Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (23 page)

A few critics notwithstanding, these restaurants continued to spread into communities that had only small Chinese
populations, carrying with them their very particular mix of food, price, customers, and atmosphere. From Atlanta to New Haven to Portland, Maine, eating a bowl of chop suey at midnight among a crowd of ruffians, fallen women, and thespians meant that you had achieved a state of worldly, urban sophistication.

In the Midwest, the arrival and acceptance of Chinese food followed a similar if somewhat delayed timeline. The first Chinese to visit the region were likely a troupe of jugglers who traveled up the Mississippi in the early 1850s. A handful of Chinese opened stores in Chicago and St. Louis during the following two decades, but the first groups of Asian immigrants didn’t arrive until after the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. They founded little Chinatowns along Clark Street in Chicago and “Hop Alley” in St. Louis, once more earning their livelihoods by running laundries and shops and working as servants. In 1889, the
Chicago Tribune
noticed two Chinese stores in the city, as well as three vegetable farms, two butchers, and a basement restaurant where the owners “welcome Americans if they come to get a meal, but . . . fear the scoffers who gaze impudently at them, and enter only to ridicule.”
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For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, some local Chinese businessmen opened a “Chinese Village,” complete with a theater, temple, tea garden, and café. They didn’t trust Americans to have a taste for Chinese food: the café menu listed mostly American dishes (cold corned beef, egg sandwiches, potato salad, and the like) along with “Chinese style” rice, “Chinese Cakes & Confections,” preserved fruit, and tea—in other words, all the fixings for a Western-style Chinese tea party. The following year, a young writer named Theodore Dreiser (six years shy of publishing his novel
Sister Carrie
) visited St. Louis’s Chinese quarter to find some journalistic color. But he couldn’t unearth any “opium joints” or gambling
dens; he just found a block of South Eighth Street between Walnut and Market Streets where the immigrants liked to mingle on Sundays. Still looking for the unspeakably exotic, he arranged for a meal at one of the district’s Chinese-only eateries, sampling duck, chicken, chicken soup, and something called “China dish”:

This dish was wonderful, awe-inspiring, and yet toothsome. It was served in a dish, half bowl, half platter. Around the platter-like edge were carefully placed bits of something which looked like wet piecrust and tasted like smoked fish. The way they stuck out along the edges suggested decoration of lettuce, parsley and watercress. The arrangement of the whole affair inspired visions of hot salad. Celery, giblets, onions, seaweed that looked like dulse, and some peculiar and totally foreign grains resembling barley, went to make this steaming-hot mass.
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Maybe this too is chop suey, but who knows? Dreiser is too busy preserving the mystery to bother asking the restaurant owner. The article ran with an engraving showing the restaurant’s supposed interior: three Chinese men holding their chopsticks wrong and eating bowls of rats beneath a sign that reads “Stewed Rats Onions 15 Cents.” Old stereotypes die hard. Less than a decade later, the
Chicago Tribune
blared “Chop Suey Fad Grows,” as midwesterners crowded into Chinese restaurants in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and beyond. The
Kansas City Star
remarked: “There are several chop suey restaurants in the city, but in none of them is real Chinese cooking served.”
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It would be decades before anyone would realize what they were missing.

Finally, we retrace our steps to the West, the last holdout against the enticements of Chinese food. In the early 1900s, San Francisco newspapers reported fights that started over “chop suey,” usually involving Irish immigrants or African Americans who refused to pay the Chinese owners of cheap eateries, but the actual dishes involved usually turned out to be American specialties like ham and eggs and potatoes. In 1903, the city’s most avant-garde hostess, Mrs. Russel Cool, attempted to break cultural barriers by taking guests dressed in Chinese costume to a Chinatown banquet, “from soup to soup again, all the way through chop suey and paste balls and bird’s nests.” Sadly, she was ahead of her time, as “the few who were brave enough to swallow the courses had difficulty in picking up enough to swallow.” “I felt dreadfully guilty about it,” she later admitted.
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The following year, a young society beauty broke numerous taboos by visiting Los Angeles’s Chinatown every night, driven by her lust for noodles. At eleven o’clock, she would sweep into a joint “where the chief patrons are outcast negroes and white damsels of no reputation,” give the customers a haughty stare, and exclaim: “Pigs! All of you. Pigs!” Then she would order three bowls of Chinese noodles, each “large enough to satisfy a hippopotamus,” consume them with fastidious manners, and depart into the night, sated.
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By 1906, Los Angeles had chop suey restaurants like the Shanghai Chop Suey Café, where the local Credit Men’s Association held its annual banquet. The menu included pork soup with vege-tables, ham omelettes, boneless duck with ham, chicken with chestnuts, chicken stuffed with birds’ nests, and preserved fruit, tea, and cakes, along with the namesake dish.
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Figure 5.4. A postcard for the Guey Sam Chinese Resturant in Chicago, 1958. Chinese-Americans changed little between 1900 and the 1960s.

Early on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Franciscans were thrown from their beds by the shocks of a massive earthquake. Rushing into the streets, they saw that the initial tremors had destroyed some buildings and damaged many, ruptured gas lines, and sparked fires. As aftershocks rattled the city, property owners set fire to their own buildings to try to recoup their losses (their insurance policies covered fire but not earthquakes). The city caught fire, and five hundred blocks were burned beyond repair. Within hours, troops were called from the Presidio military base and began patrolling the streets with orders to shoot looters on site. Chinatown was not spared the chaos, and eyewitnesses saw many whites, including National Guardsmen and “respectably-dressed women,” pawing through the rubble looking for spoils. (Decades later, shame-faced descendants were still donating looted Chinese goods to local museums.) The local newspapers cheered the destruction of Chinatown, which they long had claimed was the city’s largest blight, an overcrowded ghetto teeming with crime and immorality. A committee was formed to forcibly remove the entire community from San Francisco, but the Chinese fought back by
pointing out that they were property owners, too, and the city would lose huge amounts of trade if they moved their businesses elsewhere. Within weeks, they began to rebuild Chinatown—bigger, cleaner, and with more Oriental flair. Gone, or at least better hidden, were the opium joints and the dark haunts of the hatchet men. This “new look” Chinatown attracted businessmen, tourists, and even local San Franciscans eager for an evening’s amusement. In early 1907, the
San Francisco Call
ran a small ad for a restaurant named The China, located at 1538 Geary Boulevard and serving “novel Oriental dishes that please your palate,” including chop suey, noodles, tea, and preserves.
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White San Francisco’s fall into the clutches of Chinese food had finally begun, perhaps impelled by the shared suffering during the earthquake and its aftermath. Two years later, chop suey had so overwhelmed the West that the head of the California State Association declared that “if chop suey houses and Chinese laundries were not eliminated from the United States the next century would be one of demoralization and decay.”
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His finger in the dike was not enough; the chop suey flood continued, overrunning even the communities in the West that had been most adamantly opposed to Chinese immigration.

From the distance of over a century, it’s hard to understand the reasons behind chop suey’s phenomenal popularity. To current tastes, the dish is a brownish, overcooked stew, strangely flavorless, with no redeeming qualities, and redolent of bad school cafeterias and dingy, failing Chinese restaurants. Any redemption is only possible through nostalgia; perhaps a forkful of the dish evokes memories of Sunday evening family meals down at the corner Chinese American eatery. To American diners of a century ago, chop suey was the food of the moment, both sophisticated and enjoyed by everyman. They liked chop suey because it was
cheap, filling, and exotic, but there was something more. Chop suey
satisfied
, not just filling stomachs but giving a deeper feeling of gratification. This links it to an important part of the western culinary tradition. Since at least as early as the days of ancient Rome, peasants and urban laborers in the west have subsisted on jumbles of meat and vegetables boiled down to indecipherability: mushes, porridges, burgoos, hodgepodges, ragouts, olla podridas, and the like. Perhaps in chop suey westerners tasted a bit of the same savory primal stew that has fueled them for so many centuries.

Inevitably, just as the craze for chop suey peaked, the backlash began. Its first act was comic, at least in the rendering of a
New York Times
reporter. It seems that in 1904, a cook named Lem Sen, fresh from San Francisco, appeared in a Lower Manhattan lawyer’s office claiming that he was the inventor of chop suey. Further, he remarked that “chop-suey is no more a national dish of the Chinese than pork and beans. . . . There is not a grain of anything Celestial in it.” To the contrary, he claimed, he had concocted the dish in the kitchen of a San Francisco “Bohemian” restaurant just before Li Hongzhang arrived in the United States: “The owner of the restaurant . . . suggested that Lem Sen manufacture some weird dish that would pass as Chinese and gratify the public craze at the time. Lem Sen says that it was then he introduced to the astonished world the great dish.” Then, he said, an American man stole his recipe, and Lem Sen wanted compensation: “Mellikan man makee thousand dollar now. Lem Sen, he makee, too, but me allee time look for Mellican man who stole. Me come. Me find! Now me wantee [recipe] back, an’ all stop makee choop soo or pay for allowee do same.” (American newspapers of the time typically reported the speech of immigrants and African Americans in demeaning dialect.) Lem Sen’s lawyer
threatened to obtain an injunction “restraining all Chinese restaurant keepers from making and serving chop suey.”
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He never followed through, perhaps because New Yorkers knew that Len Sen’s claim was absurd; they had been eating chop suey down on Mott Street for over a decade before Li Hongzhang’s visit.

The idea that chop suey was not Chinese, though, had staying power. The following year, the
Boston Globe
ran a photo of six Chinese students at a textile trade school in New Bedford, Massachusetts, each neatly dressed in a Western suit and tie, beneath the headline “Never Heard of Chop Suey in China.” The students, two from the Yangzi River area and the others from Guangzhou, claimed that “not one of them had ever heard of chop suey until they came to this country.” Rather, it was “a cheap imitation of a dish which pleased Li Hung Chang at a banquet a dozen years ago.”
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Of course, Li actually never ate chop suey, but never mind that detail.

Stories of the “chop suey hoax” proliferated from then on; the gist of the story was always that the dish was a fraud, invented for Americans too ignorant to recognize real Chinese food. The sources were American travelers just back from China or more often Chinese themselves, often highly educated diplomats or businessmen from anywhere but the hinterland of the Pearl River Delta. With their deep knowledge and experience of the Middle Kingdom, they uncovered an alternate tale of the dish’s creation. It seems that in China, some beggars carry copper pots and go to the kitchen doors of houses pleading for leftovers. When they have enough scraps, they put their collection over the fire and cook up a miscellaneous “beggar’s hash” or, as the Chinese call it, chop suey. The dish was first presented to Americans on some fateful night in Gold Rush–era San Francisco, in a Chinese-run boardinghouse—or was it a restaurant? Carl
Crow, an American businessman in Shanghai, told the most elaborate version of the story, which he got from a Chinese diplomat:

Soon after the discovery of gold the Chinese colony in the city was large enough to support a couple of restaurants conducted by Cantonese cooks, who catered only to their fellow-exiles from the Middle Kingdom. The white men had heard the usual sailor yarns about what these pigtailed yellow men ate, and one night a crowd of miners decided they would try this strange fare just to see what it was like. They had been told that Chinese ate rats and they wanted to see whether or not it was true. When they got to the restaurant the regular customers had finished their suppers, and the proprietor was ready to close his doors. But the miners demanded food, so he did the best he could to avoid trouble and get them out of the way as soon as possible. He went out into the kitchen, dumped together all the food his Chinese patrons had left in their bowls, put a dash of Chinese sauce on top and served it to his unwelcome guests. As they didn’t understand Cantonese slang they didn’t know what he meant when he told them that they were eating chop suey, or “beggar hash.” At any rate, they liked it so well that they came back for more and in that chance way the great chop suey industry was established.
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