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

Panda Drive in Huntington Beach was one of the first independently owned drive-through Chinese restaurants in California. After its brief initial success, however, business slid sharply. In the summer of 2004, its owner invited me to work with her to revamp the establishment. But the efforts to bring customers back were too late, and the restaurant eventually folded along with an otherwise refreshing food-business concept. I learned an important lesson firsthand: the creation of a successful restaurant hinges on the negotiations between the restaurateur and the clientele, and small-operation restaurants, in particular, must provide the kind of food and service that corresponds to the taste and lifestyle of the consumers. This lesson also helped me better understand the development of early Chinese restaurants, which were invariably small operations. In order to fully understand the making of Chinese food and its meaning, I investigate key players in the process: Chinese American food providers and their non-Chinese clientele.

The mushrooming of Chinese restaurants resulted from the strenuous efforts of Chinese Americans in promoting their food. At the same time, such restaurants would not have developed so extensively without the patronage of non-Chinese customers. While educating these new patrons about unfamiliar Chinese ingredients and utensils, Chinese restaurant workers also labored tirelessly and deliberately to accommodate and satisfy those patrons’ needs and preferences. The American Chinese food that rose to prominence in turn-of-the-century mainstream markets was shaped by the interplay between Chinese restaurant owners and their non-Chinese consumers.

Before discussing Chinese American players, we must look at several groups—the so-called slummers, African Americans, and Jews—who provided an indispensible customer base for the expanding Chinese restaurants. The social status of those three groups helps to further illustrate the point I made in chapter 2: Chinese Americans played an important role in extending the reach and meaning of American abundance and safeguarding the principle of democracy in the realm of consumption.

The making of American Chinese food was indeed a democratic process in the marketplace, and its spread was one of the most successful grassroots marketing stories in American history. This is a story of the business ingenuity of enterprising individual Chinese restaurateurs and food workers. Without a well-organized trade association or sales force, they turned Chinese food from a disdained and unfamiliar object to one of the most recognizable commodities in the budding mass-consumption market.

Moreover, promoting Chinese food often entailed combating racial prejudice. In popularizing their cuisine, then, Chinese Americans also defended their culture and freedom, thus advancing American political democracy.

The rising Chinese restaurants themselves constituted a democratizing force in the realm of public food consumption. In bringing Chinese food to the non-Chinese palate, they also served to fulfill the empire’s promises of a better lifestyle by providing meal services to the masses. If the Chinese domestic cooks helped to free white middle-class women from kitchen chores, now the expanding Chinese restaurants offered similar personal services to the less privileged, whose patronage, in turn, provided the critical support for their expansion.

Andrew P. Haley points out that it “was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the upper class’s influence over dining for pleasure was challenged.”1 By making restaurants accessible, the multiplying Chinese establishments fundamentally shook the old regime in gastronomy. Haley focuses on the middle class. Yet those Chinatown-touring members of the white middle class, whom scholars like Dean MacCannell associate with the ascent of mass tourism in this period, deserve only partial credit for the rise of Chinese food. They were more likely to have visited Chinatown as tour-wagon sightseers than as regular patrons at its restaurants. Frequenting Chinese dining places with much greater regularity—especially the non-showcase establishments—were the socially and racially underprivileged groups, including marginalized whites, the working class, immigrants, and racial minorities. In New York, for example, the ordinary Chinese restaurants were “patronized by the laboring classes and outlaws, and quite largely by the lower classes of white people who visit Chinatown for vicious purposes or mere curiosity.”² Noting the similar class backgrounds of Chinese restaurant-goers, the New York Sun reported that Chinatown “everywhere draws the very lowest of the white population towards the haunts of race considered inferior.” It also pointed out that many such whites lived on the fringes of Chinatown; they went at night to shop in the stores, visit the gambling houses, and “feast at the restaurants.”³

Such groups, who could not afford to join the more affluent crowd in globetrotting or lavish dining activities, found Chinatown and Chinese restaurants a convenient and exotic enough site for a leisure outing. For the elite of the country, French food was the best and most desired.⁴ The less fortunate, meanwhile, discovered Chinese food. As the New York Tribune explained in 1901, “So many, who, while possessed of a small share of this world’s goods, still affect ‘sportiness’ frequent the restaurant for its cheapness and grow to enjoyed the highly flavored dishes.”⁵ Eating in a Chinese restaurant thus became a memorable adventure. Arthur Chapman wrote in 1921 that “a meal of chop suey in New York’s Chinatown was an outstanding event. The thrill of forbidden surroundings and the taste of strange food combined to make an experience to be talked of as one of the real ventures to be found in New York.”⁶ In Chinatown and Chinese restaurants, non-middle-class groups found out that both travel to exotic cultural sites and the freedom from having to cook their own meals did not necessarily have to be the exclusive domains of the privileged. In Chinese restaurants, socially respectable guests sometimes found themselves among those “not far removed from the hobo class.” For these reasons, consuming Chinese food was a “truly democratic” experience, as the Washington Times remarked in 1903.⁷

For those who faced strong racial and cultural prejudice in society, socially and economically accessible Chinese restaurants provided not only an opportunity to eat out but also a space in which to socialize. Here, rebellious youth rendezvoused in defiance of traditional values and authorities, and Jews found a place to hang out on Christmas and indulge in “their love of discussion and debate” over what to select from the long menu.⁸

Such non-Chinese customers, in turn, extended Chinese food’s customer base far beyond the numerical constraints of the dwindling Chinese community, creating a vital condition for its explosive multiplication. Moreover, their preferences significantly predicated the nature of Chinese food that prevailed in non-Chinese neighborhoods.

Among the conspicuous Chinese-restaurant customers in the early years were the “slummers,” adventurous and rebellious city youth. Hungry for amusement and for social space, they turned slumming into a noticeable “trade” in the nascent Chinatown in Manhattan beginning in the late 1880s.9 For these young men and women, roaming Chinatown’s streets “without proper escort” was part of the excitement that came from evading the police, who would drive them away or even arrest them.¹⁰ Slummers frequented Chinese restaurants so often that some believed that “wickedness in New York thrives luxuriantly in an atmosphere of stewed chicken, bamboo sprouts and mushrooms.”¹¹ On April 14, 1918, New York police conducted an early-morning massive raid of thirty chop suey places, rounding up some two thousand people and taking three hundred of them to the police station. At least fifty of these youths on average were in each restaurant, showing how popular Chinese restaurants were among such customers. The district attorney’s office claimed that it had received one hundred letters from parents complaining that “their daughters have been lured to chop suey houses.”¹² In 1918, news of such arrests of “girls from 14 to 20 years in the tenderloin cafes, chop suey joints, and back rooms of saloons” reached the town of St. Joseph, Missouri. Disapproving of the behavior of such young women, the St. Joseph Observer stated that “girls ought to be obliged to be at home at 10 P.M.,” suggesting that it was “necessary to spank a girl for deliberate lies.”¹³

These insubordinate youths went to Chinatown restaurants to eat and, more important, to cultivate a social space for themselves. In Chicago, for example, “young girls with braids down their backs daily are escorted into” many chop suey joints “by boys wearing their first long trousers,” reported the Chicago Tribune in 1910.14 And this, of course, made chop suey restaurants a target for the police chief and the health commissioner. Young white women also frequented Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia early in the twentieth century. In 1916, Philadelphia police arrested six girls in a Chinese restaurant, accusing them of using heroin.¹⁵ The same year, a New York high-school teacher on a trip to Philadelphia went to a Chinese restaurant, where he saw about a dozen girls.¹⁶ Such young females apparently had a regular presence in Chinese restaurants. By 1903, slumming had become a fad in Washington, D.C., as the Washington Times reported that “a visit to a Chinese restaurant is looked upon as an excursion into Bohemia, a taste of slumming.”¹⁷

This trend also found its way into small cities, such as Portland, Maine, where in June 1908 the police searched a newly opened Chinese restaurant, the Canton Low, to look for a young and unescorted white girl. Instead of finding the girl, the police saw four Chinese laundrymen and arrested two on charges of opium smoking.¹⁸ By the end of the nineteenth century, similar kinds of customers frequented Chinese restaurants in Boston, prompting attempts to close these dining businesses after midnight or even “for good.”¹⁹

Part of the appeal of Chinese restaurants to the slummers and the like is that they stayed open late into the night. A newspaper report of Chinese restaurants in Philadelphia in 1890 stated that “they flourish in their chief glory after night falls, and from dark until two o’clock in the morning the flavor of Chinese hot soup fills the air.”²⁰ In the many Chinese chop suey joints in Brooklyn at the beginning of the twentieth century, “there is nothing doing until after midnight.”²¹ The Chinese restaurants in Washington, D.C., also did most of their business in the evening and at night. A report by the police chief of Los Angeles in 1906 indicated that “theatrical and sporting people” and other “night owls” had developed a “remarkable hunger for chop suey.”²² In San Francisco, Chinese restaurants had long been known to stay open late. These restaurants were also filled with noise from customers chatting and sometimes from the loud music played.

The late-night hours and loud noise in Chinese restaurants helped to create an inviting “free and easy” setting not only for rebellious youngsters. In New York City, these establishments also attracted the so-called bohemians, “as well as a goodly share of class below the lowest grades of the city’s many graded Bohemia,” in the words of the New York Tribune.²³ Rerunning the same report, newspapers in California announced in headlines that “Chopstick Dinner” was a fad.²⁴ These bohemians constituted a loyal clientele who not only dined in Chinese restaurants but also ordered takeout. “Few Bohemian gatherings are complete without a pail of chop suey, brought, fresh and hot, from Chinatown,” declared the New York Tribune in 1903.²⁵

Such visitors did not always make good customers, though. In 1898, two boys tried to run away without paying after eating dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Sacramento.26 Two years later at another Sacramento Chinese restaurant, one William Donnelly showed up looking penniless. When asked to pay in advance, he broke windows and beat the Chinese waiter. Finding him guilty, a white judge also declared that “any white man who would patronize a Chinese restaurant ought to be confined in jail on general principles.”²⁷

If the judge’s principles were to be followed, American cities would soon have run out of jail space because the popularity of Chinese food continued to grow among whites. It also caught on among non-white groups, most notably African Americans, and Jews. Patronage of Chinese restaurants by rebellious youth and bohemians involved a relatively limited number of people and was confined largely to Chinatown in major cities. And this represented a trend with a limited life span. Slumming in New York, for example, tapered off by the late 1910s and early 1920s, as police crackdowns intensified. In 1918, the New York Sun already referred to its heyday as the “old slumming days.”²⁸ African Americans and Jews, by comparison, created a much bigger and far more sustainable customer base for Chinese food.

African Americans already had established a noticeable presence in Chinese restaurants by the beginning of the twentieth century. The New York Tribune reported in 1901 that they frequented the city’s Chinese dining establishments “in disproportionately large numbers.” It went on, “They seem to like the Chinese, and, indeed, the noise in the kitchen reminds one of the similar condition of southern kitchens under negro management.”²⁹

The ambience was not the only reason that attracted them to the Chinese restaurant; it was one of the few public places that welcomed them. Racial and ethnic discrimination at public institutions like restaurants was rampant throughout the United States at this time. In response to such prejudice, in 1895 New York became one of the first states to enact a civil rights law, which tried to protect equal access to such places as “inns, restaurants, hotels, eating-houses.”³⁰ The law targeted, in particular, hotels and restaurants that usually closed their doors to Jews and African Americans. But that law had little substantive effect: until its amendment in 1913, victims of discrimination had to show proof of damage in court.³¹

White customers brought their prejudicial attitudes to Chinese restaurants. Quite often, such customers would walk away at the sight of African Americans dining in a Chinese restaurant. In order to keep their white patrons, sometimes snobbish Chinese restaurateurs put their African American customers in an “inconspicuous corner” with little or no service; a few even refused to welcome them altogether.32 In 1918, a lawsuit was filed against the proprietor of a Chinese restaurant in Worcester, Massachusetts, for its refusal to serve African Americans in the main dining room.³³ Some Chinese discriminated against African Americans in other ways as well. For example, in 1904 Suey Pang, the owner of a chop suey restaurant on Sixth Avenue in New York, attempted to charge an African American real-estate agent named W. Nathaniel Walker $2.50 for a 25-cent chop suey. When Walker insisted on being served, Pang, who was waiting on two white messenger boys, called him a nigger and hit him with a club. The magistrate, who fined Pang $5, also reminded him of his racial position. “As a Chinaman,” he scolded the Chinese man, “you are scarcely a fit person to set yourself up as a judge between respectable colored business men and white messenger boys.”³⁴

But overall, a close relationship evolved between Chinese food and African Americans. In St. Louis, African Americans were among the regular “devotees” of Hop Alley, where Chinese restaurants and other businesses clustered.³⁵ The African American–Chinese food connection persisted in subsequent decades in St. Louis as well as elsewhere.³⁶

In some cities, Chinese restaurateurs took their restaurants to African American communities, such as Harlem, where the presence of Chinese food increased visibly in the early twentieth century. Wallace Thurman, a well-known Harlem Renaissance novelist, wrote in 1927 that “Negroes seem to have a penchant for Chinese food—there are innumerable Chinese restaurants all over Harlem.”³⁷

The long and sometimes ambivalent relationship between Chinese food and African American communities remains palpable in St. Louis. This was first brought to my attention by Malcolm Gay, an energetic and insightful reporter for the River Front Times of St. Louis. He called me in 2006 to discuss an article that he was researching on the chop suey houses in St. Louis. From my conversations with him and the article he published subsequently, I learned that there are still forty or fifty such restaurants in St. Louis, almost all exclusively in African American communities. Even though African Americans by and large support Chinese restaurants, they also harbor discernible resentment to the Chinese, seeing them as non-contributing outsiders. In the early twentieth-first century in St. Louis, a sign inside a now-closed African American–owned tavern, Gino’s Lounge, reveals such resentments: “No Chinese food.”

The chop suey joints that have persisted in St. Louis’s African American neighborhoods not merely are a reminder of Chinese food’s initial popularity among the underprivileged but also bear evidence of the transformation that Chinese food has gone through over time. Many now offer a locally famous new product: the St. Paul sandwich. “Comprising an egg foo young patty, slice of tomato, pickle and iceberg lettuce sandwiched between two slices of mayonnaise-laden white bread,” it is hardly a direct gastronomical offspring of chop suey.38 And the face of the city’s Chinese community has also changed. When I visited St. Louis in 2003, the city’s Hop Alley Chinatown was long gone. A local Chinese couple, Mr. and Mrs. Law, took me to Olive Street, where a cluster of food businesses, including several Chinese restaurants, had shown up. On Saturdays and Sundays, a large number of Chinese customers come for restaurant dining and grocery shopping, turning the usually quiet street into a busy weekend Chinatown.

The itinerary of first-time visitors to the United States usually includes New York, the heart of Western capitalism, whose skyscrapers have symbolized American material abundance for more than a century. But those who have already been to New York and would like to take an in-depth look at this country should also pay a visit to Detroit. Its development has been closely pegged with profound transformative moments in the evolution of the United States into an empire. Detroit’s rapid growth beginning in the late nineteenth century coincided with America’s expansion in manufacturing and global power. It then evolved into the heart and soul of the once-storied American automobile industry, which radically transformed American life and redefined the American dream in the twentieth century. A long and steady decline has now turned it into what Harper’s characterized in 2009 as “the wreck of the America dream.”³⁹ Besides its glorious history, there is still another good reason to go there: an abundance of Chinese restaurants in African American neighborhoods.

“If, like me, you’re a Detroit native who recently went home to find out what went wrong, your first instinct is to weep,” wrote Daniel Okrent in 2009.⁴⁰ I, too, found the sight of pervasive urban decay profoundly disheartening when I spent a few days in Detroit in 2011, driving through various neighborhoods and strolling through the streets. But if, like me, you are searching for evidence of African Americans’ lasting connection with Chinese food, you will not be disappointed in Detroit.

Unlike San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, Detroit is not particularly known for its Chinese food, but Chinese food in that city has a long history. Before its demolition in the 1950s, Detroit’s Chinatown boasted such famous restaurants as Henry Yee’s Forbidden City.41 The New Life Chop Suey restaurant at 13991 Gratiot Avenue made the list of the Chinese establishments that the cookbook writer Wallace Yee Hong recommended in the early 1950s.⁴² By the 1920s, Chinese food had extended beyond Detroit’s Chinatown. As evidence of the popularity of Chinese cooking in the city, a Korean American from Hawaii, Yang Yi Jhung, opened a chop suey and chow mein wholesale business in Detroit.⁴³

Syd Pollock, the owner and promoter of the old Indianapolis-Cincinnati Clowns, took his son Alan to their “favorite Chinese restaurant” in downtown Detroit in the summer of 1953 when the African American touring baseball team played there.⁴⁴ Several of the African American customers I interviewed in Detroit also indicated that they had been regularly eating Chinese food for many years. Inside the Great Wall Chinese restaurant, a stand-alone structure on the edge of downtown, a cab driver in his late fifties told me while waiting for his food, “I cannot even remember when I first started going to Chinese restaurants. It was a long time ago.” Another longtime regular consumer of Chinese food is a retired policeman, who has lived in Detroit for many years after emigrating from Jamaica.

In spite of their physical proximity, cultural and class differences have erected a palpable wall separating African American consumers from their Chinese-food providers. The Great Wall had a dining area, but it was very small, with only a couple of tables, and none of the African American customers sat down to eat or chatted with the chef and waitress during my stay there. Several other Chinese restaurants—such as Paradise Chop Suey on Grand River Avenue, a family business of more than thirty years—that served African American consumers had no chairs and no tables. Golden Bowl Chop Suey on McNichols Road West is an even more extreme example, where all the customers I observed were African American. Bearing little resemblance to our conventional concept of a restaurant, its storefront is fortified with heavy, black, iron bars. Inside, customers place their orders and take their food through a window. Such limited contact between operators of Chinese-food places and their patrons helps to explain why some African Americans feel that Chinese restaurants are in their community but are not part of it. Some Chinese restaurant workers do not identify with the community either. The chef in one restaurant, an illegal immigrant who had paid $50,000 for his voyage from Changle County in Fujian Province, referred to his African American customers derogatively as “black ghosts” (heigui).⁴⁵

Standing in sharp contrast with chop suey places serving African Americans are Chinese restaurants in white communities in suburban cities. One such city is Taylor, about eighteen miles from Detroit, named after President Zachary Taylor, whose 1850 funeral parade in San Francisco included Chinese participants. Eighty-seven percent of Taylor’s population is white, according to 2010 federal census data; by comparison, Detroit’s population is almost 83 percent African American.46 In Taylor’s Chinese restaurants like Panda Gardens on Telegraph Road, a large full-service establishment, most of the customers are white. During my lunch at this restaurant, some customers were engaged in conversations with the waitresses, and they appeared to know each other quite well. The restaurant also offers a long list of alcoholic beverages, including wines, beers, and cocktails. The differences in terms of the physical environment, service style, and range of foods between the Chinese restaurant in suburbia and its counterpart in African American communities reminds us that American Chinese food was shaped by negotiated interactions between restaurant operators and their varied consumers.

We have yet to fully explore the depth and extent of the African American– Chinese food connection. Evidence suggests that in cities across the country in the first half of the twentieth century, African Americans constituted a significant portion of Chinese restaurants’ customer base. In 1930s Philadelphia, for example, it was estimated that African Americans accounted for 60 percent of the consumers at the Chinese restaurants.⁴⁷

Eastern European Jews were another group that patronized Chinese restaurants in large numbers. Compared with the African American case, the Jewish connection to Chinese food is more clearly documented—and it has been a strong and persistent relationship.

More than ten years ago, a close Jewish friend of mine went to Europe on a family vacation, and before long, one of his boys wanted to return home to southern California because he missed the Chinese food there. This story reveals changes in both American cultural identity and the meaning of American Chinese food; it also reminds us of the long association between Chinese food and American Jews. A saga in cultural crossing, the Jewish–Chinese food connection is an important chapter in the development of American Chinese food.

A large exodus of Jews from eastern Europe started in the late nineteenth century. From 1880 to 1920, 2.5 million eastern European Jews left Europe, and probably as many as 90 percent of them emigrated to the United States.48 Many settled in New York, where the Jewish population increased from 80,000 in 1880 to 1.25 million—or more than 25 percent of the city’s population—in 1910.⁴⁹ By the end of the nineteenth century, going to Chinese restaurants had become a routine for many Jewish families. In 1899, the New York–based magazine American Hebrew warned that the food served in Chinese restaurants and food places in basements and stores was perhaps not as kosher as it claimed to be.⁵⁰ But the trend of patronizing Chinese restaurants continued to grow. In 1928, an article in Der Tog, a Yiddish daily published in New York, characterized that trend as “the war between chop suey and gefillte fish.”⁵¹ The war was won by Chinese-food lovers, who sustained the practice over the decades, turning it into a great Jewish American tradition.

For example, in the 1920s Patricia Volk’s grandmother took her mother to a Chinese restaurant on West 181st Street regularly on Thursdays when the family housekeeper had the day off.⁵² Vicky, a second-generation Jewish American born to immigrant parents from Romania, grew up in the Bronx in the 1930s. She remembers going to Chinese restaurants as a special treat, an adventure, and a rebellion: “We would go to have Chinese food, and then go to the movies afterwards … on Saturdays, Saturday afternoon. And then, as we got a little older, in the late teens when there were periods of rebellion, to show that we were becoming sophisticated, we would eat shrimp in Chinese food.”⁵³ Sandye is another Jewish woman from the Bronx, where she grew up in a Jewish neighborhood during the 1940s and 1950s. Her parents took her to a Chinese restaurant in her neighborhood once a month, usually on Sundays. For her and the Jews she knew as a child, Chinese cuisine was “the most popular, acceptable non-Jewish food.”⁵⁴ She loved Chinese food so much that her mother said jokingly that she had a Chinese great-grandmother. When she was in college and started dating, she and her fiancé, Bruce, would go to Chinatown for more authentic Chinese food.⁵⁵

The Jewish–Chinese food connection became a family tradition and was passed on through generations. During the long courtship of Patricia Volk’s parents, they dined in Chinese restaurants many times. When Volk was seven, it became a regular three-generation family event to make Sunday dinner trips to the old Ruby Foo’s on West Fifty-second Street, a restaurant that she still remembers in the early twentieth-first century. When she was old enough, she went to Chinese restaurants with her kosher-keeping paternal grandmother, who “would put on sunglasses and hat and look both ways.”

Gradually, more and more Jews took Chinese food home—not just takeouts from restaurants but also ingredients for making it in their own kitchens. Chinese cooking quietly found its way into cookbooks written by Jews. Perhaps the most famous Jewish cookbook author was Lizzie Black Kander, a native of Milwaukee. In 1896, she founded the Settlement House, where she offered popular cooking classes to Jewish immigrants. In 1901, she published The “Settlement” Cook Book, written as a textbook for her classes, and this extremely popular cookbook includes a chop suey recipe.56 Betty Dean’s The New Jewish Cook Book (1947) shows a noticeable Chinese flavor and offers chicken chop suey recipes and a whole section on soybean dishes.⁵⁷ The Rochester Hadassah Cook Book (1976), compiled by a group of Jewish women in Rochester, New York, to memorialize their community, contains recipes like “easy chop suey.”⁵⁸ Many Jews cooked Chinese food at home, as Sandye did regularly—so regularly that, she said in an interview, her son must have believed that Chinese food was part of the Jewish tradition as a child. Indeed, eating Chinese has become an important tradition by Jewish Americans in many different cities.

Several Jewish informants and friends who grew up or lived in other cities—such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles—told me that they ate Chinese food on a regular basis. It is also a practice that Jews in small towns experienced. My good friend Richard, an Orange County Jewish American who does business with China, vividly remembers going to the Paradise Chinese restaurant while he was growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, in the 1960s and 1970s. In the summer of 2012, he recalled his past food experience over lunch: “The food there was not as good as here, but it was the only Chinese restaurant in town.” Allon came from a lower-middle-class family, and his father never went beyond the seventh grade. Growing up in Cleveland Heights in the 1930s and early 1940s before he attended Yale, Allon regularly went to his favorite Chinese restaurant. He gave two reasons for his passion about Chinese food: it is cheap and delicious.

Long-standing interest and curiosity have led many Jews to travel to China in search of culinary authenticity in the years since Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. The decades-old family tradition of dining in Chinese restaurants made Patricia Volk wonder what food was like in China. On a trip there, she even brought a menu from a Sichuan restaurant in New York with her, only to discover that the food in China did not bear much resemblance to the fare in her local Chinese establishment.

Sandye and Bruce went to Hong Kong in the 1960s and to China in the 1980s, with curiosity about food in China. But when she first got to Beijing, she was somewhat disappointed because “it did not smell like wonton soup and laundry.” In the Bronx neighborhood where she spent much of her childhood, there was a Chinese laundry on Tremont Avenue, not far from the Chinese restaurant she frequented. It was also the smell that she associates with Chinatown, which, she said, “still gives me a feeling of comfort and belonging.”59

This close connection with Chinese food has certainly become part of the Jewish American folklore. Vicky has lived in southern California for many years with her husband, Milt, who served in the U.S. Army Air Forces in China during World War II. A warm and funny man, he was also an avid lover of Chinese food. In the early 1990s, Vicky and Milt invited me to give a talk in their community about Chinese food and helped me to get acquainted with the local gastronomical landscape. One day, when we were sitting in a Chinese restaurant in Westminster in southern California, he said to me: “The Jewish calendar goes back to about 5,700 years ago, and the Chinese calendar goes back to about 4,600 years ago. Do you know what that means?” Before I had time to respond, he went on with a big smile, “It means the Jews went without Chinese food for more than 1,000 years.” In time, I realized that this is a popular Jewish tale told on various occasions—in newspaper stories, Talmud classes, scholarly publications, and dinner conversations.⁶⁰

The wide circulation of similar stories and jokes about the Jewish–Chinese food connection reveals and reinforces its importance in Jewish American identity. People who have watched the film My Favorite Year (1982) might remember a line that the protagonist, a young Jewish writer, said to his non-Jewish date: “Katherine, Jews know two things: suffering, and where to find great Chinese food.” As Matthew Goodman recalled in 1999, Billy Crystal, a Jewish native of Long Beach, New York, once said to the host of a late-night talk show: “I’ll tell you, the other night I was feeling Jewish. I mean really Jewish. You know how Jewish I felt?” Crystal explained, “I ordered takeout Chinese food—that’s how Jewish I felt.”⁶¹ The popular comedy-drama television series, Gilmore Girls, which debuted early in 2000, had an episode called “Jews and Chinese Food.”

Around the end of 2011, two Jewish friends alerted me to a handwritten message on a photographed sign posted online. It reads: “The Chinese Rest. Assoc. of the United States would like to extend our thanks to The Jewish People. We do not completely understand your dietary customs. … But we are proud and grateful that your GOD insists you eat our food on Christmas.” Through email, the message reached Stuart Schoffman, a fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute and the editor of Havruta: A Journal of Jewish Conversation, who realized that it was a cartoon by the writer David Mamet. Nevertheless, as Schoffman writes, “this one touches the soul, pierces to the heart of the matter, and also tickles the taste buds, at a critical moment in Jewish history.”⁶²

Kung Pao (Gongbao) Chicken

Serves 4

Turn-of-the-twentieth-century American Chinese food was shaped by the negotiation between Chinese restaurant owners and their customers. It has continued to evolve. Today, Kung Pao has replaced chop suey as the most popular line of dishes on restaurant menus. It is Sichuan in origin and is allegedly named after a Sichuan governor in late Qing: Ding Baozhen, whose title was Gongbao (Palace Guardian).* Kung Pao chicken is the most popular among all Kung Pao dishes.^†

2 lbs boneless and skinless chicken breast, cut into ¼-inch cubes

2½ tbsp soy sauce

4 tbsp cornstarch

2 tbsp water

2 tbsp rice wine

2 tbsp salad oil

12 dried red chili peppers

several dashes ground Sichuan peppercorn

1 garlic clove, thinly sliced

1 tsp chopped green onion

3 slices of fresh ginger

½ cup roasted unsalted peanuts

3 tbsp bean sauce (doubanjiang)^‡

1 tsp sugar

Marinate the chicken in the mixed soy sauce, cornstarch, water, and rice wine for 1 hour. Heat the oil in a wok on high heat. Add the chili peppers, ground peppercorn, garlic, green onion, and ginger. Stir for 20 seconds without burning them. Add the marinated chicken and stir until the meat is almost cooked. Add the peanuts, bean sauce, and sugar. Stir to thoroughly mix for 2 to 3 minutes without overcooking the meat.

*Wu Zhenge “Gongbao Ji Ding Tan Yuan” (Exploring the Origins of Gongbao Chicken), Zhongguo Shi Pin (China Food) 6 (1986): 38–39.

^†Buwei Yang Chao called this dish “chicken cubelets” in How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (New York: Day, 1945).

^‡ Use Pixian doubanjiang if possible.

Chinese food has become an important part of Jewish American consciousness, and it has grown to be an integral element of the Jewish American community, as Chinese restaurants followed the Jews to uptown neighborhoods, to the boroughs, and to the suburbs. Gaye Tuchman and Harry Gene Levine pointed out in a well-researched and thoughtful article, “In most Jewish neighborhoods, Chinese restaurants outnumber Jewish delis. In most non-Chinese ethnic neighborhoods, the Chinese restaurants tend to be small and modest or simply store fronts selling only take-out food. But neighborhoods with many Jews (or Chinese or Korean) possess more Chinese restaurants and more large fancy ones.”63 Many Jews know this from their own experiences. Eleanor, who went to Chinese restaurants once a week while growing up in the 1930s in New York, said to me in 2000, “You can tell whether it is a Jewish neighborhood or not by the number of Chinese restaurants.”⁶⁴

The deep and lasting relationship between Chinese food and Jews was forged by a multitude of factors. Various people point to similarities between Chinese and Jewish cooking. Mimi Sheraton, the former New York Times food critic, noted “a shared taste for chicken soup, tea and dishes seasoned with garlic, celery and onion.”⁶⁵ Sandye remembers that her mother cooked a lot of chicken. And Chinese food, like kosher cooking, does not “mix meat with milk.”⁶⁶ But it also features pork and shellfish—early operators of Chinese restaurants were seafood-loving Cantonese. These were unfamiliar, forbidden, and even repulsive foods to the Jewish palate, including that of many non-kosher Jews. Tuchman and Levine mention another factor: eastern European Jews had the motivation and skills to “explore and adapt to their new urban environment.”⁶⁷ But, again, this alone does not sufficiently explain why Jews chose Chinese instead of other cuisines, such as French, which appeared excitingly exotic to several of my informants.

The most fundamental motivation for eastern European Jews to eat in Chinese restaurants stemmed from their desire to be American.68 This is not simply because Chinese food appeared American or cosmopolitan, as Tuchman and Levine have emphasized; it was that Chinese food represented a divergence, often a deliberate one, from traditional Jewish ways. Sandye recalls that her family kept a kosher kitchen, “but somehow you were allowed to go Sunday to the Chinese restaurant and eat a lot of pork.” Her father was more concerned about keeping kosher than was her mother. When he did not come home for dinner, her mother would buy non-kosher food, and they would eat out of the bag that contained the food so that the pots, pans, and plates in the house would not be polluted. At the age of twelve, when she realized the contradiction in this practice, she said to her parents: “It is interesting: our kitchen is kosher but our toilet is not.”⁶⁹

More important, going to Chinese restaurants meant a change and improvement in lifestyle, a milestone in the Jews’ pursuit of the American dream. As people like Sandye and Vicky remember, going to a Chinese restaurant represented a special event for many Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. In the early twentieth century, dining out became an increasingly imperative part of the white middle-class lifestyle and a very American thing to do in the eyes of the Jews. Eastern European Jews harbored strong aspirations to move up the social ladder and, in fact, achieved the highest rate of upward occupational mobility among all new immigrant groups.⁷⁰ It is not surprising that more and more Jews also wanted to live like middle-class Americans and join the expanding American dining-out crowd.

Nonetheless, their options were limited. French food was too expensive, and some found it too rich. By the 1930s, Italian restaurants had entered some Jewish communities, such as Vicky’s childhood neighborhood in the Bronx; in addition, Italian food was cheap, like Chinese food in the 1940s and into the 1950s as several informants remembered. But a number of factors caused Chinese food, rather than Italian, to become Jews’ chosen ethnic cuisine.

First, with a much larger ethnic consumer base, Italian restaurateurs did not have the same need to branch out as the Chinese did. In 1910, for example, there were more than 340,000 natives of Italy but only 3,904 Chinese immigrants in New York City.⁷¹ And for the small Chinese community, with virtually no other occupational options beyond the few service industries like the laundry business, the budding restaurant industry, which offered better pay than laundry work, looked like a golden opportunity.⁷² The Chinese made strenuous and successful efforts to capitalize on the new trend, turning Chinese food into an extremely popular cuisine throughout the nation in spite of a continued decrease in their population. Arthur Chapman noted in 1921 that “in New York City Chinese cooking has made more rapid headway than any other kind—and that despite the lack of increase in the Chinese population here.”⁷³ Chinese restaurants stood as a steady source of employment for Chinese Americans, including newcomers. Even Chinese students, who came to study in American universities from the 1950s to the early 1990s, often worked in Chinese restaurants to help fund their education.

The next three factors are simpler: Chinese restaurants carried much less dairy food; they stayed open on Sundays and Christmas Day; and they had no Christian iconography and no anti-Semitic antagonism.

Another factor is perhaps the most important and complex: Jews could feel “American” in Chinese restaurants more than they could in Italian establishments. The Irish, who faced strong ethnic prejudice on the East Coast, migrated to the West and “whitened” their ethnicity by positioning themselves as the opposing “other” of the racial minorities there, especially the Chinese.74 The Jews became American in Chinese restaurants. They never harbored the same anti-Chinese hostility as did the Irish, and no evidence suggests that large numbers of Jews went to Chinese restaurants as a so-called whitening act. But for many, eating Chinese did indeed represent an acculturating and Americanizing experience. If Chinese food stood as “safe treyf” to Jewish eyes, then Chinese restaurants offered a safe social space.⁷⁵ Here Jews could feel secure and American in the presence of the Chinese, who seemed to speak less English and certainly did not resemble white Americans. Alexander Portnoy in Philip Roth’s celebrated novel, for example, thought the Chinese in Chinese restaurants saw Jews as white or even “Anglo Saxon.”⁷⁶

Besides eating Chinese, Jews in New York wrought their new American identity by being Democrats and Brooklyn Dodgers fans. Compared with the latter two, eating Chinese was a much less pronounced act, especially in the beginning. People like Patricia Volk call the Jewish bond with Chinese food a love affair, but it was kept almost a secret for many years. “Memoirs and autobiographies of the immigrant era made few reference to eating Chinese food,” Hasia Diner concludes, likely because it touched on an important Jewish taboo.77 Equally important, association with the food of a perceived inassimilable people would not advance the image of the Americanness of those eager to settle and succeed in the New World. Thus many Jews kept a discernible mental detachment from the Chinese restaurants and food physically located so close to them. Some referred to eating Chinese as “eating chinks.” The phrase did not necessarily constitute a consciously derogative term, as several of my informants recall. But it does reveal an awareness among some Jews of the socioeconomic and cultural distance between them and the Chinese. Moreover, there is little indication that many Jewish diners developed any close personal relationships with Chinese restaurant workers. Among the many Jewish people who have shared with me their Chinese-food experiences, few remember the names of their neighborhood Chinese restaurant or the people who worked there. While it is undoubtedly attributable to the passage of time, this memory lapse also suggests that like the laundry shop nearby, the Chinese restaurant signified little more than a place for affordable and convenient service. Going there represented a desire to become American and middle class rather than to associate with the Chinese.

When I met him in the summer of 2009, Max still remembered his experience working as a Chinese restaurant waiter in a New York Jewish neighborhood during the late 1960s. But it was not a fond memory because he felt as if he had been treated like a robot. The customers seldom had a real conversation with him. “When they needed something, they just waved their index finger at me and said ‘give this or that,’” he recalled.

Nevertheless, persistent Jewish support was critical for the rise of Chinese food, especially in East Coast cities, where the number of Chinese restaurants quickly multiplied early in the twentieth century. In the early 1930s, some Chinese knowledgeable about the restaurant business in New York and Philadelphia estimated that Jews accounted for 60 percent of the white clientele at their establishments in the two cities.⁷⁸ But the Jewish connection to Chinese food is by no means merely a story of Jews wanting Chinese food. Chinese restaurateurs made extraordinary efforts to make their food available to Jews. They did so by keeping their restaurants open at Christmastime, giving Jews a place to go on the Christian holiday. And they also delivered their food to Jewish neighborhoods and to individual customers. In 1935, Eng Shee Chuck, a Chinese restaurant owner in Newark, New Jersey, did more than that. He and his relatives prepared eighty chow mein dinners and eighty toys with red ribbons. He took the food and toys to the Jewish Children’s Hospital, where he told Jewish children ancient Chinese fairy tales.⁷⁹

The making of American Chinese food entailed more than effective business strategies, though. The efforts to promote Chinese food closely intersected with the long-standing political campaign of the Chinese community to combat persistent racial prejudice. If that campaign had had a Medal of Honor to award, it would have undoubtedly gone to Wong Chin Foo. In many ways, he was the East Coast counterpart of Norman Assing. He moved to New York in 1874, about a quarter century after Assing’s arrival in San Francisco.⁸¹ Like Assing, Wong was an energetic and high-profile community leader, visible in various affairs, ranging from creating a Chinese theater to mediating financial disputes among fellow Chinese.⁸² And he was also a complex person, constantly involved in disputes and sometimes even physical fights with fellow Chinese; the naturalized U.S. citizen once worked as a Chinatown tour guide and as an agent to help U.S. authorities to catch Chinese smugglers of immigrants and opium into the United States.⁸³

Wong Chin Foo embodied the connection between efforts to promote Chinese food and the Chinese community’s campaign to defend its rights and freedom. Like Assing, he was a fearless and tireless civil rights fighter, establishing the Chinese Equal Rights League in 1892 and representing his countrymen as a court interpreter and the like. While Assing’s arena remained largely local, Wong brought the Chinese struggle for justice to a national level through his extensive writings in high-profile newspapers and magazines. He introduced Chinese culture to wide and diverse audiences in his public lectures across the country. Although a victim of racist violence on numerous occasions,⁸⁴ he was never intimidated but was always ready to confront it head-on. He once challenged Denis Kearney to a duel, eventually defeating the famous anti-Chinese agitator in a debate.⁸⁵ Many have called Wong a “true American hero.”⁸⁶

Although Wong never owned a restaurant, he was Chinese food’s first ambassador. A media heavyweight, who commanded a rate of $500 per public lecture by the 1880s, he drew considerable public attention to Chinese food.87 Respected as an “authority” on Chinese food, his comments and articles appeared, sometimes repeatedly, in numerous newspapers throughout the country.⁸⁸ Besides introducing the basic features, popular dishes, and utensils in Chinese cookery, he also defended it against prevailing negative perceptions, offering a $500 reward for hard evidence of Chinese eating rats and cats.⁸⁹ Sharing the fate of Assing, Wong faded away from the pubic eye, making the rest of the life of this versatile, colorful activist and food promoter a mystery forever.

In dealing with an unfriendly and often hostile environment, Chinese Americans organized various public-relations events, using food as an effective tool. Community leaders frequently invited prominent whites to lavish banquets. Samuel Bowles, a Massachusetts journalist, who traveled to the West with U.S. House Speaker Schuyler Colfax in 1865, noted that the “managers of the six Chinese companies and the leading Chinese merchants of San Francisco all hold friendly relations with the leading citizens and public men of California. Occasionally, when distinguished people are visiting here, they extend to them the courtesy of a grand Chinese dinner.”⁹⁰ When Colfax arrived in San Francisco, Chinese leaders held in his honor a long and elaborate banquet, which consisted of three stages with multiple courses in each. In 1907, Boston’s Chinese merchants hosted a banquet dinner in Chinatown for the governor, lieutenant governor, and governor’s council.⁹¹

Ordinary Chinese also did the same. In 1877, three hundred Chinese employees at Lewis Brothers, a tobacco import company, hosted an annual banquet for their white employers and colleagues as well as twenty other white guests at the luxurious Hung Fer Low (also spelled Hong Fer Low) restaurant in San Francisco. Considering the food habits of their guests, the Chinese hosts ordered various Western dishes; but they did not miss the opportunity to introduce their own cuisine, providing chopsticks as well as “pyramids of indescribable Chinese entrees.”92 When reporters and other curious whites requested Chinese companionship for a dinner in a Chinese restaurant, the Chinese readily complied. On one such occasion in 1859, three white men asked Lee Kan to join them for a Chinese meal.⁹³ Lee was a famous interpreter in San Francisco’s Chinatown, who had attended a missionary school in China and worked as the Chinese-language editor of the Oriental, a bilingual newspaper published by the Reverend William Speer. Lee also managed to bring to the dinner a successful Chinese merchant and the head of the Siyi Huigan, one of the so-called Chinese Six Companies (Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association). Chinese restaurateurs also entertained white guests, joining the community’s public-relations campaign while publicizing their businesses at the same time. In New York, for example, three Chinese businessmen invited Mayor William L. Strong to dedicate their new restaurants in 1895.⁹⁴

The following example best indicates the extensive involvement of the community in promoting its culture and food. In January 1883, less than a year after the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law, the Chinese celebrated the lunar New Year loudly and proudly in Santa Barbara. They published a public notice in the local paper, inviting everyone to join the celebration, during which they offered Chinese food to the visitors.⁹⁵ This “Chinatown open house” type of public-relations strategy would be used more often and more widely in the 1930s and 1940s.

Occasionally, the Chinese went to mainstream venues to promote their community and food. From June 1 to June 12, 1899, for example, Chinese New Yorkers conducted a Chinese fair in the Grand Central Palace.⁹⁶ Intended as a public-relations stunt, its purpose was to demonstrate Chinese Americans’ advancement in “Western education and customs.”⁹⁷ And it also included an extensive food show with a hundred kinds of different Chinese foods.⁹⁸

Furthermore, the Chinese promoted Chinatown and their food by appropriating attempts to exoticize their culture. Despite public negativity and animosity, the Chinese never lost their pride in their culture. Over time they trumpeted their cultural uniqueness in a deliberate effort to capitalize on the thickening tourist traffic. They turned the tourist favorites, such as the theaters, restaurants, and temples, into visually impressive cultural artifacts. These buildings, in the words of G. B. Densmore, “are fancifully decorated and illuminated on their balconies and upper stories during the evening, and Chinese lanterns of all sizes and shapes flutter and flicker in front of all public places.”99 Among them, the upscale restaurants were the most visible, leaving a deep impression on contemporary white observers. In New York at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, according to Louis Joseph Beck, “the most gorgeously decorated and illuminated buildings in Chinatown are those occupied by these restaurants.”¹⁰⁰ These restaurants were usually on the upper floors in three- or four-story buildings that were “gaudily painted in deep green with red and gilt trimmings. Chinese lanterns are suspended in reckless profusion from every available point.”¹⁰¹ When Chinese restaurants spread to other parts of the city, they did so “without flourish of trumpets but with considerable gilding and decoration,”¹⁰² carrying with them what Arthur Bonner characterizes as “pseudo-Oriental glitter.”¹⁰³

Decorating Chinese restaurants with the same glitter for the visual consumption of customers became a common practice among Chinese restaurateurs across the country. The New York Chinese restaurant view depicted by Beck bears striking similarities to Otis Gibson’s description of a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco during the 1870s: “Here is a three-storied building, with balconies on the second and third stories, gaudily painted with deep green, and trimmed with red. A profusion of Chinese lanterns suspended in these balconies helps to give the place a peculiarly Oriental appearance.”¹⁰⁴ Ira Miller Condit, a veteran missionary both in China and among the Chinese in California, never seemed to have developed a penchant for Chinese food or an appreciation of the Chinese passion for food, but he recalled in his memoir the physical appearance of Chinese restaurants as visually “notable institutions”: “They are three-story buildings, having balconies gaily painted and gilded, with an array of great lanterns hanging in rows.”¹⁰⁵ An article published in the Cornhill Magazine concluded that in San Francisco’s Chinatown, “the restaurants are the largest and most attractively fitted [and] painted buildings.”¹⁰⁶

Chinese restaurateurs and workers also made the Chinese motif a conspicuous feature in the interior of upscale restaurants. In 1877, Harper’s Weekly published a large drawing of the interior of a San Francisco Chinese restaurant, which “is richly decorated with carvings in wood, gorgeously painted and gilded; Chinese lamps depend from the ceiling; quaint paintings and inscriptions adorn the walls; and a stranger might almost fancy himself transported to the Celestial Empire.”¹⁰⁷ The famous Hong Fer Low restaurant emerged as a favorite of tourists in the late nineteenth century. It “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.”¹⁰⁸

In Philadelphia’s Chinese restaurants in 1890, many white patrons noticed distinctively Chinese features in the interior: “The walls are hung closely with strips of crimson paper, bearing characters in black and gold. Red curtains hang at the windows, and red draping depends from the mirror frames.”¹⁰⁹ Red was a favorite color of the Chinese for “every joyful occasion.”¹¹⁰ Over time, the interior of many restaurants in Chinatown remained conspicuously red, giving an impression of “almost like a Buddhist Temple.”¹¹¹

Such a conspicuously Chinese motif had existed long before non-Chinese diners flocked to Chinese restaurants. As non-Chinese patronage grew, however, this motif became a deliberate attempt to satisfy non-Chinese customers’ curiosity about the distant and exotic “Far East.” In the five restaurants that catered to non-Chinese clientele in New York’s Chinatown in 1919, for example, “the walls have tapestry and the lights are shrouded in fantastic shades.”112 And over the years, such ornamentation became more accentuated, acquiring new elements, such as colored pictures of “pretty Chinese girls.”¹¹³

Chinese restaurateurs and workers also made every attempt to ensure that their customers could feel and see the cleanliness of their restaurants—not a trivial matter in those days. Long associated with religious and social notions of purity, cleanliness in food had always been important. In turn-of-the century America, it was critical for attracting non-Chinese visitors for two specific reasons. First, this could help to overcome a rampant perception that the Chinese were filthy, producing the particular Chinese “odor” and spreading contagious diseases. Second, it resonated with a growing sanitation consciousness in American society, which is evidenced by the highly publicized investigative reports by activists like Jacob Riis.¹¹⁴

To compete for the slumming business, the New York Sun reported in 1896 that Chinatown restaurant owners “have cleaned up their places and made attempts at decoration”¹¹⁵ As early as 1903, the journalist Harriet Quimby noted their deliberate strategy to give “evidence that everything is done in a cleanly manner.”¹¹⁶ Indeed, cleanliness soon became a trademark in Chinese restaurants.

Inside the restaurants, the “eating rooms are kept with scrupulous cleanness, and no unusual dirt will be found in the kitchens.”117 Beginning in the late 1880s, some Chinese restaurants, such as Been Hong in New York,¹¹⁸ had an open kitchen so that customers could see that “the food is prepared in an extremely cleanly manner.”¹¹⁹ In fact, the Chinese established a reputation that “Chinese kitchens are as clean as many a white tiled dairy,” which the New York Tribune listed in 1903 as one of the reasons for the growing popularity of Chinese restaurants.¹²⁰ An article in the San Diego Union in 1887 noted that the Chinese restaurant environment was “clean, neat, and attractive.”¹²¹ In other cities, such as San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., white seekers of Chinese food—including those who had reported odors in Chinese restaurants—generally agreed that these establishments were cleanly kept, and this remained a feature of Chinese restaurants.¹²² In a book about New York’s restaurants, George S. Chappell wrote that “Chinese restaurants are everywhere, most of them clean and attractive.”¹²³ J. S. Tow, secretary of the Chinese Consulate General in New York, who had studied the condition of the Chinese, concluded that the success of Chinese restaurants was “due to the cleanliness with which they prepare their food and keep their kitchens and restaurants.” “Their kitchens are often visited by American ladies, whose verdict is usually that that they are as clean as, if not cleaner than, American restaurants,” he wrote.¹²⁴

A number of factors combined to shape the Chinese food that prevailed in Main Street America until the second half of the twentieth century: the efforts of Chinese-food workers and promoters, the early non-Chinese customers’ socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds, and the tastes of these customers. Some Chinese in the restaurant industry used the term “Chinese-American cuisine” to characterize this kind of food, and that notion effectively captures a new cuisine that is both Chinese and American.