Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (14 page)

Figure 3.3. A “movable chow shop” in Canton, c. 1919. Street vendors have sold noodles and other staple foods since the Sung dynasty.

Northern cuisine was centered on Beijing and the North China Plain. At the time of the Qing Dynasty, millet was still eaten there, but the grain staples were wheat breads and noodles. Mutton and lamb were consumed most widely, often with onions, garlic, or scallions or dipped in vinegar or in sweet and savory sauces. Peking duck, especially roasted and dipped in a savory sauce, may have been the invention of a Yuan Dynasty imperial chef. Beijing dining was also heavily influenced by the food of the Manchu, the dominant tribe whose homeland lay to the northeast. This included dairy products and the roast meats Cushing sampled. Eastern cuisine encompassed a huge stretch of China’s richest and most populous territory, perhaps from Shandong all the way down to Fujian. This cuisine was based on fresh and saltwater plants and animals, particularly fish and crabs, flavored with ginger, wine, sugar, and vinegar. Specialties included soups and slow-cooked stews with delicate seasonings. The grain staples ranged from millet and breads in the northeast to rice in the southeast. In treaty ports like Shanghai and Fuzhou, foreign merchants and missionaries tasted these specialties at the homes of wealthy merchants and local officials. In Western cuisine, centered on the inland provinces of Hunan and Sichuan, the food was spicy and oily, often featuring a sophisticated blend of intense flavors. Here rice and noodles were the staples, frequently topped with pork, cabbage, river fish, bamboo shoots, and mushrooms. Americans did not acquire a taste for these highly seasoned specialties for over a century.

The southern cuisine was centered on Guangdong Province, the region that for decades defined Chinese food in American minds. Here the people mainly spoke Cantonese and had a long history of rebelliousness—this was the last part of China
Proper to surrender to the Manchu army. The most important part of Guangdong for this discussion is the Pearl River Delta, home to the cities of Guangzhou, Macau, and Hong Kong. Like the roots of a great tree, the Pearl River’s three main tributaries meet in the vicinity of Guangzhou, where they divide into a profusion of narrower rivers, streams, and canals. This mesh of waterways shapes the rich, swampy soils of the larger delta, one of the most fertile regions of all China. The Pearl River itself, the main trunk of this riverine system, forms near Guangzhou and flows south to its wide mouth on the South China Sea. To the west of the Pearl River, human settlement marks every square inch of the delta; even the low hills are dotted with stone and concrete grave markers. In the mid–nineteenth century, the Pearl River Delta was a region of crowded cities, bustling market towns, and thousands of villages, interspersed with fields of green vegetables, orchards, rice paddies, and fish ponds. Water connected almost all these communities; there are so many rivers and streams and canals that travelers observed that roads were almost unnecessary. Rice, vegetables, pork, duck, fish, and shellfish were the staples of the delta diet.

The delta’s richest region, Sam Yap, or Three Districts (in Cantonese), which surrounded Guangzhou, consisted mostly of farmlands dotted with smaller cities, towns, and villages. The sophisticated chefs of the provincial capital excelled at seafood, which they prepared as simply as possible, often steaming or gently poaching it. The seasonings were usually soy or oyster sauces, fermented black beans, ginger, and scallions. These chefs also skillfully prepared roast meats, particularly pig and duck, as well as slow-cooked casseroles to be served over rice. In Guangzhou, the tradition of teahouse food reached its apex, with dim sum chefs preparing a vast array of sweet and savory pastry snacks. Outside the city’s walls, the land was flat, fertile, and green; truck
gardens, rice paddies, and fish ponds, often bordered with lychee trees, surrounded most communities. The regular markets that crowded into most of the cities and towns specialized in fish, fruit (lychees, longans, oranges), herbal medicines, spices, pearls, and silk grown on nearby farms. The nearby town of Shunde was a noted restaurant destination where many Guangzhou gourmets went on eating excursions—and found chefs to staff their private kitchens back in the capital. The next region south, Zhongshan, which was hillier, ran all the way down the western riverbank to Macau. Here the main occupations were rice growing and fishing; thousands of seagoing fishing vessels crowded the narrow channels that connected Zhongshan with the sea.

To the west, the Pearl River Delta graded into the more rugged hills of the poorer Sze Yap (Four Districts) region. Here, the largest towns lay along the Tan River; the most important was the city of Xinhui, the center of a fantail palm–growing district, whose inhabitants manufactured ornate fans for the rest of China and abroad. As in Guangzhou, the people spoke Cantonese, but a local dialect of it that the sophisticated residents of Sam Yap found harsh and hard to understand. Away from the river, the countryside was divided between barren, scrub-covered hills and narrow valleys dense with villages and farms that were connected by well-beaten tracks. In each village, several rows of tightly packed houses faced the valley, where lay the village’s fish ponds, water buffalo wallows, rice paddies, and vegetable fields: taro with their giant leaves, beans on trellises, cucumbers, squashes, and gourds. On the hillsides stood the orange, banana, and lychee orchards, as well as the pigpens and manure pits. People’s meals centered around
fancai
—bowls of rice topped with a bit of vegetable or fish—or mixed stir-fries, made by throwing a bit of everything one had on hand into the wok. Under the broad branches
and thick foliage of the village banyan tree, farm families enjoyed the midday shade, processed rice, and conducted meetings. Here the villagers discussed their most pressing issues: how to sustain one’s community and one’s clan in a region where people could barely produce enough food to survive, bandits roamed the countryside, and the provincial government was alternately weak and oppressive.

For the villagers of the Sze Yap region, the answer was often to seek their fortunes elsewhere—in Sam Yap, Guangzhou, even overseas. For decades, they had joined emigrants from other parts of the South in seeking better conditions elsewhere in Southeast Asia. In 1848, the people of the Four Districts heard of a new and more alluring place of opportunity—across the Pacific Ocean. They would come to call it Gold Mountain.

Kicking up a cloud of dust and dung, a train of carriages pulled up to the entrance of the four-story Occidental Hotel, San Francisco’s finest hostelry, to await the distinguished guests from the East. At six o’clock in the evening, they emerged: Schuyler Colfax, U.S. Speaker of the House; William Bross, lieutenant governor of Illinois; and Samuel Bowles and Albert Richardson, two noted newspapermen intent on publicizing the promise of the American West. They were escorted into the carriages by the evening’s Committee of Invitation, a phalanx of the city’s white elite, and the procession clattered off toward a destination just a few minutes away. In the heart of the city, where in 1865 few buildings were more than twenty years old, 308 Dupont Street stood out—a gaudy assemblage of balconies, banners, colored lanterns, and signs bearing the words “Hong Heong Restaurant.” Here the carriages stopped; their passengers alighted and were ushered through the first-floor kitchen, where the chefs bowed to them, and then up the stairs. In
the third-floor reception room, they met their hosts, San Francisco’s leading Chinese merchants and the heads of the six main Chinese associations, commonly called the Six Companies. At least sixty men crowded into the room, half of them Chinese and half European Americans. Their dress and appearance were a study in contrasts: the Chinese dignitaries wore loose robes of blue and purple satin, richly embroidered, and silk skullcaps; their faces were smooth and their foreheads shaven, with long plaited queues hanging neatly down their backs. The Americans were dressed in dark woolen jackets, vests, and trousers; black bow ties and white shirts; trimmed beards and moustaches covered their faces; their thick, unruly hair was plastered across their foreheads. After a round of drinks from a table crowded with American and European liquors, a servant announced “The poor feast is ready,” and the guests descended to the second-floor dining room.

Everything there had been imported from China—tables, lamps, decorative screens, and place settings. Ornate partitions decorated with colored glass divided the room into three sections, each enclosing three or four circular tables. Six or seven places were set on each table, with ivory chopsticks and porcelain spoons, bowls, plates, and cups; little dishes for soy sauce, mustard, pickles and sweetmeats; and a large Chinese-style flower centerpiece in the middle. Colfax, the guest of honor, was seated next to the head host, Chui Sing Tong of the Sam Yap Company; the other diners took their seats, and the procession of dishes began. Bowles noted: “there were no joints, nothing to be carved. Every article of food was brought on in quart bowls, in a sort of hash form.”
¹
During the first course, he recorded fried shark’s fin and grated ham, stewed pigeon and bamboo soup, fish sinews with ham, stewed chicken with watercress, seaweed, stewed duck and bamboo soup, sponge cake, omelet cake,
flower cake, banana fritters, and birds’ nest soup. Some of the Americans mastered their spoons and chopsticks; others were given forks with which to sample their helpings of “fish, flesh, fowl and vegetable substances, in a thousand forms undreamed of to French cooks and Caucasian housewives generally.”
²
A journalist from the
Chicago Tribune
liked the shark’s fin and ham—“a nice nutty flavor quite pleasant to taste”—and the bird’s nest soup—“which I assure you
is
a delicacy.” Bowles was not so enthusiastic: “every article, indeed, seemed to have had its original and real taste and strength dried or cooked out of it, and a common Chinese flavor put into it.”
³
The tea, however, was delicious and refreshing.

After anywhere from 12 to 136 courses—the attendees’ accounts differ greatly—the guests retired to the reception room to smoke, stretch their legs, and say goodbye to the heads of the Six Companies, who departed. The remaining portion of the dinner was hosted by the dozen or so leading Chinese merchants. After a “peculiar performance” by a Chinese musical group, everyone returned to the second floor for round two. The diners refreshed themselves with cups of cold tea and strong, rose-scented liquor, and the feast resumed: “lichens and a fungus-like moss,” more sharks’ fins, stewed chestnuts with chicken, Chinese oysters (“yellow and resurrected from the dried stage”), another helping of stewed fungus, a stew of flour and white nuts, stewed mutton, roast ducks, rice soup, rice with ducks’ eggs and pickled cucumbers, and ham and chicken soup, according to Bowles. Speeches of welcome and appreciation were exchanged. The party moved to the third floor again for a “Chinese historical recitative song pitched on a key higher than Mount Shasta.” When they returned, they discovered that the tables had been set for the dessert course, which was limited to a huge variety of fresh fruits.
At the end, Richardson made a tally: Governor Bross had tasted every dish; he himself had tried around seventy; and Speaker Colfax had tried forty. “The occasion was curious and memorable. Hereafter, upon every invitation, I shall sup with the Celestials, and say grace with all my heart.”
⁴
The
Tribune
’s reporter wrote: “For myself I shall always esteem myself peculiarly happy having made one with the party, in which there was so much to see and think of, albeit there was not much which we who speak only the Saxon tongue, could understandingly write about.” But where was Bowles, who had sampled only about a dozen dishes?

I went to the restaurant weak and hungry; but I found the one universal odor and flavor soon destroyed all appetite; and I fell back resignedly on a constitutional incapacity to use the chopsticks, and was sitting back in grim politeness through dinner number two, when there came an angel in disguise to my relief. The urbane chief of police of the city appeared and touched my shoulder: “There is a gentleman at the door who wishes to see you, and would have you bring your hat and coat.” There were visions of violated City ordinances and “assisting” at the police court the next morning. I thought, too, what a polite way this man has of arresting a stranger to the city. But, bowing my excuses to my pig-tail neighbor, I went joyfully to the unknown tribunal. A friend, a leading banker who had sat opposite to me during the evening, and had been called out a few moments before, welcomed me at the street door with: “B—, I knew you were suffering, and were hungry,—let us go get something to eat,—a good square meal!” So we crossed to an American restaurant; the lost appetite came back; and mutton-chops, squabs, fried potatoes and a bottle of champagne soon restored us. My friend insisted that
the second course of the Chinese dinner was only the first warmed over, and that was the object of the recess. However that might be,—this is how I went to the grand Chinese dinner, and went out, when it was two-thirds over, and “got something to eat.”
⁵