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

In 1991, my wife and I moved to southern California. After living for six years in the small town of Ithaca in upstate New York, the first question I asked was how to get to Little Taipei, the nickname of Monterey Park among the Chinese: I had heard so much about the good Chinese food there. A friend offered me a simple instruction. Go north on Interstate 405 to I-710; take I-10 east; roll down your window, and then just follow the smell. We took the advice. As we exited I-10 at Atlantic Boulevard and headed south, a familiar aroma of food rushed into the car.

Like conjoined twins, Chinese food and the Chinese community have been inseparable and interdependent. We have seen America’s growing consumption desires and the marginalization of Chinese Americans as historical contexts in which to fully understand the spread of Chinese restaurants. Here, I examine the critical role that the American Chinatown played in the transplantation and spread of Chinese food.

As a cradle of America’s Chinese food, Chinatown was where this food was first transplanted in the early 1850s. In the following decades, when anti-Chinese animosity was on the rise, Chinatown existed as its sanctuary; at the end of the nineteenth century, then, Chinatown became a launching pad for Chinese food to extend to non-Chinese neighborhoods.

Simply put, without Chinatown, there would be no American Chinese food as we know it. At the same time, Chinese food defined Chinatown. Various food places represented not only the biggest cluster among all businesses in the Chinese community but also its most conspicuous markers—visual and olfactory—for both Chinese and non-Chinese. Of particular importance were the restaurants that offered familiar food and a social respite for Chinese immigrant men in the early decades (Chinese women seldom came to the restaurants).1 In the first half of the twentieth century, these dining establishments constituted a vital lifeline of the urban Chinatown economy.

The symbiotic relationship between Chinese food and the Chinese community reminds us of the extraordinary importance of food as a marker of cultural identity. Chinese immigrants continued to cherish their food, even though it was derided as evidence of their reclusiveness and un-Americanness. Likewise, Americans who traveled to China during this period clung to Western food in spite of the enormous logistical difficulty they faced in finding it. The culinary allegiance in both cases demonstrates that cultural identity is not an abstract academic concept but a lived experience, one that manifests itself in people’s daily life.

The Chinese and Americans maintained allegiance to their respective culinary traditions for different reasons. In avoiding and ridiculing Chinese food, Americans articulated a sense of cultural superiority over the Chinese. Chinese immigrants maintained their own culinary tradition because it gave them a source of comfort and home in a foreign and hostile environment. And it also represented their defiance to the mounting anti-Chinese prejudice.

The Chinese American community emerged together with the arrival of Chinese food. In 1849 and early 1850, while some of the seven hundred or so Chinese in San Francisco still lived in tents, others began to construct permanent houses, using building materials and furniture imported from China, which were also utilized widely by non-Chinese San Franciscans. In early 1850, an eyewitness reported that “at least 76 houses have been imported from Canton, and are put up by Chinese carpenters.” The report also mentioned two Chinese restaurants, “kept by Kong-sung and Whang-tong, where very palatable chow-chow, curry and tarts are served up by the celestials.”²

For the Chinese, such restaurants were both eating establishments and social meeting places. On November 19, 1849, about three hundred Chinese went to a “Canton Restaurant” on Jackson Street to conduct important community affairs, forming a committee to hire an Anglo “arbitrator and adviser.”3

The appearance of Chinese restaurants was noted by others. In 1849, Bayard Taylor traveled to California on assignment to report on the Gold Rush for the New York Tribune. In Eldorado, Taylor mentioned three Chinese restaurants: Kong-Sung’s house near the water, Whang-Tong’s on Sacramento Street, and Tong-Ling’s on Jackson Street. Besides, he added, “in Pacific street another Celestial restaurant had been opened.”⁴ These early establishments did not merely cater to the Chinese but also were “much frequented by Americans,” serving “their chow-chow and curry as well as excellent tea and coffee.”⁵

San Francisco was a critical Gold Rush gateway, which swelled from a quiet small town of one thousand people in 1848 to a booming city of thirty-five thousand in 1850.⁶ Public eating places popped up to feed this mobile and predominantly young and male population—in 1849, only 2 percent of the population in the city was female, and most of them were between the ages of twenty and forty.⁷ These places expanded so fast that they immediately became an important revenue source for the city of San Francisco. For example, in the month of July 1851, the city collected almost $13,000 from drinking and eating houses, making them the single most significant tax base.⁸

William Shaw, an Englishman who visited San Francisco in 1849, believed that the Chinese restaurants were the finest in town: “The best eating houses in San Francisco are those kept by Celestials and conducted in Chinese fashion. The dishes are mostly curries, hashes and fricassee served up in small dishes and as they are exceedingly palatable.”⁹ Evidently, these restaurants had white customers and served Chinese food.

Writing about the Chinese in San Francisco at this time, James O’Meara noted that Chinese restaurant owners “accumulated rapid wealth.”¹⁰ By late 1850, some Chinese restaurants had become fairly large establishments in the city’s budding restaurant industry, as is evidenced by estimates of property damage caused by fire, a threat that San Francisco faced repeatedly at the time. On October 1, Alta California reported that a Chinese restaurateur suffered a loss of $2,800.¹¹ The loss was considerably smaller than that of some non-Chinese establishments such as Keil McCarty’s Universal Restaurant, which reported a loss of $4,000. But it was substantially more than the amount lost by some of the drinking places like the Mariposa saloon.

The assertion in Alta California in 1852 that “at one time nearly all the restaurants in the city were conducted by the Chinese” is undoubtedly an exaggeration.12 But Chinese restaurants did become quite numerous in San Francisco. As a result, the Chinese-language newspaper, Golden Hill’s News, found it necessary to announce in detail to its Chinese audiences the license fees that restaurant owners must pay.¹³

In 1856, the Chinese business directory compiled by the bilingual newspaper Oriental listed five restaurants.¹⁴ Chinese restaurants also found their way into the city’s general directories. Charles P. Kimball’s San Francisco City Directory of 1850, for instance, listed such establishments: “Canton Restaurant” and Norman Assing’s Macoa and Woosung Restaurant at the corner of Kearny and Commercial Streets.¹⁵

Non-white patronage of Chinese restaurants at this time was more a matter of circumstance than an indication of racial tolerance in San Francisco’s nascent years. The Western notion of “the restaurant” began in France first as a medical term and a therapeutic place before becoming defined as a public dining place in Paris in the early eighteenth century.¹⁶ In antebellum America, meals outside one’s own home constituted a foreign concept for most people; even many rich people still entertained extensively in their homes. Restaurant dining began to pick up in major cities in the post–Civil War decades, but the motivation varied. Unlike aristocratic New Yorkers who went to Delmonico’s for social distinction, San Franciscans flocked to restaurants primarily to feed themselves. It is not surprising that Chinese restaurateurs rose to the occasion. Their experience was not simply a food story but a highly political one that intersected with the cultural and socioeconomic currents in the fast-changing city.

Before arriving in San Francisco in 1850, Assing had traveled to the West from Macao in 1820 on a ship that brought him to New York.¹⁸ He later lived in Charleston, South Carolina, where he became a naturalized citizen and a Christian. The historian Him Mark Lai noted that his Chinese name was Yuan Sheng. Another Chinese source gave his Chinese name as Chen Yanqing.¹⁹

In the early 1850s, when Assing became a successful restaurateur, he was also involved in international trade and emerged as the community’s most vocal leader. He led his fellow Chinese in frequently participating in public ceremonies. On August 28, 1850, the Chinese marched to Portsmouth Square, near San Francisco’s Chinatown, “and arranged themselves in a circle upon the platform” during the funeral ceremony for President Zachary Taylor. Afterward, he wrote a letter to the mayor to thank him on behalf of the Chinese for the invitation to be part of the event. During the first celebration of California’s admission to the Union on October 29, 1850, Assing commanded a Chinese contingent of fifty with a banner of crimson satin and the English words “China Boys.”20 This group also took part in the public celebration of George Washington’s birthday in 1852.

Assing strenuously fought the surging anti-Chinese racism in the state. In 1852, for example, he wrote a public letter to the governor protesting his proposal to restrict Chinese immigration.²¹ He also played a visible and busy leadership role in various social affairs, ranging from posting a reward for finding a missing person to publicly expressing gratitude to a ship captain for bringing newcomers from China. In 1852, when the Tong Hook Tong theater group came from China to San Francisco, Assing was one of the men who managed its performance. In 1852, he served as the official interpreter for the Three-District Association, one of the immigrants’ most important social organizations.²² He was also a founder of the Yanghe Huiguan (Yeong Wo Native-Place Association) and often worked with other prominent Chinese. One was Tong Achick, one of the first six pupils at the Morrison School, founded in the 1830s in memory of an English missionary to China, Robert Morrison.

Assing was neither a stereotypically humble Chinese nor a modest Christian. On his forty-second birthday, he threw a party at his restaurant and, as Alta California reported, “all the China boys were present.”²³ Under the section “Foreign Consuls in San Francisco” in the 1854 city directory, he was listed as a consul representing China: “CHINA—NORMAN ASSING, Sacramento street, between Kearny and Dupont.”²⁴ In part because of the distinctive romanization of his name and because of Norman Assing’s high visibility, it is safe to assume that the Assing in the directory is our restaurateur. But the first Chinese consul did not come to San Francisco until the 1870s. Gunther Barth suspected that Assing distributed missionary tracts in 1850 while wearing “‘a singularly colored fur mantle … and a long sort of robe,’ whom a reporter assumed to be ‘a mandarin at least.’”²⁵ If Barth was right, we have further reason to believe that Assing may have given himself the consul title to boost his standing in public.

Assing, indeed, was a controversial figure. Some of his fellow Chinese viewed him as a tyrannical man hungry for power and control. Barth, one of the first scholars to look into Assing’s life, apparently shares that view and reports his scheme to “tighten his control over his countrymen.”26 James O’Meara, a resident of the city at the time, called him a Chinese “boss.”²⁷ But even within the Chinese community, Assing did not always have his way. Atoy, an adventurous and “very pretty” twenty-year-old Chinese woman, who became a visible figure shortly after coming to California, defeated his repeated attempts to have her deported and returned to her alleged husband in China.²⁸ She enlisted help from Chinese and non-Chinese allies, claiming that she was single and accusing Assing of attempting forceful abduction.²⁹

Like his influence, his wealth was limited. Apparently, the restaurateur sometimes had to visit food retailers personally for food supplies. During one such trip, he got into a fight over the price of cauliflower with a white butcher.³⁰

An imperfect person in a far less perfect world, Assing nevertheless should be remembered not as an evil man but as someone who helped put the Chinese presence on California’s gastronomical and political map. At a time of mounting anti-Chinese hostility, such a vocal, assertive, and ambitious personality was what the emerging community needed.

But the political climate for the Chinese continued to deteriorate, as anti-Chinese forces started to exclude them from mainstream political and economic life. In the case of People v. Hall (1854), the California Supreme Court ruled that Chinese were ineligible to testify against whites. Such institutionalized racism was also shared and endorsed by individual legal authorities. During a trial in 1855, when someone proposed that Tong Achick defend his case, the judge “threatened to knock Tong Achick down in the presence of the Court, if he dared to say anything insulting.”³¹ Anti-Chinese hostility became widespread throughout the American West in the 1850s. Section 6 of Article II of the Constitution of Oregon (1857) stipulated clearly: “No negro, chinaman, or mulatto, shall have the right of suffrage.” It also prohibited the Chinese from owning “real estate or mining claim.”³²

Such an increasingly hostile society had no place for a colorful and feisty Chinese personality like Norman Assing, whose life in the public eye was relatively short-lived. Nor did the society have any serious appetite for the food of a people that it hated and despised so much. As the Evening Bulletin noted, “In San Francisco, and in cities in the interior, the Chinese restaurants of ’50 and ’51 have been driven out of the business.”³³ Here as well as other cities, it was Chinese customers, rather than white patrons, who created and supported Chinese-food places, which had sprung up in conjunction with Chinese communities.

Three of the largest cities that emerged in the Gold Rush years were Marysville, Sacramento, and San Francisco, where the most significant Chinese communities had settled. During these years, Marysville stood out as the state’s third largest city; it was also a supply hub for the northern mining areas and a conduit that connected the mining district and San Francisco. It was accordingly called Third City (san bu) by the Chinese (later, Stockton inherited the title). In the 1850s, a Marysville merchant wrote in a letter that “there are twelve or fifteen teams on an average week leaving this city with loads for Chinese merchants in the mines.”34 Equally important, a Chinatown also emerged to serve a growing number of Chinese laborers, who worked as launderers, cooks, and servants in the growing local economy, and, of course, food was a central part of the service that Chinatown offered. By 1853, there were already two Chinese restaurants and three Chinese stores. All were on or around First Street, where a Chinatown would evolve.³⁵

The number of Chinese cooks and servants increased from 18 in 1860 to 211 in 1870, and laundry workers grew from 53 to 154.³⁶ Chinatown expanded accordingly, increasing its businesses to twenty-five in 1878 and forty-two in 1882.³⁷ Remaining in Chinatown and serving Chinese customers, the restaurants had not yet become a broad-based industry. At this time, Chinese restaurant workers were fewer than laundrymen and servants, and they remained under the radar screen of census takers. The manuscript census of 1860 recorded only one waiter/dishwasher, who subsequently disappeared from the 1870 and 1880 censuses.³⁸ This does not mean that the Chinese-food industry was less important than laundry and domestic service. Food places constituted an important economic pillar of Chinatown, while laundry shops and servants were more widespread, as we can see clearly in the case of Sacramento during the same period.

The next largest city created by the Gold Rush, Sacramento was known among the Chinese as Second City because of its significance in Chinese America. Its number of Chinese reached 980 in 1860 and grew to 1,331 in 1870 and 1,674 in 1880.39 By that time, the city’s sizable community boasted more than 100 businesses. Chinese providing personal services to white consumers represented the largest cohort of the Chinese labor force. Of the 104 Chinese businesses that found their way into the bilingual Wells Fargo directory in 1878, the 40 laundries were the largest category.⁴⁰ In 1880, the 638 Chinese who worked as laundrymen, cooks, and servants constituted the largest group among the city’s Chinese population.⁴¹ These individuals and laundries spread across the city. Twenty-four of the twenty-six food places were clustered on I Street between Second and Fifth Streets. Constituting the core of Chinatown’s economy, they also made it an elaborate food marketplace. Besides the nine general grocers, there were also specialty food stores: four fish merchants, two vegetable stores, and six butchers and poultry retailers. Read-to-eat food was not only available in the three restaurants but also offered by two “merchant(s)” and seven grocery stores.

The Chinese gave the crown of First City or Big City to San Francisco. Its Chinatown, the largest Chinese settlement in the United States, was unequivocally a food town from its beginning. In 1856, for example, the thirty-three grocery stores outnumbered all other businesses in the community. Together, the food places—grocery stores, five restaurants, and five meat markets—accounted for nearly half of all businesses in Chinatown. Their proportion in Chinese businesses declined over time, though. Of the 423 Chinese firms listed in the Wells Fargo directory in 1878, about 23 percent were food places due to the diversification of the ethnic economy into areas like cigar- and shoemaking and laundry. But the absolute number of clearly identifiable food stores increased to ninety-seven, which turned Chinatown into an even more sophisticated food market than the community in Sacramento. For example, of the nine stores that sold rice, five were rice specialty stores, and there were two tofu places. Of the grocery shops, twenty-eight specialized in seafood, fifteen in pork, and six in poultry—all of which were frequently used in Cantonese cooking, in spite of the image of the Chinese as only rice-eating people. And when these articles were difficult to come by, the immigrants were willing to pay a high price. As early as the 1850s, a “butcher in the Southern mines” reportedly noted the immigrants’ food habits: “They preferred pork, even at twenty-five-cents a pound. I have sold in one day as high as fourteen hogs, averaging seventy-five pounds each. They are very fond of fowls, and buy a great many. For a large one they pay two dollars, the general price now is about a dollar and a half. … They like fish too, whenever they can be got, and use dried or salt fish daily.”⁴²

Steamed Fish

Serves 1 or 2

Most Chinatown residents discussed in this chapter were Cantonese, known for their love of seafood. For complicated fish dishes, one can just go to a Cantonese seafood restaurant, which was what nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants liked to do in Chinatowns. This recipe is simple and fast to prepare at home.*

2 tbsp Chinese fermented black beans

2 tbsp Chinese rice wine

6 thin slices of fresh ginger root

3 cloves garlic

½ lb ¾-inch-thick white fish filet (preferably sea bass)

¼ cup chopped green onion

3 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tbsp soy sauce

Soak and rinse the black beans. Coarsely chop them into smaller pieces and place them in a small bowl. Add the rice wine, ginger root, and garlic; allow the mixture to macerate for at least 30 minutes. Place the sea bass in a shallow plate and smear the wine mixture evenly over the top. Cover the plate and allow to marinate for 15 to 20 minutes. Boil water in a steamer and steam the fish for 8 to 10 minutes. Turn off the heat but do not open the steamer; let the fish rest inside for another 5 minutes. Then take the plate out and place the green onion evenly on top. Heat the vegetable oil until it is very hot and pour it onto the green onion. Drizzle with the soy sauce.

*For a slightly different version of this recipe, see Yong Chen, “Try It, You May Like It,” Irvine (Calif.) Spectrum News, June 14–18, 1999, B2.

Much less numerous than food places in 1878, laundries became the largest business category in 1882 in San Francisco. But such numerical preponderance did not turn the city’s Chinatown into a “laundry town.” As in Sacramento and other cities, the 176 laundry shops were scattered, covering seventy-three streets across San Francisco and serving mostly a non-Chinese clientele.43 Their Chinese names, as recorded in the bilingual Wells Fargo directory, often explicitly indicated that they “wash barbarian clothes.” Meanwhile, Chinatown continued to be defined by food, as the number of food places increased to about 150, all located in Chinatown and serving a largely Chinese clientele. These included one hundred or so different grocery stores, six confectionary shops, and twelve butchers. A pattern of business cluster also emerged among food stores: eight of the ten poultry stores were on Washington Alley, while all four rice shops were on Dupont Street. For those who did not have the time or a place to cook, meals were available not only in the twelve so restaurants but also in the four boarding houses. Offering diverse foods and services, Chinatown stood as a convenient and exciting gastronomical mecca, where individual restaurant goers had ample choices and merchants fetched their supplies in the different food wholesale stores. As a clear indication of Chinese San Francisco as a food-supply center, the main Chinese-language newspaper frequently listed food wholesale prices on the front page in the 1870s. For example, on October 23, 1875, it displayed the per-hundred-pound price for more than twenty kinds of foods, including rice, dried fungus (muer), sugar, ham, eggs, and beans.⁴⁴

The story of the three Gold Rush cities was repeated elsewhere. Chinese eating places followed the steps of Chinese immigrants to small towns and provided a magnet for the community. One such town, Hanford in central California, owes its existence to the arrival of Chinese who worked for the Southern Pacific Railway. To serve these workers and, later, Chinese laborers in the fields, a Chinatown emerged, known as China Alley. One of the early residents was Shu Wing Gong (Henry Wing, the grandfather of the famous restaurateur Richard Wing), who catered to Chinese railroad workers shortly after his arrival in the early 1880s. Then he opened a Chinese restaurant, selling noodles to Chinese customers for as little as 5 cents a bowl.⁴⁵

Many Chinese workers—a significant number of them in the service sector—ventured beyond California. And in the Chinese communities that evolved to serve them, food businesses occupied a central place. By Marie Rose Wong’s count, the twenty-two Chinese in Portland, Oregon, in 1860 included two merchants, three laborers, and twelve in the laundry business. The city’s Chinese population increased to 1,612 in 1880, among whom the 1,024 laborers, 229 laundrymen, and 122 people in personal-service jobs represented the three largest groups.46 By that time, the city already had a good-size Chinatown. The Wells Fargo directory of 1878 lists thirty Chinese businesses, including perhaps three restaurants.⁴⁷ We do not know precisely how many of them were restaurants because the names of most businesses in either Chinese or English do not indicate their exact nature. But one had an easily recognizable restaurant name, Hong Fer Low. Sometimes spelled Hong Far Low, its Chinese words are xing hua lou, meaning “apricot blossom building.” It was also the name of a small restaurant that a Cantonese reportedly opened in Shanghai in the early 1850s, which later became famous and moved to a bigger location on Fuzhou Road in 1928.⁴⁸ There was a Hong Far Low in Boston’s Chinatown as well. The Hong Fer Low in San Francisco’s Chinatown opened in the 1850s and lasted until 1960, according to Andrew Coe, and remained a famous establishment for many years.⁴⁹ In the late nineteenth century, it was a favorite of tourists. The Morning Call described it thus: “The restaurant was most gorgeously fitted up, the walls being made of carved woods imported from China and inlaid in places with precious stones. … Some of the chandeliers in the place cost $1500 each.”⁵⁰

Portland’s Hong Fer Low was on Second Street—the heart of Chinatown. In fact, the Chinese called Second Street tang ren jie (Street of the Chinese), which was the Chinese equivalent of the English “Chinatown.” Located next to the Zhonghua Huiguan (Chinese Association), the Chinese community’s leading social organization, this restaurant stood as a reminder of the importance of food in Chinatown life. The Hong Fer Low in San Francisco was also located in the heart of Chinatown, as were numerous other good restaurants.

In 1869, the first sizable group of Chinese—250 former railroad workers—arrived in St. Louis, then the fourth largest city in the United States.⁵¹ That city’s Chinese population remained small, and many worked in the laundry business for years. In 1888, the Chinese population numbered fewer than 170, employed mostly in the seventy-six Chinese laundries.⁵² Around that time, groceries and restaurants appeared in the city’s Hop Alley to serve the Chinese.

As Chinese immigrants moved out of the West, usually to work as laundrymen and servants, urban Chinatowns developed in many eastern cities, and again food businesses played a pivotal role in this development. The nineteenth-century ethnographer Stewart Culin, who studied Chinese settlements in the East, described the community-building process: “The store is the center which life in a Chinese colony revolves. As soon as several men have collected in a town or city, one of them will send to the nearest place of supply and purchase such Chinese groceries and other wares as may be needed by the colony. … If the colony increases in numbers he may rent a small store and with the assistance of some of his friends form a store company.” The establishment of a Chinese restaurant was a signal that the community reached a significant level of stability and critical mass: “In time the shop-keeper, knowing the advantage of increasing the attraction of his place, may procure a tolerably skillful cook and open a restaurant in an upper story of his building.”⁵³

Perhaps even more sensible than their physical appearance is the distinctive aroma from Chinese-food places. Traditionally ranked at the lowest end among human senses,⁵⁵ the sense of smell is now increasingly recognized as being “important to human beings and had always been so.”⁵⁶ As neural- and marine-science research in recent decades has discovered, in navigating the outside world humans, other mammals, and sea creatures rely not only on visual and hearing senses but also on olfactory cues. Salmon, for example, swim hundreds or thousands of miles in the open water to return to their river home by following familiar smells.⁵⁷ Smell functions in humans as an emotionally charged geographic and cultural compass. In a passage about the inventions of smoking, drinking, and tea, Lin Yutang showed his appreciation of food smells: “They are all to be enjoyed through the nostrils by acting on our sense of smell.”⁵⁸ Smell is important because this significant sensory property of food is also closely connected to memory. The anthropologist David E. Sutton writes that “smells evoke what surrounds them in memory.”⁵⁹ Because of its social significance, therefore, the smell of food becomes a marker of cultural boundaries. As Sutton puts it, “Good and bad smells also make claims for social distinction.”⁶⁰

Permeating the air, the scent of food announces the presence of Chinatown. It was a smell of home that I always longed for when living in Chinatown-less upstate New York. The smell of familiar food and culture was also an important appeal of Chinatown to early immigrants, such as Wah-chung Leung. When he first arrived in San Francisco on February 3, 1922, the fragrant smells in Chinatown triggered his homesickness.⁶¹

To Anglo noses, however, it signaled just the opposite: the “strange odors of the East” is how the journalist and author Charles W. Stoddard described Chinatown in San Francisco, a city he began to know well from the 1850s. For many white observers, the smell was not just unfamiliar but also repugnant. John David Borthwick, a Scottish journalist who reached San Francisco in 1851, reported his impression of the city’s Chinese quarter: “A peculiarly nasty smell pervaded this locality.”⁶²

The practice of using the sense of smell to distinguish the racial or socioeconomic “other” has occurred in various other contexts. Industrializing France, for example, developed notions of the smell of the poor.63 The idea that African Americans had a distinctive odor prevailed in the minds of nineteenth- and twentieth-century white Americans, including those who had no direct contact with them.⁶⁴ Belonging to a culture so different, however, the Chinese smell seemed particularly detectable to white noses. Otis Gibson—who continued to work among the Chinese in California after spending ten years in China as a missionary—wrote of the food smells associated with various nations: “The French smells of garlic; the Irishman smells of whisky and tobacco; the German smells of sour krout [sic] and lager, and smells strong too; the Englishman smells of roast beef and ‘’arf and ’arf’; the American smells of corn-cake and pork and beans.” Gibson then devoted the rest of the passage to the smell of the Chinese, which he found especially unforgettable:

The Chinese smell is a mixture and a puzzle, a marvel and a wonder, a mystery and a disgust; but nevertheless, you shall find it a palpable fact. The smell of opium raw and cooked, and in the process of cooking, mixed with the smell of cigars, and tobacco leaves wet and dry, dried fish and dried vegetables, and a thousand other indescribable ingredients; all these toned to a certain degree by what may be called a shippy smell, produce a sensation upon the olfactory nerves of the average American, which once experienced will not soon be forgotten.⁶⁵

Like Gibson, some other early writers mentioned diverse sources of the smell, such as the “burning opium.”66 But frequently, it was the smell of Chinese food that triggered white visitors’ olfactory nerves. Many identified the particular Chinese “odor” or “the peculiar Chinese smell” as coming from food places, such as restaurants and butchers.⁶⁷ In 1865, Samuel Bowles, a newspaper editor from Massachusetts, attended a grand banquet in honor of the visiting Speaker of the House hosted by Chinese business and community leaders in San Francisco. He recalled his experience: “I went to the table weak and hungry; but I found the one universal odor and favor soon destroyed all appetite.” Moments later, he was called out by another guest at the same table who had left earlier. Together they went to an American restaurant and “the lost appetite came back.”⁶⁸ Iza D. Hardy, a British novelist who visited Chinatown with police escort early in the 1880s, went to a Chinese restaurant first, but he left without eating because of “the rancid odour” of the food there.⁶⁹

Many white visitors to Chinatowns in other cities also noted the smell of Chinese food. Entering a Chinese restaurant in New York in 1887, a reporter sensed “a pungent odor” from “something being cooked.”⁷⁰ In Chicago’s Chinatown, which had become fairly sizable by 1889, another white reporter found “odors from the style of cooking” “repulsive.”⁷¹ In 1890, a newspaper article relayed the experience of a white visitor to a restaurant in Philadelphia’s Chinatown, whose nose “tells him that he is in peculiar quarters.”⁷²

For Anglos, that particular smell was an essential part of the Chinese and their community. In 1880, a reporter for the New York Tribune wrote about San Francisco’s Chinatown: “The floors of these balconies, the sides of the houses, the windows, and doorways … all reek with the filth which never seems to disturb the Chinese eye, to be an offence in the Chinese nostril.” To the reporter, “the air is heavy and offensive, laden with the powerful odors of native tobacco—the same smell which taints the atmosphere of all the shops, and which clings to the Chinese.”⁷³ By the early twentieth century, white observers had developed a popular notion of a distinctive Chinese smell that “unlike almost any other odor that ever was,” as visitors to St. Louis’s Hop Alley put it in the early twentieth century.⁷⁴

Human olfactory physiology is universal: the air we breathe into the nose brings in odorant molecules (called ligands) that then bind to our odorant receptors, causing a change in the membrane potential and sending a signal to the olfactory bulb of our brain, where the information is coded and remembered.⁷⁵ But the process by which white brains and minds registered the smells of Chinatown was more cultural and racial than physiological. White noses sensed and comprehended the Chinatown food scent differently from the way Chinese nostrils did because whites relied not only on their olfactory receptor cells but also on prevailing ideas about Chinese culture and the Chinese race. What was an inviting aroma to the Chinese became a repulsive odor to many whites.

Associating the Chinese with odor was also extremely political. Politically and racially motivated people often traced the smell to specific things, such as squid, rats, and offal, all of which were regarded as embodying the strange and repulsive lifestyle and diet of the Chinese. In Monterey, California, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, Chinese fishermen were condemned for the offensive smells they generated.76 Dr. Charles Kaemmerer, a French immigrant who had lived in New York for more than twenty years and had worked as the city’s sanitary inspector, accused Chinese men of cooking and eating cats or rats, claiming that he sensed “a very peculiar odor.”⁷⁷

In cities like San Francisco, the depiction of Chinatown as a place of stink represented an attempt to “demonize and isolate the ‘other.’”⁷⁸ In 1880, under the auspices of the infamously anti-Chinese Workingmen’s Party of California, an investigating committee issued a pamphlet titled Chinatown Declared a Nuisance. It included a street-by-street report of itemized nuisances in San Francisco’s Chinatown. In describing the conditions of Chinatown’s streets and alleys, the report used words like “stink,” “stinky,” and “stench” on more than ten occasions to paint a graphically abhorrent image of Chinatown as a filthy and odorous place. It described 741 Pacific Avenue this way: “Upon entering through an adjoining wood-yard, we found a very paradise of Chinatown; piles of dirt, filth, stench, and slime, enough to sicken the stomach of any white person.” Here is another description: “An Alley on Mr. Sheppard’s property behind Stockton street, off Jackson is an indescribable hole of filth and stench. Piles of dirt, mixed with human excrement, garbage, etc., defies all civilization.”⁷⁹

In the minds of many whites, clearly, the odor of Chinatown and Chinese food signified an inferior race and an undesirable culture to be shunned and excluded from America.

Less politically motivated commentators, however, usually found the smell from Chinatown food places “impossible to describe.”⁸⁰ This was not just because of the absence of a sufficiently developed lexicon of smells in the English language; the indescribability of the Chinese smell was consistent with long-standing Western perceptions of the Chinese and their culture as exotic and mysterious. Westerners living in China also played an important role in developing such perceptions. Many of them found Chinese cooking odorous. During a journey to Chengdu in southwestern China in 1887, for example, the American Methodist Episcopal missionary Virgil C. Hart used words like “unpleasant odors” to describe the cooking of native Chinese.⁸¹

The extensive and persistent attention of Westerners to the smell of food in their observations of the Chinese reminds us that food preference constitutes a central and conspicuous element of cultural identity. Westerners had long viewed food habits as an important part of the national identity. The famous French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin pronounced in 1825: “The destiny of nations depends on the manner in which they are fed.”82 Inheriting this view, Americans attached great national importance to individual dietary preferences. A 1910 advertisement for the National Food Magazine, for instance, linked “the health of the individual” to “the health of the nation.”⁸³

For Americans and other Westerners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, food constituted a most sensible foundation on which to form their first impressions about China. “One of the first things which impress the traveler in China is the extremely simple diet of the people,” noted Arthur Henderson Smith, an American missionary in China for more than half a century.⁸⁴ Such impressions derived from food were far from benign or positive, as was clearly noted by Samuel Wells Williams, one of nineteenth-century America’s most influential China experts. In The Middle Kingdom, 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.”⁸⁵ Americans, it seemed, disliked Chinese food not just because of the food itself but because Americans identified themselves as the superior “other” of the Chinese. In a memoir of his experiences in China, an old-time British merchant compared Westerners and the Chinese: “We were different from them; we ate strong flesh of cows and sheep, which they avoid.”⁸⁶ Such a food-based consciousness of racial and cultural difference also manifested itself in the daily life of Americans and other Westerners in China.

Westerners did not stay unchanged in China, though. Both the British and the Americans fell in love with tea, for example. As a measure of identity, however, more revealing than individual foodstuffs and incidental eating events are certain long-term food patterns: the staple ingredients and how to prepare them in daily meals.

Ample evidence shows that for their regular meals, many Americans tried to avoid Chinese food and clung to their own foodways, relishing Western foods shipped to China. The Massachusetts native Osmond Tiffany, who visited China in 1848, tasted Chinese food but concluded that “no enthusiast would care to go through two Chinese dinners.” “The dishes,” she continued, “have a very strong smack of castor oil, and you can scarcely find one that has not some repulsive taste.” She also reported the importation of dairy products such as butter from outside China: “If a lot arrives … it is eagerly seized.”⁸⁷ While traveling in China, some Americans brought not only food but also their own cooks.⁸⁸ Like their American counterparts, the British in early-twentieth-century China “ate their domestic cuisine, reproducing as far as possible the tastes of their home with Chinese or imported ingredients, and they mostly found Chinese food disgusting.”⁸⁹

Americans did not abstain entirely from Chinese food; some, especially children, become “fond of Chinese food.”90 Many adults occasionally tasted Chinese food as an adventure. Eating it on a more regular basis, however, became an ordeal that they had to endure when they did not have enough Western food or money.⁹¹

A few Americans made a deliberate effort to live on Chinese food. They included members of the China Inland Mission, one of the largest and most influential missionary organizations in modern Chinese history, known as the “pigtail mission” because of its unorthodox and deliberate efforts to localize culturally.⁹² Localizing involved not only wearing native attire but also eating Chinese food. As one missionary instructed new members in a story published in the Independent in 1901, “Wearing Chinese clothes and eating Chinese food, you are to live and work and die among these people.”⁹³

Still, regular consumption of Chinese food required an effort because it was considered a hardship. At the end of the nineteenth century, the New York Evangelist published a letter remembering the late Presbyterian missionary Fannie Wright. It counted the difficulties that she had encountered while faithfully serving God in China: “She had often been without supplies from home and subsisted entirely on the Chinese food.”⁹⁴

Like their compatriots back home, many Americans in China employed Chinese servants to cook Western food. In 1866, the American Presbyterian Mission Press published a Chinese-language cookbook, Zhao Yang Fan Shu (Foreign Cookery in Chinese), in order to teach such servants how to make Western food with non-Chinese ingredients like wine, butter, cream, and “foreign carrots.” The preface notes: “Everyone knows how difficult it is to teach native cooks to prepare dishes suited to the taste and habits of foreigners.”⁹⁵ The cookbook also includes a set of rules about keeping things clean and orderly: not only did the food have to taste Western but the kitchen had to look Western.

Because of their cultural propensities, Americans in China, especially the nineteenth-century missionaries and merchants, missed an opportunity to become culinary ambassadors; otherwise, Chinese food could have reached the mainstream American palate much sooner. More important, their avoidance of Chinese food and their aversion to its aroma reveal how strongly they associated their own American identity with food. Many years later, the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote about this association: “Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign idea, foreign accents, foreign vices. So whisky drinking becomes identified with the Irish and, by coincidence, with Catholics, beer drinking with Germans, and marijuana with black musicians and zoot suits with minority group adolescents.”96 Many immigrants and their children comprehended cultural and national identity in gastronomical terms. “Americans were people who ate peanut butter and jelly on mushy white bread that came out of a plastic package,” wrote an American-born Italian, who never realized that he was an American citizen while growing up in the 1940s and 1950s.⁹⁷ Naturally, as Netta Davis notes, “the primary image of American immigrant adaptation is a culinary one.”⁹⁸

Similarly, different Chinese coming to the United States maintained their allegiance to their culinary traditions in both their consciousness and their daily lives. Many students from China longed for Chinese food after arriving in America, as I did. In the first decade of the twentieth century, when six Chinese students arrived in the United States to study in the New Bedford Textile School, they “sighed for dishes more familiar to a Chinese palate.”⁹⁹ Blanche Ching-Yi Wu, who came to the United States as a graduate student in the early 1930s, recalls that she and her fellow Chinese students at the University of Michigan were “homesick for Chinese food,” and relied on a Chinese-food peddler, who visited Detroit on weekends, for things like “salted duck eggs and the ‘ancient eggs,’ bean curd, mung beans, soybeans, soy sauce.”¹⁰⁰

Visiting government officials from China also demonstrated a strong attachment to Chinese food. Upon reaching San Francisco in 1885 as China’s minister to the United States, Zhang Yinhuan complained about two things in his diary: the harassment from immigration officials, who initially refused to let him land, and the unpalatable Western food that he had to live with during the long journey. “Western food,” he wrote, “was elegant but not to my liking.” The day after his landing, local Chinese community leaders came to his rescue, inviting him to a Chinese dinner. He apparently enjoyed the familiar food prepared by his Cantonese compatriots as they chatted about hometown foods with “laughter.”¹⁰¹ Arriving in Washington as Zhang’s successor in 1889, Cui Guoyin found himself “unable to eat the hotel’s Western food.” Fortunately, Zhang arranged to send him a pot of rice and three Chinese dishes.¹⁰² After attending the coronation ceremony of Czar Nicholas II, Viceroy Li Hung Chang (Li Hongzhang in pinyin) visited the United States in 1896 with his own chefs, and his efforts to cling to Chinese food even during public functions generated much media fascination.¹⁰³

Senior scholar-statesmen in this period often regarded eating Chinese food as a statement of patriotism. During the second Opium War (1856–1860), British solders took Canton and captured Ye Mingchen, the viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces. Imprisoned in Calcutta, he refused to eat foreign food when his food ran out and starved himself to death in 1859.104 It was not just because he found the Westerners’ food unpalatable; it was an act to protect his honor as a Chinese and a loyal subject to the emperor.

Chinese food also accompanied the immigrants en route to the New World. For example, during his voyage to the United States in 1876 on the City of Peking of the Pacific Steamship Company, a Chinese intellectual named Li Gui noticed that there were 109 Chinese passengers’ lower-class cabins as well as 38 Chinese on the kitchen staff.¹⁰⁵ The Chinese cooks undoubtedly prepared palatable food for their compatriots on board, and Chinese food remained available in transpacific voyages for years. For instance, the American Mail Line, which ran passenger service between China and the United States beginning in the late 1920s, offered Chinese meals on a daily basis for its third-class Chinese passengers on all its presidential liners.¹⁰⁶

The immigrants who lived in the United States largely maintained their food habits, as demonstrated by ample historical records and archaeological evidence.¹⁰⁷ They did so in spite of daunting obstacles. First, there was much hostility toward Chinese food. Not intimidated by it, however, the Chinese defended their foodways publicly. In a widely publicized address to President Ulysses S. Grant, the Chinese argued: “It is charged against us that we eat rice, fish, and vegetables. It is true that our diet is different from the people of this honorable country; our tastes in these matters are not exactly alike and can not be forced. … But is that a sin on our part, of sufficient gravity to be brought before the President and Congress of the United States?”¹⁰⁸ Second, the ingredients for making Chinese food were not readily available in the New World. In the early years, the Chinese had to import from China many different foodstuffs, including rice, orange skins, tea, mushrooms, bamboo shoots, shark’s fins, bird’s nest, and sea cucumber.¹⁰⁹

During the nineteenth century, immigrant Chinese working as miners, farmhands, railroad laborers, laundrymen, and cooks outside Chinatown could not easily avail themselves of Chinese food. Occasionally, there was a single store selling it, as was the case for the seven hundred or so Chinese building a railroad near the San Joaquin River. As Charles Nordhoff noted in 1873, “There was a store kept in several cars near the end of the track” that had a variety of Chinese foods like dried oysters, sweet rice crackers, dried bamboo sprouts, salted cabbage, Chinese sugar, and Chinese bacon. This demonstrates one reason why the Chinese stuck to their own food—it had far greater variety than “the beef, beans, bread-and-butter, and potatoes of the white laborers.”¹¹⁰

Whenever possible, Chinese workers traveled to Chinatowns in cities like San Francisco and Marysville, and later in New York and Philadelphia, for food in restaurants, turning the Chinatowns into food towns. For them, doing so was an affirmation of their Chineseness—it met their practical needs for food, rest, and socializing. Their cultural identity was seldom an abstract concept but was always intertwined with practical issues in daily life.

Chinatowns in the American metropolis were invariably crowded. In 1885, the Board of Supervisors of San Francisco appointed a special committee to investigate Chinatown. Full of anti-Chinese animosity, its report nonetheless revealed the cramped living conditions in the Chinese community: “The Chinese herd together as compactly as possible, both as regards living and sleeping-rooms and sleeping-accommodations.”111

Individual Chinese, especially laborers, had limited private spaces for cooking and relaxing. Just as Chinese boarding houses often provided food, many restaurants took in boarders. In San Francisco, many Chinese took advantage of such service provided by the restaurants for an average charge of $10 a month.¹¹² As the veteran Chinese missionary Otis Gibson reported in 1877, “Plain living in a common restaurant can be had by a Chinaman for eight dollars a month. Good living will cost from fifteen to twenty dollars a month, according to the ability of the boarder.”¹¹³

Chinatown restaurants also provided inexpensive food for the immigrant laborers. In the late 1870s, immigrants like Ah Quin could grab a supper for as little as 10 cents in San Francisco’s Chinatown; this was the same price as a theater ticket.¹¹⁴

Moreover, the restaurants gave the Chinese a place to socialize and recreate. In cities from New York and Washington, D.C., in the East to San Francisco in the West, white observers noted Chinese customers eating and relaxing in Chinese restaurants, and often characterized these restaurants as a “resort.” The Washington Post, for example, wrote in reference to a good Chinese restaurant that opened in the city in 1899: “This restaurant is the resort and meeting place of East Asiatics, living in the Capital, who, when they are not at their stations, are pretty certain to be in this little corner of Asia.”¹¹⁵ Feeling at home, relaxed and cheerful Chinese diners were often seen “talking loudly in their native tongue” while eating or “playing cards and dominoes and dice.”¹¹⁶

The restaurant was indeed a social resort for the Chinese. In an article about restaurants in San Francisco, Noah Brooks wrote in 1868: “The Chinese are social and cheerful in their habits. They seize every possible occasion for a feast, and the restaurants of the race in this city are almost constantly lighted up with the banquets of their numerous customers.”117 Gibson also noted that Chinese individuals enjoyed social dinners together in San Francisco’s Chinese restaurants. In New York, as Wong Chin Foo reported in 1888, the Chinese restaurants “are most thronged on Sunday, when the Chinese laundrymen of New York and neighboring cities come in for a general good time.”¹¹⁸ And good times and homey Cantonese food were what such establishments continued to offer. In the Chinese restaurants in Chicago’s Chinatown during the 1930s, as Paul Siu observed, “on every Sunday evening, the laundrymen dine together. These are the busiest hours of the week for the restaurant.”¹¹⁹

For Chinese as well as non-Chinese, culinary traditions constituted a critical element in both their consciousness and their daily lives. Chinese food traveled to America together with immigrants from China and remained a prominent fixture in Chinese communities. It was in urban Chinatowns that Chinese food took root on American soil and thrived during the time when it was shunned by the larger society. Chinatown food places gave Chinese immigrants not only familiar things to eat but also precious space for relaxation and social life. Forming the primary clientele of these places, Chinese customers supported and preserved Chinese food before launching it to non-Chinese markets.

Over time, as antagonism toward Chinese food began to lose its intensity, Chinatowns inspired non-Chinese Americans’ interest about Chinese food. One of the earliest comprehensive publications about Chinese food was a pamphlet issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture about the vegetables in Chinatown.¹²⁰ And it is also in Chinatown where many American consumers had their first taste of Chinese food.