly in reaction against the missionary agenda that she had at last rejected, she viewed American ideas of Chinese politics and culture as a mass of ignorant misconceptions begging to be corrected.
She and Walsh became lovers a year or two after the triumph of The Good Earth. They divorced their respective spouses and married in 1935. By then Buck was determined to help direct John Day’s editorial decisions, and had convinced Walsh that between them they could fill an unpardonable gap in transcultural understanding. They were arguably the most prominent married couple in American publishing.
Buck and Walsh first set out to make John Day the foremost U.S. source of books on Asian and especially Chinese affairs. Her contacts with Chinese thinkers here and abroad, and his in the trade publishing world, gave them access to many representatives of contemporary Chinese literature, philosophy, and art; pioneering teachers at American universities; and influential New York critics or reviewers. Buck’s reception of the 1938 Nobel Prize in Literature further enlarged their ambitions.
In 1934 Walsh had acquired Asia magazine. The two of them transformed it by degrees into a plainer-looking, more serious vehicle for glimpses into Asian politics and society—for instance, reports on the state of China by the well-known traveler and scholar Owen Lattimore, or a serialization of the Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters to his teenaged daughter Indira from a British prison in Uttar Pradesh. America’s entry into World War II opened still other opportunities.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor immediately brought the United States in on the side of the Nationalist Chinese government. By now the Japanese had managed to seize all of eastern and southeastern China. Chiang Kai-shek, who had retreated to temporary western headquarters in Chongqing, Sichuan Province, was hailed as America’s dauntless ally. In a miraculous reversal of earlier doctrine, the immigration authorities and the State Department decided that the Chinese were no longer the Yellow Peril, while the War Department and the Justice Department clapped thousands of first- and second-generation Japanese immigrants into detention camps.
In December of 1943 Congress passed the Magnuson Act, officially repealing at least parts of the various exclusion acts that had been in force since 1882.8 People born in China were now explicitly allowed to become naturalized citizens, and a legal immigration quota was established—a pitiful 105 Chinese a year but at least a token step away from the prior zero-tolerance policy. Though it was not the end of hardships for Chinese people in America, it decisively abolished the legal basis of much evil.
By now Buck and Walsh had done a great deal to direct China to the awareness of moderately well-read Americans. They brought the philosopher and novelist Lin Yutang to Asia magazine and launched his American career in 1935 with the best-selling book My Country and My People. For decades Lin would be the most graceful and congenial interpreter of Chinese culture to an American readership. At John Day, Buck and Walsh also commissioned both popular and specialized works ranging from the autobiography of Arnold Genthe (the photographic documenter of San Francisco Chinatown between about 1898 and 1906) to Elizabeth Colman’s contemporary photographic survey Chinatown, U.S.A.; a volume of modern Chinese short stories edited by Edgar Snow; and Owen Lattimore’s scholarly study The Mongols of Manchuria, a region now occupied by the Japanese.
The example of John Day may have created a better climate for authors and other publishers to tackle ideas on Chinese and Chinese American subjects. The early 1940s saw two well-received works that shed real insight into the cultural dilemmas of Chinese Americans. Carl Glick, a community-theater director and eclectic freelance writer who had been introduced to New York Chinatown through a job with the Emergency Works Bureau (a short-lived precursor to the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration), became fascinated by every facet of the neighborhood’s life. In 1941 his Shake Hands with the Dragon achieved widespread notice for a somewhat rose-colored but carefully observed and genuinely respectful account of a society that he felt privileged to have forged ties with. (In a chapter saluting Chinese food as “the best in the world,” Glick’s closest Chinatown friend one day has the bright idea of going uptown to “have dinner in a Chop Suey Palace. I want to see what chow mein tastes like.”9) The book attracted enough attention to be picked up at once for a Reader’s Digest condensation.
Two years later, Pardee Lowe’s memoir Father and Glorious Descendant gave a far more subtle first-person portrayal of the many tensions between Chinese and American identities in one Bay Area Cantonese family—undoubtedly new mental territory for the large audience of non-Chinese readers who made this a 1943 best seller. Together with a later Chinatown foray by Carl Glick (Three Times I Bow), it was chosen for publication in the “Armed Services Edition” roster of books printed as small, cheap, easy-to-carry paperbacks by a publishers’ consortium for distribution to members of the Armed Forces. White readers’ appetite for glimpses of Chinese American life clearly was at an all-time high.
Enter the Chao Family
In the spring of 1944 Lin Yutang and his wife told Buck and Walsh about a work in progress that had come to their notice, a concise Mandarin–English dictionary that might be available for publication by John Day. They also mentioned that the author’s wife was at work on a cookbook.10 Walsh dispatched a letter of inquiry.
The author in question was Yuenren Chao, by now a professor at Harvard’s Department of Asian Studies and one of the great linguists of his generation. He replied with a polite note explaining that the dictionary project was already spoken for, but that the cookbook should soon be finished.11 Walsh agreed to look at the manuscript.
Since her unconventional wedding to Yuenren Chao in 1921, Dr. Buwei Yang had given up her medical practice to be a full-time wife and mother. She was fifty-five at the time John Day expressed interest in her book and had never published anything except a Chinese translation of What Every Girl Should Know by Margaret Sanger, one of her early medical heroes. The Chaos had moved several times between China and the United States, and were now living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with four daughters ranging in age from thirteen to twenty-two.
Born in Nanjing, Buwei Yang Chao was an outspoken, impetuous woman who had been raised in boy’s clothing until the age of thirteen, an occasional custom among families with no sons and a surfeit of daughters. She had had the good luck to be encouraged in blunt speech and unorthodox ambitions by her progressive-minded Yang grandfather, a building supervisor and minor diplomat of catholic intellectual interests. At twenty-five she had had taught herself the elements of Chinese cooking to avoid having to eat Japanese food while studying medicine in Tokyo. As Mrs. Yuenren Chao (a title she wore with pride), she had dealt with kitchens in Nanjing; Beijing; Shanghai; Suzhou (Jiangsu Province); Guangzhou; Changsha (Hunan Province); Kunming (Yunnan Province); Honolulu; New Haven, Connecticut; and Washington, DC. She had traveled extensively in England, Germany, France, and Switzerland. But the cuisine she (like Pearl Buck) felt most at home with belonged to the general orbit of the so-called Jiangnan region—that is, central eastern China south (nan) of the Yangzi River (“Jiang”), including parts of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and southeastern Anhui provinces. In the eyes of people raised there, Jiangnan cuisine rivaled that of Guangdong Province for inspired beauty.
Mrs. Chao’s manuscript, originally written in Chinese, was a vast departure from previous attempts to teach Chinese cooking to Americans. Only a few major trade publishers had stuck a toe in these difficult waters. As discussed earlier, Shiu Wong Chan’s The Chinese Cook Book, published by Frederick A. Stokes in 1917, was a laborious effort doomed by lack of the English-language skills or nimble-mindedness needed to explain utterly foreign culinary concepts to the audience. With one obscure exception, no successor appeared from a mainstream American firm until 1938, when Macmillan published Cook at Home in Chinese by Henry Low. (The exception was Stokes’s 1936 reissue of a curiosity from the Western-language publishing scene in China: The Chinese Festive Board by Corrinne [sic] Lamb, written in Beijing and originally published in 1934 by the firm of Henri Vetch.12 The slim volume is a fascinating document of food in 1930s Beijing, but it contains only a tiny recipe section with fifty formulas too closely based on local ingredients to have been well understood by American cooks.)
Like the unknown Shiu Wong Chan, Henry Low seems to have been Cantonese since the romanizations of words and names are based on Cantonese pronunciation. He was the head chef of the famous Port Arthur restaurant in New York Chinatown, an establishment mentioned in Louis H. Chu’s New York University master’s thesis as among “the restaurants which cater chiefly to American diners.”13 He also was, or claimed to be, the originator of the Chinese American “egg roll,” for which he provides a recipe with wrappers made from a dough that he had “discovered” thirty years earlier by combining wheat flour with water chestnut starch: “Taking an old Chinese dish, which was served with a dough covering, as a basis, the author further concocted a number of ingredients as a mixture to be wrapped in this new dough, which he named ‘Tchun Guen,’ or ‘Egg Roll.’”14 (“Tchun Guen” actually means “spring roll.”) I doubt that Low’s “egg roll” skins much resembled the heavy, floury kind now known by that name. But the shredded and chopped ingredients in the filling—including canned bamboo shoots, Chinese roast pork, shrimps, scallions, water chestnuts, and monosodium glutamate—certainly sound like what would become the standard array.
Low’s book is far more polished and sophisticated than Chan’s ungainly effort; he hints at having had editorial guidance from an American helper, one Grace S. R. Hillyer. Unlike the earlier work, Cook at Home in Chinese does not print the names of recipes in Chinese characters. But it has a longer and better-arranged list of the names for special ingredients, with both Chinese characters and Cantonese romanizations. What it doesn’t have is a mindset primed to analyze and remedy either language-based or kitchen-based East–West misunderstandings. It was the best thing of its kind to date but didn’t bring truly applicable mental resources to a very complex business.
Mrs. Chao’s manuscript was quite another animal. For one thing, it was the first work in the field by a home cook who knew what other home cooks were up against. She was neither a restaurateur, journalist, nor test-kitchen flack like those hired to crank out American soy sauce manufacturers’ recipe brochures. Hers was also the first work by anyone acquainted with a broad spectrum of Chinese culinary styles beyond Cantonese (though she had lived in Guangzhou and admired the cuisine). But her book also stood apart from all others for two further reasons. One was the unspoken matter of social and educational status. The second, perhaps even more crucial, was the participation of uniquely qualified translators.
No prior Chinese cookbook addressed to Americans had been produced by a woman or man of higher learning, much less a self-assured cosmopolite who could more than hold her own among Harvard faculty wives. Both Mrs. Chao’s cooking and her fearless intelligence were known to a considerable circle in Cambridge. She and her husband had many friends in common with Buck and Walsh—notably, Agnes and William Ernest Hocking. They were respectively the head of a highly regarded progressive school and a well-known student of comparative religion who shared Buck’s scathing, highly publicized view of the American missionary presence in China. It was Agnes Hocking who had first suggested that Mrs. Chao write a cookbook.15
Of course, the Pearl River Delta Cantonese who lived and cooked in America possessed none of the Chaos’ advantages. Most were Four Counties peasants or the children of peasants, cooking by example together with the sort of trained instincts that are synonymous with strongly rooted culinary traditions anywhere from Georgia in the United States to Georgia in the Caucasus. The older generation had worked in the shadow of Exclusion until 1943. Those younger Chinese Americans who had won bachelor’s or higher degrees were with rare exceptions shut out from further academic or professional careers. In fact, Mrs. Chao was a privileged newcomer with no experience of the hardships faced by the larger Chinese community in America. Her family had never been threatened with deportation; she had never suffered the double burden imposed on women by white prejudice and Cantonese patriarchal attitudes. Her self-confident written voice radiated a sense of being naturally entitled to address cultivated persons. It could not have been mistaken for that of a first- or second-generation Chinese American, male or female.
Beyond these differences, her book was the first English-language Chinese cookbook to benefit from linguistic awareness—indeed, from the united talents of three people able to grasp the problems of “translating” a cuisine across incredible cultural and language gaps.
Mrs. Chao could make herself understood to American friends in animated but erratic, heavily accented spoken English. She could write short messages confidently enough. But she was perfectly aware of never having mastered the intricacies of English grammar. She and her oldest daughter, Rulan, had spent about three years on the manuscript—Buwei writing in Chinese, Rulan producing working translations of material in progress—with frequent pitched battles between two determined personalities.16 (Rulan, who would go on to have her own long and distinguished professorial career at Harvard, was at the moment a Chinese-language teaching assistant, working with her father on a special course for U.S. Army personnel.) The whole book had also received interested kibitzing from all the family and a thorough going-over by Professor Chao.
It happened that he not only wrote fluent and spirited English but, as his wife and daughters well knew, was possibly the greatest living expert on the problems of communication among speakers of the many northern and southern, eastern and western Han Chinese languages. He also had been a key player in the early-twentieth-century language reform movement dedicated to educating Chinese of all linguistic backgrounds in a standardized form of spoken Mandarin, the precursor to the putonghua, or “common speech,” eventually adopted by the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s.
Language reform was an issue of immense political importance. It was plain to many former Boxer Indemnity scholars and other intellectuals that China was hopelessly handicapped among world powers by vast accretions of crippling cultural baggage, including speaking and writing systems whose difficulties were nearly insuperable for non-Chinese. These advocates were collectively known as the “New Culture” movement, which also promoted writing in the vernacular style—a revolutionary protest against the educational stranglehold of the learned writing style called “Classical Chinese,” derived from two-thousand-year-old literary models. New Culture proponents recognized that any nation with dozens of spoken “dialects” (a wholly inadequate word) that in some cases were as distantly related and mutually unintelligible as Swedish and Provençal could hardly hope to function as a nation. Yuenren Chao had been deputed to study many branches of regional speech and summarize their most crucial features, with a view to an overall educational strategy.
Most of the Chao family’s peripatetic travels in and beyond China had reflected stages of Professor Chao’s research on the major Han Chinese language families. Others stemmed from his work on comprehensive schemes of simplifying and standardizing meant to bring a unilingual out of a multilingual China and make the language easier for foreigners (as well as Chinese) to read, write, and speak. He was an urbane, dry-witted man with a lively sense of linguistic absurdity—his first published work had been a Chinese translation of Alice in Wonderland—shared by his family. To him, the forbidding language barriers between Chinese and English cooking terminology were so many Gordian knots to be cut through by unexpected strokes of invention.
All three participants brought to the project a quality absent from Shiu Wong Chan’s or Henry Low’s efforts: delight in teaching something supremely difficult to be taught. They had real pedagogical imagination, a wonderful instinct for imparting shape and structure to a great mass of information outside everyday American experience. All three relished the challenge of remolding Chinese concepts into English words. Buwei, though not proficient in English, certainly grasped the problems at hand well enough to wrestle cleverly with solutions. It was her forceful, irreverent personality—as projected by her collaborators—that gave life to the whole.
The Chaos could not have found a better-qualified judge of their work than Pearl Buck, whose knowledge of the subject came from more than thirty years of living and housekeeping in China. She disdained English-language Chinese cookbooks in general, and the company had turned down several in the past. But as Richard Walsh wrote to Mrs. Chao, “As for the recipes, I can do no better than to say that after reading the manuscript for a short time, Mrs. Walsh dashed to the kitchen and made a complete Chinese meal just for herself and me. I think we shall be trying them one by one for the rest of our lives!”17 To his son Richard Jr. (a John Day editor), he had already expressed the couple’s opinion still more forthrightly: “Mrs. Chao’s cook book is splendid and we must certainly have it. . . . Pearl says it is the best Chinese cook book that she has seen.”18
The John Day Company went through the formality of requesting a reader’s report before setting up a production schedule. The reader, a Miss Mills, was lukewarm at best. She was irritated by what she saw as odd tics in the English—for instance, the proposed title “How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.” She was dubious about the eccentric coinage “stir-frying,” no matter how apt a translation it might be. (This durable phrase has the air of a Yuenren Chao caprice.) She disliked the scattering of informal asides and footnotes based on family discussions of food or Professor Chao’s philological afterthoughts. She also predicted difficulties in production, along with expenses that might or might not be justified.19
Buck and Walsh would have none of this. They saw how resourcefully the English style and tone dealt with all that ordinarily defied translation in Chinese vernacular writing and Chinese cooking. They loved Professor Chao’s off-the-cuff footnotes well enough to think that more might be added for “the masculine perspective.”20 They were not afraid of the special copyediting, proofreading, and cross-referencing demands of a cookbook. What was more, they were willing to spring for the expense of a bilingual table of recipes at the end of the book, with every entry printed in large, clear Chinese characters as well as English translation—a clue to how thoroughly they entered into the thinking behind the Chao family’s effort.
At the time Buck and Walsh accepted the manuscript for publication, they were getting ready to launch a new John Day division called Asia Press. In their enthusiasm for How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, they chose it as the first title to bear the imprint “An Asia Press Book.”21 They devised an ambitious publicity campaign that included a teaser, a small prepublication booklet of excerpts titled “Food for Philosophy” that was distributed to influential members of the New York (and national) press as a New Year’s gift. Asia magazine (now officially retitled Asia and the Americas) carried an inside back-cover ad justifying the sister press’s inaugural publication of a cookbook with the virtuous if vague declaration, “For we are much more interested in human appetites, human aspirations and all human ways than in the niceties of the experts and the crudities of the exploiters.”22
Buck herself agreed to contribute a preface to the book. The Chaos arranged for a foreword by their friend Hu Shih, one of the two witnesses at their contrarian wedding in 1921. (He and Professor Chao had been fellow Boxer Indemnity scholarship students at Cornell; Hu had later become the best-known public advocate of the New Culture movement’s proposed language reforms and had been Chinese ambassador to the United States between 1938 and 1942.) Buck and Walsh set up a dinner at the Lin Yutangs’ home for the purpose of introducing Mrs. Chao (who cooked the entire meal) to influential people including Irita Van Doren, the editor of the New York Herald Tribune Book Review.23 At the women’s page of the New York Times, the pseudonymous food reporter “Jane Holt” (Jane Nickerson) was told of the book’s importance in time to prepare an intelligently balanced review.24
In short, John Day made a point of rolling out its first Asia Press title as a cultural event of the first importance. No American publisher had ever done anything of the kind for a cookbook. The publication date—May 10, 1945—had the bad luck to occur less than a month after the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the book’s reception does not seem to have been dampened. How to Cook and Eat in Chinese received much favorable press and radio coverage. Sales were good enough to warrant several more printings by the end of the year.
“Use Your Head”
Pearl Buck’s preface suggested nominating the author for a Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her “contribution to international understanding” and observed, “As a Chinese, she knows exactly what Americans don’t know.”25 Seventy years later, one can only admire Mrs. Chao’s apt choices about not just what information to focus on but how to put it across to an audience. The first few paragraphs of her “Author’s Note” were enough to convey the flavor of a nimble, down-to-earth mind that united vastly experienced judgment with a natural glee at ridiculing authority. She roundly admitted to finding “most conventions of cooking, serving, and eating to be a little silly,” and she swept aside lumbering precepts by pointing out that “nothing takes the place of a little thinking. If you cannot get beef, get pork. If you cannot find an egg-beater, use your head”—the xiang banfa spirit in plain English (xii).
Apparently Professor Chao had found Rulan’s translation too neatly compressed into proper usage and gone through it in a correctness-be-damned spirit, supplying back-formations with a more original take on Chinese nuances. The result was sentences like “Roughly speaking, ch’ao [stir-frying] may be defined as a big-fire-shallow-fat-continual-stirring-quick-frying of cut-up material with wet seasoning” (43). Anyone who has ever seen the action in a Chinese kitchen will recognize this as an unerring slap shot.
Since Buck and the John Day team were as new as the Chaos to the cookbook game, the book had the good luck to escape the attentions of professional cookbook editors bent on translating anything original into “recipese.” Thus we encounter a dish named “Mushroom Meets Shrimp Cakes” with “meets” rendering “hui,” a method by which several separately prepared ingredients enjoy a brief rencontre in the same cooking pan (120); “leaking ladle” instead of “perforated ladle” (140); “Cut into flying-thin slices” instead of “paper-thin slices” (84); and “The most savorous part [of poached duck] is in the bones” (105).
In another departure from predecessors, the book’s culinary coverage gave great weight to the homeland of both Chaos: the central east-coast region running from the Lower Yangzi into the Yangzi Delta. From ancient times, many Chinese have thought of the eastern Yangzi reaches as the real core of Middle Kingdom civilization. To the north lies flatter, drier terrain extending toward the Yellow River and Beijing; to the south are the rich, well-watered soils of Jiangnan. The greatest local city is Shanghai. Westerners sometimes write as if “Shanghai cooking traditions” dominate all the region’s kitchens. This is a little like assuming that “New York cuisine,” with its many vigorous foreign influences, is the cuisine of the northeastern United States.
Centuries before assorted Western powers grabbed trade concessions in Shanghai, the Lower Yangzi was prosperous and powerful, dotted with older merchant towns like Yangzhou, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Hangzhou that enjoyed their own lofty culinary reputations. Since for centuries the region was linked with Beijing by the Grand Canal, it managed to unite many culinary blessings of north and south. It produced excellent rice but also imported wheat from northerly breadbasket provinces (and grew a little of its own, north of the river). Local waters supported a wealth of both freshwater and saltwater fish and shellfish.
The Lower Yangzi is known throughout China for the rice wine made in Shaoxing, the wonderful black rice wine vinegar from Chinkiang (officially “Zhenjiang” in pinyin), and the “hairy crabs” or “mitten crabs” that appear in local waters in autumn. It has its own repertory of dian xin specialties corresponding to the Cantonese “dim sum,” including various steamed or pan-fried wheat-flour rolls raised with yeast, savory dumplings, and filled buns. Like the Cantonese, people from the region are adept at stir-frying and steaming.
But the techniques that Chinese cognoscenti most associate with the Lower Yangzi are long, gentle stewing and braising. Many of the classic local stewed dishes are called “red-cooked” (Mandarin, hong shao; Cantonese, hung siu) for the red-brown color the sauce acquires from a mixture of soy sauce and rice wine. Large pieces of meat (e.g., pork shoulder) or cuts with much natural cartilage and gelatin (pigs’ feet or hocks) are often given this treatment. In all dishes, red-cooked or otherwise, discreetly blended flavors are valued over aggressive accents. Fresh ginger, small amounts of sugar, and rice wine are the most common seasonings, sometimes with the addition of scallion.
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese provided many 1940s American cooks and readers with their first glimpse of the Jiangnan or Lower Yangzi cooking style, and provides a scarcely surpassed glimpse today. It gives more than two dozen recipes for red-cooked dishes of all kinds. Mrs. Chao also offers what appear to be the first English-language recipes for man-t’ou or mantou (steamed yeast rolls), pao-tzu or baozi (filled sweet or savory dumplings using the same yeast dough), and scallion pancakes, along with one of the first recipes for fried jiaozi, or pork dumplings. (The Chaos dubbed these “wraplings” and called wontons “ramblings,” coinages that failed to catch on like “stir-fry.”) She essays pork meatballs in the style of the region’s famous “Lion’s Head.” She gives recipes for smoked fish (very briefly hot-smoked over brown sugar), Nanjing “salt-water” duck (fresh-salted, poached, and chilled), and fresh-salted pork cooked until it can be pressed flat, chilled, and sliced like an aspic for serving with Chinkiang vinegar.
Mrs. Chao also presents a good many recipes representing Beijing and the north. These too were a novelty in an American cookbook—“sour-hot soup” in the original Beijing version with peppercorns instead of hot red pepper, “soy jam noodles” (usually called zha jiang mian [Mandarin] or ja jeung min [Cantonese], and made by tossing wheat noodles with a mixture of minced pork and hoisin sauce), and a sweetmeat of dried peas cooked to a puree with sugar. There are recipes for cold jellied lamb and the equally classic Beijing-style “rinsed lamb,” a cousin of the celebrated Mongolian fire pot, along with other fire pots of various origins and occasional borrowings from other regions, such as Sichuan twice-cooked pork.
What Buwei Yang Chao doesn’t attempt is as significant as what she does. She never claims to be presenting an encyclopedic, region-by-region picture of Chinese cuisine in all its vastness and complexity. She doesn’t guarantee surefire success with every recipe or pretend that every detail is flawlessly “authentic.” Her book’s authenticity lay (and lies today) first and foremost in evoking the shape and feeling of the major Chinese cooking techniques and putting them to simple use in her recipes. It also depends on much hard work at conveying Chinese attitudes toward food. The first five recipe chapters are all for “Meat,” occupying twenty-five pages in all—but as the author has already explained, “when we [Chinese] say meat, we mean pork unless some other kind of meat is specified” (15). Beef, by contrast, gets only one seven-page chapter.
Sometimes Mrs. Chao refuses to use an American ingredient—notably, crabs. In her opinion, “fresh-water crabs are so much better than sea crabs that any crab dish made with sea crabs would be a caricature of the Chinese dish” (124). But most recipes stick to a fairly simple range of ingredients that she knew most American cooks could find without trouble, even in wartime. Scallions, soy sauce, and sherry (in place of Chinese rice wine) are her usual seasonings. Mentions of fresh ginger are usually followed by “(if you can get it)”; she allows that dried whole ginger might just possibly be substituted, but not powdered ginger. (Fresh ginger, grown only for the Chinese market, was unknown to non-Asian cooks almost everywhere on the U.S. mainland, though it was a thriving crop on Hawaii.) Despite the number of dishes that really need sesame oil, she is resigned to using plain salad oil instead. She uses fresh white mushrooms for the unavailable dried Chinese kind. These were just the sort of xiang banfa expedients that resourceful Chinese have always adopted when they had to, without falsifying the essential Chineseness of the whole approach. “I have been in some places in the United States where I can buy nothing but cabbages, lard, pork, pepper, and salt and such like things, and have still been able to make Chinese dishes,” she assures American readers (15).
Of course, the book was written in the midst of a world conflagration—as evidenced by the poor quality of the very paper on which it was printed; all publishers were getting by with whatever could be spared from government paper rationing. The war had interrupted or shut down commercial shipping around the globe, cutting off food imports from China and Southeast Asia. Even in Boston Chinatown, then among the largest in America, crucial Chinese pantry items might be scarce or unavailable. Mrs. Chao scarcely mentions the war (except to remark that friends in China had passed on such new nicknames as “‘Bomb Tokyo’ for sizzling rice toast in soup” [46]), but it clearly affected some decisions about coverage.
She also refrains from dictating that people must seek out “authentic” Chinese cooking equipment, simply telling reader-users that they ought to have “pots and pans of various sizes” (30). She does explain that a Chinese “vegetable-cutting knife” is endlessly useful and some sort of steamer arrangement absolutely necessary (30–31). As for measuring tools, “The Chinese cook or housewife never measures space, time, or matter,” but she had forced herself to get used to measuring cups and the like “so that I can show you how to do it my way. What my way was I could not tell myself until I measured myself doing it” (32–33).
The only odd-looking omission is any mention of a wok, or Mandarin huo—and the oddity vanishes when one recalls that woks were then impossible to use on American family kitchen stoves. Because of the round-bottomed shape, a wok had to fit into an aperture that held it securely over the heat source. It is unclear whether manufacturers of Chinese kitchen equipment in America had yet introduced wok rings to balance the wobbly pans on home gas or electric stoves. The fact that the Guangdong cooks who came to Gold Mountain didn’t use quite the same type of wok as the cooks of the Chaos’ native region may have complicated the issue. (The Cantonese wok is wider and shallower than Lower Yangzi counterparts and hence requires a slightly different stir-frying motion.) For whatever reason, Mrs. Chao decided not to spend time on descriptions of the basic Chinese cooking vessel or stratagems for adapting it to Western cookstoves. She is content to specify “skillets” for stir-frying. Some Cantonese-born home cooks who considered skillets the least bad choice for stir-frying in American kitchens would have agreed with her.
The book also avoids dishes best left to restaurants. Low’s Cook at Home in Chinese had a dozen recipes involving shark’s fins and many others for exorbitant or demanding presentations like chicken boned and filled with a minced fish and lobster mixture. Mrs. Chao, however, never forgot that she was addressing home cooks. She describes shark’s fin and its preparation in much detail but gives only two recipes using it. She also registers a certain coolness about a wonder ingredient that had taken Chinese American restaurants by storm in the 1920s and 1930s: monosodium glutamate, known as wei jing (Mandarin) or mei jing (Cantonese). Henry Low used it in substantial amounts for nearly everything, under the name of “gourmet powder.” Mrs. Chao, who calls it “taste-powder,” says that its widespread use “has resulted in a lowering of the standard of right cooking and a leveling of all dishes to one flavor” (28). Only in a few “very plain” (usually meatless) dishes does she allow that a small amount might do something to animate other flavors.
The breakthrough work received prompt and admiring publicity. Jane Nickerson’s review (as “Jane Holt”), which appeared in the Times on the day of publication, described How to Cook and Eat in Chinese as “something distinctly novel in the way of a cook book,” though warning would-be buyers, “Well seasoned with humor though it is, the volume is not for the novice” and observing that the work required some concentration on Mrs. Chao’s actual words if one wanted to follow “practical and good” recipes like the version of red-cooked fish printed in the review. Nickerson, a scrupulous writer who unlike many colleagues didn’t try to pass herself off as an expert on all food traditions, nonetheless sensed that the book presented “an authentic account of the Chinese cooking system.”26
Ida Bailey Allen, now conducting a nationally broadcast radio cooking show from Chicago, devoted part of a program to praising the book and scored a publicity coup of sorts by persuading the world-famous Pearl Buck to send a telegram to the station to be read on the air, explaining the importance of Mrs. Chao’s contribution.27 Several national women’s “service” magazines requested permission to print a selection of her recipes. A year later the eminent food and wine writer Julian Street, who at the moment was (anonymously) conducting a monthly newsletter called “Table Topics” for the Bellows liquor distillery, asked permission to quote at length from Mrs. Chao’s “delightful” work as part of a long, detailed essay he was preparing on Chinese food as “the only school of cookery that may properly be compared with the high cuisine of France.”28
How to Cook and Eat in Chinese sold well enough to go into several more printings before the end of the year and achieved more notice in literary circles than was usual for a mere cookbook. In fact, it was successful enough to set the participants thinking about an encore: a memoir by the woman behind the cookbook. It was to be written in Chinese by Buwei and translated into English by Yuenren. Buck and Walsh seriously hoped for a real blockbuster. This wasn’t an unreasonable bet at the time, given the popularity of books recalling early-twentieth-century immigrant lives, such as Mama’s Bank Account (1943) by Kathryn Forbes, based on the story of a Norwegian family in California; or Pardee Lowe’s previously mentioned Father and Glorious Descendant. All the participants considered the memoir, published in 1947 as Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, a work of real importance. The Chaos and the Walshes alike were disappointed when it failed to strike a chord with book buyers. Nonetheless, it remains a wonderfully original evocation of seismic changes in late-Qing and early-republican Chinese society as well as early-twentieth-century America, commonsensically interwoven with the large and small plot lines of family existence.
Postscript to Success
The cookbook proved to have a more lasting appeal than the memoir—but “lasting” only by the notoriously ephemeral stands of cookbooks. It would survive long enough to be not only read but published by people with short historical memories, before yielding to new competitors in an unimaginably different age.
To the pleasure of the original participants, sales of their pathbreaking effort held up solidly enough to justify a second edition in 1949. Probably for cost-cutting reasons, John Day decided to produce this update with an absolute minimum of changes in typesetting and pagination. The second edition was essentially the first edition printed on better paper, with about a dozen new recipes worked in on the blank space of existing pages or on a few interpolated pages numbered “34a” and so forth. Mrs. Chao had arrived at a few new perspectives, including a brief recommendation of pressure cookers for some “red-cooked” dishes; Pearl Buck had tried to get them mentioned in 1945, but the stubborn author had not then felt familiar enough with them to consent.29 With the family now living in Berkeley, she had also softened her stance against American crabs enough to admit the excellence of the “California” (i.e., Dungeness) variety.30 (Probably Chesapeake blue crabs had been her introduction to North American species, and for anyone accustomed to big, meaty Chinese river crabs, they must have been a bewildering experience.)
Again the Chaos and the Walshes were gratified by reliable sales. The 1949 edition went through at least eight printings. In fact, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese was still a desirable property more than a dozen years later. But at that point the John Day Company was a shadow of its older self. Richard Walsh had been incapacitated by a stroke in 1953; Pearl Buck was no longer as closely involved in shaping the firm’s publishing agenda. The Chaos took the book to Random House, which issued a third edition in 1963.
The new editor, Jason Epstein, had read the author’s introduction with so little comprehension as to form a muddled idea that Mrs. Chao knew no English and her husband had actually written the text.31 Apparently Random House wanted to update the work’s appeal with the smallest possible departure from the plates of the first (and second) edition. The production team arrived at the less than ideal solution of making space by deleting the Chaos’ bilingual table of recipes. (It has to be said that few publishers aside from Buck and Walsh could have understood the use of Chinese characters as anything more than window dressing.) Only the English-language index remained for guidance, minus the original Rosetta Stone. The freed-up space was used to add a couple of new chapters: a small one that discussed soybean-based foods and presented a few interesting recipes, and another on the dietary virtues of Chinese cooking. (The latter undoubtedly was meant to appeal to the body of young countercultural types who rejected traditional American diets along with a long litany of other American values.) Several more recipes had been worked in on extra-numbered pages, notably a version of pan-seared dumplings for which the Chaos had come up with the English name “pot sticker.”32 In one minor victory for linguistic barrier-crossing, a list of fourteen important ingredients with Chinese characters, English translations, and both Mandarin and Cantonese pronunciations had been crammed onto the last page of the chapter “Cooking Materials.”
The third edition proved even more durable than its predecessors. It remained in print as a hardback book until 1972, when it was reissued under the Random House Vintage paperback imprint. This, too, enjoyed a long run despite the arrival of numerous competitors, along with new fashions in Chinese cuisine (see chapter 7). It went out of print at some point in the 1980s—but not before publisher and authors had managed to produce one last footnote to the story.
The 1970s offered a favorable climate for guides that promised to clue in consumers to chic new Chinese discoveries far beyond the ken of dull, plodding chop suey fans. The Vintage editors and the Chaos decided that the moment might be right for a tiny companion to the much-loved cookbook. How to Order and Eat in Chinese, a skinny little paperback, appeared in 1974. It was another mother-father-daughter collaboration, but this time the main translator of Buwei Yang Chao’s Chinese text was her third daughter, Lensey Chao Namioka.
Like its better-known predecessor, this short-lived book has not since been surpassed for bundling much knowledge into terse and witty form. It begins with a good deal of information on Chinese meals and manners followed by four chapters on the major regional styles: “Cantonese Cuisine,” “Northern Food,” “Szechwan Cooking,” and “Southern Dishes”—“Southern” being a tradition-hallowed if geographically ambiguous Chinese epithet for the Lower Yangzi or Jiangnan area. The first three areas each received several pages of general description along with bilingual listings (containing printed Chinese characters) of a few dozen typical dishes from the major menu categories. Mrs. Chao elected not to do the same for her own home region, mostly because “there are few Southern restaurants as such in America.”33 (The situation is much altered today, though most diners are not likely to recognize “Southern” food except under the label “Shanghai.”)
Perhaps the most useful sections of this clever miniguide are the bilingual listings of dishes; humble though they look compared to the fare at up-to-the-minute restaurants in the second decade of this century, they would be helpful even today to anyone who wanted to carry along the book to dinner and point to Cantonese “Beef Slices with Greens” or Sichuanese “Ants Up a Tree” (spicy cellophane noodles and minced pork or beef). The same is true of a short final section giving nearly seventy practical culinary (and other) terms in Chinese characters with Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations.
The importance of the Chaos’ work was incalculable. It is true that they lived and thought on a plane far removed from the Cantonese Americans who actually cooked for this nation’s white (or black) patrons of Chinese restaurants at the time the cookbook appeared. But they were able to help at least some non-Chinese better understand what went into all good Chinese cooking.
Their efforts arose from new kinds of exchange that started to occur during the early twentieth century between certain privileged people of Chinese and non-Chinese ancestry. Only with the arrival of genuinely bicultural women and men like Pearl Buck and Yuenren Chao did such dialogues become possible for others.
Buwei Yang Chao had the good luck to launch one particular conversation just as American approval of China and the Chinese was at an unprecedented height, and to have America’s foremost Chinese cultural ambassador-at-large in her corner. She, her husband, and her daughter had exactly the right qualifications to go at the thing with system and gusto. They proved that a tremendously difficult body of knowledge was not after all impossible to convey to Americans who grasped the xiang banfa principle well enough to use their heads. Their great breakthrough was to discover the right language for communicating with non-Chinese cooks—to find sturdy, spirited English words for remote Chinese concepts as well as ingenious verbal bridges to the basically nonverbal business of cooking. Their success would eventually give other authors (and cookbook editors) confidence that the Chinese culinary art could be made as accessible to American cooks as any other cuisine.