It seems fitting to return to the Toisanese and other Pearl River Delta cooks who crossed the Pacific in 1849, eager to place their remarkable skills at the disposal of fellow Gold Rushers. What might Chinese American food have been like if their first friendly reception had not swiftly turned to the most rabid persecution ever visited on any racial group other than African Americans and Native Americans?
It is foolish to suppose that over time they would not have faced at least as much prejudice and disdain as the Irish or Italians, heightened by not only race but what Christian society considered an idolatrous religion. But some other things are obvious beyond question. Had the Cantonese newcomers had the same legal right as anybody else to enter the country, seek employment, and, if they wished, become American citizens, they would have made still greater contributions to the Gold Mountain table. In the Far West and perhaps elsewhere, simply being able to move around safely would have given Cantonese men even greater advantages in seeking jobs cooking for white people. At the same time, more white children would have had something like James Beard’s early exposure to Cantonese cooking through the family cook, Jue Let, as well as Johnny Kan’s cousins.
In a less hostile climate, the cultural barriers to bringing wives and daughters from ancestral Pearl River Delta villages might well have been more easily overcome. In that case, home cooking for families would have become a norm at an earlier date, along with a swifter evening-out of the distorted sex ratio. The “paper son” dodge, with constant fear of discovery and deportation, would have been unnecessary; children learning English in school and helping parents to overcome the immense language barrier would have become a factor sooner.
Would “chop suey” cuisine ever have been invented? Perhaps. Flawlessly tailored to the culinary American zeitgeist of circa 1900, it looks now like an idea simply waiting to happen. But the need for inventing it would not have been as pressing because the Chinese American community’s reliance on the employment ghettos of laundries and restaurants that existed at the behest of a white clientele would have been less desperate. By the same token, the conditions under which Chinese sometimes cooked their own food for non-Chinese patrons would have been less constrained. Long before the 1943 end of Exclusion, some of the latter had begun scorning chop suey and developing a taste for what they saw on Chinese customers’ tables. It isn’t a stretch to guess that if Exclusion had never been enacted, the path to understanding would have been less obstacle-ridden.
To wonder what might have been lends all the keener edge to thinking of what was. At a time when millions of Americans and their elected representatives were doing their utmost to deny Chinese people any place in this nation’s social and cultural fabric, the despised interlopers managed to make an irresistible claim on a small patch of that fabric. The job of cooking to please outsiders was one of the crucial weapons through which they survived threats and persecutions long enough to gradually relax their grip on the restaurant business, or its grip on them. No longer compelled to serve out long terms doing what they did so wonderfully, they have earned the freedom to form other strands in the larger fabric of American life.