Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (16 page)

“Tall, erect, active looking and manly, with an aquiline nose, bright, loving eyes, and the dark, ringleted hair with which we endow, in ideal, the head of poets,” Taylor was one of the great Romantic figures of nineteenth-century American literature.
¹⁵
He considered himself a poet, worked as a journalist and editor, and gained fame as the first bestselling American travel writer. This was the era of Manifest Destiny, when Americans began to explore their place in the larger world. Combining Romantic adventure with a broad sense of cultural superiority, Taylor’s travel writings made him a wealthy man (though his florid poetry did not sell nearly so well). His first travel book,
Views A-Foot
, on Europe, was only mildly overheated;
Eldorado
, his second, was a more straightforward journalistic account of his trip to California and Mexico. He described the various races he encountered in San Francisco without bias, and on his return trip via Mexico befriended the portly, smiling Chinese owner of Mazatlan’s Fonda de Canton hotel. In August 1851, Taylor embarked on a journey around the world. On this trip, which he turned into three separate books, he let loose his poetic sensibility. In Syria, for example, he donned a burnoose and a turban, strode through the lowest byways
of the native bazaars, and ate “hasheesh,” which gave him hallucinations worthy of Coleridge. With his poet’s eye, he judged the architecture, music, customs, and, perhaps most critically, the physiques of the peoples he visited. His ideal came straight from the muscular symmetry portrayed in Greek sculpture, which he found in Arabs but not in Africans or the Chinese, whom he first encountered in large numbers in Singapore: “Their dull faces, without expression, unless a coarse glimmering of sensuality may be called such, and their half-naked, unsymmetrical bodies, more like figures of yellow clay than warm flesh and blood, filled me with an unconquerable aversion.”
¹⁶
He nevertheless continued to China, landing first in Hong Kong and then at Shanghai.

There he found two American missionaries to act as his guides: Charles Taylor (whom we met in
chapter 2
) and M. T. Yates, both Protestants. They piloted the young writer through the narrow streets of Shanghai’s Chinese city, feeding him “explanations of the many curious scenes” they passed. He visited temples, shops, pawnshops, tea gardens, street vendors, and prisons; he was even invited to a Chinese banquet, whose dishes he found “numerous and palatable, but hardly substantial enough for a civilized taste.” Overall, he was overwhelmed by the “disgusting annoyances of a Chinese city”—the ever-present filth, ragged beggars, and vile smells. Strangely, the encounter that sent him into his greatest outpouring of revulsion was the “absolutely loathsome and repulsive” sight of a prize Chinese flower at a local horticultural show.

The only taste which the Chinese exhibit to any degree, is a love of the monstrous. That sentiment of harmony, which throbbed like a musical rhythm through the life of the Greeks, never looked out of their oblique eyes. . . . They admire whatever is distorted or unnatural, and the wider its divergence from its original
beauty or symmetry, the greater is their delight. This mental idiosyncrasy includes a moral one, of similar character. It is my deliberate opinion that the Chinese are, morally, the most debased people of the face of the earth. Forms of vice which in other countries are barely named, are in China so common, that they excite no comment among the natives. . . . Their touch is pollution, and, harsh as the opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not be allowed to settle on our soil.
¹⁷

Taylor’s missionary guides undoubtedly drew his attention to all those “forms of vice,” probably including female infanticide, gambling, eating dogs and cats, and opium smoking (a practice Taylor himself tried out). Declaring China “the best country in the world—
to leave
,” Taylor’s widely reprinted travel letters first came out in the
New York Tribune
and then in many editions of his 1855 bestseller
A Visit to India, China, and Japan
. For at least the next three decades, his harsh judgments had an outsized influence on the debate over the place of Chinese immigrants in the United States.

Despite this simmering racism, and occasional outbreaks of violence, the immigrants from the Pearl River Delta were by and large tolerated during the late 1850s and early 1860s. Those who arrived in California during this era were determined to earn their fortunes peacefully and by following the traditions they had long practiced in East Asia. The English adventurer Frederick Whymper, who encountered Chinese in both western Canada and California, writes admiringly of their persistence in keeping their culinary culture:

In the mining districts, “John Chinaman” is to be seen travelling through the country, carrying his traps on either end of a long pole, in the style depicted on the tea chests familiar to us from earliest childhood.
In this manner he “packs” much larger loads than the ordinary traveller. The writer well remembers a Chinaman he met carrying at one end of his stick a bag of rice, a pick and shovel, a pair of extra pantaloons, a frying pan, and a billy-pot [for tea]; whilst from the other depended a coop of fowls and chickens, of which “John” is devotedly fond. In this respect he is wiser than his betters; for while the ordinary “honest miner” is feeding on beans, bacon, and tea, he has eggs and chickens with his rice and is very diligent in searching out and utilising wild onions, berries, and roots. In 1865, a number of Chinamen arrived at intervals, in several vessels, at Vancouver, V.I., and a few hours after landing they invariably found their way into the woods, or on to the sea-beach, where they collected shell fish and many kinds of sea-weed, which they stewed and fried in various shapes.
¹⁸

Before leaving China, the immigrants packed provisions for the journey, including rice, dried seafood and sausages, and ceramic jars of condiments like soy sauce and pickled vegetables. Although these provisions ran out quickly after landing in California, the new arrivals did not have to adopt the local, pork-and-beans-based American diet. By the early 1850s, San Francisco was home to a number of Chinese stores specializing in products from the Middle Kingdom, including “hams, tea, dried fish, dried ducks, and other very nasty-looking Chinese eatables, besides copper-pots and kettles.”
¹⁹
An 1856 directory of the city’s Chinese quarter listed thirty-three stores selling “General Merchandise, Groceries, &c.” These merchants ordered their wares either directly from China or from the big import-export firms that were already established—branches of Chinese companies in Guangzhou or, more likely, Hong Kong that became known as
gam saan chung
—“Gold Mountain firms.” In 1873, the
journalist Albert S. Evans recorded the cargo of a ship whose wares were destined for San Francisco merchants:

90 packages cassia; 940 packages coffee, from Java and Manila; 192 packages fire-crackers; 30 packages dried fish, cuttle-fish, shark’s fins, etc.; 400 packages hemp; 116 packages miscellaneous merchandise, lacquered goods, porcelain-ware, and things for which we have no special names; 53 packages medicines; 18 packages opium; 16 packages plants; 20 packages potatoes; 2,755 packages rice; 1,238 packages sundries,—chow-chow [probably pickles], preserved fruit, salted melon-seeds, dried ducks, pickled ducks’ eggs, cabbage sprouts in brine, candied citron, dates, dwarf oranges, ginger, smoked oysters, and a hundred other Chinese edibles and table luxuries; 824 packages sugar; 20 packages silks; 203 packages sago and tapioca; 5,463 packages tea; 27 packages tin.
²⁰

This was a culinary bounty that could easily supply a gourmet restaurant like Hong Heong; all they needed to complete their banquets were fresh meat and produce (and even the imported “dwarf oranges,” either mandarins or kumquats, may have been fresh). The San Francisco import-export firms either sold the ingredients on this list to local restaurants and groceries or shipped them to Chinese stores in the new settlements that were arising in the foothills. In Chew Lung’s store in the Chinese mining camp at Camanche, for example, nearly every item—including the scales, cooking pots, bowls, tobacco, rice, tea, sugar, ginger, and cooking oil—came from across the Pacific. The exceptions were the gin and the salt fish, which may have been a local product.

Immigrants from the Pearl River Delta, with its centuries-old fishing tradition, saw the economic and culinary possibilities of California’s rich sea life very early. By 1855,
they had built dozens of Chinese fishing villages around San Francisco Bay and along the central California coast. They caught Pacific salmon and squid, collected red, black, and green abalone in the intertidal zone, and netted shrimp, minnows, and other fish. They even built Chinese-style fishing junks from which they tended their nets. Some of the catch was delivered fresh to markets and street vendors for retail sales, but most of it was boiled in salted water and dried. It could then be shipped into the mountains, where the Chinese miners used it to season their rice, or more likely packed for transport back to China, where the appetite for dried seafood was nearly inexhaustible. By the 1850s, it was estimated that roughly a thousand Chinese fishermen were working San Francisco Bay. Their methods were so efficient and the mesh on their bag nets so fine that the other fishermen complained that they were clearing every swimming thing out of the bay. Enforcement of fishing laws was impossible: the Chinese simply paid their fines or did their jail time and then returned to the same practices. One journalist estimated that $1 million worth of dried shrimp and fish—including sturgeon sinews, a Chinese delicacy—was being shipped back to China every year. Despite these complaints, and competition from Italian and Portuguese immigrants, the junks sailed in California waters until the twentieth century, when the large-scale Chinese fishing industry finally dwindled away.

From San Francisco’s residential districts to the far-flung mining camps, the Chinese produce peddler was a regular sight on the dusty streets and paths:

We have Chinese vegetable peddlers, who, braving the vicious boys, wicked men, and ugly dogs, visit every part of the city, and travel far out over the sand-hills to supply their regular customers. These men rise long before daylight and go to the great markets and to the market-wagons, fill their panniers and then return home to breakfast; after which they sally out, each man on his regular route, to return to their lodging-houses about noon with a few more dimes in their pockets than they spent at the market in the morning. It would astonish some persons should they look into a pair of these panniers, to see what a variety of articles they may contain—cabbage, beans, peas, and celery; potatoes, turnips, carrots, and parsnips; apples, pears, and the small fruits; with fish, and
bouquets
.
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Figure 4.2. A painter’s depiction of a Chinese fishmonger with his wares, late nineteenth century. White fishermen complained that their Chinese competitors were stripping San Francisco Bay of all living sea creatures.

Much of this produce was grown on the small Chinese garden plots that ringed many communities and on larger
farms tilled by Chinese owners or leaseholders. Using skills learned on the intensively cultivated plots of the Pearl River Delta, the immigrants had begun to grow vegetables soon after arriving—at first, the greens were for their own use, as they craved fresh toppings for their midday rice. But as they learned the business, and how to grow food crops in the dry but temperate California climate, they came to dominate this agricultural niche; some writers claimed that their labor fed all of San Francisco.

As in the fishing industry, a cultural clash soon arose over traditional Pearl River Delta farming methods. In Auburn, the “miasmata” arising from Chinese gardens supposedly caused diseases:

The evil consists mainly in the Chinese mode of cultivation, which is filthy and disgusting in the extreme. Their gardens are made on low grounds, and the soil is stimulated to rank productiveness by the application of the most offensive manures. Large holes are excavated in the ground, which are filled with human ordure, dead animals, and every imaginable kind of filth, water is added, and the feculent mass is left to thoroughly decompose, when it is ladled and scattered broadcast over the garden.
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The result of these methods was vegetables that “acquire a richness of flavor grateful to Chinese stomachs, but intolerable to most white palates.” In fact, most whites were able to overcome their finer feelings and purchase the familiar corn, squash, peas, tomatoes, lettuce, and the like. The farmers also grew elongated Asian radishes, unfamiliar cabbages, bitter melons, foot-long string beans, and so on, destined solely for Chinese consumers.