This book goes back to a kitchen encounter on August 23, 1985, when I first set foot in the New World. The sixteen-hour flight that took me from Beijing to New York was a great leap over an economic gap that had separated China and the West for more than a century. The eminent French historian Fernand Braudel called it “the essential problem of the history of the modern world.”1 Still looming large in the 1980s, it was the primary motivation for me and for millions of people from the third world to come to America.
The plane landed late at night. In the darkness that engulfed the city, I felt like a pioneer entering an unfamiliar wilderness. Yet I was not a total stranger in this new land. Like Alexis de Tocqueville’s American pioneer of the early nineteenth century, I was “acquainted with the past, curious of the future.”2 I had heard much about America and looked forward to a new phase in my life. My path had been paved by a long chain of historical events, ranging from the arrival of American merchants in China shortly after 1776 in pursuit of such goods as tea and porcelain, which had become symbols of luxury in the colonies, to the coming of Chinese forty-niners who accompanied the emergence of the United States as “the newest empire.”3
For me, the notion of the United States as an empire was a familiar one. During my childhood, I learned that it was an imperial power of aggression and capitalism from history textbooks and films about the Korean War and the Vietnam War. But the American empire remained a distant and abstract concept until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Chinese citizens started to visit the United States in increasingly large numbers for the first time since 1949. American politicians love to talk about American political democracy to foreign audiences; yet upon their return from the United States, Chinese visitors like Professor Qi Wenying, my adviser at Beijing University, could not stop telling stories about the spacious American kitchen and the gigantic supermarket. With no equivalent in the Chinese lexicon then, a “supermarket” with open shelves of unimaginable amounts and varieties of foods affordable and accessible for everyone was an entirely foreign and enviably “enchanting” concept for many Chinese.4 For someone like me, who had grown up under strict food rationing, such stories made tangible the idea that the United States was indeed an imperial superpower, an empire of mass consumption.
These tales rekindled China’s American dream, harbored once by the Cantonese seeking their fortunes in the “Gold Mountain,” and awakened consumer desires long suppressed under Communism. It also made America the most desirable place for the young and ambitious. The Chinese who traveled across the ocean during the early years of the reform era were among the nation’s best educated and most fortunate, rather than its tired, its poor, and its huddled masses. But their motivation was the same as that of millions of immigrants from other parts of the world: the pursuit of the American dream, a dream signified first and foremost by America’s material abundance.
Arriving in New York, I felt more like a migrant chasing this dream and a better future than a student en route to a doctorate at Cornell University. Growing up in China, we learned from Marxism that class struggle or revolution was the only way to change people’s social status or material conditions. But for my generation, the United States offered an alternative: by crossing the Pacific Ocean, we could fundamentally elevate our situation overnight. This was why I did not hesitate to give up other enviable options I fortunately had at the time: to teach at China’s best university, work for the central government, or study at Oxford University.
I did not enter the New World a lone wanderer. Howard and Renee met me at JFK Airport with Sondra and took me to their home on Long Island. I had become friends with Sondra and her husband, Bruce, when they taught in China in 1984. On the day of my arrival, she drove all the way from Connecticut to make sure that Howard and Renee would not miss the Chinese newcomer whom she had asked them to pick up.
As I stepped inside their house, Howard said in a warm and humorous voice that would become so familiar to me in the coming decades, “Welcome to America; welcome home.” Indeed, what I was entering was not just a house but American culture, and America was to become my home for the next quarter century.
In the kitchen, I had my first conversation with Americans on American soil. It also felt like a dialogue with American culture. Everything about my hosts was just so American: from the way they looked—I came with the typical Chinese presumption that American simply meant white—to the size of their kitchen, which was even more spacious than I had imagined. As Renee took a sandwich and a cup of milk from a giant double-sided refrigerator, Howard spoke to me in a consciously American way: “You are a Yankee now; please eat some American food.”
It was not entirely a mere coincidence that my first intimate encounter with America took place in an American kitchen. Long considered a space for “transnational encounter,” it had been a centerpiece of American culture and abundance.5 During the famous “kitchen debate” that Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev had in Moscow in 1959 in the model kitchen at the opening of the American National Exhibition, the Cold Warrior American vice president used the kitchen to showcase the superiority of capitalism and the American way of life.
As I chowed down on the American food in front of me, my hosts talked about their plans for the next few days to show me around New York, in Howard’s words, to “Americanize” me. But I did not have a clear idea about what being American entailed. It would take years for me to appreciate its richness and complexity in meaning. I did not realize, for example, that my American hosts were Jewish. They told me they loved Chinese food, but I was unaware of the decades-old Jewish connection to Chinese food, which had become a part of the Jewish American identity and thus led many Jewish Americans to China in search of authentic Chinese food.
As much as I was excited about coming to America, my first close contact with the country generated a surging consciousness of my Chineseness. It did not amount to an intellectual articulation of cultural identity. Through invasions, intermarriages, and internal and overseas migrations over the centuries, the long stream of history has added layers upon layers of complexity to the meaning of Chineseness, making it extremely difficult to verbalize. Those Chinese like me, who grew up during the radicalism of the Cultural Revolution, had become a people with neither religion nor tradition—the kind of religion and traditions that defined peoples like the Jews. In a foreign country like the United States, food thus became our most important commonality, giving us a sense of affinity, a shared topic, and something to look forward to. Indeed, love of food has a long association with being Chinese. One of those who understood this association was Lin Yutang, a famous author and philosopher in China before World War II. He wrote of the Chinese in 1939: “If there is anything we are serious about, it is neither religion nor learning, but food.”6
The unfamiliarity of the New World was accented by the new foods that my hosts introduced to me during my stay in New York: cereal, blueberries, spaghetti, pizza, and bagels. They fed me generously, but somehow I still felt quite hungry—not a physical hunger but a cultural one prompted by an increasingly unquenchable longing for Chinese food and home. It was the first time that my Chineseness became tangible—a Chineseness embedded in what many travelers from China have characterized as a “Chinese stomach.”7
This led me on a continual search for Chinese food—first in Ithaca and later in cities across the country like Detroit, Honolulu, New Orleans, New York, Providence, San Francisco, and St. Louis. Before long, I started to wonder why there are so many Chinese restaurants in the United States. Such questioning about the popularity of American Chinese food turned my personal craving into an intellectual quest—which now includes a blog (www.chopsueyusa.com), where readers can also find various resources for exploring food—to comprehend the journey of Chinese food to America. This culinary journey, as I would realize over time, was also an integral part of the historical development of the United States, especially its emergence as an empire.