The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (14 page)

Of course, not al Jewish people have eyed Chinese cuisine with good-natured affinity. In 1928, a Yiddish reporter sounded the alarm at the height of the chop suey madness, saying that Jewish fans of Chinese food were destined to forget their own culinary traditions. The
Der Tog
reporter lightheartedly suggested that perhaps communal-minded American Jews everywhere should raise this protest sign:

“Down with chop suey! Long live gefilte fish!”

A number of Jewish entrepreneurs have built their careers and fortunes on their connection with Chinese cuisine. Eddie Scher, a businessman who lives in Felton, California, developed a monstrously popular brand of Asian-themed sauces widely sold in Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Dean & DeLuca. He drives around with the company name on his vanity license plate: SOY VAY. Kari-Out, the largest distributor of soy sauce packets in the country, is owned by a Jewish family, the Epsteins of Westchester, New York.

There are even a number of Jewish-owned Chinese restaurants. Perhaps none is as impressive as Chai Peking, a glatt kosher Chinese place in Atlanta, which demonstrates the lengths Jews wil go to get their Chinese food. Tucked in a Kroger supermarket in a strip mal , Chai Peking doesn’t appear any more sophisticated than a food-court joint, yet it has some of the most fiercely loyal customers in al of Atlanta, maybe even the entire Southeast. It is believed to be the only glatt kosher Chinese restaurant within a radius of almost seven hundred miles—up to Maryland and down to Miami.

Chai Peking has raised takeout and delivery to another level. Takeout often means customers making four-hour round-trip drives through multiple states to pick up huge orders. In 2003 a Nashvil e man flew his plane to the Atlanta airport to pick up an order for a synagogue fund-raiser back home.

Included in his order, twenty-eight gal ons of soup, packed in five-gal on buckets. Deliveries are often sent by FedEx, frozen and packed on dry ice to arrive in Texas, Mississippi, or North Carolina the next day for whatever anniversary, birthday party, or other celebration merited the appearance of Chinese food.

At Chai Peking, I ate one of their house specialties: a Chinese hot dog. A beef hot dog is wrapped in pastrami and egg-rol skin, then deep-fried. It had familiar sensations—the crispness of the flaky egg-rol skin, the juicy hot dog, and the cured taste of pastrami—but layered together a new way.

I had found al of this interesting information, but so far my exploration had only deepened, not clarified, the central mystery: Why is chow mein the chosen food of the chosen people?

The academic literature turned up some interesting hypotheses. For one thing, Chinese people and Jews were among the two largest non-Christian immigrant groups in the United States, which meant they didn’t share the same days of worship as the rest of the predominantly Protestant and Catholic country. Even today, Christmas is often the busiest day of the year for Chinese Restaurants in New York, Florida, and other Jewish-American urban hubs. At Shun Lee, an upscale restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the onslaught of Jewish customers begins at noon and does not stop until eleven P.M., making Christmas twice as busy as the next-busiest day of the year; Singing Bamboo in West Palm Beach expects three times the normal number of customers on Christmas. The Christmas-and-Chinese-food ritual has even been systematized. At the 92nd Street Y in New York, you can come in for an al -you-can-eat Chinese buffet and a movie or two. Jews in the Bay Area have launched ChopShticks, comedy shows at Chinese restaurants during the holidays that have been continuously sold out.

The academics also note that Chinese cooking uses essential y no dairy. Thus it is easy to make kosher, more so than Italian and Mexican food, the other two main ethnic cuisines in the United States.

But there are more subtle reasons for the connection, such as those put forth by two sociologists. Gaye Tuchman and Harry G. Levine interviewed over one hundred people about their experiences with Chinese food and compiled their observations in a paper cal ed “Safe Treyf” (“treyf” is the word for nonkosher food), so named because they found that Chinese restaurants were where many Jews felt safe in breaking the laws of kashruth. The two sociologists posit that Chinese food helped the generation of immigrant Jews feel more American, in part by making them feel more cosmopolitan at a time when they were trying to shed their image as hicks from eastern Europe. Chinese food used to symbolize worldiness. As Tuchman and Levine write:

“Of al the peoples whom immigrant Jews and their children met, of al the foods they encountered in America, the Chinese were the most foreign, the most

‘un-Jewish.’ Yet Jews defined this particular foreignness not as forbidding but as appealing, attractive, and desirable. They viewed Chinese restaurants and food as exotic and cosmopolitan and therefore as good. Indeed, many Jews saw eating in Chinese restaurants as an antidote for Jewish parochialism, for the exclusive and overweening emphasis on the culture of the Jews as it had been.”

Another paper focused on a more prosaic explanation: geographic proximity. New York City’s Lower East Side, which three-quarters of al Jewish immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1920

passed through, was only a fifteen-minute walk from Chinatown, notes Hanna R. Mil er in a paper titled

“Identity Takeout: How American Jews Made Chinese Food

Their

Ethnic

Cuisine.”

That

proximity

encouraged culinary crossover. The Eldridge Street Synagogue, erected by eastern European Jewish immigrants in 1887 as the first permanent synagogue in their new homeland, is now surrounded by Chinese restaurants and specialty stores. It has decided not to fight the inevitable: now it hosts the Kosher Egg Rol Festival.

As Jews moved out of the Lower East Side and to other New York neighborhoods, other cities, and the suburbs, Chinese restaurants fol owed. There was a readymade audience with readymade appreciation for their food. Over time, the two groups helped each other become more American. “Jews!”

one Chinese restaurant owner enthusiastical y gushed to me. “They’re our best customers!”

More

subtly,

Chinese

restaurants

emphasized Jews’ proximity to the Euro-Christian tradition, rather than its distance. Christian imagery in Chinese restaurants was almost nonexistent, in contrast to Irish or Italian establishments. A friend of mine, Brian Chirls, excitedly alerted me to a passage in Philip Roth’s novel
Portnoy’s Complaint
in which Portnoy discusses nonkosher Chinese food: “Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but
white
—and maybe even Anglo Saxon. Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP! Boy, do we eat. Suddenly even the pig is no threat.”

In search of someone who spoke from the stomach rather than the head, I turned to an expert on Chinese restaurants—a Jewish man named Ed Schoenfeld from Brooklyn, who started as a busboy in a Chinese restaurant and has risen to become one of the country’s leading Chinese-restaurant consultants.

We met in the dining room of one of his clients, an upscale Chinese restaurant in lower Manhattan cal ed Chinatown Brasserie. “It was part of the secular European Jewish experience,” he said. He elaborated at length on different flavor profiles and accessibility. Then he noted: “Jews are concerned with value.”

Stil unsatisfied, I sought someone who could speak with both Jewish and Chinese authority: the lost Chinese Jews of Kaifeng.

Chinese Jews appeared in the city of Kaifeng about a thousand years ago during the Song Dynasty, a period of rapid innovation in which China gave the world gunpowder, movable type, and the magnetic compass. In 1163, as part of the Jewish diaspora, the community built a synagogue in Kaifeng, once the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty. The Chinese synagogue rose and fel in Kaifeng, destroyed by fire and flood, until the last one was demolished in the 1860s. Without a gravitational center for the community’s religious heritage, the Chinese Jews largely blended in with the surrounding Chinese community. But the smattering of Chinese Jews who have remained in Kaifeng draw pilgrims from around the world.

I had received a tip from a professor who had been there months earlier: that an old Jewish woman stil lived in the al ey that had been the epicenter of Jewish life in Kaifeng, Jiaojing Hutong, or

“Teaching Scriptures Al ey.” I found her home among the narrow passageways and knocked on the screen door of her one-room home. An old Chinese woman cleaning vegetables on the floor looked up and welcomed me in. She was smal , with a cheerful, round face and a bel y-shaking giggle. As the remaining Jew in the
hutong,
she had grown used to foreign visitors over the years—mostly Jews from America or Israel, but occasional y people from Japan or Hong Kong. During peak holiday seasons, she said, she got up to three or four visits in a single day.

“Sometimes there are so many that they don’t even fit in here,” she added, gesturing at the dark room, where she lived by herself; her husband had died and her five daughters were al married.

She was not a practicing Jew, but she kept on display a few menorahs that had been passed down through her husband’s family. Much of the other Jewish paraphernalia, like a Jerusalem plate and an Israeli flag, had been given to her by strangers. She was shrewd enough, however, to capitalize on her popularity. Three or four years earlier she had started sel ing elaborate red paper carvings that combined Jewish and Chinese themes: the star of David flanked by gently curving lotus flowers; a menorah with the Chinese character for fortune; the word “shalom” with a pair of graceful swal ows; flowers with the star of David at their center, sandwiched between “I Love Israel” in English and “China Kaifeng” in Chinese.

She earned al her income from these paper carvings. “I have to make a living. I have to eat,” she said. This eighty-one-year-old Chinese woman was a professional Jew.

She invited me to sit down at the table. I explained to her at length the research I was doing about Jews in America. I was hoping that she, being one of the rare Chinese Jews in the world today, would be able to shed light on a question that had vexed academics, bolstered comedy routines, and intrigued Portnoy.

“Why,” I asked, “do Jews in America like Chinese food so much?”

With a glint in her eye, she slapped the wooden table.

She knew.

I leaned in. This was the insight for which I had traveled thousands of miles, walked along a highway at midnight, and scoured al eyways.

Her Buddhist koan–like response was profound in its simplicity:

“Because Chinese food tastes good.”

That brings us back to the psychological importance of a kosher Chinese restaurant, and why the community wanted the Moshe Dragon issue to go away.

The newspaper accounts pressured the rabbinical council into launching an intensive, three-month investigation of the restaurant. The rabbis brought in a big-time Washington lawyer to work pro bono; he, in turn, brought in a private investigator who had earned her stripes on a kashruth corruption story a dozen years earlier. Meanwhile, they fired Mayer, though official y the council said that this had nothing to do with the ruckus he had stirred up—something
Washington Jewish Week
reporters approached with skepticism.

Invoices were scrutinized. Translators were hired. Suppliers were interviewed. Accountants were cal ed in.

One

particularly

heated

confrontation

between Mayer and investigators ended with Ung col apsing on the floor. He was taken by ambulance to Holy Cross Hospital, where he was diagnosed with a stress-related condition and given sedatives. Moshe Dragon’s backers said he’d suffered a nervous breakdown, perhaps an echo of his experience in the Cambodian holocaust. Mayer scoffed: “He saw his whole thing fal apart right in front of him.”

Despite the winds of the early evidence, at the end of the investigation the rabbinical council issued a solemn two-page report clearing Ung of any wrongdoing.

The council said it had belatedly discovered that Moshe Dragon had purchased ducks from Shaul’s and Hersel’s kosher market on August 16—

nearly a month after the previously presumed last sale. The council traced the ducks back to a supplier in Philadelphia that had also been a supplier to Ung’s restaurant in that city. While these experienced businessmen had somehow created no paper trail for hundreds of pounds of duck, the council found many people who vouched for the duck delivery. “This evidence supports Ung’s contention that the ducks sold at Moshe Dragon during the summer of 1989

were purchased from kosher sources,” the report stated.

In a world that tracks the provenance of kosher food with the rigor of high-end art dealers, this was the equivalent of accepting a photocopied letter and a pinky swear to vet a Rembrandt. The report hastened to add that the kitchen had been kashered