Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (29 page)

The menu quickly caught the attention of someone who didn’t know much about Chinese food, except that he liked
it: the
Times
’s food editor, Craig Claiborne. In the late 1920s, when he was seven or eight years old, Claiborne had been taken on a family trip from his home in tiny Sunflower, Mississippi, to the bright lights of Birmingham, Alabama:

I remember—to tell the truth, it is the only thing I do remember about that trip—being taken to a Chinese restaurant. There were hanging Chinese lanterns and foreign waiters and real Chinese china and chopsticks and very hot and exotic tea. I cannot recall the menu in precise detail, but I did eat won ton soup and a dish that contained bean sprouts. . . . It is reasonable to suppose that the food I ate then was quite spurious, adapted to the Southern palate, and dreadful. But it kindled a flame.
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Thirty years later, when Claiborne went to work at the
Times
, he knew little more about Chinese food than he’d picked up that day in Birmingham. But he was eager to expand his horizons beyond chop suey and chow mein. He apprenticed himself to a series of Chinese cooking instructors, most notably Grace Chu (who taught classes at Mandarin House) and Virginia Lee (with whom he wrote a cookbook). He also befriended and learned from many of the chefs who were beginning to open the non-Cantonese restaurants. He filled his pages with glowing reviews, and the exposure helped make Chinese cooking schools, cookbooks, and above all, eateries hugely popular.

Perhaps the restaurant that benefited most from Claiborne’s promotion was Shun Lee, owned by its chef, Tsung Ting Wang (from Shanghai via the Peking Restaurant in Washington), and Michael Tong, its Shanghai-born manager. When Shun Lee first opened in the early sixties, Claiborne described it as “a large, bustling and physically colorless Chinese restaurant with unadorned walls and artificial flowers.”
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Inside, diners
could eat cheap chicken chow mein luncheon specials or order more elaborate dishes like squab in casserole. Two years later, the restaurant reopened at Second Avenue and 49th Street as Shun Lee Dynasty, with a spectacular interior by the designer Russel Wright. Egg rolls and chow mein were still offered, but now what Claiborne really was interested in was the Sichuan side of the menu: chicken in hoisin sauce, shrimp in “Szechuan sauce,” and the like—the hotter the better. He complained, however, that the “Szechuan foods . . . are not so highly spiced as they should be, which is a concession to the public’s taste.” Just as with chop suey seventy-five years earlier, the newly arrived dishes were being adapted to the dominant American palate. No matter; Claiborne’s infatuation with the food at Shun Lee continued unabated, reaching its apotheosis when he gave Shun Lee Dynasty four stars in the 1969
New York Times Guide to Dining Out in New York
, the highest ranking ever for a Chinese restaurant in the United States.

The new climate of receptivity to adventurous Chinese restaurants drew a small group of chefs from Taiwan to New York City. They had trained under the great master chefs who had fled the Communist takeover and opened restaurants in Taipei. When the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the door to the United States, they decided to seek out new opportunities there. Many of them opened restaurants serving Shanghai and Sichuan specialties, like the Four Seas on Maiden Lane in New York, which were primarily aimed at a clientele of China hands and expatriates. But then, led by Claiborne and
New York
magazine’s column “Underground Gourmet,” a new group of culinary Bohemians began to patronize restaurants serving Sichuan food and demand dishes that were hot, hotter, hottest. Claiborne warned diners that some dishes could literally bring tears to their eyes, but that didn’t seem to matter. Eateries like Szechuan Taste
on Chatham Square, David Keh’s Szechuan on Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street, and Szechuan East on Second Avenue and Eightieth Street flourished and spread as chefs followed opportunities. Fans of Chinese food relished the thrill of the hunt, finding out where the top chefs were cooking and which restaurants were serving the newest and most “authentic” dishes. When aficionados learned that chef Wang Yun Ching had moved from the Szechuan Restaurant to the Peking Restaurant just down Broadway, the lines moved to the Peking for his lamb with scallions.

In the New York food world, Chinese was hot; and it was just at this moment that President Nixon made his ground-breaking trip to Beijing. One frigid February evening in 1972, television lights shone brightly inside the Great Hall of the People, the vast banquet room and meeting chamber on the western side of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The lights illuminated a large O-shaped table situated next to the stage in the Great Hall’s main banquet room. A low mass of greenery dotted with orange kumquats filled the table’s center. On the white tablecloth, twenty places were set with plates, chopsticks, knives and forks, tea cups and glasses, and artfully arranged servings of cold appetizers. In the host’s seat, with his back to the stage sat Communist China’s premier, Zhou Enlai, soberly dressed in his dark grey Mao suit. On either side of him sat the guests of honor: President Richard M. Nixon, his face incongruously brightened with pancake makeup, and Mrs. Nixon, her blonde bouffant hairdo glowing in the bright light. Premier Zhou unfolded his napkin onto his lap and picked up his chopsticks—the signal that the banquet had begun.

The more than six hundred American and Chinese guests seated at the room’s smaller tables began to reach for their food. President Nixon fitted his chopsticks into his hand, plucked a morsel of appetizer from one of the plates, gazed at it quizzically for a moment, put it into his mouth and began to chew. As a bank of television and movie cameras whirred, millions of people around the world watched the president of the United States eat Chinese food.

Figure 7.2. President Richard Nixon shares a meal—and a turning point in history—with Premier Zhou Enlai on February 21, 1972. The event was watched by millions of TV viewers around the world.

Nixon’s trip to China was one of the great turning points in world diplomatic history, when two implacable foes met on the road to friendship. The enmity between the two countries dated to 1949, when the Communist Party under Mao Zedong had completed its takeover of the mainland. Diplomatic relations were soon cut off; American soldiers fought Red Army battalions during the Korean War; and the People’s Republic of China aligned itself with the Soviet Union. But by the 1960s, the Soviets and the Chinese had become bitter enemies, their troops facing off along their long mutual border. As a presidential candidate in 1967,
Nixon proposed resuming relations with China as a way of breaking up the Communist bloc and bringing the billion or so Chinese out of self-imposed isolation. After he became president, it took two years of veiled messages and secret meetings for the two sides to overcome their mutual distrust and begin serious negotiations. Journalists, scholars, and the participants themselves have amply documented the complicated road to this new relationship. They have not discussed the importance of food, particularly Chinese food, during this whole affair. Nixon’s China trip not only changed the course of American foreign relations but also helped instigate a revolution in Americans’ perception of Chinese food.

Nixon conceived the opening of relations with China, but the mastermind who turned it into a reality was his Machiavellian national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Operating with utmost secrecy, Kissinger oversaw the delicate diplomatic dance whose purpose was to convince the Chinese that the United States was serious about rapprochement. Both sides were hampered by the fact that they knew remarkably little about each other’s country. Nobody in Washington had any firsthand knowledge of conditions inside the People’s Republic; most of the knowledge the CIA had was gleaned from defectors and from reading the Chinese press at the CIA’s monitoring station in Hong Kong. For American journalists and scholars, visas for China had been essentially impossible to get, particularly since the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. The exception was the old American “fellow traveler” Edgar Snow, who had been invited to visit Chairman Mao and was photographed with him reviewing a parade. (The Americans learned only later that the Chinese had been trying to send a message to
them
.) For help, Kissinger relied on two trusted advisers: his right-hand man, Winston Lord, who was married to a Chinese woman
(the novelist Bette Bao Lord), and Charles “Chas” Freeman, a China expert at the State Department who had spent years studying, and eating, in Taiwan. When the time came, the White House turned to experts like Lord and Freeman for advice on how to handle a pair of chopsticks.

In July 1971, Kissinger, three aides, and two very nervous Secret Service agents found themselves on a Pakistani airliner flying over the Himalayas into Chinese airspace. The secret trip, code-named Polo I, was a leap into the void. As Kissinger looked out at the stark, snow-clad summits of the Rooftop of the World, his mind was filled with questions: How would they be received? Would the trip be a success or an international embarrassment? Would they meet Chairman Mao himself? How would they handle the delicate issue of Taiwan? And what would they eat during their allotted fifty hours in China?

The Americans had heard that the decades since the Communist takeover had not been good for Chinese cuisine. The best chefs had fled and their restaurants closed; both peasants and city folk had been forced to give up their family-centered meals and eat in communal dining halls. By the 1960s, the quality of the food had sunk to little better than livestock feed. During the Cultural Revolution, the chefs who remained became targets of denunciations and beatings by Little Red Book–waving mobs. But then Chairman Mao decided to temper the devastation of the forces he himself had unleashed. He sent the angry mobs to the countryside, where they could focus their energies on tilling the soil, and he ordered Premier Zhou Enlai to reestablish contact with the non-Communist world by wining and dining foreign leaders. Within a few months, the Chinese read of state banquets again being held in the Great Hall of the People. There were limits, of course: the meals were kept to six or eight courses, not the hundreds typical of the old Qing imperial era.
Still, not everyone agreed with the change in policy: “Class struggle exists even at the tips of one’s chopsticks,” one radical wrote in
Red Flag
in 1970. “As the common saying goes, if you eat the things of others you will find it difficult to raise your hand against them.”
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Nevertheless, the chairman had given the order, so the banquets continued. There was one ironclad rule, which reflected Chinese nationalism more than Communism: only Chinese cuisine was allowed on the menu. Serving Western food to American guests would be left to imperialist lackeys like Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek. In the People’s Republic, foreigners adapted to Chinese tastes, not the other way round.

The Pakistani jet touched down in Beijing on July 9, 1971. Kissinger and his aides were met on the runway by the stern-faced Marshal Ye Jianying, a vice-chairman of the Chinese Communist Party. A closed motorcade whisked the party to the secluded Diaoyutai guesthouse where the most important foreign visitors usually stayed. There, the aged Marshal Ye hosted a multicourse feast for the Americans—their first meal on Chinese soil. It was all a bit unreal. The Americans, jet-lagged and culture-shocked, were unable to believe that they were actually in Beijing sitting down at a table with a group of friendly Red Chinese. Kissinger, probably exaggerating, told Nixon that the dishes had been of “staggering variety and quantity”; Winston Lord remembers that it was merely a “good meal.” Either way, it was quickly overshadowed by the next event of the afternoon: the arrival of Premier Zhou Enlai, unaccompanied, at the guesthouse. Elegant, cultured, ruthless, and brilliant, Zhou was the nation’s main contact with the outside world. While living in Chongqing, the capital of Nationalist China during World War II, he had met and entertained many Americans and learned how they thought and how they ate. The Chinese and the Americans repaired to a meeting room, and for the
next seven hours Kissinger and Zhou debated and discussed the future of U.S.-Chinese relations. In his memoir, Kissinger would call Zhou one of the two most impressive world leaders he ever met (the other was Charles DeGaulle).

Discussions resumed on a much harsher note in the Great Hall of the People the next morning. Zhou gave a “scorching” lecture on the state of the world, emphasizing China’s great differences with the United States. Kissinger felt he had to respond in kind, but just as he was getting warmed up for his tough talk, Zhou interrupted: “I believe the second item which you wanted to go into is Indochina, which is also very long. I suggest rest now and relaxation. Otherwise, you will be under tension and the duck will be cold.”

“That would be most calamitous,” Kissinger replied. “Tension we can take.”
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