The First Age of Race-Blind Immigration
The Restaurant Experience: Unequal Racial Exchanges
In the year that saw such exalted events as Nixon’s visit to Beijing, the opening of the Hunam Restaurant, and the appearance of Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee’s cookbook, Pantheon Books published a San Francisco oral history project titled Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown. This unsparing portrait by the husband and wife team of Victor G. Nee and Brett de Bary Nee contained dozens of interviews with local residents old and young. It examined poverty, violence, and other realities hidden behind the community’s atmospheric architectural flourishes and colorful paint jobs. Among the sections devoted to labor issues, one of the most disillusioning was the chapter “Why Chinatown Restaurants Are Cheaper.” The unvarnished reason, as told to the Nees, was that the enterprises were staffed by nonunionized workers who had no better choice. Employers could dictate the lowest wages for sixty-four-hour weeks to either greenhorn newcomers from Hong Kong who spoke no English or older Cantonese American housing-project dwellers who had been stuck in dead-end waiters’ jobs for decades.1
Such conditions were not new in the Chinese American restaurant business and still are far from rare today. Since cash and other transactions in the internal economy of America’s Chinatowns often have taken place off the books, exact documentation always has been elusive. But regardless of precise dollar figures, this pioneering investigation left no doubt that badly paid behind-the-scenes labor and restaurant patrons’ dinners were two sides of the same coin—something still worth pointing out to any non-Chinese fan of Chinese food in America. Unfortunately, separate frames of reference exist for people who own or work in eating places—whether diners, coffee shops, kosher delis, luncheonettes, or Michelin-three-star sensations—and the clients who frequent them. This is especially true when personnel (from owners to dishwashers) and clientele are of different races. Late in my research on this book, a fellow culinary historian expressed a belief that Chinese food in the United States has been declining since a 1970s high point of accomplishment and variety. The claim prompted me to a realization: There is still a terrible disconnect between restaurants as part of the modern Chinese American community and the same places as viewed by white arbiters.
Certainly the late 1960s and 1970s were the apogee of some important developments in Chinese American food. But arguably one of the most important was the self-consequence with which non-Chinese judges of culinary fashion ruled on upscale Chinese restaurants deftly attuned to their fancy. Nothing was further from their minds than fathoming the great geographical, historical, and cultural breadth and depth of food in the worldwide Chinese experience, or questioning their own role in racial exchanges between Chinese American cooks and white customers.
Those exchanges were the product of particular historical circumstances. I have already pointed out that cooking for non-Chinese was a lifeline for desperate victims of Exclusion-era hostility and a profitable career for later Mandarin speakers brought to the United States by the Washington–Taipei alliance. It does not follow that the heirs of Exclusion or the astute postwar generation of restaurateurs will remain permanently wedded to the business of cooking to please outsiders. In fact, an inexorable shift in the relative population shares of white Americans and people of color—above all, Asian Americans—makes it increasingly likely that in an ever-growing number of Chinese restaurants, the presence or absence of white customers will be a negligible factor.
The demographic upheaval in question was triggered by the passage of the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 and its implementation in 1968. One of the law’s early effects was an expansion in the numbers of Chinese Americans able to make a living by cooking for other members of the Chinese immigrant community, or often just the segment of it that shared their own regional ethnicity or language. White gourmets took several decades to notice the gathering trend and even then usually interpreted it in self-referential terms, not as a sign of things to come in an increasingly multiracial America. Now, however, it is impossible for students of food history to ignore the implications of a shifting racial balance that is currently projected to make whites a minority of the total U.S. population by about 2040.2
Of course, the demographic fallout of Hart-Celler was not to be foreseen in 1968. Between then and the end of the 1980s, many global and domestic forces reshaped the Chinese American food scene in ways that could not have been fully grasped at the time. They include the Western world’s formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the legitimate Chinese nation, bloody ethnic rivalries in Southeast Asia, the depopulation and repopulation of old immigrant enclaves along with the founding of new ones in the United States, and the political protest movements of the 1960s. But for many years the only agency of change visible to most American diners was the fickle course of food fashion as ordained by the usual media oracles.
The Moving Spotlight
In hindsight, the late 1960s and 1970s do indeed look like a golden age of Chinese food in America—that is, from the perspective of critics telling people which new restaurant to go to or editors deciding what to publish. After about 1980, the number of dazzling Chinese dining spots mentioned by leading arbiters and ambitious English-language Chinese cookbooks fell off sharply. Admirable Chinese restaurants did not disappear. Neither did intelligent writing about Chinese food. But the excitement of the former scene has never been recaptured.
What ended the supposed golden age was not any sudden dearth of gifted chefs and writers but an increasingly competitive, buzz-driven climate in which simply serving excellent food didn’t necessarily make any place either cool or hot in the eye of the vogue-chasing beholder. The fashion spotlight moved on, as spotlights will in an age of shrinking attention spans.
Needing something new to celebrate, some critical champions of upscale Chinese food began “discovering” Thai food in print. Members of the Chinese American community and the very tiny Thai counterpart didn’t get to announce that one cuisine had been discovered as the latest rage or the other de-discovered as old hat. That job was handled by white authorities belonging to neither community—usually well-meaning, liberal-minded people who would have been horrified to hear anybody crudely point out the implication that only the dominant race’s rating scale mattered. They had no conscious intent to selectively belittle any one Asian people or cuisine. And it would be unjust to ignore what they did to improve non-Chinese understanding of Chinese food. But their profession came more and more to resemble self-preening, trend-hailing coverage of this or that exclusive couturier’s spring or fall lines.
Newer fashions were also draining some of the glamour from “cooking Chinese” at home with the aid of woks and cookbooks. In many kitchens, do-it-yourself Chinese cooking acquired or reacquired the reputation of being more trouble than it was worth. Cookbook editors, noting decreased enthusiasm for sustained concentration on the part of reader-cooks, now often backed away from arduous earlier struggles with the challenges of Chinese cooking concepts and techniques. Advertising copy tended to stress such watchwords as “quick,” “light,” and “easy,” all of which are fine descriptions of stir-fry cooking as practiced by the practiced but must have made many frustrated beginners gnash their teeth.
Yet Chinese cuisine in America was not about to dwindle into a tired fad in search of updated sales pitches. Too much had already been achieved by too many capable and dedicated people, both Chinese and non-Chinese. There was no going back to the atmosphere of ignorance in which American “experts” and diners had cheerfully identified a distorted version of Cantonese cuisine as the height of authenticity. Some enlarged understanding was here to stay, at least for the class of “serious” cooks and restaurant-goers. Just before other Asian culinary vogues began encroaching on the media attention paid to Chinese food, Gourmet magazine treated the subject to a prolonged scrutiny that would lastingly register with influential readers.
An Iconic Bastion Conquered
Everyone recognized Gourmet as the bastion of a culinary value system rooted in misty WASP-but-Francophile notions of past epicurean glories. Loyal readers did know that such places as India, Japan, and China existed. From time to time an isolated tribute to some Asian tradition might appear. Still, the august magazine had been content with distinctly sporadic coverage of anything that wasn’t French, regional American, or perhaps Italian. But 1979—by coincidence, the year in which diplomatic relations were established between the United States and the PRC—marked a watershed in Gourmet’s approach to Far Eastern cuisines.
The writer who breached the fortress once and for all was Nina Simonds. She had spent several years in Taipei working with the Wei-Chuan teaching and publishing arms before returning to the United States with an excellent grounding in Mandarin speech and the essentials of Chinese cooking methods. The intrepid young woman next transferred herself to Paris for a year’s study as a stagiaire (student-trainee) at Anne Willan’s new and high-powered French cooking school La Varenne.3 Still filled with a sense of mission about passing on what she had learned on Taiwan, she asked permission to moonlight on the school premises by demonstrating Chinese cooking principles in the evenings to small classes of students.
Among those who attended these informal sessions was Zanne Zakroff, then on a year’s leave from her duties as Gourmet’s executive food editor and head of the test kitchen.4 To Zakroff, the dimensions of the subject being opened up through Simonds’s eager advocacy were a revelation.
Nothing more happened for a couple of years. But in 1978 the two women met over lunch in New York to share Paris reminiscences and talk about food. Their conversation turned to possible article ideas. Simonds suggested that the time might have come to examine Chinese cuisine as one of the world’s crowning cultural-gastronomic achievements.
Zakroff’s encouragement was decidedly cautious. She had little hope that Jane Montant, the magazine’s very proper and Francophile editor-in-chief, would entertain any far-reaching proposal on the subject. But to her amazement, Mrs. Montant (as she was always called) not only welcomed the idea of paying more attention to the food of China but ended up accepting a detailed, impressive proposal from Simonds for a series of monthly columns exploring the subject’s major facets. Improbably, a Gourmet editor apparently wedded to a nearly forty-year-old credo upholding the eternal value of la grande cuisine française recognized that Chinese cuisine had comparable (and older) claims to eternal value.
Gourmet had published long serial explorations of particular cuisines before, but they had never strayed from a Eurocentric focus. The time and space that Mrs. Montant finally agreed to devote to this ambitious endeavor were astonishing. After much consideration and planning, she committed the magazine to publishing a two-year run of text-and-recipes monthly columns by Simonds between January 1979 and December 1980. It was an effort more far-reaching and conscientious than any attention previously paid to Chinese cuisine by the Claiborne-led restaurant reviewers and other journalistic pundits. And being sustained over twenty-four months rather than squeezed into a one-shot culinary paean, it had a long time to sink into the awareness of Gourmet subscribers.
Though chiefly organized around individual foodstuffs such as eggs, chicken, fish, pork, and so forth, the Simonds series began in 1979 with a careful two-part introduction to crucial seasonings and flavoring principles. Properly and tellingly, the first ingredient to have a column to itself was rice. Presentations on noodles (in two parts), breads, and dumplings followed. Soybeans and bean curd received separate columns; vegetarian cooking was treated at length. Lamb (unusually at the time, since most Chinese restaurateurs in America still came from areas where it was little eaten) received a whole column. Sweets were given two, though Simonds was careful to explain that they didn’t really correspond to any Western concept of desserts.
The attention that Gourmet devoted to this unprecedented body of instruction was perhaps the most dramatic announcement of change among august food authorities between the start of the Cold War and the first years of official Chinese-American recognition. The series was also the making of Simonds’s career as a recognized authority on Chinese cuisine. And Jane Montant’s loosening of the magazine’s longtime “gourmet-equals-French” conceptual stranglehold would appear all the more enlightened almost fifteen years later when the ex–New York Times restaurant reviewer Bryan Miller covertly tried to have his successor, Ruth Reichl, fired for crimes against the paper’s previously exalted standards.5 Sublimely ignorant of Asian culinary traditions, Miller was apoplectic at the mere idea of Japanese soba noodle restaurants deserving three stars on any Times-approved scale of values. The Simonds Gourmet series was one of the reasons that by then many people writing about food recognized the absurdity of such attitudes.
Retrenchment on the Book Scene
In the cookbook field, searches for newer-than-newest trends dampened many trade publishers’ and editors’ devotion to Chinese cuisine after the late 1970s. But academic publishers began to scent opportunity. In 1977 Yale University Press issued a collection of eight scholarly essays by different hands examining the course of Chinese food over more than four thousand years: Food in Chinese Culture, edited by K. C. Chang.6 For lay readers in love with Chinese cuisine, this unprecedented source of English-language information by bona fide researchers on diet, crops, and material culture from Neolithic to modern times was like a feast to the starving. James Beard greeted it as “long overdue”; Raymond Sokolov called it “a panorama of all Chinese social history, viewed from the kitchen door.”7 Even today it is an unsurpassed introduction to a host of ethnographic and culinary issues in Chinese food history.
An Eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters by James D. McCawley, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1985, was another milestone.8 A small paperback that could be taken to restaurants in a pocket or purse, it was the first and still almost the only serious attack on the fearful language gap that had always stood between English-speaking patrons and real understanding of what they were eating. McCawley, an eminent linguist, had devised a rough-and-ready version of usual Chinese character-recognition systems, enabling users to look up a root element of a word and find more complex words based on it in a glossary containing about two thousand culinary items. Reissued in 2004, it remains the only attempt to date at a Chinese–English culinary dictionary. The long-unmet need for a compact but detailed history of Chinese food was filled in 1988, when Yale published The Food of China by the anthropologist E. N. Anderson, one of the contributors to the earlier compendium.9 Anderson, a trenchant observer and lucid writer, was equally good at compressing masses of specialized scholarship into shapely form and conveying nuances of gastronomic judgment.
These three books, soon indispensable for hard-core Chinese-food enthusiasts, would also be seminal influences on future scholars and food writers. A work of wider popular impact, The Book of Tofu by the soy-food advocates William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, was first published in 1975 by a small New Age press in Massachusetts and reissued as a mass-market paperback by Ballantine Books in 1979.10 The timing couldn’t have been more ideal. Bean curd was just ceasing to be exclusively associated with Japanese or Chinese cuisine and beginning a rise to mainstream success boosted by a (spurious) reputation as a low-fat diet aid. At the same moment, questions about the wastefulness of land use for raising livestock as opposed to high-protein plant crops were moving closer to the center stage of American political debate. Shurtleff and Aoyagi’s ecological arguments and their zeal in devising recipes based on tofu triggered prominent debate and moved some serious vegetarians to investigate the huge repertoire of meatless Chinese dishes.
During this time, the major trade publishers showed only fitful interest in following up the Chinese cookbook standouts of the 1960s and 1970s. Houghton Mifflin, however, managed to secure Nina Simonds’s first cookbook, a solid, basic manual titled Chinese Classic Cuisine.11 Published in 1982, it thoughtfully revisited and expanded on much of the best material from the Gourmet series, and remains one of the best general cooks’ introductions to the Chinese kitchen.
An ambitious work that implicitly placed Chinese and French cuisines on the same exalted plane was Chinese Technique, published in 1981 by Simon & Schuster.12 The authors were Ken Hom and Harvey Steiman, respectively a young Berkeley alumnus (and French-traveled champion of East–West fusion cuisine) who was teaching Chinese cooking in the Bay Area and the food-and-wine editor of the San Francisco Examiner. The editor was Ann Bramson, who several years before had smoothed the French-born Jacques Pépin’s path to American fame by overseeing a pair of pictorial manuals issued by another publisher, La Technique and La Methode. Each was based on literally hundreds of photographs of Pépin—or usually his hands—demonstrating French culinary procedures in exhaustive step-by-step detail.
The Hom-Steiman book was in effect a replica of the Pépin volumes dedicated to Chinese food and using Hom’s hands, with photographs by Willie Kee. Today the black-and-white reproduction looks dated and fuzzy, but the crucial ideas still emerge with clarity. Chinese Technique launched Hom’s career by bringing him to the notice of a BBC producer who was planning a new television series and looking for a photogenic English-speaking Chinese cook. The resulting show, Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery, had made him a superstar in the United Kingdom by the mid-1980s.
Several important projects came from an energetic editor at William Morrow. Maria Guarnaschelli (who much later would introduce the English writer Fuchsia Dunlop to an American public) supervised the decade’s one blockbuster Chinese cookbook, Barbara Tropp’s The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking (1982).13 Well-focused and astute enough to serve as a good general introduction, it was nonetheless charged with Tropp’s fierce individualism and penchant for arranging East–West culinary marriages. Guarnaschelli followed up this success with Florence Lin’s Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings and Breads (1986), which dealt encyclopedically with a subject particularly appealing to American audiences and may have been the veteran author’s best-loved book.14 She went on to oversee the first really extensive cook’s-eye survey of Far Eastern foodstuffs, Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients (1988).15 Bruce Cost, a San Francisco newspaper columnist and cooking instructor as well as a friend of Alice Waters, had managed to interweave an eclectic collection of recipes with descriptions of a pan-Asian array of ingredients ranging from Vietnamese fresh herbs to Chinese rock sugar. The book would stand for years as the most practical reference aid in the field.
Several attractive books testified to the appeal of dim sum, which wasn’t absolutely new but had become a big draw among non-Chinese only after the mid-1970s. Florence Lin had actually treated several aspects of the subject in the noodle-dumpling book. So had the thoughtful cooking teacher Mai Leung in The Chinese People’s Cookbook (1979), a work about snacks and street foods overseen by Frances McCullough at Harper & Row (1982) and later reissued as Dim Sum and Other Chinese Street Foods.16 More tightly focused on the Cantonese-style teahouse repertoire was The Dim Sum Book by the China Institute instructor Eileen Yin-Fei Lo (Crown, 1982).17 Despite the lucidity and loving detail of Lo’s recipes, it is doubtful that many people were able to cook their way through much of this work or a slighter competitor titled Classic Deem Sum (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1985) by Henry Chan (proprietor of the well-known San Francisco dim sum parlor Yank Sing) with Yukiko Haydock and Bob Haydock.18 The problem was that no Chinese recipes are more excruciatingly labor-intensive than the dim sum dumplings that first brought crowds flocking to dim sum parlors like Yank Sing or Hee Seung Fun in New York Chinatown, or require a more dexterous touch in filling and shaping.
The Crossover Craze
Though Thai and Vietnamese establishments siphoned off some of the erstwhile Chinese restaurant clientele, a few Chinese specialties became permanent favorites in an otherwise fickle, hyperactive national food scene. Dumplings—both the northern Chinese jiaozi (“pot stickers” or “boiled dumplings,” according to how they were cooked) and the kinds belonging to Cantonese dim sum—were rapidly welcomed, along with the great wealth of Chinese wheat-flour and other noodle dishes. As of 1980 northern-style flatbreads were seldom represented by anything but the so-called scallion pancake, but it was such an immediate hit that many Cantonese restaurants were obliged to add it to their menus along with jiaozi. Non-Chinese diners responded to such items not as oddities but as congenial counterparts to adoptive citizens like pizza (scallion pancakes often appeared on menus as “Chinese pizza”), ravioli, and spaghetti.
East–West culinary interchanges—depending on one’s perspective, confused jumbles or fruitful unions—were a hallmark of the age. In parts of the Far East, versions of packaged white bread and bottled mayonnaise had come to stay; Americans investigating a new crop of city greengroceries run by Korean immigrants might decide to see how rice vinegar tasted in a salad dressing, or some kind of dried noodles in a pasta dish. Brewed soy sauce from Wisconsin (where the Japanese-founded Kikkoman firm had had a plant since 1972) was giving hydrolyzed American pseudo–soy sauce a run for its money at supermarkets.
At another level, forward-looking restaurants reaped headlines for bending or obliterating boundaries between national cuisines. Some leading mainstream chefs began raiding Japanese or Chinese cuisine for effects that they usually grafted onto French backgrounds. The ensuing “fusion” razzle-dazzle stole a certain amount of thunder from the food of Mandarinized high-end Chinese restaurants. But it also helped under score the innate grace of Chinese cuisine.
The chief though not the only laboratory for such experiments was California, headquarters for both old San Francisco Chinatown in the north and swathes of affluent new Taiwanese ethnoburbs in the south. The showiest showplace of the French-Chinese fusion vogue was in Los Angeles: Chinois on Main, founded in 1983 by the Austrian-born, French-trained superstar chef Wolfgang Puck.
At China Moon in San Francisco, Barbara Tropp evolved a bolder, edgier style of hybridization. The Bay Area also nurtured links between leaders of the incipient “California cuisine” and prominent local Chinese restaurateurs, especially Cecilia Chiang, a close friend of Alice Waters and other Chez Panisse stalwarts. Nearly everyone in California food circles assumed that all people with any claim to culinary literacy needed an informed appreciation of Chinese food. That idea was also being mightily fostered to the south by Jonathan Gold, a writer for Los Angeles Weekly. Starting in 1986, readers of his column “Counter Intelligence” were regularly treated to reviews of San Gabriel Valley Chinese restaurants based on more determined immersion in the cuisine than any American critic had previously attempted.19 (I once heard Gold describe going back to eat a specialty new and baffling to him—“stinky tofu”—at a Taiwan-style restaurant more than a dozen times before he felt halfway qualified to write a word about it.)
Activism and Academia
To an articulate and angry segment of the Chinese American community, the time that outsiders spent exclaiming over Chinese restaurants was not a compliment but an affront. The same years that saw the passage of Hart-Celler and the Nixon administration’s first overtures to mainland China also bred inner-city riots, political assassinations, student “liberations” of university administrators’ offices, and mass demonstrations aimed at ending American imperialism. It would have been impossible for the Black Power movement and other militant social-justice campaigns not to inspire kindred rage in the major Chinese American communities.
In a firestorm of protests and strikes during 1968 and 1969, the California State University system was either persuaded or forced to institute some of the nation’s first ethnic studies programs at the University of California–Berkeley and San Francisco State College. The spread of such programs was at first sporadic. But within several decades the only college and university curricula that failed to address the concerns of minority groups were at a handful of very reactionary religiously affiliated schools.
Young graduate students and teachers who had welcomed the first California victories immediately began designing courses to redress the earlier neglect of Chinese American history. Among the first fruits was a now classic scholarly reference tool titled A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus, edited by Thomas W. Chinn, Him Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy.20 It was published in 1969 by the Chinese Historical Society of America, of which Chinn had been principal founder in 1963. The society was soon joined by such other organizations as the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (1975) and the New York Chinatown History Project (1980), a precursor to what is now the Museum of Chinese in America. Today many states from coast to coast have their own Chinese historical societies, maintaining both paper and online archives.
To young political activists, leaders of older community organizations such as the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association looked like Uncle Toms and (as perennial supporters of the Chiang Kai-shek regime on Taiwan) tools of American warmongers. The pseudo-Chinese trappings of San Francisco Chinatown were an insult. So was the popular identification of Chinese Americans with two businesses that in the new activists’ minds marked them as ghetto victims: laundries and restaurants.
The activists recognized and despised the racism that had doomed their grandparents to years of disenfranchised Exclusion-era drudgery in chop suey joints and kept their parents chained to the same work in spite of supposedly full citizenship. They saw the occupational hardships imposed on contemporary restaurant workers and detailed in the Nees’ Longtime Californ’. It is not surprising that when well-meaning white allies gushed about their love of Chinatown restaurants, people trying to establish Chinese American history and sociology as a legitimate field of study often reacted like African Americans hearing praise of the old plantation. Their resentment would not soften for many years.
The activists’ belief that anti-Chinese racism still enjoyed free rein in America was horrifically reinforced in 1982, when two Detroit auto workers not only ambushed and beat to death a young Chinese American named Vincent Chin, whom they had scuffled with in a bar, but were acquitted of all charges except manslaughter and set free on three years’ probation.21 (The killers—to whom one Asian looked like another—had thought their victim was Japanese.) One of the two was later found guilty on a federal civil rights violation count, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. The Chin murder led to the founding of a Detroit-area Asian American coalition called American Citizens for Justice, which spearheaded a national campaign to hold perpetrators accountable for anti-Asian crimes. It signaled the growth of an Asian American political solidarity that—in contrast to former Chinese–Japanese rivalries—transcended country-of-origin boundaries.
In their own right and as part of the growing Asian American movement, Chinese Americans continued to press for equal justice and opportunity. (Notwithstanding later myths that lumped together all Chinese as a fortunate, high-achieving “model minority,” the poor and badly educated had little access to these blessings.) The first university Asian American studies programs meanwhile grew in breadth and depth throughout the 1970s and 1980s, attracting people of both Asian and non-Asian origin. Among the pioneer contributors were the eminent historians Roger Daniels, Him Mark Lai, and Ronald Takaki. Thanks to them and the influential scholars who came in their wake, both specialists and lay people had increasing access to invaluable histories—for instance, Sucheng Chan’s detailed study This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 and Shih-shan Henry Tsai’s compact summary The Chinese Experience in America (both 1986).22
At the time of the first Asian American studies programs, the Hart-Celler Act was too new to have affected anyone’s thinking about later immigration patterns. Philip Hart, Emanuel Celler, and Lyndon Johnson had not dreamed that the act would wreak any startling changes on the American population. Asian Americans themselves were equally ignorant of the future—the more so as diplomatic recognition of the PRC was a yet-unforeseen event.
The first inkling of Far Eastern consequences came during the fallout of America’s ill-fated war with Vietnam, which lurched to an end seven years after the implementation of Hart-Celler in 1968. It was a terrible omen for thousands of ethnic Chinese living in the regions of Southeast Asia that they collectively called the Nanyang.
Virtually all of the Nanyang Chinese had come from the southeast coast of China. Cantonese adventurers had founded some settlements. But the great majority were Fujianese or, in their own pronunciation, Hokkienese. In a few areas the Hakka ethnic minority predominated, in others the “Teochiu” or Chaozhou people from a community clustered around the Guangdong-Fujian border. Wherever they went, they had held firm to their languages and sense of group identity. Their cuisine had never lost its Chinese foundations. Happily adopting local ingredients such as lemongrass, basil, coconuts, fish sauce, fermented shrimp paste, taro, or mangoes, they had nonetheless retained the core Chinese cooking techniques and culinary principles.
In far corners of the Nanyang, from the Philippines to Malaysia, the Han Chinese in their hundreds of settled outposts had earned a reputation as profiteering alien merchants and middlemen preying on the societies that they dealt with. The fierceness with which they were hated can be judged from the title of a 1914 pamphlet by King Rama VI of Thailand denouncing the Chinese: The Jews of the East.23 When the after math of the Vietnam War left much of Southeast Asia in disequilibrium if not bloody tatters, a tide of anti-Chinese fury broke loose in many of their adoptive homes.
Violent outbreaks against Chinese were not new in the Nanyang. What was new (in addition to the devastation caused by the American war) was the Hart-Celler Act. Thanks to Hart-Celler, thousands of refugees who at one time would have been automatically excluded were able to seek new lives in the United States on the same footing as people from England, Sweden, Belgium, or anywhere else in the world.
Most of the refugees who began crowding onto any boat that would carry them and fleeing from Vietnam in 1977 and 1978 were ethnic Hokkienese who had lived for generations in the Cholon district of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. Later waves of “boat people” followed over the next ten or dozen years. Sporadic anti-Chinese riots occurred throughout the late twentieth century in Indonesia, Burma, and Malaysia, among other places.
Some U.S. Chinatowns soon began acquiring a scattering of Vietnamese restaurants whose cooking overlapped only in part with the cuisine of other people in northern or southern Vietnam. A little later these outposts were joined by Malaysian restaurants with the strong imprint of the (mostly Hokkienese) Chinese–Malaysian tradition, as distinguished from native Malay, Hindu Indian–Malaysian, and Muslim Indian–Malaysian cooking or various local culinary hybridizations.
The effect of Hart-Celler on Chinese diasporic communities was not limited to the old Nanyang, though for some time that was the biggest general source of new ethnic Chinese immigrants. Mainlanders who had managed to escape to Hong Kong during or after the Communist takeover soon made their way to American destinations, especially San Francisco Chinatown. Most often poor and disadvantaged by lack of English skills, they were a new factor for unrest in that troubled community.
Taiwan, though it lost the diplomatic-recognition battle in 1979, continued to send waves of prosperous and well-educated newcomers to southern California ethnoburbs and (on a smaller scale) New York City’s emerging Flushing Chinatown. It also sent enormous amounts of money for investment plans spearheaded by either Taiwanese or new American citizens. Simultaneously, Hong Kong millionaires looking to take their assets elsewhere before 1997 (when the colony was to be returned to the PRC on the expiration of the 1898 British lease) began a spate of ambitious building and restaurant projects in Manhattan Chinatown and Flushing. The Tawa Supermarket (later renamed 99 Ranch Market) and Hong Kong Supermarket chains, created respectively by Taiwanese and Hong Kong entrepreneurs during the 1980s search for investment opportunities, revolutionized food shopping for many thousands of newcomers.24 The branch stores are spacious emporiums on the model of large, palatial American supermarkets, carrying a vast array of imported Asian food products together with a wide selection of fresh produce, meats, and fish. Most cater to a Taiwanese or other Chinese clientele, but some serve Vietnamese, Indonesian, and other ex-Nanyang immigrant communities.
During this early tide of Taiwanese and Nanyang immigration, other ethnic Chinese groups started reaching America in lesser numbers. Already a few descendants of the Chinese who had worked nineteenth-century Cuban sugar plantations had started coming to America along with a version of cocina chinacubana that acquired a small fan club in New York. So had counterparts who had founded a tribe of restaurants popularly called chifas in Peru and Ecuador after the decline of the guano mining that had been their chief employment. Representatives of the Hakka settlement that had become the center of the Calcutta leather-working trade would also establish North American niches. Unlike Southeast Asian newcomers, these immigrants didn’t necessarily gravitate to existing American Chinatowns, more often clustering in other ethnic neighborhoods along with members of their own communities.
The Start of Mainland Emigration
It took some fifteen years for the effects of the implemented Hart-Celler Act to reach mainland China, since the Mao regime compared favorably with even the most isolationist imperial dynasties for cutting off emigration. Until Mao’s death in 1976, undoctored news of the outside world seldom reached citizens of the PRC. The converse was almost equally true. From 1949 until the late 1970s, the U.S. public received only foggy and scattered descriptions of events behind the Bamboo Curtain. Some accounts of the Great Leap Forward (roughly 1958–1960) reached the West but no estimates of the death toll resulting from this “modernization” program’s disastrous effects on agriculture. The Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s produced some press reports of state-backed violence against victims identified as “class enemies,” but again, Western observers would not understand the full horror for some time to come.
For decades, most Americans’ ideas of the mysterious mainland were still shaped more by party lines than solid information. Those with left-leaning convictions went on defending Red China as a noble experiment. Cold War hard-liners (still bitterly opposed to abandoning Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists) went on calling it a threat to the free world.
Many also insisted on viewing food through ideological prisms. In 1961 the veteran Hong Kong–based correspondent Peggy Durdin published an article in the New York Times Magazine, “Mao’s ‘Great Crime’ Against Cuisine,” excoriating the latest communal-kitchen policy and describing the usual fare as a “dull, tasteless, monotonous” travesty of “the world’s best, most richly diversified cuisine.”25 A letter to the editor from an angry PRC sympathizer promptly dismissed her account as the let-’em-eat-cake elitism of a “well-traveled gourmet” blind to the plight of hungry masses.26
Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing did not immediately create a flow of information between the two nations. The Watergate scandal, erupting the year after the signing of the Shanghai communiqué, hobbled his administration’s foreign policy agenda. The White House could spare no thought or energy on lining up support for the politically risky step of transferring official U.S. recognition from Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China to the PRC. For a time, Washington could not open an official embassy in Beijing. But it did establish a kind of shadow embassy known as the U.S. liaison office, headed at one point by future president George H. W. Bush.
During this diplomatic limbo, the declining health of Mao and Zhou Enlai left the PRC’s entire future in doubt—though in Mao’s last years, expatriates living in the United States were granted a little more leeway to visit families on the mainland. Among the few who obtained travel visas was Cecilia Chiang.
The scene that greeted Chiang in 1975 was horrifying enough to spur her to publish a revised edition of The Mandarin Way (1980) detailing her experiences. She found her gentle, learned father dying, “after years of privation,” in a squalid Beijing hole with essentially no medical attention. His children, who tried to literally carry him through the streets to a hospital on the terrible last day (there was no ambulance), had to bury him in a wretched miscellany of garments.27
This nightmare, Chiang made clear, summed up the irrevocable ruin of Chinese culture as she had known it. Food had been one casualty. “As all the best ingredients are exported to obtain foreign exchange, the basic diet is a main dish of cabbage, eggplant or spinach, and sometimes turnip.” Cooks trained in anything but rock-bottom basics had died out; formerly celebrated restaurants served clumsy travesties of the old repertoire. “Everywhere I noticed that the skillful cutting and refinement of classical Chinese cooking had departed.” In sum, “China will no doubt suffer for the errors of the Cultural Revolution for many years to come.”28
Cecilia Chiang’s visit occurred just on the cusp of tremendous geopolitical shakeups. Both Mao and Zhou died in 1976, having outlived their old enemy Chiang Kai-shek for less than a year. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping emerged victorious from a brief struggle for power, with aggressive reforms in mind. One was to finish the unfinished business of diplomatic recognition. In January of 1979 he and President Jimmy Carter signed the necessary accords; an exchange of ambassadors soon followed. The Republic of China on Taiwan, now replaced by the PRC as the recognized government of China, was given its own shadow embassy and cautiously worded promises of military support.
It was several more years before Deng went on to liberalize the PRC’s restrictive emigration policy in the early 1980s. By then he had begun publicly repudiating certain Maoist “errors,” limited freedom of travel was opening up, and American news media were establishing Beijing bureaus. For the first time Western journalists were able to form clear ideas of earlier disasters, including crop failures during the Great Leap Forward and savage punishments visited on (among other “enemies”) former restaurant chefs during the Cultural Revolution.
The PRC now received a Hart-Celler immigration quota of twenty thousand a year, equivalent to that for Taiwan. Previously most mainlanders who made it to the United States had been lumped in with the Taiwanese quota or a special Hong Kong quota of five thousand. These numbers, together with other influxes from Southeast Asian nations, meant a steep rise in the numbers of Chinese immigrating to the United States. By 1990 the crowds of mainlanders seeking to enter the country were so great that each year’s twenty-thousand quota was filled in the blink of an eye. People who didn’t make the authorized cut looked to other means. Fujian province, historically a breeding ground of lawbreakers, became the chief source of illegal immigration from the PRC, with hordes of locals incurring massive debts to “snakeheads,” or people-smugglers who would clandestinely transport them to U.S. ports or border crossings.29
At the time of the new quota arrangements, the old Cantonese-dominated New York City Chinatown had been steadily declining since World War II. The Hart-Celler Act reversed the ebbing tide as undocumented Fujianese poured into the old hub by many tens of thousands. In a sense, Fujian started to become a new Toisan on a far larger scale, the wellhead of a huge transoceanic human pipeline that the immigration authorities constantly struggled to control.30 A crucial difference was that, even as illegal aliens, the Fujianese in New York were not automatically singled out by racist immigration laws. Fujianese restaurants boldly took root along East Broadway and Forsyth Street, regularly replacing former Cantonese joints. In an equally significant departure, the regular customers were not whites but other Fujianese living in the neighborhood, legally or illegally. People went to Yeung Sun—owned by a highly popular snakehead—and its counterparts to eat the food they loved and talk their own language. The same could be said of many dozens of restaurants that sprang up in Flushing and half a dozen other New York neighborhoods not dependent on illegal immigration, after Hart-Celler had cleared the way to admit Chinese from the Nanyang, the mainland, Taiwan, and elsewhere. The majority of these new arrivals came to New York, which surpassed San Francisco as the largest Chinese American population center during the 1980s.31
A Changed Restaurant Landscape
The new Chinatown restaurants had nothing to do with either chop suey models or the gilded gathering spots founded by earlier Mandarin speakers. They didn’t boast the services of chefs whose virtuosic skills harked back to the late Qing Empire. Western lovers of Chinese food now at least faintly glimpsed the truth of what Cecilia Chiang and a few others had reported about the havoc wreaked on the Chinese culinary legacy by the Cultural Revolution. The break with a system of apprenticeship and training that had long supplied magnificent restaurants and great households with da shi fu (Cantonese, daai si fu)—culinary “grandmasters”—was real and far-reaching. The legacy survived in some strength in the island enclaves of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. It was all but extinct on the mainland, and its influence in America would diminish with the loss of aging pioneer chefs like T. T. Wang and C. M. Lo.
But there were substantial compensations. The grandmasters had never represented more than one facet of the Chinese culinary world. Their disappearance did not doom home cooking skills or ordinary people’s appreciation of simple beauty in a meal. Once victims of collectivization, hunger, and political purges were free to cook for their own families and communities, Chinese regional cuisines were also free to resurface.
Their distinctive characters would later be somewhat softened by nation wide interchange. But in the first years of emigration under Deng, geography and climate (not to mention rudimentary communications technology) remained potent factors for culinary conservatism. Many of the nation’s provinces and autonomous zones were still isolated from the hubs of political and cultural life. The diverse ecosystems of China’s many agricultural zones meant strongly differentiated local cuisines, including some that earlier codifiers had never bothered to name among the regional cuisines of China and that American fans of Cantonese, Sichuanese, Hunanese, or Shanghainese cuisine had never heard of. They now began appearing in strength, especially in Flushing and the other new Chinese enclaves in New York City.
There is no general agreement on how many “Chinatowns” were founded by new immigrants in Brooklyn and Queens, but throughout the 1980s Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong and Guangdong flocked to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Sunset Park. They also converged on nearby Bensonhurst, along with an overflow of Fujianese from Manhattan Chinatown. Flushing, a center of Korean and some Indian as well as Chinese immigration, was bolstered by large infusions of Taiwanese money but also attracted disparate settlers from the Nanyang and many mainland regions. Elmhurst in Queens began developing into a smaller pan-Asian hub embracing diverse Chinese elements.
A messy mosaic of languages and provincial origins would eventually appear in all American Chinatowns, but New York remained the chief beneficiary. The Taiwanese were the best educated and most upwardly mobile, quickly gravitating to skilled professions. Many others, especially in Manhattan Chinatown, were trapped in semi–slum housing and badly paying jobs by lack of English. Some (mostly women) found work in a new generation of Chinatown garment-trade sweatshops. Others (mostly men) made their way to a bumper crop of employment agencies that put people on buses to Chinese restaurants anywhere from Georgia to Arizona, where they had been promised jobs as waiters, dishwashers, cashiers, or perhaps cooks.32 Lucky handfuls, then gathering numbers, managed to found small businesses for neighborhood clienteles, with Fujianese in the old Chinatown forming an aggressive example. Soon restaurants serving particular ethnic Chinese clienteles flourished in all the new Chinatowns. They were seriously baffling to non-Chinese visitors who had thought they knew something about Chinese food. But they were a magnet to a new class of white (and sometimes black) patrons.
Before 1990 two widely different wings were appearing in the ranks of devoted urban restaurant-goers. One consisted of so-called foodies, a word introduced with mildly satirical intent in the early 1980s by the English-based writers Ann Barr and Paul Levy but soon claimed in all seriousness by a U.S. coterie deaf to such nuances. The other was a resolutely disorganized new sect who scorned foodies and cultivated a snobbery-in-reverse devotion to inconspicuous neighborhood beaneries frequented and staffed by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, South America, Africa, the Near East, and the Far East. In the cyber age to come, they would play a great role in disseminating knowledge about ethnic cuisines through assorted blogs. But from the first they were joyous explorers of the unmapped immigrant food territories annexed to the American larder, as if by some new Louisiana Purchase, as a result of the Hart-Celler Act.
Recognized dining authorities, and the foodies who followed their pronouncements, had an awful time making sense out of anything they tasted in the new immigrant eateries. Reviewers and tastemakers who had learned the difference between Cantonese and two or three other regional categories usually were out of their depth. Restaurant mavens generally winced at the lack of what they considered decor. Where English translations existed for menu items written in Chinese, they might be unintelligible. Waiters or waitresses seldom spoke enough English to bridge the gap, and impressing the management with any sense of one’s importance was usually a lost cause. Sometimes it was possible to make out clues indicating regional or ethnic origin like “Fujian” (or “Hokkien”), “Teochiu” (or other bewildering romanizations), “Hakka,” “Xi’an,” “Shandong,” “Wenzhou,” “Yunnan,” or “Dongbei.” But English-language sources shedding any light on those names scarcely existed.
The contrarians adored such challenges. Unlike mainstream foodies, they perfectly understood that their presence in a neighborhood Turkish or Uzbek restaurant wasn’t particularly interesting to the management or anyone else. Eagerly swapping notes about obscure places where they had eaten unfamiliar dishes, they half-accidentally amassed a seat-of-the-pants acquaintance with a number of non-Western cuisines. With only slight exaggeration, Calvin Trillin once explained to New Yorker readers that no member of the crew was “likely to spend his time in the latest chic Manhattan bistro while there are Nigerian yam-porridge outposts in Brooklyn left to explore.”33 After some years of noncommunication between the two parties, the foodies and gourmet pundits began discovering that devotees of “alternative eating” or “ethnic eating” were on to something. Exchanges of information about previously remote cuisines grew less haphazard as immigrant communities, together with unpretentious restaurants or street carts serving their needs, became more strongly rooted in American cities. An enlarged idea of the “new” Chinese cuisines began diffusing beyond recently settled Chinese neighborhoods throughout the 1980s.
More windows of culinary exchange have opened up since then, though always lagging behind the pace of enclave-formation from still other Chinese regions or minority populations. Well before the end of the twentieth century, growing numbers of smart, sophisticated, and often bilingual young Chinese Americans started to become magazine test cooks, recipe developers, and food writers. New bicultural sources of knowledge sprang up, famously including a labor-of-love quarterly newsletter titled Flavor and Fortune whose editor, Jacqueline M. Newman, diligently sought to fill in one blank space after another on the culinary-cultural map. A younger generation of restaurant critics—not always white—learned to explore the remarkable gamut of Chinese restaurants with a seriousness and humility that hadn’t always distinguished mainstream writing on the subject.
From Honeymoon to Disillusionment
Such developments, however, lay some time ahead as Reagan-era America embarked on a sort of honeymoon with Deng-era China reflected in high-level meetings and popular curiosity. Many U.S. citizens thought that they were now looking at a kinder, gentler PRC. So did many higherups. Ronald Reagan himself paid a state visit to Beijing in 1984 to discuss expanded economic cooperation. Reports about the PRC’s abandonment of collective farming and a full-tilt race to industrialization filled Western news media. The Deng regime launched tourism initiatives that brought thousands of American citizens on carefully supervised visits to Beijing, Shanghai, and many of the provinces. There were even hints that gastronomic tourism might at some point be on the cards. A handful of American food writers were allowed to eat their way around some once-fabled centers of Chinese cuisine. Most famously, in 1986 the former New York Times writer Mimi Sheraton (one of the more clear-eyed restaurant reviewers of the day) was dispatched by Time magazine to spend a month dining out in seven Chinese cities.34
Academic exchange programs grew rapidly. American students’ interest in Mandarin classes was exceeded only by Chinese students’ enthusiasm for English classes. Western historians of modern China had unprecedented access to crucial materials. Middle-aged Chinese Americans who had been student protesters during the 1960s now learned that youthful counterparts in the 1980s PRC were organizing their own rapidly swelling protests against restrictions on freedom of speech and the press. The news seemed to augur a powerful freedom-seeking tide with history on its side, like the one simultaneously gathering in the old Soviet bloc countries and the Soviet Union itself.
This illusion was shattered in June of 1989, when on Deng Xiaoping’s orders the People’s Liberation Army brutally crushed a massive pro-democracy rally in the Tiananmen Square plaza of central Beijing. Western governments registered shocked protests. But they lost little time before returning to the course of pragmatic rapprochement with Beijing. The collapse of all the major Soviet bloc regimes during 1989 and the precarious balancing act of Communist Party secretary (later president) Mikhail Gorbachev in what remained of the Soviet Union spurred rather than discouraged Washington’s interest in a strategic alliance with China, the most dramatically rising new powerhouse in all Eurasia.
But many of the well-meaning American welcomers of Deng’s reforms who had expected him to supervise a transition to Western-style democracy were lastingly disabused by the 1989 massacre. Never again would they trustingly assume that the PRC had shed its totalitarian past. Tiananmen Square closed the books on a certain hopeful post-Mao phase of U.S.–PRC interchange. American citizens—Chinese and non-Chinese alike—generally stopped hoping for enlightened democracy-to-democracy interchange and accepted the reality of hard-nosed American–Chinese relationships based on self-interest in an unsettled, unsettling post–Cold War world. One result of the bloody Tiananmen Square debacle, however, was a speeded-up flow of immigrants to America’s Chinatowns from the PRC, Taiwan, and other parts of the Far East. After 1990 the representation of regional and ethnic Chinese cuisines on American soil became even more diverse.
Who Cooks for Whom?
When some naive early expectations of the Deng regime ended, a certain chapter of Chinese American food history was also approaching an end, together with earlier assumptions about who cooked for whom and why. In today’s romantic haze of fantasies about the glamour of restaurant cooking, it is easy to forget that people don’t necessarily spend a lifetime preparing meals for others in sweltering kitchens because it is their dearest ambition. From the 1890s until about forty years ago, the Chinese restaurant story in America meant very different things to those who enjoyed the meals and those who did the actual work. The 1960s activists who founded the first Asian studies programs did everyone a service by refusing to equate Chinese American identity with laundry or restaurant work benefiting a (mostly) white clientele.
The accomplishments of the people who made the meals had been great. They not only consciously strove to cook for Western taste preferences but almost effortlessly succeeded at the task. In the face of appalling threats and hardships, Pearl River Deltans in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America summoned up the indomitable xiang banfa instinct to concoct a stepchild version of Cantonese cuisine that ever since has pushed all the right buttons for millions of white and black diners. After World War II, newly arrived Mandarin speakers pulled off a partly similar feat under much more favorable circumstances. They managed to open stylish restaurants cleverly tailored to the palates of government policy wonks, businessmen, and food writers. What was more, they got their influential clientele talking (if confusedly) about authenticity and regionality. In both cases, Chinese transplants to this country had used food as a linking interest that helped them take the initiative in a certain asymmetrical colloquy or dialogue with non-Chinese Americans.
In retrospect we can see the chop suey restaurants founded in the Exclusion era as symbols of a will not only to endure but to prevail. Today the thousands that still thrive are as all-American as pizza parlors, which they long predated as a crossover national craze. They represent a permanent enrichment of the American table. The joy with which a huge audience has embraced them for some five generations can’t be argued away by anyone impatiently dismissing the food as a distortion of Cantonese cuisine.
The smaller contingent of Mandarin speakers who arrived half a century later enjoyed more freedom to make a start in any potential career. But those who chose restaurants (or sometimes cooking schools) had as apt instincts as their predecessors for delighting non-Chinese eaters with sudden discoveries that for a time seemed inexhaustible. They, too, lastingly enlarged America’s culinary horizons.
But cooking to please people who don’t understand one’s birthright culinary “language” can never justify kitchen drudgery in the same way as cooking to the taste of fellow “speakers.” More pragmatically: Chinese American restaurant work has often been inseparable from the semi-thralldom of men like those interviewed in Longtime Californ’, caught up in bleak poverty while dreaming of escape to better jobs. The family-run chop suey restaurants that dotted the small-town American landscape were not exploitative to the same degree. But by the late twentieth century the demanding routine to which they held every member was usually justified, in parents’ eyes, by future bills for the college education that would free their children to pursue other goals. Nor did the more affluent Mandarin speakers who had attracted movers and shakers to elegant establishments necessarily want to hand them down from generation to generation. Their children already had an easier road to lucrative professions than most Cantonese Americans.
This is to say that by 1990 a sizable proportion of the old Cantonese and the postwar Mandarin-speaking communities had graduated from restaurants. The pool of talent for running establishments designed to attract a predominantly white clientele had been changed forever by the simple fact that as time went on, fewer of the Chinese already settled in America needed to do it. For the heirs of the first Cantonese Americans, cooking for non-Chinese had long ceased to be a default defense against the immigration authorities. The initial wave of urbane Mandarin-speaking restaurateurs from the mainland via Taiwan had seen its children become lawyers and scientists.
The Chinese Americans who arrived through the Hart-Celler Act and the softening of PRC emigration restrictions did not view cooking for non-Chinese through the same prisms as their predecessors. It is true that many were (and still are) obliged to take initial jobs at chop suey joints in scattered corners of the nation. But restaurateurs in the substantial new Chinatowns of the 1980s were spared the necessity of, so to speak, cooking down to an ignorant non-Chinese clientele. Thus it happened that the numbers of Chinese speakers who understood particular regional or ethnic cuisines, and the ranks of restaurants attuned to their palates, were rapidly growing at the same time that many owners of restaurants dependent on a non-Chinese clientele were leaving the business. With steadily increasing immigration from Asia, and steadily expanding educational and career equality for the heirs of earlier Chinese immigrants, these trends can only accelerate in future.
It’s worth noting that some “edgy” twenty-first-century successors to 1970s experiments in East–West chic may stand to contribute profoundly to coming transethnic culinary-cultural conversations. But the old racial dynamic of Chinese American restaurants is beyond recovery. Its passing is not to be lamented.
Life under the Chinese Exclusion Act is now only a memory—though a very bitter memory—for one contingent of a growing Chinese American community that today is unified by nothing except having originated within certain East Asian geographical coordinates. The most recently arrived often endure work every bit as hard and poorly paid as anything their Cantonese predecessors faced and cram themselves into equally wretched sleeping quarters. But they know that they can work toward a future as citizens of a confusedly evolving multiracial America. And simply by being here, they are opening fellow citizens’ eyes to the unimaginable diversity of Chineseness. This is the first moment at which a white minority-to-be has had a chance to glimpse—or taste—the huge dimensions of Chinese identity. More than a half-century into the Hart-Celler Act, Gold Mountain may at last be ready to appreciate what Chinese cooks have given other Americans in the past and will give in future.