Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (26 page)

There is something, honey baby, that grieves my mind.
I’m thinking about your future, when I leave you behind.
It’s got me up a tree—here’s the thing that worries me:
Who’ll chop your suey when I’m gone?
Who’ll corn your fritters Sunday morn?

Borrowing from African American artists, white songwriters used food-related motifs for novelty songs, for example, “A Bowl of Chop Suey and You-ey,” from the 1934 Jack Oakie musical
Shoot the Works
:

Take a look at this place that we’ve wandered into,
It’s not Arabian, it’s not Hindu,
It’s just a Chinese eat place, not a swell or elite place,
I won’t order rice or tea, here’s what appeals to me.
All I want is a bowl of chop suey, a bowl of chop suey and you-ey,
A cozy little table for two-ey with a bowl of chop suey and you-ey.

(It goes on like this for far too long.) This stew of Chinese food, fun, and romance continued into the 1950s with songs like Louis Prima and Keely Smith’s “Chop Suey, Chow Mein” (“Chop suey, chow mein, tufu [
sic
] and you, / I’ve got the craziest feeling . . .”). Perhaps something about food as a theme encourages frivolity. Only Rogers and Hammerstein’s song “Chop Suey,” from their 1957 musical
Flower Drum Song
, resists cartoon imagery and addresses racial themes more earnestly, reflecting an era when these issues were beginning to be treated more seriously.

Visual artists also began using Chinese restaurants in their paintings and drawings: the chop suey joint was now a quintessential urban setting. Images ranged from the stylized
Vanity Fair
cartoons by the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias to the earthier and more realistic work of Reginald Marsh. His 1929 etching
Chop Suey Dancers
#2 portrays three all-female couples dressed as flappers practicing their dance moves in a Chinese nightclub, probably during their lunch hour. A series of booths lines the wall in the background, where a shadowy figure in black, maybe a Chinese waiter, flits across the scene, appearing to leer at the women. Arguably the most famous of all Chinese restaurant paintings is Edward Hopper’s 1929 painting
Chop Suey
. As in many of his works, a strong dose of melancholy infuses the scene. In the foreground we see two women, both in cloche hats, sitting at a little table in the dining room of a second-floor Chinese restaurant. Through the window we see the fragment of a large sign saying “SUEY” and a slice of fire escape ladder. It may be wintertime, because a woman’s
yellow coat hangs on a peg. One of the women, in a lilac blouse, has her back to us. Opposite her sits a woman in a green sweater, its color made pale by the sun. Under her hat, her face is stark white, with bright red lips and luminous eyes that seem to be stunned or saddened by something her tablemate has said. On the table between the two women stand a pale pink teapot and an empty blue bowl. Perhaps this unusual scene for a painting, the chop suey joint, was meant to help create a jarring suggestion of tension and loss.

By the 1920s, chop suey and chow mein had claimed a place in the national diet alongside ham and eggs, coffee and a slice of pie, and the Sunday pot roast. For those who were not part of the mainstream culture, eating Chinese food offered one way to join it, to prove one belonged. For the sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants, growing up in New York, Chicago, and many other urban areas, all the chop suey joints up one flight of stairs on side streets proved particularly attractive. By 1925, the United States was home to well over a million Jewish immigrants, the majority from Eastern Europe and Russia. Most of these immigrants continued to follow the religious practices of Old World Orthodox Judaism, where food and spirituality mingled: eating was another way of celebrating the divine. Each meal began with blessings over the wine, the bread, and the rest of the dishes. Of course, Jewish food was as much about what it was
not
as about what it was. The laws of
kashrut
(kosher practice) forbid a long list of foods, including pork, rabbit, eel, shrimp, lobster, insects (except for certain grasshoppers), and any meat that has not been ritually slaughtered by a kosher butcher. Meat and dairy products cannot be served together or heated in the same pot, and one is forbidden to consume many cooked foods unless they have been prepared by Jewish hands or under
rabbinic supervision. Compare this with the anything-goes tradition of Chinese food, as Lin Yutang described it: “We are too over-populated and famine is too common for us not to eat everything we can lay our hands on.”
¹⁶
In spite of—and perhaps also because of—this fundamental difference, for second- and third-generation American Jews, Chinese restaurants became a home away from home.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Jews coming of age were being pulled in many directions. First, there was the weight of religious custom as practiced by their immigrant parents. After arriving, many settled in densely populated Jewish districts of the big cities. On New York’s Lower East Side, synagogues could be found on nearly every block, and Yiddish, not English, was the lingua franca. These were insular neighborhoods, cultural ghettoes with little contact with the larger society—in fact, these Lower East Siders rarely even visited nearby Chinatown. But for their American-educated children, this Old World Jewish identity was in many ways a dead end. Jews who emigrated from Europe had been cut off from their ancestral homes in the cities and shtetls by war, political unrest, and anti-Semitism. Their children born in the United States would probably live there for the rest of their lives. If they wanted to succeed, they had to speak English and drop the outward signs of being observant Jews—beards and sidelocks for men and heads-carves for women. The necessity to assimilate grew as their families moved from the urban ghettoes out into newer and more ethnically mixed middle-class neighborhoods away from the city center. Part of that assimilation was becoming accustomed to the alien eating habits they were exposed to in schools—a ham sandwich and a glass of milk—and workplaces. Their immigrant parents had rarely, if ever, eaten out; they only felt comfortable with food they had cooked themselves. But young Jews employed in factories
and offices were on occasion invited to go out with their workmates. Their destination was a place called a restaurant, with alien customs like ordering from a menu and mysterious food that didn’t conform to kosher standards. During this era, the most popular restaurants to visit for a fun, after-work meal were Chinese.

We get a picture of the difficulty second- and third-generation Jews faced in crossing the culinary gulf to eating Chinese food from Herman Wouk’s bestselling 1954 novel
Marjorie Morningstar
. Its story begins around 1933; the lead character is the daughter of successful immigrants from Eastern Europe who have already made the jump from the Bronx to the comfort of the El Dorado, a big apartment building on Central Park West. She attends Hunter College, where her beauty and talent land her the lead in a production of
The Mikado
. While working on the play, she meets Marsha Zelenko, and one night early in their friendship, Marsha takes Marjorie out to dinner:

They went to an old brownstone house on a side street, and up a flight of stairs to a doorway framed by a huge grinning gilt dragon mouth;
Mi Fong’s Jade Garden
, the sign over the dragon’s ears read. They passed through the fanged jaws into a crimson-lit room smelling of incense and strange cookery. Marjorie was very glad she had not committed herself to eat. She half believed that cats, dogs, and mice were cooked in Chinese restaurants. The pervading odor seemed more or less to confirm the idea.
¹⁷

Marsha, the personification of the adventurous, intellectual, assimilated Jewish New Yorker, tells her that the food is sublime, “and it costs next to nothing. If you have forty cents on you, you can have a feast.” The first dish arrives with their Singapore slings: a plate “full of fat brown curved things”—shrimp. Marjorie demurs; she’s never eaten shrimp. Marsha asks, “You’re kosher, aren’t you?” “Well, hardly,” Marjorie replies. “My folks are. But pork or shellfish—it’s just the idea.” Finally, Marsha cajoles Marjorie into trying some Chinese food, starting with the soup: “Marjorie took a few spoonfuls, straining the liquid. The taste was very spicy, not bad. But when she found herself chewing what seemed to be a couple of rubber bands, or possibly worms, she emptied her mouth and pushed away the dish.”
¹⁸
Then comes “Moo Yak with almonds,” a main course made up of a “number of greasy objects, some vegetable, some animal” piled on white rice. The restaurant owner claims that the meat is lamb, but Marjorie knows what pork smells like. Nevertheless, she eats:

Not wanting to insult Marsha by seeming to call her a liar, Marjorie made a hearty show of enjoying the dish, whatever it was; she scooped the rice from under the meat and ate that. But the light was dim and her instruments greasy for such delicate work. She soon found herself chewing a large piece of rubbery meat. She went into a coughing fit, got rid of it in her handkerchief, and pushed the food around her plate without eating any more.
¹⁹

Figure 6.4. Started in 1959, Bernstein-on-Essex on New York’s Lower East Side was the pioneer of Chinese-kosher cuisine. From its menu you could order both moo goo gai pan and pastrami sandwiches.

Despite her discomfort, the dinner is a watershed moment for Marjorie, because during it Marsha convinces her to make the theater her career.

Almost four hundred pages and perhaps three years later, Marjorie indulges in a second Chinese meal. Now she’s a successful, world-traveled theater actress with a Bohemian playwright boyfriend named Noel Airman. After a dress rehearsal of his musical masterwork, there’s a small party in his apartment where everybody drinks highballs and eats Chinese takeout:

It was quite a supper. A plate of sliced pink pork was part of the buffet, along with egg rolls, chow mein, fried lobster and rice. Marjorie had become quite free about the food she ate; but she had never yet deliberately helped herself to pork, though she had suspected more than once that she was eating it, and had gone on eating. It occurred to her now, when she saw little Mrs. Lemberg piling pork on her plate, that it was high time she shrugged off these hypocritical little distinctions of hers. She took a couple of pork slices; and by dipping them completely in mustard sauce she got them down without any trouble. Eating the pork gave her an odd sense of freedom, and at the same time, though she suppressed it, a twinge of disgust.
²⁰

Here we understand that Marjorie has finally cast off ancestral customs and become assimilated fully into American life. Later that night, after a few more highballs, she loses her virginity. This experience, too, gives her simultaneous feelings of liberation and disgust. By the novel’s end, she has finally jettisoned her no-good boyfriend, married a nice but boring lawyer named Milton Schwartz, and settled down to raise a family in the Westchester suburbs.

Wouk’s ending implies that Mrs. Milton Schwartz, now a kosher-keeping mother of four, has left the sinful, sexually tinged realm of Chinese food behind. But in the real world, most American Jews, including the observant ones, found chop suey, chow mein, fried shrimp, roast pork, and all those other forbidden foods too tempting to avoid. In 1936, the
Sentinel Jewish Cook Book
, published in Chicago, included recipes for chop suey from scratch, chop suey from cans, and egg foo young. The same year, a Jewish newspaper noticed that Chinese restaurants had taken over even the Lower East Side; there were eighteen within blocks of Ratner’s dairy restaurant and Katz’s Delicatessen. Out in the sprawling neighborhoods of two-story row houses and middle-class apartment buildings that were covering the Bronx and Brooklyn, the neon signs of chop suey joints vied with Italian red sauce restaurants and American coffee shops to attract patrons. Within their walls, the children and grandchildren of eastern European immigrants were attracted by the same qualities that had drawn the rest of society: Chinese food was cheap, filling, and just mysterious enough. Ordering a plate of chow mein showed sophistication, setting one apart from the Old World immigrants with the odors of the shtetl still clinging to their clothes. Still, the match between the two cultures was not completely consummated. In the 1930s, there was still something absurd about the idea of Jews eating Chinese food.

In the 1938 movie
Mannequin
, Joan Crawford plays a tough girl from Hester Street who marries her no-good boyfriend. The wedding takes place in a Chinese-Jewish restaurant, where a waiter named Horowitz is garbed in Chinese clothes and carries a platter of Chinese-style gefilte fish to the newlyweds’ table. (Stranger things actually happened; many of the waiters at Ratner’s on Delancey Street were Chinese and could trade rapid-fire witticisms with the largely Yiddish-speaking clientele.) In the story “A Man Will Do Anything to Make a Living,” by the Yiddish writer Sam Liptzin, a couple considers what to do after failing at a “candy store, a grocery, a boarding house, a marriage broker’s business, a restaurant, a bakery, a 5-and-10-cent store.”
²¹
Finally, the wife decides: a Chinese restaurant. So the husband adopts the name Yu Fang, learns to eat gefilte fish with chopsticks, and opens a restaurant with Chinese cooks, waiters, and dishwashers. They wait and wait, but after two months nobody comes. “Yu Fang!” says the wife. “We must give up the business. We are Jews, not Chinese, we can’t compete with them!”
²²