Introduction
1. A photograph of the incriminating banana is reproduced in Marie Rose Wong, Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 111.
2. Ellen D. Wu, “The Best Tofu in the World Comes from . . . Indiana?” in Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present, ed. Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 372–76.
Prologue: A Stroke of the Pen
1. Text of Hart-Celler Act is available from the University of Washington (Bothell) legal research database, U.S. Immigration Legislation Online: http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1965_immigration_and_nationality_act.html.
2. Among the few nonwhite participants were at least two distinguished Japanese Americans: Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii and the official White House photographer, Yoichi Okamoto.
3. Text of Johnson’s October 3, 1965, speech is available at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/Johnson/archives.hom/speeches.hom/651003.asp.
4. Text of the Johnson-Reed Act is available at http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1924_immigration_act.html.
5. Text of the Chinese Exclusion Act is available at http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1882_chinese_exclusion_act.html.
6. Text of the McCarran-Walter Act is available at http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1952_immigration_and_nationality_act.html. Text of the 1790 Naturalization Act is available at http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1790_naturalization_act.html.
1. Origins: The Toisan‐California Pipeline
1. The Nanjing Treaty signing ceremony was commemorated in a well-known engraving based on a painting by John Platt, a British officer in a Bengal Volunteers regiment posted to service in China during the First Opium War.
2. See John Keay, China: A History (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 65–66; and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Cambridge Illustrated History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 179.
3. Lynn Pan, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 98; and Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy, eds., A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), 12.
4. Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha America, 1994), 15.
5. See Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 18–19.
6. Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor, 14–15.
7. See the account in Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 55–104.
8. Pan, Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, 54.
9. Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 25.
10. My treatment of the Canton system draws substantially on Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).
11. Ibid., 21–23.
12. Ibid., 7, 12–13, 51–75.
13. Ibid., 77–81.
14. Ibid., 111–13.
15. John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman, China: A New History, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 168.
16. Pan, Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, 26; Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839–1861 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 125–38; and Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 27–29.
17. Ebrey, Cambridge Illustrated History, 240–43; Fairbank and Goldman, China, 206–12; and Keay, China, 469–74.
18. Text of the Treaty of Nanjing is available at www.international.ucla.edu/asia/article/18421.
19. The best account of the nineteenth-century Hong Kong–San Francisco traffic is Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013).
20. For Hong Kong’s Chinese and non-Chinese population between 1841 and 1910, see Historical and Statistical Abstract of the Colony of Hongkong (Hongkong: Noronha & Co. Government Printers, 1911), 1–7.
21. As Philip A. Kuhn points out, there is no real Chinese equivalent for the concept of “emigrant,” though setting up a provisional base of action outside one’s home was well understood. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 4 and 5.
22. Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991), 5.
23. Ibid., 6.
24. Cantonese commercial activities in Hong Kong are well described in Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 43–91, 191–218.
25. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 8, 12.
26. Ibid., 16–18.
27. William Poy Lee, The Eighth Promise: An American Son’s Tribute to His Toisanese Mother (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2007), 72–73.
28. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 17.
29. The repatriation of bones is examined at length in Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 265–95. See Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 40–54, for an account of Toisan’s economic dependence on remittances from sojourners in the United States.
30. See descriptions of the coolie trade in Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 132–34; Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 50; Chinn et al., History of Chinese in California, 13–14; and Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 21–26.
31. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 213; Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 51–52; Chinn et al, History of Chinese in California, 15; and Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 1909; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1969), 43–45 (page references are to the 1969 edition).
32. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 36–37; and Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 23.
33. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 203; and Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 31–35. The speed with which the Chinese began founding enterprises such as restaurants in San Francisco bespeaks a remarkable amount of business talent assembled in the half-begun settlement as early as the summer of 1849; see chapter 3.
2. The Culinary “Language” Barrier
1. See, for instance, Henry Low, Cook at Home in Chinese (New York: Macmillan, 1938); and Buwei Yang Chao, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (New York: John Day, 1945).
2. Lynn Pan, Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora (New York: Kodansha America, 1994), 130; and G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 103–4.
3. Charles Frederick Noble, A Voyage to the East Indies (London: 1765), 224, cited in Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700–1845 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 62.
4. George Wingrove Cooke, China: Being “The Times” Special Correspondence from China in the Years 1857–58 (London: G. Routledge, 1859), 236–37.
5. James Beard, Delights and Prejudices: A Memoir with Recipes (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1990), 15, 19, 39–40, 54.
6. William Kitchiner, The Cook’s Oracle and Housekeeper’s Manual (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1830), 66–82. Many early- to mid-nineteenth-century English and American cookbooks either closely or loosely adopt Kitchiner’s classification of cooking methods.
7. Cooke, China, 235.
8. See Donald B. Wagner’s translation of a seventeenth-century Chinese account of iron smelting in Guangdong Province in Ferrous Metallurgy, vol. 5, part 11 of Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 49–52.
9. Mary Tsui Ping Yee, Chinese Immigrant Cooking (Cobb, CA: First Glance Books, 1998), 18.
10. Prentice Mulford, “California Culinary Experiences,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 2, no. 6 (June 1869): 560. “Hashes” of neatly sliced meats begin to disappear from standard cookbooks after about 1870.
11. See E. N. Anderson Jr. and Marja L. Anderson, “Modern China: South,” in Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, ed. K. C. Chang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 339.
12. Shiu-ying Hu, Food Plants of China (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005), 27–31. The author presents an overview of other fermented products, 32–41.
13. Cooke, China, 238.
14. H. T. Huang gives a description of several edible oils in Fermentations and Food Science, volume 6, part 5 of Science and Civilisation in China, ed. Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 436–57.
15. Fuchsia Dunlop, Sichuan Cookery (London: Penguin Books, 2001), 240–58, or the American edition published as Land of Plenty (New York: Norton, 2003), 240–58.
16. Mary Hyman and Philip Hyman, “France,” in The Oxford Companion to Food, by Alan Davidson, 2nd ed., ed. Tom Jaine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 314.
17. Évariste Régis Huc, The Chinese Empire: A Sequel to Recollections of a Journey Through Tartary and Thibet by M. Huc, Formerly Missionary Apostolic in China, new ed. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1859), 128.
18. Griffith John, “North China—Hiau-Kan.” In The Chronicle of the London Missionary Society, April, 1879, in The Evangelical and Missionary Chronicle, vol. 9, new series (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1879), 260.
3. “Celestials” on Gold Mountain
1. Leslie Brenner, American Appetite: The Coming of Age of a Cuisine (New York: Avon Books, 1999), 95–96.
2. Fred Ferretti, “A Rat in the Kitchen,” New York Times, op-ed article, February 9, 2008, A15.
3. Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250–1276, trans. M. M. Wright, 2nd ed. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 49–51; and Joanna Waley-Cohen, “The Quest for Balance: Taste and Gastronomy in Imperial China,” in Food: The History of Taste, ed. Paul Freedman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 111–12.
4. Meng liang lu, as cited in Gernet, Daily Life, 50–51.
5. Gernet, Daily Life, 133–38; and Michael Freeman, “Sung,” in Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives, ed. K. C. Chang (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 146–47, 154–55, 161–62.
6. Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991), 188–95.
7. Freeman, “Sung,” 146; and E. N. Anderson, The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 77.
8. Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 183; Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 364, 420; and G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 112.
9. See the description of the services rendered by the contemporary jin shan zhuang, or “Gold Mountain firms,” in Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 34–40.
10. Prentice Mulford, “Glimpses of John Chinaman,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature and Science 11 (February 1873): 219–20.
11. Étienne Derbec, A French Journalist in the California Gold Rush: The Letters of Etienne Derbec, ed. A. P. Nasatir (Georgetown, CA: Talisman Press, 1964), 170.
12. Such items seem to have been regularly shipped from Hong Kong. See James Delgado, Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 103 and app. 3, 191–203; and Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), app. 1, 309–11.
13. Bayard Taylor, Eldorado: Or, Adventures in the Path of Empire (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1861), 117.
14. “Meeting of the Chinese Residents of San Francisco,” Daily Alta California, December 10, 1849, 1.
15. The historian H. H. Bancroft estimated the number of Chinese in California in January 1850 at 787 men and 2 women. Hubert Howe Bancroft, History of California, vol. 7, 1860–1890, of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, 39 vols. (San Francisco: History Company, 1890), 336.
16. Weekly Alta California, October 4, 1849, advertisement, 3. I am indebted to Erica J. Peters for bringing this notice to my attention.
17. Charles P. Kimball, The San Francisco City Directory (San Francisco: Journal of Commerce Press, September 1, 1850), 8.
18. Him Mark Lai, Becoming Chinese American: A History of Communities and Institutions (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), 179–80.
19. James O’Meara, “The Chinese in Early Days,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 3, no. 5 (May 1884): 478.
20. Ibid., 477–78.
21. J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1867), 74–75.
22. Richard Steven Street, Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769–1913 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 80, 97.
23. Taylor, Eldorado, 117.
24. James Delavan, Notes on California and the Placers: How to Get There and What to Do Afterwards (New York: H. Long & Brother, 1850), 100.
25. William Shaw, Golden Dreams and Waking Realities (London: Smith, Elder, 1851), 42.
26. William Redmond Ryan, Personal Adventures in Upper and Lower California, vol. 2 (London: William Shoberl, 1852), 267–68.
27. William Kelly, An Excursion to California, vol. 2 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1851), 244.
28. Among various reports of foodstuffs available in the Chinese community, probably the most comprehensive is Robert F. G. Spier, “Food Habits of Nineteenth-Century California Chinese,” California Historical Society Quarterly 37 (March 1958): 79–84, and (June 1958): 129–36.
29. Derbec, A French Journalist, 170.
30. Bancroft, History of California, 7:336.
31. Population figures compiled from ibid., 7:698n6; Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), part I, page A1–8, Series A 1-5; and Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy, eds., A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969), 19, table 2.
32. Alta California, June 15, 1853, 2.
33. Mary Roberts Coolidge, Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 1909; repr. Arno Press, 1969), 255–57; and Sue Fawn Chung, In Pursuit of Gold: Chinese American Miners and Merchants in the American West (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 12–13, 35–45.
34. For information on some industrial Chinese employment opportunities, see Chinn et al., A History of the Chinese in California, 49–55.
35. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 181–85.
36. Jack Chen, The Chinese of America: From the Beginnings to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 97–103; Chinn et al, A History of the Chinese in California, 37–41; Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 72–74; and Sandy Lydon, Chinese Gold: The Chinese in the Monterey Bay Region (Capitola, CA: Capitola Book Company, 1985), 29–59.
37. See Walter C. Blasdale, A Description of Some Chinese Vegetable Food Materials, U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin No. 68 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899).
38. Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 99–100; and Frederick J. Simoons, Food in China: A Cultural and Historical Inquiry (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 1991), 470–71.
39. Washington Standard, June 20, 1879, cited on Olympia Historical Society and Bigelow House Museum website, olympiahistory.org/wp/market-gardens/.
40. Edwin L. Sabin, Building the Pacific Railway (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919), 125.
41. Chinn et al., A History of the Chinese in California, 44; and Charles Nordhoff, California: For Health, Pleasure, and Residence (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1873), 189–90. Nordhoff points out that the cooks were hired (presumably for special wages) by the contractor; the Chinese agents at the San Francisco end must have been able to tap into a supply of qualified applicants.
42. A. W. Loomis, “How Our Chinamen Are Employed,” Overland Monthly, vol. 2, no. 3 (March 1868): 232.
43. Henry George, “The Chinese in America: Their Habits, Morals and Prospects—The Extermination of the Exterminator,” Defiance Democrat (Ohio), June 19, 1869, 1. (Originally published in the New-York Tribune on May 1, 1869, as “The Chinese on the Pacific Coast.”) I am indebted to Michael T. Intranuovo of the Center of Archival Collections at Bowling Green State University for sending me a PDF of this article.
44. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 158–89; and Street, Beasts of the Field, 259–67.
45. Testimony of Col. F. A. Bee in Report of the Joint Special Committee to Investigate Chinese Immigration, 44th Congress (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), 40–41.
46. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 106–57.
47. Chinn et al., A History of the Chinese in California, 19, table 2.
48. A statement by survivors of the Rock Springs massacre appears in “Memorial of Chinese Laborers at Rock Springs, Wyoming,” in Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present, edited by Judy Yung, Gordon H. Cheng, and Him Mark Lai, 48–54 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). See also Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 67–72. The Nast cartoon appeared in Harper’s Weekly, September 19, 1885.
49. The anti-coolie arguments are summarized by Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 41–54.
50. Ibid., 498.
51. The highly biased proceedings of the joint congressional delegations are summarized by Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 96–108. For the relevant portions of the 1879 California state constitution, see William L. Tung, The Chinese in America, 1820–1973: A Chronology and Fact Book (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1974), 57.
52. For text of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act and the Geary Act, see Tung, Chinese in America, 58–61 and 71–73.
53. Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 189 (table 7.3) and 129 (table 6.5); and Historical Statistics of the United States, page A1–8, series A1–55.
54. Chinn et al., A History of the Chinese in California, 24–25.
55. For text of the Burlingame Treaty, see Tung, Chinese in America, 87–90.
56. For descriptions of laundry working conditions, see Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, ed. John Kuo Wei Tchen (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 69–76; and John Jung, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain (N.p.: Yin & Yang Press, 2007), 126–46.
57. Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 361–68; and Street, Beasts of the Field, 243–47.
58. Street, Beasts of the Field, 245–46.
59. J. S. Cummins, ed., The Travels and Controversies of Friar Domingo Navarrete, 1618–1686, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Hakluyt Society, 1962), 228.
60. Prentice Mulford, “California Culinary Experiences,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 2, no. 6 (June 1869): 558.
61. See the account of one farm wife, writing to the Stockton Independent in 1876, as cited in Chan, This Bittersweet Soil, 365.
62. The competition between female Irish and male Chinese household servants is examined in detail by Andrew Theodore Urban in “An Intimate World: Race, Migration, and Chinese and Irish Domestic Servants in the United States, 1856–1920” (PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2009).
63. Reproduced in ibid., 145.
4. The Road to Chinatown
1. Lynn Pan, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 23–24.
2. Ibid., 46–47, 75–77; and Jack M. Potter, “Land and Lineage in Traditional China,” in Family and Kinship in Chinese Society, ed. Maurice Freedman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), 121–38.
3. G. William Skinner, “Mobility Strategies in Late Imperial China: A Regional Systems Analysis” in Regional Analysis, vol. 1: Economic Systems, ed. Carol A. Smith (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 327–64; and Elizabeth Sinn, Pacific Crossing: California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013), 265–83.
4. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 224–25; and Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 18–19.
5. H. H. Bancroft, History of California, vol. 7 of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, 39 vols. (San Francisco: History Company, 1890), 336. The 1900 ratio is from U.S. census figures as tabulated in Roger Daniels, Asian America: Chinese and Japanese in the United States Since 1850 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), 69.
6. As Mary Roberts Coolidge pointed out in 1909, extreme overcrowding in the unventilated, sub-sub-divided, bunk-lined cubicles that constituted living quarters for most Chinese workingmen in San Francisco was largely due to the greed of white landlords. See her Chinese Immigration (New York: Henry Holt, 1909; repr. Arno Press, 1969), 412–15.
7. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 226.
8. Ibid., 226, 228–35; see also Yung, Unbound Feet, 27–31, 37–41.
9. Sucheng Chan, “Against All Odds: Chinese Female Migration and Family Formation on American Soil During the Early Twentieth Century,” in Chinese American Transnationalism: The Flow of People, Resources, and Ideas Between China and America During the Exclusion Era, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 56; and Yung, Unbound Feet, 33–34.
10. The text of the Page Act can be accessed through the University of Washington (Bothell) legal research database, http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1875_page_law.html.
11. “How American Women May Make Chop Suey,” Indianapolis News, February 16, 1906, 7.
12. Sinn, Pacific Crossing, 191–216.
13. Josephine Clifford, “Chinatown,” Potter’s American Monthly 14 (May 1880): 353–64.
14. See the introduction to some organizations in Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 79–80, 111–18, 181–91.
15. Yong Chen, Chinese San Francisco, 1850–1943: A Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 110–14.
16. For the text of the Geary Act, see William L. Tung, The Chinese in America, 1820–1973: A Chronology and Fact Book (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1974), 71–73.
17. For the text of the majority opinion in Wong Kim Ark, see Tung, Chinese in America, 104–5.
18. Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882–1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 68–89; and Helen Hong Wong, “Reminiscences of a Gold Mountain Woman,” in Chinese American Voices: From the Gold Rush to the Present, ed. Judy Yung, Gordon H. Chang, and Him Mark Lai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 159–60. Other immigration stations were set up at Oregon and Washington State ports. See Marie Rose Wong, Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of Portland, Oregon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 75–148.
19. See photographs of banana and peanut coaching letters in Wong, Sweet Cakes, 110–11.
20. Immigration and census figures as tabulated in Pan, Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, 262. The collection of data during this era was at times haphazard, and widely varying estimates appear in different sources.
21. The text of the 1921 Emergency Quota Act can be accessed at the University of Washington (Bothell) legal research database, http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1921_emergency_quota_law.html.
22. Quoted in George M. Stephenson, A History of American Immigration (Boston: Ginn, 1926), 190.
23. The text of the Johnson-Reed Act can be accessed at the University of Washington (Bothell) legal research database, http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1924_immigration_act.html.
24. Coolidge, Chinese Immigration, 73–74, describes the Italian takeover of the San Francisco fisheries.
25. Jack Chen, The Chinese of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 105–7.
26. Harold Sands, “Subduing the Sockeye,” Canadian Magazine 33, no. 2 (May 1909): 69.
27. Wong, Sweet Cakes, 211–20.
28. Jeffrey M. Fee, “Idaho’s Mountain Gardens,” in Hidden Heritage: Historical Archaeology of the Overseas Chinese, ed. Priscilla Wegars (Amityville, NY: Baywood, 1993), 65–96.
29. The Augusta-Atlanta story is examined in Jianli Zhao, Strangers in the City: The Atlanta Chinese, Their Community, and Stories of Their Lives (New York: Routledge, 2000).
30. Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post–Civil War South: A People Without a History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 82–132.
31. Richard Campanella, Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabric Before the Storm (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2006), 337–55.
32. The Sigel case has been retold by Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).
33. Louis J. Beck, New York’s Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of Its People and Places (New York: Bohemia Publishing, 1898), 11. See also Arthur Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither? The Chinese in New York, 1800–1950 (Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 46–47, 61, 71, 103; and John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York Before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 236–37.
34. Huping Ling, Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 26–27.
35. Lena Sze, “Opportunity, Conflict, and Community in Transition: Historical and Contemporary Chinese Immigration to Philadelphia,” in Global Philadelphia: Immigrant Communities Old and New, ed. Ayumi Takenaka and Mary Johnson Osirim (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 99.
36. Betty H. Lam, “Earliest Chinese Settlement in Boston Dated 1875,” Chinese Historical Society of New England Newsletter 4, no. 1 (Summer 1998): 2, accessed at http://chsne.org/newsletters/1998.htm.
37. Huping Ling, Chinese Chicago: Race, Transnational Migration, and Community Since 1870 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012), 30–31.
38. To this day, southern Chinese cling to the otherwise archaic term “tong yan” (Mandarin, tang ren) or “people of Tang” (referring to the Tang Dynasty, 618–907) as a badge of identity, while Chinese of other regions prefer “han ren” (Han people). I am indebted to E. N. Anderson for pointing out the meaning of the name.
39. Susan B. Carter, “Embracing Isolation: Chinese American Geographic Redistribution during the Exclusion Era, 1882—1943” (unpublished paper, 2013), 44, table 4.
40. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, 35.
41. Paul C. P. Siu, The Chinese Laundryman: A Study of Social Isolation, ed. John Kuo Wei Tchen (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 144–48; Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic, Chinese America: The Untold Story of America’s Oldest New Community (New York: New Press, 2005), 133; and Beck, New York’s Chinatown, 46–47.
42. Jessup Whitehead, The Steward’s Handbook and Guide to Party Catering (Chicago: Jessup Whitehead, 1903), 279; and Beck, New York’s Chinatown, 85–90. Smaller Chinatowns also often relied on market gardeners.
43. Siu, Chinese Laundryman, 41; Kwong and Miscevic, Chinese America, 132–33, 186–89; and Bonner, Alas! What Brought Thee Hither?, 26–32.
44. Kwong and Miscevic, Chinese America, 186–87; John Jung, Chinese Laundries: Tickets to Survival on Gold Mountain (N.p.: Yin and Yang Press, 2007), 71–74, 84–88; and Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, updated and rev. ed. (Boston: Little, Brown / Back Bay Books, 1998), 244–45.
45. Jung, Chinese Laundries, 213.
46. Philip P. Choy, “The Architecture of San Francisco Chinatown,” in Chinese American History and Perspectives, 1990 (Brisbane, CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1990), 37–66.
47. “Queer Dishes Served at the Waldorf by Li Hung Chung’s Chinese Cook,” New York Journal, September 6, 1896, 29; and “A Chinese Dinner,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 22, 1896, 8.
48. “Joy Hing Lo,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 31, 1908, 18.
49. Population figures as tabulated in Pan, Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, 262.
5. The Birth of Chinese American Cuisine
1. Otis Gibson, The Chinese in America (Cincinnati: Hitchcock & Walker, 1877), 70.
2. Hubert Howe Bancroft, “Mongolianism in America,” in Essays and Miscellany, vol. 38, 309–418, of The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, 39 vols. (San Francisco: History Company, 1890), 331.
3. George Augustus Sala, America Revisited, 6th ed. (London: Vizelly, 1886), 498.
4. Sir Edwin Arnold, Seas and Lands (New York: Longmans, Green, 1891), 134.
5. Gibson, Chinese in America, 71–72.
6. Wong Chin Foo, “The Chinese in New York,” Cosmopolitan 5, no. 4 (June 1888): 305.
7. Susan B. Carter, “How the Penny Press ‘Educated Up’ the American Palate: From ‘Rats and Dogs’ to ‘Chop Suey Mad,’” paper presented at the Roger Smith Food/Tech Conference, April 5, 2014; and Susan B. Carter, “Celestial Suppers: The Political Economy of America’s Chop Suey Craze, 1900–1930” (unpublished manuscript, 2009).
8. E. T. Lander, “Chinese Horticulture in New York,” Garden and Forest: A Journal of Horticulture, Landscape Art and Forestry 1 (December 5, 1888): 483–84.
9. L. H. Bailey, Some Recent Chinese Vegetables (Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, Horticultural Division, Bulletin 67; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, June 1894), 177–201; and Walter C. Blasdale, A Description of Some Chinese Vegetables and Food Materials, and Their Nutritive and Economic Value. U.S. Department of Agriculture Bulletin 68 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1899).
10. Blasdale, Description of Some Chinese Vegetables, 35–36.
11. These last comments appear to come from a British observer in Hong Kong and refer to wok cooking on a pottery brazier, not a fixed range. Jessup Whitehead, The Steward’s Handbook and Guide to Party Catering (Chicago: Jessup Whitehead, 1903), 279.
12. An online translation of the Suiyuan Shidan by S. J. S. Chen has been published in installments at https://wayoftheeating.wordpress.com/. A scholarly translation by Beilei Pu, edited by Eugene N. Anderson, is in preparation; see http://www.krazykioti.com/articles/yuan-mei-and-his-suiyuan-shidian-food-book/.
13. Alice Moore, Chinese Recipes: Letters from Alice Moore to Ethel Moore Rook (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1923), 1–2.
14. John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne, Mouth Wide Open: A Cook and His Appetite (New York: North Point Press, 2008), 157n.
15. Wing Chinfoo [Wong Chin Foo], “Chinese Cooking,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 6, 1884, 4.
16. Wong, “Chinese in New York,” 304.
17. American Gas Engineering Journal 107, no. 24 (December 15, 1917), 539–40. Chop suey stoves are mentioned as an interesting innovation in American Gas Light Journal (June 23, 1913), 407.
18. Jessie Louise Nolton, ed., Chinese Cookery in the Home Kitchen: Being Recipes for the Preparation of the Most Popular Chinese Dishes at Home (Detroit: Chino-American Publishing Company, 1911).
19. Advertisement of Wm. F. Traub Range Co. in Chinese Students’ Monthly 16, no. 1 (November 1920): 105.
20. Nolton, Chinese Cookery, n.p.
21. See Grace Young and Alan Richardson, The Breath of a Wok: Unlocking the Spirit of Chinese Wok Cooking Through Recipes and Lore (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004) and Grace Young, Stir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge: The Ultimate Guide to Mastery, with Authentic Recipes and Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).
22. “Got the Chinese Craze?” New York Journal, September 6, 1896, 33.
23. “Chop Suey Resorts: Chinese Dish Now Served in Many Parts of the City,” New York Times, November 15, 1903, 20.
24. Ibid.
25. Huping Ling, Chinese St. Louis: From Enclave to Cultural Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 49.
26. Raymond G. Carroll, “Chinese Laundries Gone; Restaurants Are Many,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 1924, 6. (Originally published in Philadelphia Public Ledger.)
27. Sunyowe Pang, “The Chinese in America,” Forum 32, no. 5 (January 1902): 606.
28. Wong Chin Foo, “Chinese Recipes,” in The Cook 1, no. 5 (April 27, 1885): 7. My thanks to Scott Seligman for sending me clear images of the complete Wong series in The Cook.
29. Jane Eddington, “Perennial Chop Suey,” Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1915, 14.
30. Louis J. Beck, New York’s Chinatown: An Historical Presentation of Its People and Places (New York: Bohemia Publishing, 1898), 56.
31. Mrs. Simon [Lizzie Black] Kander, The Settlement Cook Book, 7th ed. (Milwaukee: Settlement Cook Book Co., 1915), 144.
32. Fannie Merritt Farmer and Cora D. Perkins, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, rev. ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929), 461.
33. Nolton, Chinese Cookery, n.p.
34. The U.S. Patent Office recorded a trademark registration for Chop Suey Sauce by the Chop Suey Sauce Company of New York in 1915.
35. Ida C. Bailey Allen, Mrs. Allen’s Cook Book (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1917), 383.
36. Beverly Hills Woman’s Club, Fashions in Food in Beverly Hills, 2nd ed. (Beverly Hills, CA: Beverly Hills Citizen, 1930), 73.
37. Advertisement for Mazola, The Courier-Express (Dubois, PA), May 24, 1927, 5.
38. Dan J. Forrestal, The Kernel and the Bean: The 75-year History of the Staley Company (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 102, 151.
39. See entry 2848 in William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, History of Soy Sauce (160 CE to 2012): Extensively Annotated Bibliography and Sourcebook (Lafayette, CA: Soyinfo Center, 2012), 849–50.
40. It is not clear how or when egg rolls came to be invented. Chinese cooks from all regions generally disdain them as crude, heavy caricatures of spring rolls. See chapter 6 for one not particularly convincing claim by Henry Low.
41. Wing [Wong], “Chinese Cooking.”
42. Nolton, Chinese Cookery, n.p.
43. Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 168.
44. La Choy urged buyers to create a one-dish chow mein meal by purchasing canned chow mein noodles along with La Choy canned bean sprouts and bottled “soy” and “brown” sauces, and adding any “favorite meat and domestic vegetables.” Advertisement in Indianapolis News, January 22, 1929, 27.
45. James Beard, Delights and Prejudices: A Memoir with Recipes (New York: Collier Macmillan, 1990), 22–23.
46. “Easter Shopping Done in Chinatown,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 5, 1903, 15.
47. “Chinese Cooking Is a Fine Art,” Minneapolis Journal, October 24, 1903, section 2, 3.
48. For a brief introduction to yat ca mein under many improbable spellings, see John T. Edge, “Seventh Ward Ramen,” Lucky Peach, no. 1 (Summer 2011): 45–47.
49. Nolton, Chinese Cookery.
50. Sara Bossé and Onoto Watanna, Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1914). The pseudonymous Watanna (in fact, the novelist Winnifred Eaton) and her sister, the painter Sara Bossé, were of mixed Chinese and English parentage; it is doubtful that either had firsthand knowledge of Chinese or Japanese cooking.
51. Shiu Wong Chan, The Chinese Cook Book (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1917).
52. Ibid., 91.
53. Ibid., 199–201.
54. “How American Women May Make Chop Suey,” Indianapolis News, February 16, 1906, 7.
55. “Chinese Dishes,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 31, 1919, 5.
56. The script for “A Chinese Dinner” may be accessed at https://archive.org/details/chinesedinner1931unit.
57. The Spatula: An Illustrated Magazine for Pharmacists, August 1903, 686.
58. Advertisement, Red Bank (N.J.) Register, October 22, 1913, 1.
59. Though there is a durable legend that Harry Houdini craved farmer’s chop suey when he lay dying in 1926, I have not been able to ascertain whether it then existed under that name.
60. For an attempt to chronicle the chow mein sandwich, see Imogene L. Lim, “Chinese Cuisine Meets the American Palate: The Chow Mein Sandwich,” in Chinese Cuisine American Palate: An Anthology, ed. Jacqueline M. Newman and Roberta Halporn, 130–39 (Brooklyn, NY: Center for Thanatology Research & Education), available at https://wordpress.viu.ca.limi/files/2012/008/ChineseCuisineMeetsTheAmericanPalate_CMS.pdf. I am not aware of any similar history of the St. Paul sandwich.
61. “Live Topics about Town,” New York Sun, October 2, 1911, 7.
62. Kander, Settlement Cook Book, 144.
63. “How to Make Chop Suey,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 23, 1913, 44.
64. Lynnhurst Congregational Church Cook Book of Tested Recipes (Minneapolis: Lynnhurst Congregational Church, 1920), 43.
65. Susan B. Carter, “Embracing Isolation: Chinese American Geographic Redistribution During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943” (unpublished manuscript, 2013).
66. John Jung, Sweet and Sour: Life in Chinese Family Restaurants (N.p.: Yin & Yang Press, 2010), 169.
67. Ling, Chinese St. Louis, 49.
68. Ken Hom, Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood (New York: Knopf, 1997), 19.
69. “Advice on Vegetables,” Cincinnati Enquirer, September 27, 1916, 16.
6. Change, Interchange, and the First Successful “Translators”
1. For the major facts of the Chaos’ careers, I have relied on Buwei Yang Chao, Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, Put into English by Her Husband, Yuenren Chao (New York: John Day, 1947).
2. “King Joy Lo: The Finest Chinese-American Restaurant in the World,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 22, 1906, 2.
3. Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Social Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 206.
4. Pardee Lowe, Father and Glorious Descendant (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), 127–48.
5. Louis H. Chu, “The Chinese Restaurants in New York City,” master’s thesis, New York University, 1939.
6. Carl Crow, 400 Million Customers: The Experiences—Some Happy, Some Sad, of an American in China, and What They Taught Me (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937).
7. The best survey of Pearl Buck’s career is Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). I have drawn on this account and Buck’s own memoir, My Several Worlds: A Personal Record (New York: John Day, 1954).
8. The text of the Magnuson Act can be accessed at the University of Washington (Bothell) legal research database, http://library.uwb.edu/static/USimmigration/1943_magnuson_act.html.
9. Carl Glick, Shake Hands with the Dragon (New York: Whittlesey House / McGraw-Hill, 1941), 162.
10. My account of the How to Cook and Eat in Chinese publishing story is based on the relevant papers in the John Day Company Archives at the Firestone Library, Princeton University, cited hereafter as JDCA. Walsh’s original letter of inquiry was dated March 13, 1944. (For another interesting perspective on “how to cook and eat in Chinese,” see John Eng-Wong, “How to Cook and Eat Chinese,” Brown University “Year of China” event, May 10, 2012, https://www.brown.edu/about/administration/international-affairs/year-of-china/how-cook-and-eat-chinese; and YouTube, June 4, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV-xOmtP5NQ).
11. Yuenren Chao to Richard J. Walsh, March 27, 1944 (JDCA).
12. Lamb, born Corrine Goodknight in Sedalia, Missouri, was an American explorer who made several treks into remote areas of China with her husband, Eugene Lamb.
13. Chu, Chinese Restaurants in New York City, 63.
14. Henry Low, Cook at Home in Chinese (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 214.
15. Buwei Yang Chao, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (New York: John Day, 1945), xiii.
16. Ibid., xiii–xiv.
17. Richard J. Walsh to Mrs. Yuenren Chao, June 2, 1944 (JDCA).
18. Richard J. Walsh to Richard Walsh Jr., May 30, 1944 (JDCA).
19. Memo headed “HOW TO COOK AND EAT IN CHINESE—Mrs. Chao,” May 25, 1944 (JDCA).
20. Richard J. Walsh memo on “promotion points,” May 30, 1944 (JDCA).
21. Richard J. Walsh to Buwei Yang Chao, December 27, 1944 (JDCA).
22. Asia 45, no. 5 (May 1945).
23. Richard J. Walsh to Irita Van Doren, May 2, 1945 (JDCA).
24. Undated memo, M. McManus to Richard J. Walsh (JDCA).
25. Chao, How to Cook and Eat, x. Subsequent text references are to this edition.
26. Jane Holt [Jane Nickerson], “News of Food,” New York Times, May 10, 1945, 20.
27. Telegram, Pearl S. Buck to Ida Bailey Allen, May 7, 1945 (JDCA).
28. Julian Street to the John Day Company, August 27, 1946 (JDCA).
29. Buwei Yang Chao, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, rev., enlarged ed. (New York: John Day, 1949), 34.
30. Ibid., 124.
31. Jason Epstein, “Chinese Characters,” Sunday Times Magazine, June 13, 2004, 71–72.
32. Buwei Yang Chao, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1963), 214a and 214b.
33. Buwei Yang Chao, How to Order and Eat in Chinese (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 76.
7. White America Rediscovers Chinese Cuisine
1. In 1940 the Chinese population stood at 40,262 American-born and 37,242 foreign-born residents; see Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), table 8, 303.
2. Rose Hum Lee, “Chinese in the United States Today: The War Has Changed Their Lives,” Survey Graphic 31, no. 19 (October 1949): 419, 444.
3. Ibid., 419.
4. Ibid., 444.
5. Jade Snow Wong, Fifth Chinese Daughter, with a new introduction (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 188–98.
6. Lee, “Chinese in the United States Today,” 444.
7. Susan B. Carter, “Embracing Isolation: Chinese American Geographic Redistribution During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943” (unpublished manuscript, 2013), 47, table 8.
8. Kenneth J. Guest, “From Mott Street to East Broadway: Fuzhounese Immigrants and the Revitalization of New York’s Chinatown,” in Chinatowns Around the World: Gilded Ghetto, Ethnopolis, and Cultural Diaspora, ed. Bernard R. Wong and Tan Chee-Beng (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 32.
9. Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 175.
10. Denny Roy, Taiwan: A Political History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 76.
11. John De Ferrari, Historic Restaurants of Washington, D.C. (Charleston, SC: History Press / American Palate, 2013), 170; and Frank C. Porter, “Chinese Restaurants Keep Going Despite Low Profits,” Washington Post, April 27, 1959, 69.
12. Henry Low, Cook at Home in Chinese (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 144.
13. De Ferrari, Historic Restaurants, 171–72; “Oo Soup Is Exclusive,” Huntingdon (Pennsylvania) Daily News, January 20, 1956, 11 (one of many newspaper squibs); and Phyllis C. Richman, “Washington’s Bill of Fare,” Washington Post, March 4, 1982, E1.
14. Craig Claiborne, “T. T. Wang, Influential Master of Chinese Cuisine, Dies at 55,” New York Times, February 19, 1983; and Michael Tong and Elaine Louie, The Shun Lee Cookbook: Recipes from a Chinese Restaurant Dynasty (New York: William Morrow, 2007), viii–x.
15. Craig Claiborne, “Chimes Ring in Feasts at Shun Lee Dynasty,” New York Times, January 4, 1966, 31.
16. Kate Simon, New York Places and Pleasures (New York: Meridian, 1959), 153.
17. Ibid., 149.
18. Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, “Chen, Joyce,” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Susan Ware, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 116–17. Dana Polan is preparing a study of Chen’s television program.
19. See Cecilia Chiang, as told to Alan Carr, The Mandarin Way, rev. ed. (San Francisco: A California Living Book, 1980); and Cecilia Chiang with Lisa Weiss, The Seventh Daughter: My Culinary Journey from Beijing to San Francisco (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2007).
20. Chiang with Weiss, Seventh Daughter, 15–16.
21. Doris Muscatine, A Cook’s Tour of San Francisco, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 1969), 135.
22. Ibid., 146–51.
23. On April 1 and April 3, 2013, a granddaughter of Peter and Betty Lo, writing under the screen name “mixolydian,” posted brief histories of their restaurants, Chinese Teahouse, Peter Lo’s, and Panda Panda, on a Chowhound thread; see chowhound.chow.com/topics/112187.
24. Death Notice for Emily Kwoh, New York Times, January 20, 1998; see also “Farm for ‘Hollow Bamboos,’” in “Overseas Chinese,” Taiwan Info, June 1, 1963, http://taiwaninfo.nat.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=164307&ctNode=124; and New York University oral history project “Voices from the Food Revolution” conducted by Judith Weinraub, transcription of interview with Mimi Sheraton, July 2, 2009, dlib.nyu.edu/beard/interviews/mimi-sheraton-interview-1.
25. Sheila Chang obituary, Houston Chronicle, March 7, 2103. Chang was the author of a self-published culinary memoir, Destiny (2007).
26. Raymond A. Sokolov, “Drivers Who Stop Only for Gas Don’t Know What They’re Missing,” New York Times, May 13, 1971, 54.
27. Barbara Tropp, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking (New York: Morrow, 1982), 198n.
28. Raymond A. Sokolov, “For the City’s Best in Chinese Cuisine,” New York Times, May 26, 1972, 43.
29. Raymond Sokolov, Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food (New York: Knopf, 2013), 90.
30. Gael Greene, “Star Struck at Hunam: A Chinese Roundup,” New York, October 1, 1973, 85.
31. For more on the history of David Keh and Uncle Tai’s, see the January 20, 2010, posting by Ed Schoenfeld on the blog of the English writer Fuchsia Dunlop, “General Tso’s Chicken (Again),” Fuchsia Dunlop (blog), January 6, 2010, www.fuchsiadunlop.com/general-tsos-chicken-again/.
32. For Schoenfeld’s accounts of the 1970s New York Chinese restaurant scene, including his own career, see the January 20, 2010, comments on the Dunlop blog (ibid.); Amanda Kludt, “Ed Schoenfeld on the Golden Age of NY Chinese Food,” Eater NY, November 4, 2011, http://ny.eater.com/2011/11/4/6640057/ed-schoenfeld-on-the-golden-age-of-ny-chinese-food; and Laura Neilson, “Ed Schoenfeld of RedFarm on Domestic Bliss,” Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2013, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323628004578459070142111656.
33. Sam Sifton, “The Way We Eat: New York Noodletown,” Sunday Times Magazine, April 1, 2007.
34. Sheila Chang obituary, Houston Chronicle; and Texas Monthly advertisement, June 1979, 65.
35. Kennon Crisp, “Weekender Culinary Explorations,” San Antonio Express and News, June 9, 1973, 3.
36. Griffin Smith Jr., “Pass the Chop Sticks, Por Favor,” Texas Monthly, July 1973, www.texasmonthly.com/content/pass-chop-sticks-por-favor.
37. Ibid.
38. Different facets of the General Tso’s story have been addressed by Fuchsia Dunlop, The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook: Recipes from Hunan Province (London: Ebury Press, 2006; and New York: Norton, 2007), 117–19; Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2009), 66–83; and Ed Schoenfeld, qtd. in Francis Lam, “The Curious History of General Tso’s Chicken,” Salon, January 5, 2010, www.salon.com/2010/01/05/history_of_general_tsos_chicken/; and Schoenfeld, qtd. in the Dunlop blog thread cited above, n28.
39. Stan Miller, Arline Miller, Rita Rowan, and James Rowan, New York’s Chinese Restaurants (New York: Atheneum, 1977), 130.
40. See the facsimile of a menu page from the Hunam in Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 242.
41. Lee, Fortune Cookie Chronicles, 82–83.
42. Eugenia Sheppard, “The Pearl of Pearl’s Restaurant,” Kansas City Star, May 12, 1969, 70.
43. Gael Greene, “Pearl’s: The Scrutable Ouch,” New York, July 26, 1971.
44. Ralph Graves, “Losing a Pearl: A Midtown Empress Leaves Her Throne,” New York, February 4, 1985, 34.
45. Raymond A. Sokolov, “Standards at Pearl’s Have Slipped a Bit,” New York Times, September 24, 1971, 46.
46. Craig Claiborne, “Oriental Tang,” Sunday Times Magazine, September 14, 1969, 92.
8. An Advancement of Learning
1. Profiles of Ms. Fu include Amy Lo’s “A Woking Ambassador,” Taiwan Info, September 1, 1992, http://taiwaninfo.nat.gov.tw/fp.asp?xItem=102025&CtNode=124; and “Fu Pei Mei,” Askmar Publishing (n.d.), http://www.askmarpublishing.com/authors/pei_mei.html.
2. See advertisements for the Wei-Chuan School’s various offerings on the last page of Su-Huei Huang, Chinese Cuisine: Wei-Chuan Cooking Book, English-language ed. (Taipei: School of Home Economics, Wei-Chuan Foods, 1972).
3. Fu Pei Mei, Pei Mei’s Cook Book [Pei Mei Shi Pu] (Taipei: Fu Pei Mei, 1969).
4. See Timothy P. Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); and Li Wei, Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009). Li is generally credited with having coined the term “ethnoburb.”
5. Laurie Ochoa, “My Name’s Nina, What’s Good?” Los Angeles Times, March 9, 1997; and Dianna Marder, “Cookbook Author Nina Simonds’ Taste for Chinese Food Dates Back to Childhood,” philly.com, January 19, 2012.
6. Huang, Chinese Cuisine.
7. Huang Su-Huei, Chinese Cuisine: Wei-Chuan Cooking Book, rev. English-language ed., trans. Nina Simonds (Taipei: Department of Home Economics, Wei-Chuan Foods, 1974).
8. Huang Su-Huei, assisted by Lee Mu-Chu, Chinese Cuisine: Wei-Chuan Cooking Book, bilingual Chinese–English ed., trans. Nina Simonds (Taipei: Department of Home Economics, Wei-Chuan Foods, 1976).
9. Huang Su-Huei, assisted by Lee Mu Tsun, Chinese Snacks: Wei-Chuan’s Cook Book, trans. Nina Simonds (Taipei: Department of Home Economics, Wei-Chuan Foods, 1974).
10. See profile of Huang Su-Huei at Zoominfo, http://www.zoominfo.com/s/#!search/profile/company?companyId=302022775&targetid=profile. The Alham bra cooking school and several Wei-Chuan American distribution centers are mentioned on the back endpaper of Chinese Snacks.
11. For a brief biographical sketch of Grace Zia Chu’s career, see Sonia Lee, “Chu, Grace Zia,” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Susan Ware, vol. 5 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 120–21.
12. Some circumstances of Florence Lin’s career are mentioned in Jenny Hu, “In Conversation: Florence Lin and Cecilia Chiang,” SFGate, September 17, 2013.
13. Craig Claiborne, “Culinary Revolution Topples Chinese Standby,” New York Times, September 3, 1970, 28.
14. On Margaret Spader, see Cecily Brownstone, “Chinese Cooking Is Her Hobby,” Lewiston (Maine) Evening Journal, October 28, 1978; for an example of Spader’s attempts to disseminate Chinese-based culinary approaches to the American cooking public, see “Serve Meals That Say, ‘It’s Spring,’” Amsterdam (New York) Evening Recorder, March 31, 1960, 18.
15. Grace Zia Chu, Madame Chu’s Chinese Cooking School (New York: Simon & Schuster / Fireside, 1975) contains a section headed “Recipes Contributed by My Students” (253–67), describing the cooking engagements of the students.
16. Doreen Yen Hung Feng, The Joy of Chinese Cooking (New York: Greenberg, 1950); and Evan Jones, “A Chinese Way with Duck,” Sports Illustrated, May 30, 1960.
17. Feng, Joy of Chinese Cooking, 24, 31.
18. Ibid., 113.
19. Katherine Bazore, Hawaiian and Pacific Foods: A Cook Book of Culinary Customs and Recipes Adapted for the American Hostess (New York: M. Barrows, 1940), 50.
20. Feng, Joy of Chinese Cooking, 19, 37.
21. Doreen Yen Hung Feng, The Joy of Chinese Cooking (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1954).
22. Doreen Yen Hung Feng, The Joy of Chinese Cooking (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1992).
23. Tsuifeng Lin and Hsiangju Lin, Cooking with the Chinese Flavor (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1956).
24. Tsuifeng Lin and Hsiangju Lin, Secrets of Chinese Cooking (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960).
25. Grace Zia Chu, The Pleasures of Chinese Cooking (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962).
26. Joyce Chen, Joyce Chen Cook Book (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1962).
27. Ibid., 31–33.
28. Ibid., 127, 143.
29. Ibid., 106.
30. Ibid., 109–10.
31. Johnny Kan, with Charles L. Leong, Eight Immortal Flavors (Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1963). Kan contributed a valuable narrative of 1930s and 1940s San Francisco Chinatown restaurant life to the oral histories collected in Victor G. Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (New York: Random House / Pantheon, 1972), 110–16.
32. Eight of the Jake Lee paintings are now in the collection of the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco.
33. James Beard, foreword to Eight Immortal Flavors, by Johnny Kan with Charles L. Leong (Berkeley: Howell-North Books, 1963), 6.
34. Kan and Leong, Eight Immortal Flavors, 32.
35. Ibid., 15–16.
36. Ibid., 235–38.
37. Ibid., 40.
38. Ibid., 24.
39. Ibid., 148.
40. Ibid., 212–13, 216–19.
41. Johnny Kan with Charles L. Leong, Eight Immortal Flavors: Secrets of Cantonese Cookery, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Johnny Kan, 1982).
42. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s New Cantonese Cooking (New York: Viking, 1988); Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, My Grandmother’s Chinese Kitchen (New York: HP Books, 2006); and Ken Hom, Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood: 150 Delicious Chinese Dishes for Today’s American Table (New York: Knopf, 1997).
43. Gloria Bley Miller, The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook (New York: Atheneum, 1966).
44. Hsiang Ju Lin and Tsuifeng Lin, Chinese Gastronomy (New York: Hastings House, 1969).
45. Ibid., 53.
46. Ibid., 139.
47. Emily Hahn and the Editors of Time-Life Books, The Cooking of China (New York: Time-Life Books, 1968), 92.
48. Ibid., 103.
49. Ibid., 120, 147, 77–78.
50. Ibid., 86.
51. Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee, The Chinese Cookbook (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), xiv–xvi, xxi.
52. Ibid., 431.
53. Ibid., 134.
54. Ibid., 182.
55. Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang, as told to Allan Carr, The Mandarin Way (Boston: Little, Brown / Atlantic Monthly Press, 1974), 29, 31, 57, 60, 170.
56. Chu, Madame Chu’s Chinese Cooking School.
57. Ibid., 92, 144.
58. Craig Claiborne, “Steamed Fish—Chinese Style—Gains Something in Translation,” New York Times, October 23, 1969.
59. Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Regional Cookbook (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975).
60. Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Chinese Vegetarian Cookbook (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1976); Florence Lin’s Chinese One-Dish Meals: The Fastest Way of Cooking Delicious, Economical, Well-Balanced Meals (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1978); and Florence Lin’s Cooking with Fire Pots (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1979).
61. Robert A. Delfs, The Good Food of Szechwan: Down-to-Earth Chinese Cooking (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1974).
62. Ellen Schrecker with John Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).
63. Virginia Heffington, “The Year of the Dragon,” Long Beach (California) Independent Press-Telegram, January 28 and 29, 1976, F-1.
64. Schrecker, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook, xvii–xviii.
65. Ibid., acknowledgments.
66. Irene Kuo, The Key to Chinese Cooking (New York: Knopf, 1977).
67. Judith Jones, The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food (New York: Knopf, 2007), 101.
68. Author interview with Suzi Arensberg Diacou, October 24, 2014.
69. Kuo, Key to Chinese Cooking, 206.
70. Ibid., 441.
71. Ibid., 466.
72. Irma S. Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker, The Joy of Cooking (Indiana polis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975).
73. Joanne Will, “The Pan from the Far East That Won the Hearts of the West,” Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1980, section 7, 1.
74. See images accompanying record of patent grant by the U.S. Patent Office. Joyce Chen, Cooking Utensil, US Patent, 221,397, filed March 9, 1970, and issued August 10, 1971, https://www.google.com/patents/USD221397?dq=USD221397j.
75. Gary Lee, The Wok: A Chinese Cookbook (Concord, CA: Nitty Gritty Productions, 1970).
76. Charles Schafer and Violet Schafer, Wokcraft: A Stirring Compendium of Chinese Cookery (San Francisco: Yerba Buena Press, 1972).
77. Random House, The International Cooks’ Catalogue: A Beard Glaser Wolf Book, intro. by James Beard (New York: Random House, 1977), 12–16.
78. Random House, The Great Cooks’ Guide to Woks, Steamers & Fire Pots (New York: Random House, 1977), 20, 33.
79. Judith A. Gaulke, ed. Sunset Wok Cook Book (Menlo Park, CA: Lane Publishing, 1978), 33, 20.
80. Ibid., 74.
81. Marian Burros, “De Gustibus: Vegetables: There’s Crispy, Crunchy and Firm,” New York Times, April 28, 1984.
9. The First Age of Race‐Blind Immigration
1. Victor G. Nee and Brett de Bary Nee, Longtime Californ’: A Documentary Study of an American Chinatown (New York: Random House / Pantheon, 1972), 278–88.
2. See the Pew Research Center’s fifty-year projection of racial redistribution, “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 2065: Views of Immigration’s Impact on U.S. Society Mixed” (Washington, DC: September, 2015), http://www.pewhispanic.org/files/2015/09/2015-09-28_modern-immigration-wave_REPORT.pdf, 10.
3. Anne Willan with Amy Friedman, One Soufflé at a Time: A Memoir of Food and France, with Recipes (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 167.
4. Author interview with Zanne [Zakroff] Stewart, October 31, 2014.
5. Ruth Reichl, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (New York: Penguin, 2005), 235–44.
6. K. C. Chang, ed., Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977).
7. See blurbs, back cover of ibid.
8. James D. McCawley, The Eater’s Guide to Chinese Characters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
9. E. N. Anderson, The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
10. William Shurtleff and Akiko Aoyagi, The Book of Tofu (Brookline, MA: Autumn Press, 1975; repr., New York: Ballantine Books, 1980).
11. Nina Simonds, Chinese Classic Cuisine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
12. Ken Hom with Harvey Steiman, Chinese Technique: An Illustrated Guide to the Fundamental Techniques of Chinese Cooking (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981).
13. Barbara Tropp, The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking (New York: Morrow, 1982).
14. Florence Lin, Florence Lin’s Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings and Breads (New York: Morrow, 1986).
15. Bruce Cost, Bruce Cost’s Asian Ingredients: Buying and Cooking the Staple Foods of China, Japan and Southeast Asia (New York: Morrow, 1988).
16. Mai Leung, The Chinese People’s Cookbook (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Reissued as Harper Colophon paperback in 1982 under the title Dim Sum and Other Chinese Street Food.
17. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, The Dim Sum Book: Classic Recipes from the Chinese Teahouse (New York: Crown, 1982).
18. Henry Chan, Yukiko Haydock, and Bob Haydock, Classic Deem Sum: Recipes from Yank Sing Restaurant, San Francisco (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985).
19. Gold’s reviews were first published as Jonathan Gold, Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles (New York: St. Martin’s Press / LA Weekly Books, 2000).
20. Thomas W. Chinn, H. Mark Lai, and Philip P. Choy, eds., A History of the Chinese in California: A Syllabus (San Francisco: Chinese Historical Society of America, 1969).
21. Iris Chang, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History (New York: Viking, 2003), 320–21.
22. Sucheng Chan, This Bittersweet Soil: The Chinese in California Agriculture, 1860–1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
23. Victor Purcell, The Chinese in Southeast Asia, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 120.
24. Wei Li, Ethnoburb: The New Ethnic Community in Urban America (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 106–9; and Timothy P. Fong, The First Suburban Chinatown: The Remaking of Monterey Park, California (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 62.
25. Peggy Durdin, “Mao’s ‘Great Crime’ Against Cuisine,” Sunday Times Magazine, March 19, 1961, 62.
26. Eric Northrup, letter to the editor, Sunday Times Magazine, April 16, 1961, 14.
27. Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang, as told to Allan Carr, The Mandarin Way, rev. ed. (San Francisco: California Living Books, 1980), 268–72.
28. Ibid., 273–75.
29. Kenneth J. Guest, “From Mott Street to East Broadway: Fuzhounese Immigrants and the Revitalization of New York’s Chinatown,” in Chinatowns Around the World: Gilded Ghetto, Ethnopolis, and Cultural Diaspora, ed. Bernard P. Wong and Tan Chee-Beng (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 35–54; and Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2008), 107–38.
30. Jennifer 8. Lee draws a similar analogy between Toisan and Fujian in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, 130–31.
31. Min Zhou, Chinatown: The Socioeconomic Potential of an Urban Enclave (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 122, 186–87.
32. Lee, Fortune Cookie Chronicles, 156–59.
33. Calvin Trillin, “New Grub Streets,” New Yorker, September 3, 2001, 45.
34. Mimi Sheraton, Eating My Words: An Appetite for Life (New York: Morrow, 2004), 181–91.