Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (17 page)

Thanks to their imports, as well as farming and fishing, the Chinese of California clearly had the raw materials to replicate even the finest dishes of Cantonese cuisine. In 1853, a writer for the
San Francisco Whig
was “escorted to the crack Chinese restaurant on Dupont street called Hong fa-lo, where a circular table was set out in fine style.” This eatery may have been the earliest incarnation of Chinatown’s famous Hang Far Low restaurant, at 713 and then 723 Grant Avenue, which finally closed in 1960. The evening’s host, a merchant named Key Chong, had spared no expense; birds’ nests, sea cucumbers, and mushrooms that cost $3 a pound were among the dishes. The other ingredients included fish, dried oysters, “China lobster,” ducks, “stewed acorns,” chestnuts, sausages, shrimps, and periwinkles. The whites in attendance were often flummoxed as to what they were eating. According to the newspaper, the menu included “Course No. 2—Won Fo (a dish oblivious to us, and not mentioned in the Cook Book). No. 3—Ton-Song, (ditto likewise). No. 4—Tap Fan, (another quien sabe).” Despite the author’s humorous take, he and the other white guests seem to have genuinely enjoyed their meal:

Figure 4.3. A Chinese peddler sells fruit and vegetables to a San Francisco housewife. These peddlers were a common sight in western cities and towns.

We came away, after three hours sitting, fully convinced that a China dinner is a costly and elaborate affair, worthy the attention of epicures. From this time henceforth we are in the field for China against any insinuations on the question of diet a la rat, which we pronounce a tale of untruth. We beg leave to return our thanks to our host, Key Chong, for his elegant entertainment which one conversant with the Chinese bill of fare informs us must have cost over $100. Vive la China!
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It was rare, but not unheard-of, for non-Chinese San Franciscans to initiate a Chinese banquet. In 1857, four “claiming to be white—one a Maj. U.S. Army—two Capts.—and one legal gentleman” decided to enjoy a “dinner got up in the most approved style of the Celestials, laying aside everything like fastidiousness in regard to material or taste, conforming to, and partaking of, the full course, come as it might, whether fricasseed monkey or baked rats made any part of the bill of fare or not.” They invited along Lee Kan, a Chinese newspaper editor who arranged the meal, as well as an important Chinese merchant and the head of the Sze Yap Company. The name and location of the restaurant was not recorded, but it possessed a “sumptuous dining-hall, furnished with all the elegancies and appurtenances believed by the Chinese to be indispensable to such an apartment.” The first course would have done justice to a wealthy merchant’s kitchen back in Guangzhou and included soups of birds’ nest and sharks’ fin, “calf’s throat cut in imitation of mammoth centipedes,” quails, duck feet, fish maws, sea cucumbers, crab balls, and herring heads. The whites attempted
to down these delicacies using chopsticks and failed. When they saw that their Chinese guests were way ahead of them, they “felt constrained to resort to knife, fork, and spoon, in self defense.” Then, on to the second half of the meal:

Tea; cake made of rice flour; water nuts, called in Chinese Ma Tai and truly delicious; preserved water lily seeds; pomelo, a kind of orange, preserved; Chinese plums; jelly made from sea-weed; ducks’ hearts and gizzards with shrimps; cakes of minced pork and other ingredients of doubtful character; fish gelatine; eggs preserved in ley [thousand-year-old eggs?] and oil—very fine; almonds salted and baked; oranges; preserved water melon seeds; two other kinds of cake made from rice flour; cigars; white wine, made from rice; a third proof liquor made from rice; and finishing off with an opium smoke, and Chinese cigaritas.

Those cakes of “doubtful character” are probably dim sum, which often accompanied Chinese banquets of this magnitude. Three days and nine hours after this unique event, a participant wrote, “We are all alive!” He never indicates whether or not he enjoyed the food, but he does give a warning: the bill was $42, an astronomical sum for post–Gold Rush San Francisco. Nevertheless, he says, it was worth it; the memory, and probably the bragging rights, would “last us as long as we live.”
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Of course, these wealthy diners were an exception. The only Chinese-owned restaurants that most whites entered in post–Gold Rush San Francisco were the myriad cheap cafés where they could chew on a gristly steak or plate of pork and beans, not Chinese food.

During the late 1860s and 1870s, San Francisco had well over a dozen Chinese restaurants, including three or four elaborate, multistory establishments whose chefs could prepare banquets featuring the same costly ingredients
and sophisticated preparations used by Guangzhou’s finest chefs. These did not draw regular customers from the non-Chinese population, as whites picked up on the sentiments first expressed in the
Chinese Repository
decades earlier, that the dishes were on the whole inedible:

almost everything has the same taste of nut oil sicklied over all, and few western palates can endure even the most delicate of their dishes. Shark’s fins, stewed bamboo, duck’s eggs boiled, baked and stewed in oil, pork disguised in hot sauces, and other things like these, are the standard dishes of a Chinese bill of fare, though they have an infinite variety of sweetmeats which are really palatable, and of sweetcakes, which are inviting in their quaint, odd forms and decorations, but are ashes and wormwood to taste.
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Moreover, a rumor spread that the chefs used the same unclean methods as the neighborhood Chinese laundrymen:

In the preparation of sauces he even surpasses Soyer’s countrymen. The art with which Chinese washermen regulate the fineness and direction of the spray from his [
sic
] mouth upon the garments, has been a source of admiration to the uninitiated. Their admiration would increase were they to witness the dexterity with which the cook would mix the various condiments by blowing from his mouth the exact quantity needed by the dish before him. Many dishes depend entirely on adjuncts for savor; and the taste as a rule inclines to rancid oil and doubtful lard.
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Behind this disgust was more than simple differences in taste. Agitation against the presence of Chinese in the West was growing, and it became politically and socially dangerous to admit to having a taste for Chinese cuisine.

In fact, culinary prejudices were so deep that even those few local whites who supported Chinese rights could not stomach their food. The New York–born Methodist minister Otis Gibson had labored for 10 years in Fujian Province. When he moved to San Francisco to continue his mission, he was shocked at the “ignorance, bigotry, prejudice and selfishness” of the anti-Chinese crusaders, who also targeted missionaries like himself. Although his 1877 book
The Chinese in America
does exhibit old missionary intolerance—“the mass of [Chinese] people are untruthful, selfish and cruel”—he strongly defends the Chinese presence in the American West. His reasons were partly economic (the Chinese were good for business) and partly moral (the Chinese in their sins were no worse than the American masses). Nonetheless, he could not bring himself to enjoy the food, due to the same problematic flavor of “rancid oil or strong butter.” Yet when missionary guests from the East arrived, he set aside his culinary objections and showed them the wonders of the Chinese quarter:

In company with the Rev. Dr. Newman, Mrs. Newman, and Rev. Dr. Sunderland, of Washington City, and Dr. J T. M’Lean, of San Francisco, I once took a Chinese dinner at the restaurant on Jackson Street. Dr. Newman took hold and ate like a hungry man, and when I thought he must be about filled, he astonished me by saying that the meats were excellent, and were it not that he had to deliver a lecture that evening, he would take hold and eat a good hearty dinner. Dr. Sunderland did not seem to relish things quite so well. But Mrs. Newman relishing some of the meats, and failing to get the pieces to her mouth with the chopsticks, wisely threw aside all conventional notions, used her fingers instead of chopsticks, and, as the Californians would say, “ate a square meal.”
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In nineteenth-century America, the idea of a cultured, Christian lady tossing aside manners to stuff herself with strange pagan food was shocking. Then again, these were visitors from the East, perhaps with more sophisticated ideas of right and wrong.

In fact, tourists often eagerly embraced the experience of eating in the quarter now known as Chinatown. San Franciscans only visited the district if they had to; but visitors from the East and Europe considered it a must-see stop on the city’s tourist trail. According to one local correspondent, the typical tourist “wants to see it all”:

He wants to be shocked by the Oriental depravity that he has heard so much about, or if he is one of the large class who believes that the Chinese are a much-maligned race of virtuous and enlightened people, he desires to see for himself that John Chinaman has been libeled . . . . The great majority indulge in this Oriental “slumming.” They come out of it with a confused impression of tortuous alleys, underground dens reeking with the odor of tobacco and opium, and faces so villainous that they haunt one’s dreams like the Malay that tyrannized over De Quincey’s opium-fed imagination.
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To see beyond the facades of the curio shops to the “inside” Chinatown, tourists would hire a local police officer, particularly for nighttime tours of the district’s netherworld. The itinerary usually included the Chinese temple, a barber shop, the Chinese theater, a “thieves’ lodging house” (where one officer amused visitors by “playfully jerking the long cue of one or two Chinamen he could reach without trouble”),
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a gambling hall, an opium den, and a restaurant or two.

Paying 5 or 10 cents a meal, the mass of Chinese city-dwellers of modest means found regular sustenance at these
eateries, which were usually below street level and furnished with benches and tables that served as beds at night. Typically, the kitchen setup was of the most basic kind, “with its rickety little furnace, lumps of pork frying and sputtering, bowls of rice, square bags of sausage meat, fruit, fresh and dried fish, chop sticks of the approved style, and a general flavor of the cook shop grown old and stale.”
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The tourists would never think of eating at one of these establishments, but they did like to peek into the pots:

The raw material, so far as we could see with our inexperienced eyes, consisted of the sprouts growing out of potato-eyes, pig’s (or dog’s) ears pickled, and green leeks. (Now, I don’t want to say anything mean against the Chinese; but I do believe that the funny little things we saw at the bottom of a deep earthen jar were rat’s-tails skinned).
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The local Chinese also ate at their places of work, which were equipped with kitchens and dining areas. The employees of a well-to-do merchant enjoyed the traditional communal meals: “Their meat and vegetables are hashed, or cut into small pieces, and are brought to the table in a common dish, from which each one helps himself with his chopsticks. It is the usual custom to have two meals a day, one about eleven o’clock, and the other late in the afternoon.”
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At the opposite end of the spectrum, the district’s poorest residents could buy from street vendors who sold “fish, vegetables, rice-cakes and innumerable nameless Chinese comestibles,”
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or cooked modest meals on small charcoal braziers set up on balconies or even in apartments, creating one more Chinese threat for nativist agitators to attack.

The other culinary sight on the typical Chinatown tour was one of the fancy, three-story banquet restaurants, like Hong Heong. Sometimes the tourists went in simply to stare
at the diners, but more often they actually sat down for a bite to eat:

Try some of this unbaked biscuit with the red letter painted on top. It is a sort of pallid doughball or dumpling filled with dark and finely cut meat: it certainly does not look edible, and its faint flavor suggests—well, nothing at all: it is entirely negative. Then here is a block of pure white marble two inches square, and on its polished top again the red-painted character: this is fairly artistic in its perfect resemblance to a block of stone with clear-cut edges and sharp corners. It is some preparation of rice flour, about the consistency of stiff jelly or blanc-mange, and is of a pleasantly sweetish taste and fairly good, or at least very unobjectionable as food. We are getting reassured and bold: let us try a sample of this yellow affair. It is round like a biscuit, but a brilliant saffron-yellow in color, with of course the omnipresent red character painted on top. Shut your eyes and bite boldly. Dust and ashes! what can this be? Do they use the sacred dust of their ancestors to feed the barbarian on? Bah! this mouldy medicinal taste, this mouthful of dry yellow ashes, is positively nasty. No more, thank you! and please pass the sweetmeats: let us forget in the familiar taste of ginger this tidbit from the tombs. Finish, if you like, with the dried sweets and the pellucid and cloying syrups: I have had enough, and shall be glad to get out.
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