The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (8 page)

So Americans were suspicious of these foreigners and their animated cooking over large flames. There were too many noises: chopping, clanging, the roar of the fire, chattering over meals.

As one San Francisco magazine writer observed of their ingredients in 1868, “Few western palates can endure even the most delicate of their dishes. Shark’s fin, 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 bil of fare.” The Chinese also seemed wil ing to consume anything they dredged from the sea: seaweed, abalone, squid, turtles (stil available today, live, in many restaurant tanks).

And the things they could do with beans! As one writer noted, “Undisputed ruler, lord of al lesser greens, reigns the almighty bean. Boston has adopted the baked bean, but China had it first. Not only baked but boiled, made into pastes, soups, oil and cheese.” Now tofu is available in every suburban supermarket and is a vegetarian staple, but in the eyes of a turn-of-the-century American with European ancestry, it was a bit revolting: “In the window of almost every Chinese grocer is a bilious pyramid of yel ow-green cakes of bean cheese.” What was this semisolid substance? “Taken alone and reduced to an essence,” the journalist jeered, “the result is a feeling, not a flavor.”

(For their part, the Chinese, with a largely dairy-free diet, were horrified by cheese. Even today my Chinese friends from China find the springy, gooey, oozing texture of cheese somewhat stomach-turning. Yet cheese and tofu are essential y made by similar processes: a fluid is coagulated until it separates into liquids and solids; the solids are kept, pressed together, and processed. With beans, the solids become tofu. With milk, the curds become cheese.)

Chinese meat products were eyed with suspicion: these animals did not hail from a farm; nor had they been caught by a fishing rod or fel ed by a bul et from a hunter’s rifle. “The meat things served here are strangely barbaric, seen in their uncooked stages in the open meat markets below, which are redolent with articles of diet for which an Occidental butcher would have no name,” one journalist remarked, reminiscing about San Francisco’s Chinatown months after the 1906 earthquake had leveled the neighborhood. In addition, there were

“giblets of you-never-know-what, maybe gizzards, possibly livers, perhaps toes.”

The image of the Chinese as vermin-eating immigrants persisted in the public’s imagination. A picture of a rat-eating Chinese man was used in children’s textbooks in the late 1800s. An enterprising Jersey City exterminator designed an advertisement for his rat poison, Rough on Rats, that showed an oddly dressed Chinaman devouring a rat and the line

“They Must Go!” (This subtly referred to both the rats and the Chinese immigrants.)

Even Mark Twain, while working as a reporter in Virginia City, Nevada, kept his distance. In the 1860s, during a visit to a shopkeeper named Ah Sing at 13 Wang Street, he accepted the hospitality of the merchant’s brandy but declined the “smal , neat sausages, of which we could have swal owed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse.”

The Americans were horrified by Chinese table manners. In a culture that judged a man’s class by how adroitly he maneuvered a metal knife and fork, eating rice with spindly wooden sticks was emasculating. These eating utensils were even used to make a point in a criminal trial; the lawyer for the white leader of an 1865 race riot defended his client’s behavior by informing the judge, “Why, sir, these Chinamen live on rice and, sir, they eat it with sticks!”

To be sure, Chinese cooking did find some fans—the budget-conscious and the adventurous—

partial y because it provided good food for good value. “The best eating houses in Francisco are those kept by the Celestials, and conducted in a Chinese fashion; the dishes are mostly curries, hashes and fricassees, served in smal dishes and as they were exceedingly palatable, I was not curious enough to inquire about the ingredients,” wrote Wil iam Shaw, a self-identified gold seeker, in 1851. Cal ed “chow chows,” Chinese restaurants could be spotted by the triangular yel ow flags fluttering outside their doors.

They attracted miners and bohemians looking to escape the mundane.

The waves of Chinese continued to wash up on the shores; the immigrants took jobs in manufacturing, agriculture, mining, and railroads. They were wil ing to work for less, and they were numerous, and they kept coming. The population of what is now the state of Idaho was in the 1870s some one-third Chinese.

America had become infested with these creatures, white workers felt. Some of them wanted to make it stop. In their efforts, they littered the coast from Los Angeles to Tacoma, Washington, with the dead bodies of Chinese men.

The

embers

of

culinary

xenophobia

smoldered. These foreigners’ dining habits became a point of attack, a concrete behavior used to differentiate “them” from “us.” Samuel Gompers, a hero of the labor movement and the president of the American Federation of Labor, published a pamphlet under the auspices of that organization in 1902:

“Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat Versus Rice, American Manhood Versus Asiatic Coolieism

—Which Shal Survive?” Real men could not live on rice alone.

As white economic anxiety grew, it was unleashed in the form of shootings, arson, mutilation, and lynchings. Across the West, there were numerous impromptu campaigns to purge the country of Chinese. In 1885, an anti-Chinese ral y in Seattle set a deadline for al Chinese to be out of Washington Territory by November 1. Two days after the deadline, residents conducted a giant raid against Tacoma’s Chinatown, where the merchants, who were less transient than the laborers, had remained. Doors were kicked down, bodies were dragged, people were herded like wayward cattle. About six hundred Chinese were forced to wait for transport to Portland at a railroad station where there was no shelter.

During the night a heavy rain fel ; some Chinese died.

The same year, miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, conspired to drive their Chinese competition out, attacking their settlement with guns and fire. As the Chinese miners tried to escape the burning wooden shacks, their attackers forced them back into the flames. Some who fled into the mountains were later eaten by wolves. At least twenty-eight people died.

But the most lurid tale was the Snake River Massacre of 1887. The water in Hel ’s Canyon in Oregon ran red with blood as more than thirty Chinese gold miners were kil ed and mutilated by a group of white men who had conspired to steal their gold and force the Chinese out. Three kil ers were brought to trial. Not one was convicted, and the kil ers kept their souvenirs. A Chinese skul fashioned into a sugar bowl graced the kitchen table of one ranch home for many years.

The economic and political backlash culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in stages between 1882 and 1902, which restricted Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese arrivals from becoming naturalized citizens. It would be the only law in American history to exclude a group by race or ethnicity.

But even as the doors slammed shut, some Chinese had already made it to the other side. Were they to be considered lucky or not? They had bought their way to a land of opportunity, but now the opportunities were rapidly shriveling. The Chinese were

driven

from

agriculture,

mining,

and

manufacturing. They were driven eastward, inland.

They found themselves stranded in a strange land, thousands of miles and months of sea travel from their hometowns. They had come to make money, to support their families, but now employers were afraid to give them jobs for fear of violent retribution. The jobs slowly dried up.

So what happened?

The Chinese response stil dots the American

landscape

today:

restaurants

and

laundries.

In the half century from 1870 and 1920, the number of Chinese restaurant workers surged from 164 to 11,438, even though the total number of Chinese employed declined. Between 1900 and 1920, in many cities the number of Chinese restaurants doubled. In New York City there were six Chinese restaurants in 1885. Less than twenty years later, in 1905, there were more than one hundred chop suey restaurants between Fourteenth and Forty-fifth Streets and Third and Eighth Avenues.

Restaurant workers didn’t even appear on San Francisco’s 1877 list of the twenty-two top occupations,

which

included

whip

makers,

stonecutters, and lumbermen. The top occupations were listed as cigarmakers (7,500); merchants, traders, and clerks (5,000); and house servants (4,500). Laundrymen (3,500) appeared just before enslaved prostitutes (2,600). Laundries had long been a domain of Chinese workers, ever since 1851, when Wah Lee first hung up a sign for “Wash’ng and Iron’ng” in San Francisco and drove down the prices for starched col ars and hard-boiled shirts. The Chinese had a near lock on laundries on the West Coast, and those continued to grow and thrive.

Why was there suddenly an entrepreneurial explosion of restaurants, and why, of al smal businesses, did laundries survive?

Cleaning and cooking were both women’s work. They were not threatening to white laborers.

The Chinese did not survive as restaurateurs by sel ing American diners “waxen meats,” “bean cheese,” or shark’s fin soup. Americans had once sneered at Chinese food, but by the turn of the century they

were

flocking

“zombielike”

to

Chinese

restaurants, which had proliferated across the country.

In 1900, the
New York Times
declared that New York City had experienced an “outbreak of Chinese restaurants al over town.” Diners were being drawn by something dazzling! Something sophisticated!

Something exotic! Something that had taken the country by storm. Something cal ed . . . chop suey?

In a cooking tradition hostile to excessive spices, sharp flavors, and “foreign” ingredients, chop suey meant new textures. Thin, squiggly white bean sprouts. Crispy, round water chestnuts. Gravy! New York City had gone “chop suey mad.” Chop suey parlors lined the streets of downtown Brooklyn, Washington, and Des Moines. Instead of the Yel ow Peril, the Chinese-Americans had been transformed into benign restaurateurs sel ing a saucy vegetable-and-meat concoction.

The dish became a national addiction. Men impressed their dates with their sophistication by taking them out for chop suey, while they themselves could order from the safer, less adventuresome dishes on the “American” side of the menu: hamburgers and gril ed pork chops. A fifteen-year-old Chicago girl stole $3,400 from her parents, using fake checks, and spent it on chop suey; she was put on probation by a juvenile court in 1923. Attempts to prove that she had used the money for things other than chop suey failed.

Chop suey even became a government-tracked commodity. In 1920, a dozen Chinese restaurant owners were hauled in front of a Chicago city council committee investigating living costs. They were gril ed about the price of the ingredients and their profit margins on every kind of chop suey, from plain to chicken with fine white mushrooms. The aldermen then declared that chop suey prices were too high.

Middle-class women examined newspaper and magazine recipes, trying to make their own brown sauce, vegetables, and rice taste as authentic as that of the chop suey parlors. (The secret, they were told, was soy sauce and sesame oil.) Chop suey, along with chow mein and egg foo yong, were added to the bible of American domesticity:
The Joy
of Cooking.

Chinese restaurants became so common in New York that in 1952 a prominent German restaurant final y caved in and restored to its name the umlaut that had been removed during World War I. Lüchow’s owner had gotten tired of tourists coming in and ordering chop suey and egg rol s.

There was one smal point that the restaurateurs were careful not to emphasize to their customers: the dish Americans knew as chop suey was al but unknown in China. In fact, the dish was reported in China decades after it appeared in the States. During World War I and its aftermath, local Chinese cooks hung up

“chop suey” signs to attract American soldiers as customers.

The magic behind chop suey was that it was familiar but exotic. Chinese restaurant owners would use this formula again and again—with fortune cookies, with General Tso’s chicken, with other dishes.

But where had chop suey come from? And how had it spread so fast?

Two tales are commonly cited, each with variations. In fact, both stories are so firmly accepted that they are repeated in history books, newspapers, and on the Internet, to the point where they have taken on the tenacious quality of historical truth.

In the first tale, white railroad (or mine) workers come to a Chinese restaurant just before (or after) its closing in San Francisco (or the Wild West).

They are drunk (or just hungry) and order (or force) the cook to prepare something for them to eat. He takes the scraps (or leftovers) from the kitchen and whips up a random concoction of vegetables, meats, and brown sauce. The workers, of course, love it and ask the poor cook what the dish is cal ed. Since it real y doesn’t have a name, he makes one up, cal ing it