Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (9 page)

Though Williams tones down the harshness of his
Repository
article’s judgments, he still cannot bring himself to enjoy the food of China. The “repose of putrefied garlic on a much-used blanket” is gone. Now, the food is admired as “sufficient in variety, wholesome, and well cooked,” but it remains “unpalatable to a European from the vegetable oil used in their preparation, and the alliaceous plants introduced to savor them.” He treats only minimally the question of how the Chinese prepare their dishes, commenting that they like to cut up their food into small pieces before stewing or frying. In sum, he reported: “the art of cooking has not reached any high degree of perfection among the Chinese, consisting chiefly of stews of various kinds, in which garlic and grease are more abundant than pepper and salt.”
¹⁹
One of the world’s great cuisines was reduced to a couple of oily stewpots. Judgments like these would dominate American opinion of Chinese food for many decades.

Unfortunately, when Williams returned to Guangzhou in 1848, he discovered that the community of Western China hands was no longer interested in that country’s history and culture, except as they furthered their own narrow interests. He wrote home: “the class of merchants here now take very much less interest in China than they used to, and the publication is carried on at a loss.”
²⁰
In fact, he soon had to stop publishing the
Chinese Repository
because subscriptions
dropped dramatically. (He spent the next few decades of his life in the U.S. consular service and then retired to teach at Yale University.) He also found that the missionaries who were then arriving in China—those who had answered his call—were a different breed than the earlier generation. The missionary boards back in the United States had grown tired of supporting men like Williams, Parker, and Bridgman, with their printing presses, schools, hospitals, and scholarly work. Now they wanted young, energetic, devout, and single-minded men and women who could concentrate on the task of saving Chinese souls. These turned out to be far more interested in Williams’s examination of China’s moral “debasement,” especially the three pages he devotes to female infanticide, than his scholarship about Chinese life and customs.

When the new crop of missionaries landed in the treaty ports (usually, to their embarrassment, aboard opium schooners), they settled in Chinese neighborhoods and quickly began the tasks of preaching to anyone who would listen, distributing Chinese-language tracts, and building Christian chapels. This description of the Presbyterian preacher John B. French in his home near Guangzhou clearly shows how these new missionaries viewed the world outside their doors:

The sides and rear of his little two story dwelling . . . was [
sic
] closely packed in by small Chinese houses swarming with heathen life—blocked off by narrow, dark, and filthy foot-paths as the only streets; presented but a dismal home for a man in the freshness of youth and refinement of feeling. Still here he lived alone, with a Chinese boy to bring him water and cook his rice, and a Chinese teacher to aid him in the study of the language. And he was happy and cheerful. He had daily communings with the pure above though
surrounded by pagans below—and while every thing around him was dark and filthy, and deafening discord—within his heart all was peace, and within his house all was neatness and order.
²¹

The author of that paragraph was William Dean, a Baptist from upstate New York. When he was first recruited for the mission field, he was “tall, broad-shouldered, with muscles hardened on his father’s farm, with dark brown eyes that could sparkle with fun or glow with the fire of determined purpose.” But after preaching to the “heathens” for fifteen years, six of those in China, he was tired out, weakened by tropical disease, old wounds from Malaysian pirates’ spears, and the deaths of two wives in the Far East. Even in convalescence, he retained his faith in his holy work. In 1859, he published
The China Mission
, a kind of instruction manual for young evangelists. Its four hundred pages include every point he thought relevant about the Middle Kingdom, from geography to religion, as well as inspirational stories about the triumphs of Protestant missionaries—and about their not infrequent martyrdoms. (Many observers noticed that missionary wives seemed to die with particular rapidity in Asia.) He dispatches the cuisine of China in one short paragraph:

If you ask what they eat—we answer, they do not eat beef nor bread, mutton nor milk, butter nor cheese; but they do eat fowls and fishes, pigs and puppies, rats and rice, maize and millet, wheat and barley, pumpkins and potatoes, turnips and tomatoes, ground-nuts and garlics, pears and peaches, plantains and pumeloes, grapes and guavas, pineapples and pomegranates, olives and oranges, sharks’ fins and birds’ nests. But why so much curiosity to learn what they eat, while so little concern for the fact that they are hastening by
millions to a world of everlasting starvation, while we hold in our hands the bread which came down from heaven, of which a man eat he shall live forever—and we refuse to give it to them, at the peril of our salvation and theirs.
²²

Cursory and sprinkled with errors (Dean knew from sources like
The Middle Kingdom
that beef and mutton were at least occasionally eaten), this description is typical of missionary writings of the era. There was no reason to dwell on the old, pagan, depraved habits of the Chinese because all of that would soon be swept away by the clean, pure, “civilizing” influence of western Christianity.

There were a few exceptions to this attitude, at least regarding food. Charles Taylor, a medical missionary sent to Shanghai in the early 1850s by the Methodist church, whose 1860 book
Five Years in China
is liberally larded with Christian condemnation, also reveals a scientist’s knack for direct observation. He was curious about every aspect of Chinese life, from housing to criminal punishment, and his section on foodstuffs shows clearly that he actually tasted, and enjoyed, bamboo shoots, frogs’ legs, and ripe persimmons. He is not put off when his Chinese host ladles soup into his bowl with a spoon that has touched his own lips or cleans his guest’s chopsticks with his fingers—“after having sucked them clean.” And he is one of the rare Americans of the nineteenth century who admits to having enjoyed the occasional formal Chinese banquet:

Figure 2.3. An American missionary with her Chinese converts in Fuzhou, c. 1902. After the signing of the Treaty of Wang Xia, most Americans in China were either missionaries or traders.

The variety of preparations is certainly very great, and many of them are as delicate and well-flavored as any one could desire. Such at least is my own opinion, founded on actual experience; for just in order to inform myself, I have done what, perhaps, few foreigners who visit China venture upon—imagining the presence of some canine or feline ingredient—have tasted most of the dishes at a fashionable Chinese dinner, even when the appearance and odor suggested something disagreeable, and have found them exceedingly palatable.
²³

The Americans who lived and worked in China during that time were mainly interested not in what it was but in what they thought it should be—an economically and technologically modern Christian nation. To them, imperial China was an antiquated monolith akin to ancient Egypt or Rome and best relegated to the dustbin of history. Even by the 1890s, few Americans had seen much more of the country than the coast and a few inland cities, and only a small minority had mastered Chinese. Their culturally limited viewpoint profoundly influenced the reception on American soil of Chinese immigrants and Chinese food.

In 1795, when the Americans were still marveling at Chinese food from the confines of Guangzhou, the Middle Kingdom’s most famous poet, Yuan Mei, wrote of the deterioration caused by advancing age:

When I was young and had no money to spend
I had a passionate longing for expensive things.
I was always envying people for their fur coats,
For the wonderful things they got to eat and drink.
I dreamt of these things, but none of them came my way,
And in the end I became very depressed.
Nowadays, I have got quite smart clothes,
But am old and ugly, and they do not suit me at all.
All the choicest foods are on my table;
But I only manage to eat a few scraps.
I feel inclined to say to my Creator
“Let me live my days on earth again,
But this time be rich when I am young;
To be poor when one is old does not matter at all.”
¹

Yuan Mei was born poor in 1716 in the city of Hangzhou. His teachers realized the power of his intellect very early; after he passed the official examinations, he became a district magistrate in the city of Nanjing on the lower Yangzi River. Passionate, irreverent, and disrespectful of authority, he soon realized that he was unfit for official life. Already famous for his poetry, he decided to take up the writing life full time. In 1748, he resigned his posts and retired to a sprawling estate—the Sui Gardens—he had built in the outskirts of Nanjing. His gardens included twenty-four decorative pavilions, a scholar’s library and studio, arched bridges over a pond, and a kitchen. There, for the rest of his life, he devoted himself to poetry and friends, sexual indulgences, and refining the gastronomic arts.

Like many with sensitive stomachs (probably caused by too much early indulgence), Yuan Mei was obsessed with food. He hired a chef, Wang Xiaoyu, who shared his culinary passion and aesthetic. Wang told him:

To find an employer who appreciates one is not easy. But to find one who understands anything about cookery, is harder still. So much imagination and hard thinking go into the making of every dish that one may say I serve up along with it my whole mind and heart. The ordinary hard-drinking revelers at a fashionable dinner-party would be equally happy to gulp down any stinking mess. They say what a wonderful cook I am, but in the service of such people my art can only decline. . . . You, on the contrary, continually criticize me, fly into a rage with me, but on every such occasion make me aware of some real defect; so that I would a thousand times rather listen to your bitter admonitions than to the sweetest praise.
²

Wang brought to the poet’s kitchen his ability to cook the simplest ingredients in a way that preserved and enhanced
their natural characteristics. “If one has art,” he said, “then a piece of celery or salted cabbage can be made into a marvelous delicacy.”
³
Yuan also expanded his kitchen’s repertoire by eating widely, both at the houses of friends and on his extensive travels throughout China. When he encountered a dish he liked, he took notes, barged into the kitchen to interrogate the chefs, even brought them home to demonstrate its preparation. His tastes ran to simple meals, due both to his stomach problems and because he thought a cook could only make four or five successful dishes at a time. After a banquet where more than forty different kinds of food had been served, he wrote, “when I got home I was so hungry that I ordered a bowl of plain rice-gruel [congee].”
⁴

At age eighty, when the choicest morsels had lost their savor, Yuan Mei decided to sum up a lifetime of eating in his book
Suiyan Shidan
, “Recipes from the Sui Gardens.” It contains more than three hundred recipes for fish, shellfish, meat, poultry, vegetables, bean curd, noodles, breads, and rice dishes. More important, he prefaces the book with a dozen pages of culinary rules and taboos that give readers a grounding in the general principles of how food should be cooked and served. Like Chef Wang, Yuan holds that foods should exhibit their own characteristics when cooked, and each dish should have one dominant flavor. “Then the palate of the gourmand will respond without fail, and the flowers of the soul blossom forth.”
⁵
Comparing cookery to matrimony, he writes that ingredients should complement one another and criticizes cooks who pile too many incompatible meats into one pot. In the kitchen, the chef should keep his workspace and knives clean to avoid contamination of flavors. Guests at the table should not “eat with their eyes” or be overwhelmed by a profusion of elaborate, poorly prepared dishes. And they should not “eat with their ears” or be impressed by hearing of the cost of rare dishes like birds’
nests and sea cucumbers. Yuan preferred well-prepared bean curd and bamboo shoots and declared chicken, pork, fish, and duck “the four heroes of table.”
⁶
Above all, the host should never allow the standards of his kitchen to slip: “into no department of life should indifference be allowed to creep; into none less than into the domain of cookery.”
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