Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (5 page)

From the beginning, American merchants faced a perennial quandary of what to bring to China for trade. The Guangzhou merchants accepted Spanish silver dollars, then the principal trade currency, but the Americans only had a limited supply of them. When the ginseng trade soon began
to play out, traders remembered Ledyard’s tales of huge sea otter colonies in the Pacific Northwest. They also discovered that the forests of the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands were filled with aromatic sandalwood trees whose wood the Chinese favored. For a few decades, American traders in Guangzhou made fortunes with ships filled with fur and sandalwood, until they killed nearly all the sea otters and chopped down all the sandalwood forests. The Americans next fixed on a commodity they first saw in Guangzhou’s markets: piles of what looked like lumpy brown, gray, and black cigars, with a distinctive rank, fishy odor, sold from big straw market baskets. These were dried sea cucumbers, also known as trepang or
bêche-de-mer
(“worm of the sea”): soft-bodied invertebrates, related to sea stars and sea urchins, that live in shallow tropical seas. For centuries, the Chinese have considered sea cucumbers one of the great delicacies of their cuisine, because of both their culinary properties and the boost to strength and virility they supposedly imparts. Chefs soften the dried animals in water and then cook them in delicately flavored stews, where they absorb the flavors of the sauce and add their slightly fishy taste and spongy, glutinous texture.

All the American merchants knew was that the sea cucumbers would find “a ready sale in the Chinese market.” On their journey across the Pacific, they stopped at islands like Tonga, Samoa, and the Fijis and hired troops of islanders through the local chief, whom they paid in trade goods like guns, gunpowder, and hatchets. (These weapons greatly increased the death tolls of the frequent battles between tribal factions on the islands.) The natives collected as many sea cucumbers as they could find in the nearby waters, while the Americans set up drying sheds on the beach. The animals were boiled in great iron kettles, gutted, and then smoked. Once thoroughly dried, they were packed in straw baskets
and loaded on the American ships. The most valuable variety could fetch 115 Spanish silver dollars for a 125-pound box in the Guangzhou market. A French traveler who tasted freshly cleaned sea cucumber on the coast of Malaya remarked that it “had some resemblance to lobster.”

Another odd product Americans noticed in the Guangzhou market was the edible bird’s nest. It appeared to be nothing more than a fragile, yellowish shell, but the prices for it were nothing short of astronomical—136 pounds of the finest bird’s nest would sell for 3,500 silver dollars! The richest sources of birds’ nests were caves lying along the tropical coasts from India to Southeast Asia that were home to two species of swiftlet, a bird that resembles a swallow. It attaches its cup-like nest, which it makes almost entirely from its own saliva, high up on these caves’ walls. Holding sputtering torches, the natives had to climb up towering, rickety ladders in the caves to find and harvest the nests. The most precious variety was almost white and free of any sticks or other detritus; the darker “black” nests had to be carefully cleaned before cooking. In the hands of Chinese chefs, these nests had almost no taste themselves; they were used to absorb the flavors of soups and stews and add a special glutinous texture. Du Halde wrote: “they mix them with other meats, which give them a good relish.”
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Like sea cucumbers, birds’ nests were also considered useful for enhancing strength and potency. As soon as American merchants figured out the best sources of supply in Southeast Asia, they began to add birds’ nests to their cargoes bound for China.

During this first era of the China trade, the few hundreds of Americans and Europeans working in Guangzhou constructed a kind of cocoon of western culture around themselves. While their every need from waking to going to bed was met by an army of Chinese servants, they continued to wear western dress, largely refused to learn the local languages
(in fairness, imperial edict forbade the teaching of Mandarin or Cantonese to these barbarians, though a few still received tutoring on the sly), worshipped in Catholic or Protestant chapels, socialized almost exclusively with other westerners, and gathered at the table for three meals a day of western food and drink. This was an incredible act of communal will, because the Chinese city was never more than a stone’s throw away and sometimes just outside their windows. They must have smelled the aromas from Chinese kitchens wafting over from Chinese houses. They could not have missed the “long line of victualing stands, furnished with fruits, cakes, sweetmeats, soups, and such like” in the narrow streets that formed the border between the factory compound and the greater city.
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Nevertheless, the first account we have of Americans eating Chinese food does not appear until 1819, thirty-five years after Shaw’s visit. It was written by Bryant Parrott Tilden, a young trader from Salem who acted as supercargo on a number of Asia voyages. In Guangzhou, he was befriended by Paunkeiqua, a leading merchant who cultivated good relations with many American firms. Just before Tilden’s ship was set to sail home, Paunkeiqua invited the American merchants to spend the day at his mansion on Honam island. Tilden’s account of that visit, which was capped by a magnificent feast, is not unlike the descriptions Shaw or even William Hickey wrote a half century earlier. First, he tours Paunkeiqua’s traditional Chinese garden and encounters some of the merchant’s children yelling “Fankwae! Fankwae!” (“Foreign devil! Foreign devil!”). Then Paunkeiqua shows him his library, including “some curious looking
old Chinese maps of the world
as these ‘celestials’ suppose it to be, with their Empire occupying three quarters of it, surrounded by nameless islands & seas bounded only by the edges of the maps.” Finally, his host tells him: “Now my flinde Tillen,
you must go long my for catche chow chow tiffin.” In other words, dinner was served in a spacious dining hall, where the guests were seated at small tables.

“Soon after,” Tilden writes, “a train of servants came in bringing a most splendid service of fancy colored, painted and gilt large tureens & bowls, containing soups, among them the celebrated
bird nest soup
, as also a variety of stewed messes, and plenty of boiled rice, & same style of smaller bowls, but alas! no plates and knives and forks.” (By “messes,” Tilden probably meant prepared dishes, not unsavory jumbles.)

The Americans attempted to eat with chopsticks, with very poor results: “Monkies [
sic
] with knitting needles would not have looked more ludicrous than some of us did.” Finally, their host put an end to their discomfort by ordering western-style plates, knives, forks, and spoons. Then the main portion of the meal began:

Twenty separate courses were placed on the table during three hours in as many different services of elegant china ware, the messes consisting of soups, gelatinous food, a variety of stewed hashes, made up of all sorts of chopped meats, small birds cock’s-combs, a favorite dish, some fish & all sorts of vegetables, rice, and pickles, of which the Chinese are very fond. Ginger and pepper are used plentifully in most of their cookery. Not a joint of meat or a whole fowl or bird were placed on the table. Between the changing of the courses, we freely conversed and partook of Madeira & other European wines—and costly teas.
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After fruits, pastries, and more wine, the dinner finally came to an end. Tilden and his friends left glowing with happiness (and alcohol) at the honor Paunkeiqua had shown them with this lavish meal. Nowhere, however, does
Tilden tell us whether the Americans actually enjoyed these “messes” and “hashes.”

In 1830, American missionaries joined the traders in Guangzhou and Macau. The United States was then decades into a religious awakening that had spread from New England west to the frontier. A key tenet of this evangelical Christian movement was the solemn duty to spread the Protestant gospel to every corner of the nation and the globe. One of those who caught the fervor was a Massachusetts farmer’s son named Elijah Coleman Bridgman. After devoting his life to God at a local revival meeting, he was eventually ordained as a “minister to Christ, and as a missionary to the heathen.” When he learned that more heathens lived in China than any other country on Earth, Bridgman took a berth on the next boat to Asia. Soon after he landed in Guangzhou, he took a tour of a Chinese temple and was invited by the priest to share some food. With the help of a translator, he quizzed the priest about his beliefs over Chinese tea and “sweetmeats,” probably candied fruits. At the end of this repast, Bridgman “thanked and rewarded him for his hospitality, and left him as we found him, a miserable idolater.”
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Bridgman soon concluded that the Middle Kingdom was the most morally debased land on Earth: “Idolatry, superstition, fraud, falsehood, cruelty, and oppression everywhere predominate, and iniquity, like a mighty flood, is extending far and wide its desolation.”
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To make matters worse, the Chinese were deaf to his gospel-spreading efforts. Guangzhou authorities refused to allow missionaries to proselytize in the Chinese city, and the local Chinese in Macau showed little interest in his message of salvation. After twenty years of preaching, Bridgman and his fellow American missionaries could count literally no Chinese converts; the few who had embraced the Christian faith had all reverted to their heathen ways!

With his dour and implacable faith, Bridgman was adept at conveying his vision of China to anyone who would listen. In 1832, he became the Guangzhou tour guide of Edmund Roberts, an American diplomat on a round-the-world journey to improve trade ties. Roberts published a long account of his voyage that is filled with virulent xenophobia. Of the Chinese he writes:

In their habits they are most depraved and vicious; gambling is universal and is carried to a most ruinous and criminal extent; they use the most pernicious drugs as well as the most intoxicating liquors to produce intoxication; they are also gross gluttons; every thing that runs, walks, creeps, flies, or swims, in fact, every thing that will supply the place of food, whether of the sea, or the land, and articles most disgusting to other people, are by them greedily devoured.
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His outrage about Chinese culinary habits may have been particularly spurred by the fact that his window in the American factory overlooked the afternoon dog and cat market in Old China Street.

Other missionaries who joined Bridgman in Guangzhou included Peter Parker and Samuel Wells Williams. Parker, another Massachusetts farmer’s son, had been educated at Amherst and Yale at a time when these schools produced more lawyers and ministers than anything else. A classmate described him as short, fat, and sluggish, but “quick as a toad” when he wanted to be. After Parker decided that he, too, wanted to save the Chinese heathens, his advisors suggested that he study medicine as a backup. Stymied in his missionary efforts in Guangzhou, Parker opened a clinic to treat the Chinese for eye disorders. Samuel Wells Williams, the only one of this group who wasn’t ordained as a minister, was the son of a devout printer in Utica, New York. Williams considered becoming a
botanist before his father secured him the job of running the missionary printing press in Guangzhou. Shortly after landing, he wrote to his father:

I have been here a week, and in that short time have seen enough idolatries to call forth all the energies that I have. . . . To take a circuit thro’ one of these streets about eventide, and see the abominations practiced against the honor of Him who has commanded, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” and not be affected with a deep sense of the depth to which this intellectual people has sunk, is impossible to a warm Christian man.
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Williams joined Bridgman in writing and printing a monthly journal, the
Chinese Repository
. During its lifespan, the
Repository
became an encyclopedic compilation of Western knowledge about China, including its culinary customs.

Four months after arriving in Guangzhou, Williams was invited to his first Chinese meal—“it should be more properly termed a gratification of curiosity than any pleasure”—the obligatory banquet at a merchant’s house:

At 7 p.m. the dinner began with a soup of birds’ nests which we ate with chop sticks; these we used somewhat clownishly at first, as it required a little practice to eat a soup with two ivory sticks. Then followed dishes whose names and contents were unknown, but which tasted pretty much all alike. They were all in cups about the size of tea-cups, and when given to each guest always eaten with these same chop-sticks. In eating liquid dishes, as soups, the mouth is put down to the edge of the dish and the contents shoveled in. They will eat rice as fast again in this way as I could ever manage with a spoon. Some of the dishes we had were birds’ nests, lily roots, pigs’ tongues, fishes’
stomachs, sharks’ fins, biche-de-mer, fishes’ heads—and others to the number of fourteen. After this a European dinner was served, but rather inferior.
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The main difference between these American missionaries and the traders in Guangzhou was that Bridgman and his compatriots were actually interested in the lives of the Chinese. This curiosity was driven by their mission work, because they realized they couldn’t convert their audiences unless they knew something about their history, beliefs, and customs. Bridgman and Williams researched a wide variety of aspects of Chinese life, from weights and measures to grammar to the practices of the imperial court, and published all their findings in the
Chinese Repository
. These articles were reprinted in many United States periodicals and avidly read by merchants looking for information they could use in the China trade.