Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (20 page)

Figure 5.1. This second-floor Port Arthur restaurant attracted wealthy white “slummers” to Mott Street in New York’s Chinatown.

When Saturday evening arrived, half the party went missing, giving excuses that “were more ingenious than satisfactory.” The dinner went on with four diners, including Hawk Ling. The brave eaters were greeted by a table set with concessions to “American taste and table habits”: a white tablecloth, red napkins, slightly tarnished knives and forks of a “primitive farm-house pattern,” and little dishes of mustard covered with oil. (Mustard later became ubiquitous on Cantonese American restaurant tables, usually accompanied by plum sauce and deep-fried chop suey noodles.) China plates, bowls, and spoons completed the dinner service. After a little fun with the menu—“Ah Sin” at first handed them a Chinese laundry bill—the Americans learned that duck and pork would not be included in the meal. The restaurant owner had decided that these meats were too common and that his guests would be served only “imported food, mostly fish of some kind, and of the sort only enjoyed
by ‘high-toned gentlemen in China.’” (Yuan Mei would not have approved.) Assuming a false bravado, Trafton ordered chopsticks to use instead of forks and commenced to eat. Beyond a reference to “lice” (rice), his report skimps on the details of what they ate, attempting only this description:

The flavors were unlike anything known to our more familiar gastronomy, and the fundamental article of each was so artfully concealed as to defy identification. One course consisted of a hard, white gelatinous substance; another, contained strips of what resembled tripe; another, small rolls of pale-yellow Russia leather, but the
pièce de resistance
was the bowl of bull-fish.
²

This final item was the imported delicacy that Ah-Sin said “smell heap.” As soon as the last course was finished, the guests thanked Hawk Ling and the restaurant’s owner and hightailed it to the nearby Astor House hotel on Broadway. Over drinks, they compared notes. Trafton said his “palate testified to having lunched off a rainbow soaked in brine,” while a “fashionable New York editor and magazinist” in the party felt as though he had eaten a “rare-done nightmare.” They had experienced their Chinese dinner as a novelty, to be boasted about but never to be repeated—an attitude reminiscent of 1844 Macau or 1850s San Francisco.

Ten years later, in one of the greatest cultural shifts in American culinary history, New Yorkers would be flocking to Mott Street to eat Chinese food. The developments that preceded this revolution in taste were gradual, and began with the original founding of New York’s Chinese community. The first arrivals began to come in the early nineteenth century in a slow but steady trickle—some from the West, others from Cuba, Peru, and the Middle Kingdom itself. The first to begin to put down roots were sailors who stayed between ships in the boardinghouses down by the East River docks.
Others arrived as members of theatrical exhibitions, including a Guangzhou “princess” named Afong Moy, P. T. Barnum’s “Chinese Family,” the crew of a Chinese junk that was heading to London’s Crystal Palace show, and a Chinese opera company that became stranded when their backers went broke. By the 1850s, New York’s permanent Chinese community was based in the Irish boardinghouse district of the Fourth Ward, near the docks. Working as sailors, cigar and candy peddlers, cooks, stewards, and store owners, these men earned modest livelihoods, and many married Irish or German women. In 1873, Wo Kee, a businessman, opened a store and lodging house at 34 Mott Street, just below Pell Street, the first outpost in what became Chinatown. At this time, a
New York Times
reporter estimated that five hundred Chinese lived in the city, most visible as the cigar and candy peddlers who frequented City Hall Park. The centers of the community were three or four lodging houses, a temple and club on Baxter Street, and another club in Wo Kee’s building on Mott. Here the reporter encountered some men playing a version of Chinese chess and witnessed meal preparations over a corner stove:

Two men were engaged at this in preparing a meal for some dozen others who were anxiously waiting. What they were cooking is a mystery, only to be fathomed by the brain contained in some “becued” head. It appeared to be a mixture of all the vegetables and meats known to the City markets. The man who seemed to be the head cook first put about half a pound of lard in a monster frying-pan; his assistant in the meantime chopped up a large head of white cabbage, and as soon as the lard was melted threw it, and about half a dozen scraped carrots, into the pan. Salt and pepper were shaken profusely over this, and then came a layer of chopped meat. Cold boiled
potatoes followed, the whole being supplemented by what looked like pulled codfish. The fumes that ascended from this peculiar cookery can be better imagined than described. . . . The Chinese seemed very much offended when it was intimated that the smell of their kitchen was not very pleasant, and that the meal that was being prepared was likely to prove to those of a dyspeptic constitution slightly indigestible.
³

This one of the earliest accounts we have of the mixed stir-fry, one of the Pearl River Delta’s village specialties, that would have an outsized influence on the American perception of Chinese food.

During the 1860s and 1870s, New York journalists predicted the imminent arrival of hordes of Chinese immigrants from the West, and these prophecies became more frequent as work on the railroads ended and anti-Chinese violence spread. In reality, those hordes never materialized, and Chinese immigrants continued to flow in, as they always had, gradually. The journalists, following the lead of the San Francisco newspapers, descended on the city’s nascent Chinatown to nose out any signs of gambling, poor sanitation, and particularly opium use. In 1880, a
Times
reporter visited Mott Street’s little Chinese community expecting to find “dragons’ wings scattered over the floor, and ends of serpents’ tails disappearing under the bed” but admitted: “none of these things are there.” He had to enlist a police officer to take him behind a combined restaurant and gambling parlor to find one tiny opium den where he could indulge his fantasies of Oriental depravity.
⁴
Generally, however, these writers couldn’t muster as much moral condemnation of Chinese vice as had Bayard Taylor. With more curiosity than outrage, they explored the rules and odds of the Chinese gambling games and sampled a few puffs of opium to learn how it was smoked.

This relative lack of hysteria may have been due to the fact that the thousand or so Chinese in New York were only a drop in the bucket compared to the size of other immigrant groups. In May 1880, the
Times
noted that since the beginning of the year more than one hundred thousand immigrants had passed through the processing facility at Castle Garden on Manhattan’s southern tip.
⁵
The majority were German, English, Irish, French, and Scandinavian. The masses of Italians and East European Jews began to arrive a few years later. Most paused only long enough to collect their baggage before they were whisked off to other parts of the country, but thousands stayed and settled in the crowded immigrant districts of the Lower East and West Sides. The Chinese were certainly the most exotic new immigrants, but they were unlikely to be seen as an economic threat when compared to the flood of Europeans.

Like their compatriots in California, New York City’s Chinese residents soon began to remake their environment to suit their culinary needs. By 1878, a pair of Chinese farmers named Ah Wah and Ah Ling were growing Asian vegetables on a three-acre plot in the Tremont section of the Bronx. (Within a few years they were joined by another farmer in the Bronx and then Chinese farms in Astoria, Queens.) Store owners like Wo Kee sold imported specialties like pickled, salted, and dried vegetables as well as the usual array of Chinese dried seafood. In 1880, an agent of the Ichthyophagus Club scouting Chinatown for piscatory oddities for its annual dinner found sharks’ fins, dried oysters, salted octopus and squid, sea cucumbers, and birds’ nests. The appearance of these alien culinary items soon led to the city’s first controversy over Chinese food. In 1883, a “short, stout, excitable Frenchman” named Dr. Charles Kaemmerer accused a Chinatown grocer of cooking cats and rats. He was visiting a saloon at 199 Worth Street when he noticed a
“very peculiar odor” in its back courtyard, which it shared with a Chinese grocery at 5 Mott Street. Looking outside, he saw “some Chinamen standing there handling some things that looked like very small cats or very large rats.” He told a reporter: “I didn’t see them eat the animals . . . but I don’t know why they shouldn’t do so.” (After all, a popular street ditty went: “Chink, chink, Chinaman/Eats dead rats, / Eats them up/Like gingersnaps.”) A reporter later accompanied Dr. Vermilye, the sanitary inspector, to the premises and found:

There was no offal in the yard, nor cat or rat skins, and no stench. By the open window a Chinese cook was seen preparing the dinner. He was making a stew, which was composed of salted Chinese turnips, soft-shelled crabs, and pig’s ears. These and various other articles of food were washed and sliced on a huge butcher’s block with a butcher’s cleaver. The cook was as deft as a hotel
chef
, and did his work with as much care and cleanliness. He shelled fresh peas, sliced a wholesome-looking cabbage head, and peeled fresh potatoes whose skins were almost white. There was nothing suggestive of rats or cats about the place, and the doctor said that he should report that there was no cause for complaint.
⁶

That wasn’t enough for the editor of New York’s first Chinese newspaper, Wong Ching Foo, who was very different from the rest of the Chinese population. He had been raised in the Shanghai region, not the Pearl River Delta; he had been educated at an elite academy, not a village school, and had even worked as an interpreter in the imperial court. He was also a sharp-tongued gadfly, not afraid to speak out against the California racist rabble-rouser Denis Kearney or anyone else who wished to deprive the Chinese of their rights. In fact, his aggressive defense of his compatriots may be part of why
the anti-Chinese movement failed to gain traction in New York. By 1883, the year he founded the
Chinese-American
, he was the veteran of at least two national lecture tours, one defending his “pagan” beliefs and the other attacking the anti-Chinese movement. When he heard Dr. Kaemmerer’s accusations, he offered a $500 reward to anyone who could “prove that a Chinaman ate rats and cats” and threatened a slander suit. In all his travels through China, he declared, he had never heard of anyone eating cats or rats: “They drew the line at dogs.”
⁷
Nobody took Wong up on his challenge, but the event apparently inspired him to write an article on food, the first in English by a Chinese, for the
Brooklyn Eagle
:

The epicure flourishes in the Orient as well as in the Occident. In Europe he bows down before the genius of France; in Asia, before that of the flowery kingdom. The renown of Chinese food and cooking is more than deserved. For generations the followers of Confucius and Buddha have studied the art which Brillat-Savarin and Blot rendered famous, and have evolved a system which, while it may not in all respects meet the approval of the Western races, yet possesses an individuality and merit of the highest order.
⁸

Wong goes on to make the daring suggestion that Chinese cooking may be better, because of its far broader range of ingredients and the mandarin gourmet’s preference for “extraordinary” and expensive foods over the European gourmet’s cheap and common turkey, duck, lamb, or beef. To further compare the two styles, Wong uses Caleb Cushing’s old trope of the Chinese as the opposite of the American:

Where the Americans use ice water they use hot tea; where we sweeten tea and coffee they drink these beverages plain; where we salt fish they dress it with sugar; with them the dessert comes in the first stages
of the meal; everything in their menu is cooked so thoroughly as to lose entirely its original character, while with us rare meats, raw vegetables, Russian salad, simple fruits, oysters and clams are served almost in their natural condition.

There’s a little confusion between “us” and “them” here; the author is Chinese after all. This confused viewpoint appears in a number of places in his article. No Chinese person would have been likely to say that Chinese food is overcooked, because the Chinese considered Westerners the masters of overcooking. In fact, Wong later praises the Chinese practice of steaming, saying that it lets cooks serve vegetables “with every line and point unbroken.” Yet Wong certainly had noticed the presence of raw and barely cooked food on New York tables. All this leads one to surmise that it’s the editor, not Wong Ching Foo, who speaks in many places in the article.

Wong mentions the Ichthyophagus Club’s work in bringing some of China’s “extraordinary” dishes to Western palates, and then describes some dishes that could be “well adapted for cosmopolitan use,” including hellbenders, sturgeon’s swim-bladders, poultry feet, and sharks’ fins, which he compares (strangely) to both pickled herring and shad. Finally, he arrives at a list of “other special dishes,” giving us the earliest reliable glimpse we have of the ordinary restaurant food of Pearl River Delta immigrants in the United States. Here are sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf (a dim sum staple), “Wun-hawn,” or wonton; “Yak-o-men,” wheat noodles with meat in broth; “Sai-fun,” seafood with rice noodles; beef, chicken, pork, or bacon balls (popular in soups or as dim sum); curried rice with meat or seafood; “Bo-ahp,” duck boiled with orange peel; and “Chop soly,” for which “each cook has his own recipe. The main features of it are pork, bacon, chickens, mushroom, bamboo shoots,
onion and pepper. These may be called characteristics; accidental ingredients are duck, beef, perfumed turnip, salted black beans, sliced yam, peas and string beans.” This, Wong claims, “may be justly termed the national dish of China.” Having traveled widely in China, Wong must have known this statement was incorrect. Perhaps he included it because “Chop soly” was already becoming popular with Western diners, who knew the dish also as “chow-chop-sui” and later “chop suey.” Wong sums up: “Chinese cooking is better and cheaper than our own. It utilizes almost every part of food animals, and many plants, herbs and trees, both terrestrial and marine, unknown to our pantries.” And those stories about cats, dogs, and rats? Fictitious. Poor people will eat them in times of famine, but those animals “are not recognized articles of diet in the great restaurants, any more than at Delmonico’s or the Brunswick.”
⁹
That was the kind of white lie that would help protect Chinese from the Kearneys of this world.