Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America

This is the question that unavoidably arises from the ubiquity of Chinese food in the United States, but it is not a question that can be answered purely in gastronomical terms. Rather, the reasons for the migration of Chinese food from China to Chinatown to non-Chinese neighborhoods and eventually to the suburbs are found not in the merits of Chinese food as a cuisine but in the conditions of global labor and capital markets, changes in the American economy and consumption patterns, and demographic and occupational transformation of Chinese America.

One such visitor was Sun Yat-sen. During his fourth visit to the continental United States in 1911, he traveled to numerous cities—including San Francisco, Stockton, Isleton, Courtland, Sacramento, Portland, Seattle, Spokane, Walla Walla, Austin, Carson City, Boston, and Denver—on a fund-raising tour for his fellow revolutionaries back in China2 He noticed that “there is no American town without a Chinese restaurant.”³ Chinese food’s extraordinary prevalence has since then become more and more apparent. But the precise extent of that prevalence remains somewhat murky, first of all because Chinese restaurants tend to be independent, small-size family operations, scattered all over the nation without significant horizontal connections. Second, many of the restaurants change hands or simply close doors quietly and often quickly in an industry characterized by a high rate of turnover. Finally, only a few people have attempted to systematically collect data on Chinese restaurants.

In 1946, a Chinese-language newspaper, Hua Qiao Nian Bao (Annals of the Overseas Chinese), estimated that there were 1,101 Chinese restaurants in eleven cities: New York (315), San Francisco (147), Chicago (142), Los Angeles (117), Washington, D.C. (82), Seattle (62), Boston (61), Philadelphia (51), Portland (42), Oakland (41), and Detroit (41).⁴ Chen Benchang (Ben John Chen) was one of the first individuals to collect systematic data on Chinese restaurants. When I met him in his office in New York on October 24, 2000, the eighty-seven-year-old man did not look his age at all as he remained an active community leader and a busy businessman. He served as an officer in the expedition army during the war against the Japanese invasion in China. After coming to the United States in 1958, he established himself as a successful businessman in the food industry and an eminent figure in politics, whom President Ronald Reagan called “a special friend.”⁵ In 1971, he published a lengthy study of the Chinese restaurant industry in the United States. He was an ideal person to undertake such a study. A diligent writer and researcher, Chen also had extensive experiences in the food industry and created a successful food wholesale business (Benjohn Trading Company). According to his detailed survey, there were 9,355 Chinese restaurants across the country.⁶ This number is consistent with that of Paul Chan and Kenneth Baker, who noted the 1970s that there were at least 10,000 such establishments.⁷

The popularity of Chinese food continued to grow. By 1980, Chinese food had clearly become the most popular ethnic cuisine in the restaurant industry, possibly constituting about 30 percent of America’s major ethnic cuisines according to the geographer Wilbur Zelinsky, who found 7,796 Chinese restaurants in 270 U.S. and Canadian metropolitan areas; and Chinese restaurants maintained their dominant presence in the ethnic dining market throughout the decade.8 The popularity of Chinese food continued to grow. A Chinese American named Tang Fuxiang, vice president of the committee to promote Chinese food, reported in 1988 that there were more than 21,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States and Canada, employing 240,000 people, or one-tenth of the Chinese population in these two countries.⁹ In 2008, according to Jennifer 8 Lee, “there [were] some forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States—more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.”¹⁰ My own survey of Chinese restaurants in 62 cities across the nation in the summer of 2007 indicates that their number exceeded 30,000.¹¹

Those who are used to its ubiquitous presence may find it hard to believe that few nineteenth-century commentators expected Chinese food to rise to popularity. Alexander Young concluded in 1872: “It is not likely that Chinese delicacies of the table will ever become popular in this country. On the contrary, John Chinaman, appreciating the dietetic conditions of our civilization, will probably conform to our customs in this as in other respects.”¹² Thirteen years later, another observer drew the same conclusion that Chinese food was not expected “to be popular in this country.”¹³ Even in the early twentieth century, when the popularity of Chinese food became quite noticeable, some remained cautious about its future, believing that “a prejudice against Chinese foods must be overcome before their delicacy and economy can be enjoyed.”¹⁴

There were ample reasons for such not-so-optimistic sentiments about Chinese food’s prospects at the time, when mainstream American society exerted enormous enmity, even contempt, for Chinese food and the immigrants who brought it to American shores. Anti-Chinese forces persistently targeted the immigrants’ food habits and invoked their eating of such items as rice as evidence of their un-Americanness.¹⁵ In addition, the Chinese also faced other unfavorable conditions. First, the Chinese population remained small and was further reduced in size by different forms of racism, ranging from street violence to anti-Chinese legislation. It stayed under 110,000 throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and then declined from 107,488 in 1890 to 89, 863 in 1900, and 61,639 in 1920.¹⁶ It would not return to the 1890 level until after World War II. Second, the small, shrinking community remained a predominantly immigrant population and was politically disfranchised.¹⁷ Almost 90 percent of the Chinese in 1900 were immigrants and could not become citizens until 1943.¹⁸ Third, facing discrimination in America, they received little help or protection from the Chinese government, which was initially hostile to overseas Chinese emigration. When the Qing court (1644–1911) adjusted its attitude and policies toward overseas Chinese immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century, it was too weak to offer meaningful assistance. And fourth, largely a laborer population, the Chinese had very limited economic resources.

Under such circumstances, the rise of Chinese restaurants in cities across the nation at the turn of the twentieth century was unexpected and “surprising” in the eyes of many people.19 Why all the Chinese restaurants? they wondered. Some even surmised that they were backed by millionaires.²⁰ A more widespread and seemingly more conceivable interpretation emphasized the gastronomical excellence of Chinese food: Chinese food prevailed in the United States because it was the best cuisine in the world, and this has remained a conviction among many Chinese.

Hailed as the founding father of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen articulated this belief in The Treatises of Sun Yat-sen (Sun Wen Xueshuo, 1918). It is interesting that his purpose was not to make a purely gastronomical argument but to develop his thoughts on how to build a modern nation, which the republican revolution had failed to bring about. He began not with an action plan but with an epistemological deliberation, attributing the failure of the revolution to the influence of the ancient Chinese maxim that “knowledge is easy, but action is difficult.” He employed several examples to prove its fallacy, and the first came from food, which the Chinese consumed daily but did not understand well. His deliberations conveyed a profound sense of the superiority of Chinese cooking:

In the modern evolution of civilization, our China has lagged behind others in every aspect except the development of food and drinks, where it remains ahead of the civilized countries. Not only is the cuisine invented by China far more extensive and grand than that in Europe and America, but the exquisite quality of Chinese cooking has no equal in Europe and America. … Before commerce opened up between China and the West, Westerners only knew French food as the best in the world. After tasting Chinese food, however, everyone considers China as the best in the world [in cooking].

China’s culinary supremacy was a belief shared by many other Chinese. At a time when Western powers repeatedly defeated and humiliated China and looked down on Chinese culture, gastronomy was one of the few areas where the Chinese could find some solace and a source of pride. For Chinese Americans, defending their foodways was to defend their community and culture. Highlighting the use of chopsticks as a sign of backwardness and weakness, the New York–based weekly newspaper Spirit of the Times wrote: “The celestials, though claiming such a high descent, are not renowned for their chivalric spirit, or their skill in using a more warlike weapon than a chop stick.”22 The Chinese countered by mocking the Westerners’ use of knife and fork at mealtime, saying that “the Englishman does the chief work of the slaughter house on his dinner table, and remits the principal work of the kitchen to his stomach.”²³

In 1910, Cui Tongyue compiled Chinese America’s first known cookbook; it contained a collection of Western-food recipes intended for Chinese cooks and servants working for Anglo employers. In the preface, Cui expressed similar pride about Chinese food: “The finest food is found in China. Among all nations under the heaven, only France is nearly as good as China in terms of culinary development and cooking skills. The other countries lag far behind.”²⁴ Early Chinese American cookbook writers harbored similar sentiments. Shiu Wong Chan wrote of Chinese cooking in 1919: “When you have eaten the food you will soon be convinced not only of its merits but, in fact, of its superiority over other kinds of food and ways of cooking.”²⁵

Such sentiments have persisted among the Chinese for decades. In explaining the attraction of Chinese food, Chen Benchang remarked in 1971 that the major reason for this is that Chinese cuisine possesses “better cooking skills and tastes better than foreign cuisines.”²⁶ Gregory C. Chow, a noted economist and expert on China, offered a similar gastronomical interpretation of the rise of Chinese food by arguing that the Chinese “became cooks in the United States simply because they had the basic culinary skills that the Chinese had. Their home cooking skills were good enough to make their way to a Chinese restaurant to make money.”²⁷

The merit of Chinese food as a centuries-old tradition was certainly a factor in its appeal to non-Chinese consumers, and the culinary excellence of the Chinese also received praise from Western commentators. “Few people understand the popularity of Chinese cooking,” wrote the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1906. This was because, the newspaper continued, “they do not know that the Chinese as a race are the greatest epicures since the famous feasters of ancient Rome.”28 Kenneth W. Andrew, who served as chief inspector of police in Hong Kong from 1912 to 1938, emphasized the gastronomical distinction of Chinese food as the reason for its popularity in Britain and elsewhere: “There is no need to stress that Chinese food is now accepted as being the best food in the world. It is eaten in every country, and is so popular that ‘taking away’ Chinese food has now become the most popular way to buy it; there are at present well over three thousand Chinese restaurants in the United Kingdom.”²⁹

Not ready to go as far as to say that Chinese food is the best in the world, the French historian Fernand Braudel nonetheless found it comparable to French food and believed that the reason for its prevalence is gastronomical. He placed his assessment in a historical perspective: “Chinese cookery, which has taken over so many restaurants in the West today, belongs to a very ancient tradition, over a thousand years old, with unchanged rituals, elaborate recipes: one that is extremely attentive both in a sensual and literary sense to the range of tastes and their combinations, displaying a respect for the art of eating which is shared perhaps only by the French.”³⁰ Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Western epicureans adored French food, and comparing another cuisine to French food was a great tribute. And that was what some Americans did in praising Chinese food. Juliet Corson, a noted American food expert, observed in 1879 that Chinese food “greatly resembles” French food.³¹ Without invoking the French-food comparison, the Chicago Tribune simply observed that the Chinese “as a race” were “the greatest epicures the world ever has known.”³²

Conscious of the respect that French food commanded among Americans, the early Chinese American food promoter Wong Chin Foo used it as a point of reference. “The epicure flourishes in the Orient as well as the Occident,” Wong wrote. “In Europe he bows down before the genius of France; in Asia, before that of the flowery kingdom,” he concluded.³³ Others, such as the writer Emily Hahn, held that Chinese food was better than French food: “I believe Chinese cuisine is better than any other in the world, and this is a view shared by many, including some who have long been devotees of French cooking.”³⁴

The problem with the gastronomical interpretation lies not merely in the highly subjective notion of Chinese food’s culinary superiority. More problematic is the implied inevitability of its success. Chinese food remained looked down on in American culture for some fifty years after its initial arrival. Moreover, what eventually prevailed in public dining were not the exquisite dishes that Chinese epicures had cultivated over the centuries, dishes that Western food connoisseurs had widely regarded as best representing Chinese cuisine. Instead, it was the simplest and least trumpeted dishes that won over the American palate. In fact, recognized gastronomical preeminence alone has seldom been the deciding factor in the popularity contest among cuisines. French food, for example, whose grandeur culinary-minded Americans have always revered, has never attained the level of popularity of Chinese, Mexican, or even fast food. Conversely, foodways with little gastronomical merit or sophistication in cooking or taste can become wildly trendy, as in the case of American fast food, which since the early 1990s has swiftly infiltrated all major restaurant markets in China, a country known for its long tradition in the culinary arts. Its stunning success in the marketplace was attributable to the hegemony of American capital and culture rather than its culinary virtue.

An important part of cultural globalization, curiosity about exotic cultures for vicarious pleasure was certainly a crucial factor. Symptomatic of this curiosity, the emergence of tourism created an important condition for the development of Chinese food, but cultural curiosity alone does not explain the spread of Chinese food.

America’s curiosity about Chinese culture began with American merchants and missionaries in China. The missionaries, in particular, were important agents of transpacific cultural exchange because their writings significantly shaped American perceptions of Chinese culture, including Chinese food.³⁶ Warren I. Cohen pointed out in Pacific Passage that missionaries were also instrumental in opening “a window through which the Chinese could access the outside world.”³⁷ However, missionaries and their compatriots in China hardly deserve much credit for the spread of Chinese food in the United States because the image projected by them was not only exotic but also largely repulsive.

S. Wells Williams, who went to China in 1833 as a missionary printer and eventually became a prominent Sinologist, was keenly aware of this imagery. He also understood that it helped to shape prevailing unfavorable perceptions of China as a whole. In The Middle Kingdom (1848), which saw several editions and reprintings, and was translated into numerous languages after its initial publication, Williams wrote: “The articles of food which the Chinese eat, and the mode and ceremonies attending their feasts have aided much in giving them the odd character they bear abroad, though uncouth or unsavory viands form an infinitesimal portion of their food, and ceremonious feasts not one in a thousand of their repasts.” He listed foods that featured prominently and frequently in sensationalized misperceptions about the Chinese diet: “Travelers have so often spoken of birdsnest soup, canine hams, and grimalkin fricassees, rats, snakes, worms, and other culinary novelties, served up in equally strange ways, that their readers get the idea that these articles form as large a proportion of the food as their description does of the narrative.”38

Williams’s writing not only failed completely to dispel such misperceptions but also often echoed them: “Rats and mice are, no doubt, eaten now and then, and so are many other undesirable things, by those whom want compels to take what they can get.” Nor did he demonstrate any intention to bring Chinese food to the table of his readers. He made it clear that “the Chinese eat many things which are rejected by other peoples.”³⁹ “The art of cooking,” he concluded, “has not reached any high degree of perfection.”⁴⁰ Evidently, nineteenth-century American readers were unlikely to find such descriptions appetizing. Indeed, it is obvious that in the early years, cultural curiosity did not increase Americans’ appetite for Chinese food.

Another important component of cultural globalization is international immigration, which constituted an extremely viable vehicle in the transplantation of Chinese food as well as several cuisines, such as Italian food, in the United States.⁴¹ But there is no absolute correlation between immigration and the transplantation of cuisines, which is why the foodways of numerous large immigrant groups, such as the Filipinos, have stayed largely invisible. Some ethnic cuisines, though, like Thai food have become quite popular in spite of the small size of the ethnic community they represent. Brian Greenberg and Linda S. Watts report that “the popularity of Thai restaurants with American yuppies was one of the most striking features of the 1980s cuisine.”⁴² Yet, there were only 45,279 Thais in America in 1980,⁴³ and that number grew to merely 110,851 two decades later.⁴⁴

The presence of Chinese immigrants in the United States alone does not necessarily guarantee the success of Chinese food in the marketplace. One of the seemingly insurmountable obstacles lying in its way to the mainstream palate was the image of the Chinese as eaters of repulsive foods, including rats—an important but unfortunate legacy that the American public inherited from Americans who had ventured to China.

Unappetizing depictions of Chinese eating strange items gained currency in the United States after the arrival of Cantonese immigrants. The Boston-based Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion published the following joke in 1854: “A California paper gives the following as a bill of fare at a Chinese restaurant in that city: ‘Cat Cutlet, 25 cents; Griddled Rats, 6 cents; Dog Soup, 12 cents; Roast Dog, 18 cents; Dog Pie, 6 cents.’”45 But the allegation that the Chinese ate such things was no joking matter. Claiming to rely on sources in French “scientific journals,” the Saturday Evening Post reported in 1860 the Chinese habit of eating such animals. After a long passage on eating dog and cat, the Post stated: “The rat is also an animal which occupies a large place in the food of the Chinese.”⁴⁶

By the 1860s and 1870s, negative attitudes toward Chinese food became intensely hostile. Most revealing of this attitude is the increasingly frequent use of the word “rat” in descriptions of Chinese food. Closely associated with filthiness, disease, and barbarianism, “rat” portrayed a pungent image, painting the diet of the Chinese as being not only undesirable but also despicable. More important, it was also seen as an integral part of Chinese restaurants. The message is clear: the Chinese were not just eating such disgusting stuff themselves but serving it to the public as well.

In an article in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1870, Thomas W. Cox relayed a popular (but not authentic) story that in the early days of Chinese San Francisco, “a Chinese restaurant announced ‘rat pies’ on the bill of fare. The delicacy was not popular with the Americans, and after a week or so, it was stricken from the list. Next day, the restaurant advertised ‘squirrel pies,’ and found them in good demand.”⁴⁷ In 1880, a defender of Chinese food used the cleanliness of a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco in an effort to debunk the popular fiction. After describing how “shining” and “clean” the table, kitchen, and cookware were, this author concluded: “It is a revelation to those who have been educated in the delusion that rats and garbage form the staple of the Chinese cuisine.”⁴⁸ But such efforts apparently had little effect in stopping the denigration of Chinese food. By then, prevalent notions that rats were among “the staples of a Chinaman’s diet” had helped to create the legend that the Chinese restaurant served such dreadful creatures.⁴⁹

The mass media continued to entertain this type of made-up story. In 1906, the Monroe City Democrat in Missouri published the following passage: “In Minneapolis they are investigating the chop suey restaurants. There is a suspicion that they do not use fresh rats.”50 Reports of Chinese as habitual rat eaters appeared not just in newspapers but also in writings by visitors to Chinese communities. After touring Chinatown in San Francisco, Joseph Carey reported in 1901 that the Chinese ate things “most repulsive to the epicurean taste of an Anglo-Saxon. … Even lizards and rats and young dogs they will not refuse.”⁵¹

The notion of Chinese eating rats became so imbedded in American culture that in the early twentieth century, when Chinese food began to gain increasing appeal, prospective consumers still harbored anxiety about rats on their plate. Lucien Adkins observed: “Take a friend to Chinatown for the first time and watch his face when the savory chop-suey arrives. He looks suspiciously at the mixture. He is certain it has rats in it, for the popular superstition that the Chinese eat rats is in-bred.” Adkins continued: “He remembers his schoolboy history, with the picture of a Chinaman carrying around a cage of rats for sale.”⁵²

Indeed, many nineteenth-century Americans acquired the image of the Chinese as a rat-consuming race in their school days. “Do the Chinese eat rats?” the New York Times asked rhetorically in 1888.” It went on: “This has always been a mooted question. Geographers contain the assertion that they do, and an old wood-cut of a Chinaman peddling rodents, strung by the tails to a rack which he carried over his shoulders, is a standard illustration of the common school atlases of 10 years ago.”⁵³ A reporter for the New York Tribune recalled similar geography lessons: “People of the older generation can recall in their geographies a picture of a Chinese coolie trotting along barefooted, with a string of rats suspended on his shoulders.”⁵⁴

In a book that he researched in the 1930s, Paul Siu recounted a children’s chant:

Do the Chinese eat rats?—the very question that the New York Times posed back in 1888—popped up unexpectedly in my e-mail inbox from a scholar and animal-rights activist a few years ago. I found the question perplexing because it did not come from an uninformed or a sinophobic source. Moreover, an adequate and comprehensive answer lies beneath the intertwined complexities of political and gastronomical developments. A simple factual answer would be yes. We can find numerous records of the Chinese, especially the Cantonese, eating what Americans commonly called rats in historical sources. But the Cantonese did not eat indiscriminately every kind of the 66 recognized species within the genus Rattus, and “rodent,” another word that was sometimes used in association with Chinese food, represents more than half of all the more than 4,600 mammalian species, scientifically speaking. In the comprehensive book about Chinese life during the Qing dynasty that he compiled in 1917, Xu Ke mentioned the unique foodstuffs of people in East Guangdong Province, including rice-field mice.⁵⁷ But this does not mean that the Chinese have been particularly fond of rats as food. On the contrary, they have been aware of the threat posed by rats to human health. Jia Ming, a Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) food writer, issued stern warnings about rats when accidentally used as food in Yingshi Xu Zhi (All You Must Know About Food), one of the earlier manuals on the health values and hazards of various food stuffs. “If eaten by mistake, the bones of rats can cause people to lose weight,” he wrote. It was a serious warning at a time when gaining weight was a sign of good health and good fortunes. “Rat saliva is poisonous,” and “if it is dropped into human food and consumed by people, it can cause shu lou (scrofula).”⁵⁸ When I was growing up in China, rats were officially labeled as one of the four pests (sihai) that the central government mobilized the entire nation to eliminate.

But in post–Gold Rush American political and popular culture, whether the Chinese ate rats—a word always used vaguely—was never a purely gastronomical question about the diet of the Chinese or the specific kinds of things deemed edible. Rather, the association of their food with rats stemmed from prevalent ideas about Chinese as a culture and a race, projecting them not only as a despicable and barbaric people but also dangerous propagators of epidemics. For Americans, then, especially American public-health authorities, rats represented dirtiness, diseases, and death, rather than the kind of cute little creatures that we see today in animated films such as Ratatouille.

A revealing example is Frank Todd’s Eradicating Plague from San Francisco, a report issued by San Francisco’s Citizens’ Health Committee at the end of the city’s second bubonic plague of 1907/1908. The chapter “The Role of the Rat” linked the epidemic to rats: “From the earliest times … people have noticed that plague was apt to accompany sickness among rats.” It concluded that “the plague is a disease of rats.” The report then dissociated the rat from the Europeans: “People that suppose rats in some way necessary to humanity are mistaken. There was not aboriginal or autochthonous European rat.” The report suggested that Asians were responsible for spreading rats to white people and launching the epidemic by reminding readers that “starting from China in 1334, the ‘Black Death’ killed 25,000,000 of these people, or nearly twentieth-four per cent [of the European population].”

Adding a racial twist to its historical analysis, the report noted that the plague had long been considered a “typically Oriental disease.” The purpose was to connect the dangerous disease to the Chinese community and its restaurants, and rats embodied that connection: “In the Chinatown epidemic eighty-seven dead rats, eleven dead of plague, were found in the walls of a Chinese restaurant. Several cases of human plague had been traced to this place, but they immediately ceased when the rats were cleaned out.”59

Acutely aware of the racial and political dimensions of the Chinese rat-eating question, Lee Chew, a Chinese living in New York, responded to the question defiantly around the turn of the century: “The rat which is eaten by the Chinese is a field animal which lives on rice, grain and sugar cane. Its flesh is delicious. Many Americans who have tasted shark’s fin and bird’s nest soup and tiger lily flowers and bulbs are firm friends of Chinese cookery. If they could enjoy one of our fine rats they would go to China to live, so as to get some more.” He went on, “American people eat ground hogs, which are very like these Chinese rats, and they also eat many sorts of food that our people would not touch.”⁶⁰ He understood clearly that ideas about edibility are often culturally constructed and serve as markers of social boundaries. Claims that the Chinese were rat eaters were not statements about their food preferences but were aimed at magnifying their undesirability and inferiority.

Such perceptions erected a great wall, separating American consumers from Chinese food for about half a century after it voyaged to the New World. If the culinary interpretation is flawed and the cultural transnationalization theory has apparent holes, then what can account for the rise of the Chinese food’s popularity? A larger historical context sheds light on the ascent of such a highly undesirable diet: the evolution of the United States as an empire.