Seven

White America Rediscovers Chinese Cuisine

The War Years

By the time Exclusion was abolished in 1943, China’s position on the geopolitical stage had radically altered. So had Western attitudes toward the Guomindang (GMD) or “Nationalist” regime that had replaced the Qing Empire. World War II marked the first moment in history at which the United States voluntarily acknowledged China as a great military and political ally vital to America’s own security. On this side of the Pacific Ocean, it also marked the first moment at which a precariously positioned Chinese-born population was outnumbered by younger birthright citizens born to Chinese parents in this country—another sign of the shift to an immigrant community at least partly comparable to European-descended immigrant groups.¹

Chinese Americans had not waited for the end of Exclusion to throw themselves into the war effort. They had watched with mounting horror as Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and continued to menace China’s eastern provinces. Horror turned to militant rage when Japan launched a full-fledged invasion, with no declaration of war, in the summer and autumn of 1937. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, the great eastern cities of Shanghai and Nanjing had been in Japanese hands for more than three years, and bombing raids by Japan’s highly advanced air force had penetrated far inland. Young Chinese American men had been quick to volunteer for service in the Chinese air force; in a 1942 magazine article, Rose Hum Lee reported that thirty-three trained pilots from Portland, Oregon, had gone to fight on behalf of China before Pearl Harbor.2

With America’s entry into the war, Chinese Americans found themselves in the novel role of extravagantly cheered poster children for both Chinese and American patriotism—“Americans first,” as some boasted, but for the first time ever, free to express pride in a dual Chinese and American identity. Acceptance by white American society now seemed to be something more than a dream.

Chinese American men of military service age signed up in great numbers for the draft. For the rest of the community, the burgeoning wartime economy created an unprecedented wealth of job opportunities beyond the old racially stamped employment ghettos of laundries and restaurants. According to Rose Hum Lee,

Throughout the Chinatowns in the United States there is a labor shortage. For the first time since Chinese exclusion began, absorption of the Chinese into American industry has been significant. Whether in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, or Butte, Mont., the service in Chinese restaurants is slow. Four restaurants in New York’s Chinatown have closed their doors in the past few months. The proprietor of Li Po, an up-to-date cocktail-chop suey place located in “Chinatown-on-Broadway” in Los Angeles, said sadly: “I was just ready for another venture. But I can’t now. No men to run it.”³

In New York, she added, students who used to moonlight as waiters “have found employment in industries working on lease-lend material for China.”⁴

Women, too, were beneficiaries of the expanded job market. In the Bay Area, a resourceful can-do college graduate and future memoirist named Jade Snow Wong snared a position at a Marin County shipyard, where her younger sister was already employed, and soon graduated from typist-clerk in a War Production Drive office to more important personnel-relations positions.⁵ Throughout the country, women eagerly poured into defense-related industries or were inducted into the Women’s Army Corps or Army Nurse Corps.

Rose Hum Lee’s 1942 article suggested that the community’s contributions to the war effort showed the necessity of ending the disgraceful legacy of the Exclusion Act and National Origins Act.6 Congressional dithering over the question ended in 1943 with repeal of Exclusion through the Magnuson Act. The historic vote for Magnuson probably did not indicate that a new band of principled statesmen had seen the light. A more likely motivation was the Roosevelt administration’s argument that to continue barring a great contingent of the yellow race from entry would lend embarrassing ammunition—above and beyond the incarceration of Japanese Americans—to Japanese war propagandists.

After 1945 a flood of returning white servicemen partly reversed the wartime employment gains that had been made by women and members of racial minorities. But for American-born Chinese men, the ghetto wall had been decisively breached—the more so with the slow attrition of the aging Chinese-born population to whom the ghettos had been places of refuge. It is true that restaurants continued to be a major source of work. In both 1940 and 1950, they accounted for 29.8 percent of Chinese American employment nationwide.⁷ But racist state and local laws (for instance, against Chinese using municipal swimming pools along with whites or buying homes in white neighborhoods) were beginning to crumble, and Chinese with college or higher degrees stood improved chances of well-paying and satisfying careers, rather than a lifetime as (generally nonunionized) cooks or waiters.

The Taiwanese Connection

Meanwhile, the world political chessboard had altered even more profoundly since the Japanese surrender. In a very few years, the Cold War converted popular American idealizations of a heroic, freedom-loving China into fearsome images of a Communist-menace China. The Guomindang government, portrayed by the press for four years as our brave comrade-in-arms, was now a needy and difficult ally-in-exile. The linking figure here was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, military commander in chief and president of the Republic of China in its beleaguered, mercilessly bombed wartime Chongqing headquarters and later on Taiwan (usually called “Formosa” by the American news media). The Republic of China, of course, was a very different entity from the People’s Republic of China, which was proclaimed on the mainland in October 1949, while the Nationalist forces were scrambling to escape to the island of Taiwan about a hundred miles off the coast of Fujian Province.

During the war, Chiang and the GMD had played a major role in the Allied Command’s Far Eastern theater strategy. One result of America’s continuing alliance with the Republic of China was a stream of Nationalist Chinese diplomats and military attachés arriving (with households) in Washington, DC, almost from the day of Pearl Harbor on into the 1950s and 1960s. After the war, still others came to New York City with the Nationalist mission to the newly founded United Nations. (The UN General Assembly was temporarily housed at the former 1939 World’s Fair New York City pavilion in Flushing Meadows, Queens, and the tiny precursor to a future Flushing Chinese community took root before the move to permanent UN headquarters on the East Side of Manhattan in 1951.8) Some of the newcomers were officially stationed at the U.S. and UN Chinese embassies. Others had been dispatched from different government or trade organizations. Prominent businessmen and financiers accompanied by families and retinues also appeared in major cities, above all Washington and New York.

World War II and the 1949 GMD exodus to Taiwan already had had a certain culinary-cultural impact on people from many regions of China. Starting with the 1937 Japanese invasion, the temporary capital at Chongqing had received perhaps as many as half a million refugees from the war zones.⁹ Until 1945 the mountainous Sichuan city would house relocated businesses, schools, and universities as well as the Nationalist government and the Allied Far Eastern military command.

For the duration, all sorts of regional cooking traditions briefly rubbed elbows in Chongqing. Men and women from Shandong, Fujian, Guangdong, or Shanxi might find themselves eating Sichuanese meals or sharing a dish prepared by fellow refugees from some unfamiliar location. At times during the war a scattering of foreign journalists (including luminaries like Theodore White and Emily Hahn) and many Western military personnel also lived in Chongqing long enough to become acquainted with its cuisine.

The 1949 flight to Taiwan had even stronger effects on gastronomic horizons. In a few months it deposited at least a million mainlanders (by some estimates, as many as 2 million) on an island of some 7 million people.10 At the time, most Taiwan-born people were of Fujianese, or “Hokkienese,” descent. (We may briefly note that their cookery was an offshoot of that practiced across the straits in Fujian Province, with some influence from a large minority of Hakkas who had arrived during the Ming dynastic struggles. But neither Hokkienese nor Hakka cuisine would come to the notice of American diners for many years.) They spoke their own version of the Hokkienese or “Minnan” language, unintelligible to the Mandarin-speaking Nationalist leaders.

Taiwan had been liberated from Japan only in 1945, after a half-century of occupation. The merciless, blood-soaked Nationalist takeover was a fresh hell for the population. But it was also one of the most important events in the modern history of Chinese food. The new occupiers included eminent generals, politicians, and businessmen from every part of China, together with the capable kitchen staffs who cooked for them. In an extraordinary concentration of talent, many highly trained professional representatives of different regional culinary schools were now practicing their craft on one island less than twice the size of New Jersey.

In a very short time, tables in the United States would be direct beneficiaries of all these changes. It was an eye-opening experience for Washingtonians and, later, New Yorkers to see Chinese-born people of wealth and political importance moving in the first social circles and hosting impressive entertainments complete with elegant Chinese food. The entourages that had come with them from Taiwan included cooks—often, sizable staffs of cooks able to mount official dinners and other parties. A number of these men had been trained by the last generation of royal or aristocratic household chefs who had ruled over great kitchens before the end of the Qing Empire. Their cooking often amazed Western guests. It represented many prominent Americans’ first exposure to Chinese food unconnected with Chinatown, glitzy uptown Chinese nightclubs, or small-town Chinese restaurants—and often conspicuously distinct from the Cantonese culinary style, until now the default image of “Chinese cuisine.”

Eventually some of the people brought to this country by the war or Cold War realized that cooking skills might be a passport to careers in America. Among the most important opportunities were restaurants, cooking schools, and cookbook writing. The new arrivals’ advantages over the chop suey generation of Chinese cooks included a break with not only culinary but racial stereotypes.

The Han Chinese themselves universally recognized an unscientific but definite contrast between “southern” and “northern” physical types. The Chinatown Cantonese whom U.S. racists had pilloried as yellow rats belonged to the first group. Most were dark-skinned and very short, with broad faces and flattened noses. The northern newcomers were usually several inches taller and fairly light-skinned, with facial features less strange to Western eyes. Few non-Chinese Americans now remembered the old caricatures of hideous little “Chinks” (though caricatures of hideous little “Japs” had flourished throughout the war). But the Mandarin-speaking newcomers’ ventures into culinary careers were not hurt by the fact that they tended to look less like the longtime Chinatown residents whose fathers and grandfathers had been thought synonymous with the Yellow Peril than the strategically made-up white actors who usually played Chinese men and women in the movies.

Many or most of the newcomers who opened their own restaurants—at least at the outset—were master cooks with solid experience in the kitchens of grand personages. As individuals, they were of various regional origins. But as professional cooks, they all knew something about the cooking styles of several regions. A rough analogy might be the training of Auguste Escoffier–era chefs in great international hotels; no matter whether they had been born in Portugal or Prussia, they were expected to master a certain repertoire including some important dishes from far-flung European capitals. Similarly, well-schooled, mainland-born Chinese chefs in the first adoptive Chongqing-Taiwan generation had some acquaintance with the cuisine of the north as the former fare of the Manchu emperors in Beijing; the south (that is, Guangzhou-based) as the most refined of all Chinese cuisines; the east (from Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Nanjing, and environs) as the one-time food of a storied Jiangnan merchant elite; and the west (chiefly Sichuan) as both wartime refuge and a celebrated cradle of fierce, startling culinary effects.

Women, who faced more obstacles in becoming restaurant owners or chefs, initially were drawn to culinary teaching and writing. Both offered much scope to ladies of social poise and resourcefulness. Depending on their family backgrounds, the pioneer figures might not have grown up doing their own cooking. But many had made up for it since—often having had to cook from scratch by the exercise of sheer xiang banfa ingenuity during wartime uprootings and relocations, certainly having learned to direct kitchen staffs.

Over time, more varied backgrounds and career paths became the norm. Ambitious younger men managed to found their own places after short apprenticeships at popular restaurants; determined women managed to break into the ranks of restaurant owners.

The immigration situation was fluid enough to aid such ambitions. Though the official Chinese quota was fixed at a meager 105 people a year, new wartime and Cold War geopolitical alignments helped many more to enter the United States on humanitarian or diplomatic grounds or simply through high-placed connections. Many members of Nationalist bigwigs’ staffs successfully applied for political asylum. The War Brides Act (1945) and Chinese War Brides Act (1946) allowed about six thousand women to bypass the quota and immigrate as wives of servicemen, further improving the sex ratio and soon producing a small American Chinese baby boom. Other measures authorized permanent visas for professors and students who had been stranded in America by the war and the Communist takeover.

The privileged treatment of people connected with the mainland-via-Taiwan Chinese VIP route was a far cry from the openly racist hatred that Cantonese workers had encountered in America during Exclusion. The fact did not endear the new Mandarin-speakers to the existing Chinese American community. Indeed, the years in which non-Cantonese chefs began invading the world of American culinary fashion were difficult ones for old-school Chinese American restaurants in many ways. The base of cooks who had helped create chop suey–parlor cuisine had grown old or died. Though that vogue’s first glamour had long since faded, the dishes it had introduced were still sincerely loved by many non-Chinese fans. But the dwindling number of people who continued to supply their wants knew that few bright young descendants of Guangdong-born sojourners saw much of a future behind a restaurant stove, as opposed to studying art history or penetrating new frontiers of technology.

Meanwhile, the Communist victory on the mainland and the GMD’s flight to Taiwan had placed the larger American Chinatowns (especially older Chinese-born residents) in a terrible quandary. When American cold warriors led by Senator Joseph McCarthy began pointing fingers at State Department employees and demanding to know what traitors had “lost” China, the Chinese American community saw its recently acquired halo of patriotism abruptly snatched away. During the war, political disagreements about the rival claims of the GMD and the Communists had been successfully papered over to produce unwavering support of Chiang Kai-shek as political heir of the revered Sun Yat-sen and the Nationalist army as defender of the motherland against Japan. Many Chinese Americans had expected that Chiang would again be a legitimate target for opposition after the Japanese surrender. But now anyone rash enough to criticize him in public was likely to bring Mc-Carthyist suspicion on the whole community.

The national and local Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations quickly lined up behind the GMD. But the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 reinforced right-wing suspicions of all American Chinese as potential spies for the People’s Republic. Older people born in China—a group still heavily represented among cooks and restaurant owners—were intimidated by a resumption of State Department investigations into “paper son” immigration fraud. It is not hard to see why hard-bitten Toisanese-speaking Chinatown restaurateurs reacted angrily to the arrival of affluent, sophisticated Mandarin-speaking newcomers whose cooking was now admired by white leaders of culinary fads.

Toisan, the largest single source of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese labor, had been hit especially hard by World War II when the Japanese occupied Guangdong Province. Money remittances sent by American to Toisanese relatives—nearly the entire basis of the district’s economy—had been cut off. Worse was to come during the Korean War, when the United States declared a trade embargo on China. Communication with families on the mainland was again effectually severed. American Chinatown importers, deprived of specialty ingredients from China during the war, once more faced shortages of necessary foods until new ties were established with manufacturers and exporters in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and other parts of Southeast Asia. (In any case, many of the articles they prized were no longer being produced in quantity, or at all, in the People’s Republic.)

The New Face of Chinese Restaurants

Among the first of the upscale new stateside restaurateurs was the Chinese-trained C. M. Lo, who came to Washington, DC, in 1941 at the age of twenty-three as butler at the Chinese embassy. By the end of the war he had acquired some familiarity with the capital scene. Deciding to put his culinary expertise and local connections to work, he teamed up with several partners in 1947 to launch the Peking restaurant in the Chevy Chase neighborhood of the district.11 It was the right moment: A budding postwar generation of American sophisticates close to the seat of power now plumed themselves on acquiring a taste for unusual gastronomic experiences matching Washington’s status as—in its own and many others’ eyes—the citadel of the free world.

The place’s title implicitly linked one world capital with another. The far northwest location—miles from the District of Columbia’s recently relocated small Chinatown—anticipated chic future trends. In a strategic break with earlier restaurant demographics, it was set in a residential neighborhood overflowing with wealth and prestige. The immediate clientele were members of a Washington smart set that loved the sense of tableside global adventure. Over a few novel dishes, politically connected diners could fancy themselves veteran China hands. This, too, presaged the future appeal of many other elegant Chinese restaurants.

The Peking soon found its niche. It began with and never wholly abandoned a partly Americanized menu. But Lo, himself Canton-born (though of august credentials unknown to most Cantonese-descended Chinatown chefs), put enough northern specialties on the menu to justify the place’s title.

In the late 1940s few American restaurant-goers had ever imagined the great size and diversity of mainland China or grasped that it did not have one homogeneous cuisine based on their favorite chop suey–parlor specialties. Once in a while some large Chinatown establishments had ventured to present a few non-Cantonese dishes, little-known here, that enjoyed a nationwide reputation in China. It was terribly difficult for most restaurant waitstaffs to explain their context to non-Chinese patrons. But by the mid-1950s it was worth the effort to pitch unfamiliar specialties to a new clientele hungry for tokens of sophistication such as mu shu pork and Peking duck, two of the Peking’s star dishes.

It is not clear whether mu shu pork (Mandarin, mu xi rou or mu xu rou, a stir-fried melange of pork, vegetables, and scrambled egg bits served with the small, thin pancakes called bao bing) had appeared on earlier restaurant menus in San Francisco or New York Chinatown. Certainly Peking duck already had fans in both places. Henry Low’s 1938 cookbook gave a recipe, though with yeast-raised folded “lotus-leaf buns” (Mandarin, he ye juan) instead of the bao bing that soon came to be more common.12 The recipe does not mention the finishing touches of hoisin sauce, slivered cucumbers, and scallion brushes that later would become standard.

In a soon-familiar pattern, Lo’s hirees used the Peking as a steppingstone to new career moves. S. Van Lung, son of a former military governor of Yunnan Province, left in 1955 to found the rival Peking Palace only a few blocks away. His ex-employer was not happy. Early in 1956 the Peking filed suit against the Peking Palace, complaining about an allegedly purloined signature dish as well as the restaurant name. The Peking ultimately prevailed in court, forcing the upstart to remove the offending dish (a pork shred/bean curd soup called “O-O soup”) from the menu and stop calling itself the Peking Palace. American newspapers had a fine time with this tempest in a teapot. Van Lung and his partners coolly restyled their restaurant “Yenching Palace”—“Yenching,” or in modern pinyin “Yanqing” or “Yenqing,” being an archaic name for Beijing itself.¹³

The offshoot soon became more popular than the parent restaurant. For decades it was a major venue for power lunches and celebrity sightings. Reports circulated that it had been the site of secret negotiations between Kremlin and U.S. representatives to resolve the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. In the new age of Chinese restaurants combining claims of authenticity with a well-honed appeal to an affluent white clientele, name-dropping in society columns would become an indispensable weapon.

Another Peking staff member, Shanghai-trained T. T. “Tiger” Wang, had come to Washington in 1956 as a chef for the Nationalist ambassador Hollington K. Tong. He decamped to the Peking in 1957 and to New York about a year later. At that time the Manhattan real estate situation was colored by the above-mentioned Cantonese, and especially Toisanese, resentment of northern interlopers. Finding themselves unwelcome in Chinatown locations, non-Cantonese entrepreneurs looked elsewhere. A stretch of upper Broadway in Morningside Heights now began to acquire a scattering of restaurants known for what was loosely called “Shanghai” food, brought by chefs and owners from various parts of the Jiangnan region.

Wang landed at one of these, Shun Lee, on the corner of Broadway and 91st Street. He had been there several years when in 1964 a young American-educated engineer, Michael Tong, was taken by a relative to sample the Shun Lee fare and came away delighted by memorable Shanghai-style, Beijing-style, and even Sichuan-style dishes. The restaurant moved to large, ambitious quarters in the Gramercy neighborhood (Lexington and 23rd Street) before Wang persuaded Tong to join him in a far more expensive gamble, the Shun Lee Dynasty. It opened late in 1965.14

Like the Peking, Wang and Tong’s new venture occupied a piece of strategically chosen real estate: Second Avenue at 48th Street, handy to deep-pocketed lunchers and diners at the United Nations and many midtown corporate headquarters. To this advantage it added the “wow” factor of a cutting-edge decor (by the celebrated industrial designer Russel Wright) emulating a new breed of wonderland restaurants with breathtakingly planned interiors and fittings. New York’s La Fonda del Sol and Four Seasons were the most iconic of these glamorous destinations. Much of Shun Lee Dynasty’s instant (and lasting) éclat lay in having been the first Chinese restaurant in Manhattan to stake out such an image for itself—and one of the first to set its sights on the 1960s expense-account clientele.

The menu was a well-judged mixture of American diners’ proven favorites with northern, eastern, and western Chinese selections that were new to almost all non-Chinese patrons. The last—“Szechuan” dishes, in pre-pinyin spelling—were destined to become the greatest sensation by virtue of a startling firepower that was new to people raised on usual American Chinatown food.

The partners’ gamble was one of the luckiest in New York restaurant history. Its patrons loved the trappings of wealth and success. Their judgment was rapidly confirmed by Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food columnist. Enthralled by the mysteries of Chinese cuisine since his small-town Mississippi childhood, he had made himself familiar with many Manhattan Chinese restaurants, including the two previous Shun Lee incarnations. Starting with a New Year’s salute to the charms and wind chimes of this “Oriental bazaar” on January 4, 1966, Claiborne would heap increasing praises on Shun Lee Dynasty.15

The Threshold of a New Era

It was at this juncture—almost exactly coinciding with the 1965 opening of Shun Lee Dynasty—that President Lyndon Johnson succeeded in pushing through passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which forever ended the special plight of Chinese seeking to immigrate. The new law officially took effect in the summer of 1968, a clamorous and sometimes bloody presidential election season preceding Richard Nixon’s defeat of Hubert Humphrey.

The political climate had undergone intense shakeups from the time of the Korean War. A real end to the Cold War was still not foreseeable, but leading minds in Washington increasingly thought that the United States had fairly free rein to pursue military objectives in the Far East or Southeast Asia without bringing about the end of civilization. Unlike Korea, the new battleground of Vietnam did not seem certain to draw China into open acts of belligerence. The Chinese American community was no longer under blanket suspicion by right-wingers, partly because it had seldom strayed from public allegiance to the United States and the Nationalist regime on Taiwan. Few of the old “paper sons” were left now to fear deportation if their true past happened to be uncovered. As for the Chinatown restaurant scene, it seemed to have nearly closed one chapter without being quite ready to open another.

One of Nixon’s first acts on taking office was to appoint the well-known foreign policy pundit Henry A. Kissinger as national security advisor, giving him an initial brief of preparing America’s exit from the Vietnam War. By now it was an open secret that the Washington foreign policy establishment was heartily sick of Chiang Kai-shek and ready to abandon previous assertions that the mainland Chinese government and the Soviet Union formed one menacing Communist bloc. The rest of the free world (already a half-obsolete term) had gone along for decades with American refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China but seemed increasingly eager to break with earlier policy. Halfway through Nixon’s first term, the two great powers began covertly feeling their way toward diplomatic rapprochement, with Kissinger representing the United States and Premier Zhou Enlai the People’s Republic. GMD loyalists on Taiwan and in America’s Chinatowns suspected that they were about to be left in the lurch.

Zhou and Kissinger had barely concluded their second meeting when, in October of 1971, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to expel the Republic of China and seat the People’s Republic. By now the U.S. State Department had slightly relaxed restrictions on travel to the mainland. The scent of change was in the air, avidly sniffed by the news media. By informed guesses, official American recognition of the “Red China” once denounced by none other than Richard Nixon as our most pernicious Asian enemy was only a matter of time. Zhou and Kissinger were soon smoothing the way for Nixon to visit Beijing in February of 1972. With this trip, the newly unfolding United States–Soviet détente was enlarged to include the People’s Republic.

News reporters followed every stage of the trip with rapturous fascination and a special fondness for images of Nixon and his wife wielding chopsticks at official functions. Frequent updates from Beijing throughout the Nixons’ stay prefaced a joint communiqué issued at Shanghai on February 26. The bulk of the document contained several intricate pas de deux in which the two powers first stated their differing official views on the Asian geopolitical scene and the future of Taiwan. But in the shorter final sections, both agreed to work together toward full normalization of relations through improved “contacts and exchanges.” These would gradually expand until 1979, when détente was followed by the establishment of full diplomatic relations under President Jimmy Carter and the new Chinese head of state, Deng Xiaoping. (The trade embargo officially ended in 1974, though the range of exportable food items still being produced in the People’s Republic was limited.) To many leaders of the Chinese American community. it appeared that they and Nationalist Taiwan had been thrown under the bus. But for much of the news-consuming public, the excitement of watching the very symbol of the mysterious East emerge from the enforced invisibility of almost thirty years trumped other considerations.

Culinary Chinamania

Popular food history would later conflate many developments into one hazy notion that Nixon’s watershed 1972 journey to Beijing launched an American era of unprecedented culinary discovery. As the story goes, it suddenly inspired everybody who was anybody to start scarfing up meals at exciting new Chinese restaurants and buying exciting new Chinese cookbooks. The claim is muddled at best. In fact, the 1972 diplomatic breakthrough didn’t start a craze for “discovering” unexplored vistas of Chinese cuisine. It reinforced an exploratory vogue that had been under way for decades. By 1972 restaurants like the Peking and Yenching Palace in Washington or Shun Lee Dynasty in New York were familiar to the urban style-setting classes, and people who read about food in small-town newspapers might well have at least seen the term “Szechuan cuisine.”

The Sinophile vanguard was based in New York from the mid-1960s on and included two food writers who between them put the restaurant-reviewing profession on the map. Craig Claiborne at the New York Times and Gael Greene at New York magazine both had immense power to set trend-conscious New Yorkers (and visitors from elsewhere) worshiping places that had received their accolades, or solemnly discussing rival versions of restaurant dishes that they had made famous. And both were mad for Chinese food—though perhaps not as knowledgeable as their older contemporary James Beard, who had had some real exposure to Cantonese-school cooking while growing up on the West Coast. Writing as if an appreciation of the world’s oldest great cuisine were de rigueur for modern sophisticates, they spearheaded a near-manic obsession with the latest action on the China front among a certain white urban clique. In a sense, the new Chinese vogue resembled the chop suey craze transposed into another key. Overt racism no longer figured in the equation, but class snobberies did.

Claiborne and Greene eventually brought a wide spectrum of Chinese restaurants to popular notice. But their highest praise was most often reserved for Shun Lee Dynasty together with Wang and Tong’s next venture, Shun Lee Palace, which opened on East 55th Street in 1971. Their coverage generally implied that these establishments had introduced America to a version of Chinese haute cuisine as far removed from lowly Chinatown grub as La Côte Basque from a wiener roast. Visible swank often counted for a lot in their reviews. So did any dramatic departure from the trodden ways of previous Chinese American restaurant menus—for instance, hot chile peppers.

Shun Lee Dynasty’s Szechuan dishes had struck Claiborne’s attention by the end of 1965. On return visits, he seldom missed a chance to mention them, often complaining about inauthenticity if they weren’t fiery enough. Between them, he and the Shun Lee team launched a delirious vogue for Chinese food primed with detonators in dried-chile form. Greene, who started at New York in 1968, shared the new passion. Soon many New Yorkers were categorically writing off old-style Cantonese American cuisine as dowdy and insipid, while new eateries labeled “Szechuan” multiplied like dandelions in April.

Some of the new craze was based on simplistic notions. It is not true that hot chile peppers—introduced to China from the New World in the sixteenth century—figure only in the food of Sichuan and nearby provinces. They turn up in other regions, though most rarely among the subtlety-loving Cantonese. The Sichuanese culinary style is not a freakish outlier among China’s varied cuisines, nor are hot peppers its only distinguishing feature; knowledgeable Chinese diners might point also to a fondness for particular textures or ways of pickling vegetables. On the other hand, the devastating wallop of hot chile, often combined with the “numbing” effect of the native Sichuan peppercorns, required no brains at all for novice devotees to identify, whether or not they appreciated these elements’ interplay with other flavors. Proving one’s grasp of Sichuanese authenticity was not exactly a blood sport, but it did often mean outfacing all rival chile-heads in the house until somebody was weeping in pain.

Meanwhile, other entrepreneurs were also redrawing the map of American Chinese restaurant food. In New York the cluster of Shanghai-style restaurants on upper Broadway, led by Shanghai Café at 125th Street and Great Shanghai at 103rd Street, formed an example mentioned as early as 1959 in Kate Simon’s New York Places and Pleasures. Among the dishes she singled out at Shanghai Café were “fried dumplings and shrimp balls”; “sweet-and-sour bass cooked in a syrup of Oriental nectars”; “spicy pork in black bean sauce”; “the ugly and delectable Chinese black mushrooms”; “thin, elusive, shiny noodles; the beef in oyster sauce.”16 All were clearly appealing departures from anything that Simon—a fearless cosmopolite—had tasted before at Chinese eateries. Her comment that the cooking on display at the new places was “more subtle and varied . . . than the Cantonese, less burdened with garlic and the green of scallions,” testifies less to the real qualities of either cuisine than to uptown restaurateurs’ successful campaign to discredit Cantonese food as coarse and outmoded.¹⁷

A revised perspective on Chinese food arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1958 with the founding of the eponymous Joyce Chen Restaurant. Chen, a Beijing native who had left China in her early twenties at the time of the Communist takeover, offered an eclectic selection of dishes from several different regions. No more welcoming community could have been imagined. The restaurant rapidly drew crowds from the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology campuses and exposed hundreds if not thousands of young people to presumably “authentic” Chinese food. (The cookbook that Chen produced in the wake of the restaurant’s success does not inspire confidence in the presumption.) For decades it was a favorite destination for dating couples, celebrators of birthdays or anniversaries, and members of high-powered policy cliques (most famously, Kissinger). The location also proved lucky when WGBH, the Boston television station that had made broadcasting history in 1962 with Julia Child’s first French Chef appearances, was casting about for another cooking project and invited Chen to star in a weekly program. The result, Joyce Chen Cooks, was broadcast on public television stations nationwide in 1967 and enlarged the fan club for Chinese dishes not limited to the old Cantonese mold.¹⁸

At around this time, Sinophile diners like Kate Simon also started talking about a fashion called “Mandarin.” The word has no meaning whatever in reference to Chinese cuisine, but for more than half a century restaurateurs had known that it appealed to American notions of ancient Chinese grandeur. This aura still lingered when a young woman named Cecilia Chiang moved from Japan to San Francisco in 1960. Not long afterward her friends talked her into a rash investment in a restaurant startup. Left holding the bag when the other people pulled out, she soldiered on by herself and fashioned a menu based, like Joyce Chen’s, on a cross-section of regional dishes. Within a few years her restaurant, the Mandarin, had managed to rekindle the glamour of that term.19

Chiang, born to wealthy parents in Wuxi at the heart of the Jiangnan culinary region, had been raised for the most part in Beijing. In contrast to owners or cooks at most San Francisco Chinese eateries, her bearing effortlessly conveyed that she was a person of education and position. Everything about the Mandarin was conspicuously upscale and mandarin-worthy, including the prices. Like pathbreaking counterparts in Washington and New York, it was located outside of the city’s Chinatown and pointedly distanced from images of Cantonese American food—which, Chiang let it be known, was utterly déclassé. Chop suey and red hanging lanterns would never darken her door, at either the restaurant’s original location on Polk Street in Russian Hill or the grander, elegantly appointed Ghirardelli Square quarters to which it moved in 1968.

After about a year at the Polk Street location, the Mandarin was visited by the popular San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. The next day the paper carried his paean to a “new discovery,” announcing, “Here you will find real Chinese food.”²⁰ Chiang’s fortune was launched.

As in New York, the rising tide lifted other boats. In 1969 the carefully researched second edition of Doris Muscatine’s A Cook’s Tour of San Francisco commented on the new cluster of restaurants that “have been introducing Americans to Mandarin, Szechwan, Shanghai, and Mongolian specialties.”²¹ They included the Great Shanghai, the North China Restaurant, and the Manchurian (in Chiang’s old Polk Street location). Muscatine’s description of the now-celebrated Mandarin mentioned such bold decorative touches as the building’s original “brick wall and long wooden rafters” and “the Mongolian open barbecue” with seats around the encircling “birch chopping block counter.” She singled out such delicacies as “Mandarin tidbits to order,” “the Mongolian chafing pot,” “prawns a la Szechwan,” “beggar’s chicken” baked in clay, “Peking or Mandarin duck,” and both “pao tzu” (pinyin, baozi; steamed yeast-raised dumplings) and “chao tzu” (jiaozi, not yet universally known as “pot stickers”).22

The term “Mandarin” had already spread across the land. By 1968 even I (quite in the dark about Chinese food) had uncomprehendingly heard tributes to Mandarin cuisine at a restaurant in Philadelphia’s tiny Chinatown. In Chicago, Peter and Betty Lo opened the supposedly “Mandarin-style” Chinese Tea House in 1968, followed by Peter Lo’s Mandarin restaurant in 1972.²³ In New York, Sichuan-style restaurants were rapidly replacing Shanghai-style predecessors along a good stretch of upper Broadway, driving some of the former owners and cooks to transplant Shanghai or “Mandarin” establishments to new locations.

Emily Kwoh of New York’s first Great Shanghai (Broadway and 103rd Street) started the Mandarin East (at Second Avenue and 57th Street) and Mandarin House (in Greenwich Village on West 13th Street; it did not hurt that Craig Claiborne lived in the same building).²⁴ The Scottish-Chinese Sheila Chang, who also had been at Great Shanghai, began Shanghai East, a luxurious establishment at Third Avenue and 63rd Street.²⁵ Meanwhile, the Sichuan invasion arrived in Chinatown, where barriers to non-Cantonese restaurant ownership were disappearing as the older generation retired or died off. Even younger Cantonese restaurateurs might now at least consider updating their image to suit a new crew of chile-happy white patrons.

The Competition Expands

T. T. Wang and Michael Tong, who had inspired the Sichuan vogue and watched others rush to exploit the name, pulled a winning card out of their sleeve in 1972 with a new restaurant called the Hunam, again within the UN orbit (Second Avenue close to 46th Street). Its opening, less than three months after Nixon’s visit to China, was a stroke of genius. For one thing, no non-Chinese except a few World War II veterans had ever heard of Hunan Province. (The standard Mandarin pronunciation is “Hunan,” but the final consonant has a slightly different nuance in Xiang, the local language.) For another, the restaurateurs were able to claim with complete accuracy that Hunanese food outgunned Si chuanese in sheer firepower.

Claiborne had left the Times in 1971. Raymond Sokolov, also a Sichuan-food enthusiast, succeeded to the post of restaurant reviewer. His first feature article for the Times was a scoop on a secret Chinese treasure just outside Princeton, New Jersey: a friendly mom-and-pop filling station-cum-lunchroom at which Alex and Anna Shen would gladly cook up magnificent, phenomenally cheap Chinese dishes like hot bean curd, smoked chicken, “real Peking sweet and sour pork,” and eggplant with shrimp and hoisin sauce, for customers in the know.26 (As the chef- and writer-to-be Barbara Tropp—then a Princeton graduate student—later commented, this unsought publicity “resulted in the nice couple becoming very rich in a second, palatial restaurant that featured miserable, steam-table food.”²⁷)

Sokolov lost no time weighing in on the Hunam. Within three weeks of its opening, he had written a four-star review declaring, “By a wide margin, it is the best Chinese restaurant in the city.” Grandly informing neophytes that Hunan—not “Peking or Canton or Szechuan or Shanghai or Fukien”—was the source of China’s “most celebrated food,” he assured them that the restaurant “justifies all the praise lavished on the cuisine of the region by old China hands.”²⁸ Forty-plus years later he would acknowledge in his autobiography, “I was mostly operating in the dark about Chinese gastronomy.”²⁹ This did not matter to the local non-Chinese Chinese fan club, most of whom were still more in the dark; my husband and I with two friends managed to snare a table on the day the review appeared, and we all perused the menu with a reverence exceeded only by ignorance. Crowds nearly battered down the doors of the Hunam in eagerness to sample “honey ham with lotus nuts” and “Lake Tung Ting shrimp.” Wang and Tong did not explain—nor did most of us wonder—what their ocean shrimp dish had to do with the freshwater Lake Dongting, or how serving ham in honey sauce squared with the well-known Hunan dislike of sweetness in anything savory. (The dish is famously associated with Yunnan Province.)

The Hunam rapidly acquired a handful of rivals also claiming to specialize in Hunanese cooking. Soon many restaurants that had boasted of their Sichuanese menus were hastily adding the phrase “Hunan cuisine.” In a few years the watchword “Hunan” graced restaurants in most large American cities and some midsized towns.

Less than a year and a half after the Hunam had opened, the vogue was well enough advanced for Gael Greene to do a magazine roundup of restaurants boasting some Hunanese connection. She laid down the law as snootily as Sokolov: “Hunan means little to the scholars of Chinese gastronomy.” “Beyond ham and sausage and tung hsien cai”—which she identified as “a rare green vegetable” eaten only in Hunan—“the Hunan kitchen is unsung.”30 Such casually dropped bits of lore were great favorites with restaurant critics eager to put Chinese cuisine on the gastronomic glamour map. (In fact, Hunan is one of China’s most renowned rice-growing regions, famous for a range of smoke-cured meats but not preeminently for ham or sausage; the leafy green mallow called dong xian cai or dong han cai—Malva verticillata—is not unique to Hunan or even to Asia.)

Greene, whose literary trademark was a form of voluptuary rejoicing over food she loved, hailed the Hunam as “my favorite Chinese restaurant.” She went on to discuss two new competitors named Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan (i.e., “garden”) and Uncle Peng’s Hunan Yuan, and noted a number of recent Hunan-style additions to the Shun Lee palace menu.

Uncle Tai’s was the brainchild of a prominent Wang and Tong rival David Keh, who had already opened several highly regarded Sichuanese restaurants both in Chinatown and in the old Upper West Side Shanghainese stronghold.³¹ He and the Shun Lee team had carried out rival scouting expeditions on Taiwan for chefs who knew Hunanese cuisine. T. T. Wang came back with enough dishes to get the Hunam going; seven or eight months later Keh set up the chef Wen Dah Tai in his eponymous establishment nearby.

In New York, Keh would rule a shifting empire of mostly (not exclusively) Chinese restaurants for many years. At the time he started Uncle Tai’s, he had recently met a very young, highly starstruck would-be Claiborne named Ed Schoenfeld. The incurably curious youth’s initial acquaintance with Chinese food was no greater than that of many other Jewish New Yorkers who frequented Manhattan or Brooklyn citadels of “shar mein”—the preferred pronunciation of aficionados—and wonton soup. (This is as good a place as any to correct the muddled myth that a special passion for Chinese food is a distinguishing mark of American Jews, a claim with little relevance for anybody except New Yorkers or New York expats.) By his late teens Schoenfeld had developed an excellent nose for the Sichuan-style cooking just starting to appear in a few corners of Manhattan. After briefly studying with the well-known cooking teacher Grace Zia Chu and trying his luck as a freelance arranger of Chinese banquets, he convinced Keh to take him on as an aide during the planning for Uncle Tai’s opening at the start of 1973.32

Schoenfeld was insatiable in the quest for hands-on cooking knowledge. His banquet-hosting ventures had been an ideal means of scoping out the expanding ranks of mainland-trained Chinese chefs in New York. His association with Keh opened still more doors during the first age of Sichuan-style restaurants. Schoenfeld was on hand to encounter the legendary version of cold noodles in sesame sauce that the Sichuan-born chef “Shorty” Tang (Tang Win Fat) introduced to New York at one or two of David Keh’s places at around 1970.³³ He appointed himself an informal apprentice to Lou Hoy Yuen, who had come to the New York Sichuanese restaurant scene by way of Brazil and intermittently worked at several Keh enterprises. In a few years he not only knew his way around home and restaurant woks but understood the business side of fashionable, leading-edge Chinese restaurants at least as well as any Chinese colleague.

By 1980 Schoenfeld would be on his way to becoming a mover and shaker—eventually an innovator—in the Chinese American restaurant world. Such a development would have been inconceivable during the chop suey era or the last years of Exclusion. The appearance of a trained, insightful white insider on the scene (as opposed to the few whites who had earlier managed to acquire some notions of Chinese restaurant mechanics and culinary principles) marked a new stage in the American relationship with Chinese food—in a sense, a new psychological stage. By 1960 or 1970, recently arrived Chinese-born cooks and restaurant impresarios who were American citizens or eligible for citizenship could conduct themselves toward whites with a consciousness of equality (in fact, professional superiority) that would have been impossible when the threat of deportation stamped the consciousness of Chinese-born people from the minute they arrived. On the other side, a brash New Yorker like Schoenfeld could sincerely view the chance to penetrate Chinese restaurant circles as an honor and a privilege. And in purely practical terms, the opportunity could not have occurred previously for an inquisitive white youth to spend months and years watching masters of stir-frying and other techniques until the essential motions and timings were in his blood. His presence at Keh’s new Hunan venture heralded the emergence of more people who could communicate across the formidable barriers of spoken and culinary idioms.

Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan was a lively success. Reviewers were soon showering it with superlatives as ecstatic as those for the Hunam. But Uncle Tai himself was canny enough to see how chancy Manhattan restaurant success could be and made an exit when friction developed between him and Keh. In 1979 he lit out for the territories, or at least Houston, where he triumphantly relaunched Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan. Eventually he relocated to Boca Raton, Florida, where the restaurant is still thriving.

Uncle Tai was not the only Chinese restaurateur to decide that the time was ripe for bringing “new” regional cuisines to the hinterland. In 1973 Sheila Chang had pulled up stakes on Third Avenue and transplanted Shanghai East to the palatial Galleria Mall in Houston. By 1979 it was covering another base by advertising “The First Authentic Szechuan Cuisine in Houston.”34 The Uncle Tai’s menu likewise underwent strategic cross-breeding after some years in Texas and later Florida.

In 1973 the brother of a manager at the Washington, DC, Peking opened the Peking Jr. in San Antonio. A local newspaper reviewer reported that the place specialized in “the dishes of Western China,” which “originated in Honan [sic] and Szechuan.” The owner, known as Karate Hsu by virtue of a black belt, loftily professed a complete lack of interest in “the cuisine of Foochow or Southern China” (i.e, Guangdong).³⁵ Soon the Texas Monthly restaurant reviewer had visited the Peking Jr. and proclaimed that “at its best, the food . . . is simply unbeatable in Texas.” With enough notice, Hsu would prepare any dish to order from the menu of the original Peking; but “even if you walk in unheralded, you can expect to find succulent Chinese dishes you didn’t even know existed. Simply set aside the menu and tell Karate you want real Chinese food, not chow mein or egg foo young, then sit back and see what he brings.”³⁶

The same issue of the magazine offered more cautious encomiums of another San Antonio newcomer, the King Wah, that at the time had few parallels in North America. Its creators, two couples both surnamed Leon, were from the Chinese community of Lima, Peru, a seat of Chinese culinary traditions then completely unfamiliar to U.S. fashionistas. They had assembled a restaurant staff somehow able to make themselves understood to each other and the customers in Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin, and English. Such linguistic feats would eventually be taken for granted in many Chinese American restaurants but must have looked astonishing to 1970s outsiders.

As the King Wah owners told the magazine reporter, they had originally planned to open a restaurant in New York City but changed their minds on seeing the reality of “that declining megapolis.”37 It would be decades before non-Chinese New Yorkers glimpsed the Chinese-Andean heritage represented by the Leons. For the nonce, writers covering the New York food scene were too caught up in the Mandarin-Sichuan-Hunan vogues to understand much else.

Sugar Sells: The General Tso’s and Lemon Chicken Success Stories

Another rising star arrived in New York for a brief but notable interval. David Keh’s and T. T. Wang’s scoutings on Taiwan had introduced them to a redoubtable chef actually born and raised in Hunan, Chang-kuei Peng or Peng Chang-kuei. Through no fault of his own, his signal mark on Chinese American cuisine was destined to be a dubious blessing.

Peng, born in 1919, was one of the mainland-born chefs who had received classical training in youth from some of the last surviving Qing-era masters or their apprentices before going on to cook for the highest circles of the Nationalist government in exile on Taiwan. Arriving in New York in 1973, he founded an east midtown spot called Uncle Peng’s Hunan Yuan that swiftly folded after drawing unfavorable comparisons with the two reigning favorites, the Hunam and Uncle Tai’s. (New Yorkers did not immediately realize that Peng had more genuine Hunanese roots than the competition.) He had better luck with two later ventures, Peng’s Yunnan Yuan and the tersely named Peng’s. All three offered a dish that Peng had originally invented in Taipei and named for a native son of Hunan, the nineteenth-century general Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t’ang in the old Wade-Giles transliteration system).³⁸

A 1977 guide to New York Chinese restaurants describes the Peng’s Yunnan Yuan version of “General Tso’s Chicken” as “hot but delectable. Tender chicken cubes are stir-fried in a spicy sauce containing red chilies and crisp scallions.”39 There is no mention of a sweet, sticky red sauce or a thick, crunchy deep-fried coating. But already these featured prominently in a completely different incarnation of General Tso’s chicken introduced by T. T. Wang at Hunam and Shun Lee without Peng’s knowledge or consent. It was listed on the Hunam menu in English as “General Ching’s Chicken” and in Chinese as “Guo Fan Chicken Chunks” (for General Zeng Guofan, a contemporary of Zuo’s).⁴⁰ Unlike the slightly tart, vinegar-laced original and a somewhat similar version featured at Uncle Tai’s Hunan Yuan, the rival dish cleverly addressed the American passion for syrup on anything from ice cream to breakfast sausages. This crunchy creation, usually set on a bed of broccoli and incorporating ever-increasing amounts of sugar, soon marched forth from New York to conquer the nation under the name “General Tso’s chicken”; today millions of Americans would probably call it their favorite Chinese dish. Throughout the land, almost the only Chinese restaurants that don’t now serve it are ones catering to fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrants.

People who considered themselves leaders of advanced taste soon reacted to the mere name “General Tso’s” with all the hauteur formerly reserved for “chop suey.” Decades later, the elderly Peng (who returned to Taiwan in 1984) was still bemused at how this American cuckoo’s chick could have been passed off as having any Hunanese ancestry. “The dish can’t be sweet,” he emphatically told the questing New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee in 2007. “The taste of Hunan cuisine is not sweet.” He took umbrage at the idea of serving the chicken over broccoli, and summed up the entire momingqimiao (bafflement) in a few well-chosen words: “Chinese cuisine took on an American influence in order to make a business out of it. . . . If you give them real authentic Chinese cuisine, Americans can’t accept it.”⁴¹

What they did accept was the sense of being admitted to an inner sanctum. Even in this age of regional newcomers, a few Cantonese-style restaurants still managed to attract an au courant non-Chinese clientele by cultivating an air of privilege. Probably the best-known on the East Coast was Pearl’s, a longtime fixture in west Midtown Manhattan. Pearl’s represented a certain successful Chinese restaurant school of the age. To start with, it was the creation of a native New Yorker endowed with sangfroid and perfect chic.42 The slender, glamorous Pearl Wong and her husband, James, were second-generation immigrants with quick instincts for attracting 1960s and 1970s glitterati. She would respond to well-heeled habitués’ plea “Feed us, Pearl!” by ignoring the menu and telling the chef, Yook Lum Lee, to improvise something for the party in question.⁴³ (It was a sensible and natural strategy in any Chinese restaurant but at Pearl’s was chiefly practiced by clubby insiders.)

The Wongs had been running the Canton Village on West 49th Street for some years when the owner sold the business out from under them. It was a severe blow to the largest single contingent of Canton Village patrons, the editorial staffs of Time and Life magazines at their nearby Sixth Avenue headquarters. Someone in this more or less lily-white club suggested raising enough money to start another restaurant by forming themselves into a corporation at five hundred dollars a share. Appealed to through a grass-roots campaign, Canton Village regulars from the theatrical and publishing worlds loyally chipped in, most at a share apiece. The Wongs and Yook Lum Lee were the largest shareholders.⁴⁴

Pearl’s opened in 1967 at a very long, narrow space on West 48th Street that the architectural firm of Gwathmey Siegel had managed to imbue with a wonderful sense of cool spaciousness and sunny radiance through the ingenious use of glass and mirrors. It at once joined the Shun Lee restaurants and Uncle Tai’s as a venue for celebrity spotting. No one who wrote about it failed to mention names like Jacqueline Onassis, Mike Nichols, Truman Capote, or Danny Kaye. Sokolov, who considered it his mission to educate Times readers about “the exciting, if anarchic, revolution in authentic Chinese cooking now in process in this city,” regally wrote off the place as “the perfect Chinese restaurant for people who don’t really like Chinese restaurants.”⁴⁵

Like the Hunam, Pearl’s launched a dish now found on innumerable American Chinese restaurant menus. It was called “Lemon Chicken,” and had come into being when Yook Lum Lee finished off a presentation of fried boneless chicken breasts and lightly cooked julienned vegetables by throwing one fluid ounce—two full tablespoons—of bottled lemon extract into a luridly sugared sweet-and-sour sauce. By the time of Sokolov’s review, it was considered the star attraction at Pearl’s. He was not inclined to approve this concoction. The flavor, he tersely noted, was “certainly unusual,” but the crowd-pleasing favorite was “not a native Chinese dish.”

This was a backhanded swipe at Claiborne, who had fallen in love with Pearl’s lemon chicken the minute he tasted it and given it national celebrity by publishing a recipe (headed “Oriental Tang”) in the Sunday Times Magazine in 1969.46 (More subtle versions of lemon chicken with real lemon juice or sliced lemons were known in Guangdong and elsewhere.)

The truth was that Greene, Sokolov, Claiborne, and all other non-Chinese arbiters who tackled the subject of Chinese cuisine in the 1960s and 1970s were overwhelmed by the same obstacles to understanding that had bedeviled earlier would-be explicators. They were pioneers unable to draw on the specialized maps that would be available to everyone several decades later. But the prestige that these sometimes inexpert experts conferred on Sichuan or “Mandarin” restaurants played an important role in the eventual creation of such maps by people who really knew the terrain. Though nothing could make the road to mastery of Chinese cooking smooth and foolproof for hopeful Westerners, a new generation of instructors was inspired to rethink the task. Some of the teaching tools that they were looking for would eventually be developed—with help from innovative publishers and editors—in the United States. Some would arrive by way of Taiwan.