The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (9 page)

“chop suey.” The workers are satisfied and wander off. Somehow, from that, a craze is born.

The second tale is more historical in nature, tying itself tightly to an 1896 visit to the United States by a prominent Chinese diplomat named Li Hongzhang. The details vary but are very specific in how they vary: Li is a guest (or host) of a dinner in New York (or Washington, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco). At the dinner a dish is summarily thrown together by a Chinese cook (or Li himself) because Li has indigestion (or does not like the Western dishes available or the Western guests do not like the Chinese dishes available). When the guests (or newspaper reporters) ask for the dish’s name, they are told it is cal ed chop suey. The dinner that is most specifical y cited is a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in August 1896.

The Li Hongzhang story is cited so often, with so much detail, how could it not be true? But the menu from that Waldorf-Astoria banquet was actual y French: consommés and soufflés. After nibbling a bit, Li had his servants bring him a tray of boiled chicken, white rice, and vegetable soup, according to the detailed account provided by the
New York Times.

The definitive scholarly paper on the origins of chop suey was published some twenty years ago, in 1987, by a then graduate student named Renqiu Yu, in the journal
Chinese America: History and
Perspectives,
which I found devilishly hard to track down.

It was a few months before I met up with Ren Yu. We agreed to have lunch at Big Wong King Restaurant one September afternoon; the shops already had their moon cakes on display for the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival. Ren told me that he first became interested in chop suey when he moved to New York City to earn his Ph.D. at New York University. As a single graduate student, he ate out a lot and noticed that chop suey was on the majority of the menus. He never ordered the dish, but he observed others savoring it.

He spent almost three years doing his research, including a summer in NYU’s library scrol ing through microfilm of the
New York Times,
looking for any early mention of chop suey. Chop suey was not created from whole cloth, Ren believed. An actual Chinese dish cal ed “chow chop suey” (or

“chow chop sui” or “chow chop sooy”) was being served among the Chinese themselves by the 1880s and early 1890s; “chow” means to stir-fry and “chop suey” often meant animal entrails—livers, giblets, and the like.

That fit with what I’d found, that there were early mentions of something cal ed “chow chop suey”

before the Li Hongzhang visit, a dish described as being made with gizzards. But the new dish had suddenly taken off after Li Hongzhang’s visit, in part because of the way it was (deceivingly?) associated with him. “You have a celebrity culture in America,”

Ren mused. “If it is associated with a name of a celebrity, it wil sel very wel .” He rattled off a list of things: clothes, sneakers, perfumes. “What is wrong with the Chinese practice of an American commercial skil ? Sel ing a dish by attaching his name?

“That’s my hypothesis,” he said. “There is no documentation.”

But there was yet another claim. One night I was scrol ing through the newly digitized files of old
New
York Times
articles, stretching back to 1851, when something caught my eye. The headline was “Chop Suey Injunction: Len Sem of ’Frisco Here to Al ege Copyright Infringement”; it was dated June 15, 1904.

The story unfolded: Chinatown was plunged into gloom, an air of silent preoccupation overhanging the habitués of Mott and Pel Streets. Word had spread of an economic crisis. Earlier in the week, a San Francisco Chinese man had walked into the soaring twenty-six-story St. Paul Building on Broadway. Armed with a sheaf of legal documents, he’d headed into the law offices of Rufus P.

Livermore, who ran a distinguished smal -time practice just southwest of Chinatown. The San Francisco visitor’s name was Lem Sen. He told Mr.

Livermore that he was the inventor of chop suey and had the documents to prove it. And in an aggressive, sophisticated assertion of intel ectual property rights, he wanted to file an injunction to stop the

“manufacturing and serving” of chop suey in New York City.

This claim surprised Mr. Livermore, but it did not come total y out of the blue. He had already sensed that something was amiss with chop suey.

Like most Americans, he had long assumed it was the “national dish” of China, but only a few weeks earlier he had heard a story that had cast a seed of doubt. That month, a Chinese envoy to the St. Louis Exposition, Pu Lun, had paid a visit to New York. As Mr. Livermore heard it, one of the guides tried to please Pu Lun during his tour of Chinatown by tel ing him, “And now, your highness, we wil soon be dining on your national dish, chop suey.”

“What is chop suey?” the prince asked innocently.

Now in front of Livermore was a man who claimed that chop suey was no more the national dish of China than pork and beans. He asserted that there was not a grain of anything Celestial in it. He said that he’d been employed at an American-owned restaurant when his boss told him to manufacture some weird dish that “would pass as Chinese and gratify the public craze at the time” created by a visit from a high-level Chinese diplomat. In an expression of his humor, Lem Sen christened his dish “chop suey,” a term often used in Cantonese for “odds and ends” or “bits and pieces.” But then his recipe was stolen, and spread across America. Lem Sen wanted these copycats stopped.

The reporter quoted Lem Sen: “Mel ikan makee thousand dol ar now. Lem Sen, he makee, too. But me al ee time look for Mel ican man who stole. Me come. Me find! Now me want papel back, and al stop makee choop soo or pay me for al owee do same.”

Was this the answer? Had it been lying in the depths of newspaper archives for al that time, unlocked by the magic of optical recognition? It had appeared several years after the span that Ren, the historian, had examined in the historical record.

Digging through more records, I discovered a brief, four-paragraph wire story describing the Waldorf-Astoria banquet. The article, which ran across the country, listed “chop suey” as the food that was brought to Li Hongzhang—the first time that name may have appeared in print as such. But the dishes served to him had been, specifical y, boiled chicken and rice. I knew enough about how reporters groped through unfamiliar situations to guess that the wire-service reporter might have asked someone what Li Hongzhang had been served, been told “odds and ends” in Chinese, and interpreted it as a name of a single dish.

If so, then Lem Sen’s story held a grain of truth. Everything fit: the purposeful myth that connected it to the diplomat Li Hongzhang; the sudden rise in popularity of Chinese restaurants within a decade; why the term “chop suey” appeared in print before 1896 but only as “chow chop suey”; how chop suey later emerged as its own dish everywhere. Had this short wire story spurred a national American demand for something cal ed

“chop suey,” which Lem Sen then invented so as to have a dish to serve? One that incorporated interesting but not outlandish vegetables, like celery, bean sprouts, and water chestnuts?

I pondered the tale about the bul ied Chinese chef who threw scraps together for hungry laborers. That probably did happen somewhere, sometime. In a way, “chop suey” had always existed in the sense of “odds and ends.” But how could a recipe like that have spread with such ferocity without some spirited campaign behind it?

“It’s an amazing story,” Ren wrote back to me in an e-mail, after I gave him the article.

So was the injunction ever filed? Was that sheaf of legal papers that Lem Sen had carried into Livermore’s office buried in the bowels of New York City’s courthouse system? I couldn’t find anything during a visit downtown.

Perhaps Lem Sen was the true innovator. Or perhaps he was claiming credit while building on work also done by others—like Watson and Crick with Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction images of DNA

—especial y since the historical evidence seems to point to chop suey first becoming popularized in New York City.

But I wanted to believe his story. I wanted to believe that there was a single figure in history who had come up with the recipe—not simply of a single dish, but the recipe for success at a time when it was desperately needed by Chinese workers in the United States. I wanted to believe that there was an individual who had created one of the earliest gambits of celebrity marketing in the United States.

Maybe it’s the writer’s weakness, always trying to distil history into simple stories about a single person, a fight, an invention, a smal act of civil disobedience. That is why we often say World War I was triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Or that the American civil rights movement was prompted by Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat. Perhaps that’s also why I felt compel ed to seek the true origins of the fortune cookie—whether the creator turned out to be a noodlemaker in Los Angeles or a gardener from Japan. We want a person behind a phenomenon.

These symbolic characters make the mess of history more streamlined, palatable, and digestible—not unlike Americanized Chinese food. Against a backdrop of chaos, there is a single pleasant narrative.

Chop suey has done its duty. A century later, the dish is gently fading away from American menus, supplanted by General Tso’s chicken, beef with broccoli, and sweet-and-sour pork. It has been kicked out of
The Joy of Cooking,
replaced by more fashionable Chinese dishes. It is stil found in some urban Chinese takeouts and in scattered restaurants around the country, but few people order it, restaurant owners tel me. Most Americans now know that chop suey is not real Chinese food. A handful don’t care.

Yet it stil endures. Chop suey, I discovered, has become an American export. I have found it in Japan, Korea, Jamaica, Guyana, and the Caribbean.

In India, “American chop suey” (often made with ketchup!) remains one of the most popular dishes on Chinese menus, a stalwart just across the border from China. In Los Angeles, a Chicano girl who worked at Avis confided to me that her family would sometimes drive four hours to Mexicali, the Chinese-restaurant capital of Mexico, to have chop suey. She added,

“You can’t get it in the same way in the United States.”

The Long March of General Tso

I have traveled thousands of miles, from New York to the Hunan city of Changsha, to pay homage to one of the most prominent Chinese figures known in America.

Undoubtedly, the most famous man to emerge from Hunan, a rural province largely analogous to Arkansas in America, is Chairman Mao Zedong, the megalomaniac Communist leader who led the careening nation through wars and revolutions.

His name reverberates with sacred reverence in Hunan. China’s aspiring politicians pay visits to his childhood home, sometimes secretly. My driver has Mao’s face as his cel phone background.

But rivaling Chairman Mao’s stature in the United States is another man, one who plays a more familiar role in our day-to-day lives, a man whose name passes through the lips of thousands of Americans every week. He is the great scholar-warrior Zuo Zongtang, a crusher of rebel ions against the imperial Qing court, an elder statesman who held modern Chinese territory together. Outside China, however, he is less often recognized in history books than in cookbooks. Born in 1812 about fifty miles north of Changsha in the smal vil age of Jietoupu, he is also known as General Zuo or, more famously, General Tso. The Chinese respect the general as a vicious and gifted military leader, the equivalent of American Civil War general Wil iam Tecumseh Sherman. But mil ions of Americans know him only for the chicken dish named in his honor. He is the General Tso of General Tso’s chicken. Tso Tsungtang

—the more modern spel ing is Zuo Zongtang—may have died in 1885, but his name lives forever in smal towns and big cities across the United States, spoken, even if mispronounced, more often than Chairman Mao’s. (“Tso” is commonly said like “So”

but is actual y properly pronounced halfway between

“Zuoh” and “Juoh,” something like “Jaw.”) What I discover: in America, General Tso, like Colonel Sanders, is known for chicken, not war. In China, he is known for war, not chicken.

General Tso’s chicken is probably the most popular Chinese chef’s special in America. What’s there not to like? Succulent, crispy fried chicken is drenched in a tangy, spicy sauce and sautéed with garlic, ginger, and chili peppers until it bursts with flavor. Each bite is a rapturous gastronomic journey, beginning with a pleasant crunch that gives way to the tender dark meat, al while your tongue experiences the simultaneous ecstasy of sweetness paired with the kick from the chili peppers.

In my travels, I have encountered chicken belonging to General Gau, General Chau, General Tao, General Tsuo, General Joe, General So, General Chow, and just plain old “General.” Then there was my personal favorite, in Wichita, Kansas: General T (perhaps a cousin of Mr.?). The general goes undercover at the United States Naval Academy dining hal , which serves “Admiral Tso’s Chicken.”