Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (6 page)

In 1835, Williams wrote a long essay for the
Repository
, on the “Diet of the Chinese.” His scientific background shows itself in his thorough investigation of every aspect of his subject. He admits that due to the restrictions on foreign travel within China, his article gives only a fragmentary look at the country’s cuisine: “in endeavoring to ascertain the sources from whence food for so great a population is derived, and the various modes which are employed to fit it for use, we shall resort to all means of information within our reach. Our inquiries, however, must be confined chiefly to those persons who have come more or less in contact with foreigners.” Using travelers’ accounts as well as his own observations in and around Guangzhou, Williams first gives a long description of the grains, vegetables, fruits, oil plants, fish, domesticated animals, birds, insects, beverages, and liquors the Chinese consume. He then turns to Chinese kitchens, cooking methods, and meal customs and mentions the huge numbers of “taverns, eating-houses, and cook-stalls”
in the cities. Of the larger restaurants, he remarks that “we should suppose that they were much patronized, but by what particular class, or whether by all classes, we do not know.” The edict forbidding foreign entry into the city still held, so no foreigner had ever dined in a Guangzhou restaurant. About halfway through this article, Williams lets slip his unvarnished opinion about Chinese food. Here we finally learn what all the traders really thought about the weird dishes served at the banquets across the river at Honam:

The cooking and mode of eating among the Chinese are peculiar. . . . The universal use of oil, not always the sweetest or purest, and of onions, in their dishes, together with the habitual neglect of their persons, causes an odor, almost insufferable to a European, and which is well characterized by Ellis, as the “repose of putrefied garlic on a much used blanket.” The dishes, when brought on the table, are almost destitute of seasoning, taste, flavor, or anything else by which one can be distinguished from another; all are alike insipid and greasy to the palate of the foreigner.
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It’s unclear how the Chinese dishes could be both insipid and stinking of garlic, onion, and rancid oil. In fact, Westerners smelled that aroma everywhere. Even outside the dining room, this was what many Americans and Europeans apparently thought the Chinese smelled like—garlic, onions, and body odor.

By the late 1830s, relations between the Chinese and the barbarians had grown strained. The westerners were tired of being cooped up in Guangzhou and Macau; they ached to sell their goods in the whole of China. Americans and Europeans had also grown weary of Chinese arrogance, of what Bridgman saw as China’s “absurd claim of universal supremacy.” To them, any nation that rejected Christianity
could not claim to be the center of human civilization. On the Chinese side, the Daoguang Emperor and his top officials believed that the barbarians must be reined in, if not kicked out of the Middle Kingdom altogether. They had good cause. For decades now, the British had been smuggling opium into China from India. This was against Chinese law (and western morality), but the profits were too great for the Crown to stop: income from opium helped Britain maintain its status as the dominant seagoing power. Tired of trading in sea cucumbers and birds’ nests, American merchants began shipping in their own opium from Turkey. By the early nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese had become opium addicts, a situation that ruined lives and weakened local economies. Half the officials along the South China coast had become corrupted by bribery. Finally, in 1839 Daoguang Emperor ordered the blockade of Guangzhou and the arrest of the principal traffickers. This action precipitated the disastrous Opium War of 1840–42.

The emperor thought it enough to strengthen the Guangzhou harbor blockade and set up cannons along the Guangdong coast. The British fleet bypassed Guangzhou and sailed up the east coast of China bombarding cities. They then doubled back to Guangzhou and encircled the city, forcing its officials to capitulate and hand over a large ransom. In 1842, when the rest of the British Asia fleet arrived from India, the combined force included dozens of fully armed warships and ten thousand soldiers. They sailed up the China coast again, capturing the major port cities and even threatening Beijing. Chinese resistance was fiercest along the Yangzi Valley, but the British weapons and soldiers proved unstoppable. The western army marched up the Yangzi, one of China’s richest districts, destroying any opposition it met. As his military evaporated, the emperor vacillated, unable to decide whether to surrender or fight on. Finally,
he summoned his trusted aide Qiying, who like himself was a Manchu and a direct descendant of the Qing Dynasty’s founder. Qiying had seen the awesome power of the British military machine up close and advised the emperor that a policy of appeasement was the only option. Realizing that the war threatened the survival of his dynasty, the emperor agreed to sue for peace. In August 1842, Qiying signed the Treaty of Nanking aboard a British battleship. The Chinese agreed to have full diplomatic relations with Britain, to cede Hong Kong to the Queen, to open four more ports to trade, and to pay a massive indemnity. It was China’s most humiliating defeat at the hands of barbarians since the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century.

The white sails of the U.S.S.
Brandywine
, a frigate carrying forty-four guns, appeared off the coast of South China in February 1844. Its most important cargo was the first United States ambassador to China: Caleb Cushing, bearing a letter from President John Tyler to China’s emperor. A large party assembled at Macau’s docks to welcome him ashore, while a marine band played and cannons roared a salute from the Portuguese fort. As the boat carrying Cushing, rowed by a dozen American sailors, hove into view, his costume appeared first: he wore a white ostrich feather atop a large, navy blue hat, a blue coat covered in gold buttons, white pantaloons with a gold stripe down the side, tall boots, and spurs—the uniform of a major general. Some of the women tittered behind their fans; the European merchants whispered wry comments to each other. When Commissioner Cushing alighted and the crowd caught sight of his face, the snickering stopped. He looked the model of the nineteenth-century authority figure—tall, with a strong chin, a
stern mouth line, and a flowing moustache. His deep baritone voice could fill the largest meeting halls. In fact, the only thing that had kept him out of the highest political posts was his aloof and uncompromising disposition—he lacked the common touch. As Cushing shook the hands of the dignitaries at the dock, the people could sense the seriousness with which he took his mission. After sailing halfway around the world at some risk to his life (one of his boats had been destroyed by fire), Cushing was determined to do whatever it took to formalize a treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and China—even if it meant eating at a Chinese table.

In the aftermath of the 1840–42 Opium War, the United States was intent on increasing its influence in East Asia. President Tyler and Secretary of State Daniel Webster knew the terms of the Treaty of Nanking and had heard that British merchants were at the forefront of opening up new markets in China. The letter to the Chinese emperor that Cushing carried (which introduced its bearer as “Count Caleb Cushing, one of the wise and learned men on this country”) proposed opening a new era of “peace and friendship” between China and the United States. Tyler’s terms for this friendship included full diplomatic relations, trading privileges for American merchants that were at least as favorable as the Treaty of Nanking’s, and permission for American missionaries to live and proselytize among the Chinese. Over the next few decades, American diplomats, merchants, and missionaries would indeed have much greater access to Chinese officials and to China’s 300 million customers and souls. However, the post–Opium War years did not necessarily usher in a new era of friendship between the two peoples—with direct consequences for the American experience of Chinese food.

In the decades before the Opium War, the relations between the two countries had been purely commercial. The American merchants in Guangzhou had actively rejected the idea of a U.S. treaty with China, not wanting to upset their lucrative status quo. This attitude had changed during the blockade of Guangzhou, when American traders had asked for the intervention of American warships to protect their lives. The war started before the ships could be sent out. As a result, in 1841 Parker had traveled to Washington to make the case to Tyler and Webster for a formal U.S.-China agreement. Parker was deeply afraid that the conflict would cause China to close its doors to the West. Not only would American business suffer; the heathens might lose the “moral benefits” of the missionary enterprise. Parker’s choice to lead the first U.S. diplomatic mission to China was ex-president John Quincy Adams, who had already given a rabble-rousing speech on the Opium War. The war’s real cause, Adams had said, was not the opium trade but “the pretension on the part of the Chinese, that in all their intercourse with other nations, political or commercial, their superiority must be implicitly acknowledged, and manifested in humiliating forms.”
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He went on: “it is time that this enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations, should cease.”
²
If negotiations with the Chinese didn’t work, Adams, like Parker, was quite prepared to enforce American claims to trading rights with a fleet of warships.

Webster wasn’t quite so fast on the trigger, but he had his own reasons for pushing for a treaty with China. The term “manifest destiny” hadn’t been coined yet, but the concept behind it was already widespread in the early 1840s. Many American politicians believed their country had a divinely given right to possess the land running all the way to the Pacific Ocean. That meant Texas, California, the Oregon
Territory, and maybe even the British colony of Canada. Webster had already declared that the Sandwich Islands, known to its natives as Hawai’i, lay within the American “sphere of influence.” The next step was to check the British Empire’s growing power on the other side of the Pacific. As soon as Webster had received word of the Treaty of Nanking, he had begun to plan for America’s first high-level diplomatic mission to China. Its goals were to open full diplomatic relations with the imperial government, achieve favorable trading terms for American merchants, and make clear that the United States, unlike Britain, had no belligerent intentions toward China. To lead this effort, Webster had turned to Caleb Cushing, who shared his faith in an aggressive, expansionist foreign policy. Cushing told a crowd in Boston: “I go to China, sir, if I may so express myself, in behalf of civilization and that, if possible, the doors of three hundred million Asiatic laborers may be opened to America.”
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In Macau, Cushing was not exactly welcomed by the local American population. They were afraid that his inexperience in dealing with imperial officials (and his ludicrous uniform!) would only worsen their relations with the Chinese government. Their fears were confirmed when the emperor categorically denied Cushing’s request to come to Beijing. The arrival of a rude and awkward foreigner would only upset the ritual of the imperial court. Cushing was not fazed. He quickly hired Parker and Bridgman to act as his translators and resident experts on Chinese affairs. While he continued to pester the emperor with demands to travel to Beijing, Cushing learned all he could about local customs from Parker and Bridgman. He wanted to be able to face any eventuality, both at the negotiating table and at the dinner table. Finally, the emperor decided to send his relative Qiying, by now an imperial commissioner and China’s de facto foreign minister, to negotiate with the barbarian emissary. Qiying took his time; he arrived in Macau in the middle of June 1844. With his retinue, including aides, dozens of servants, and a troop of soldiers, he made his headquarters the Wang Xia Temple (now known as the Kun Iam Temple) just outside Macau’s city walls. He immediately sent word to Macau that he would visit the American legation there the next day.

Figure 2.1. Caleb Cushing, the U.S. Commissioner to China from 1843 to 1845, arrived in China after eight years in Congress, including two as chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

The following morning, Qiying undertook the mile-and-a-half trip into Macau with all the pomp and solemnity of his exalted position. First a messenger ran ahead bearing an edict that announced the coming of the high official. Then the procession set off from the Wang Xia Temple
under the steamy subtropical sun. At its head marched two fearsome military officers, one brandishing a long-handled axe, the other a whip to clear pedestrians from the path. A troop of regular soldiers followed and then a military band banging gongs and blowing horns to signal that the envoy was in transit. Next came three aides on sedan chairs carried by servants, and then Qiying himself, idly fanning himself in the heat. He was short, stocky, and obviously well fed, with an elegant little goatee and moustache and a glint of humor and intelligence in his eyes. His light silk robe, cool in the summertime, was tied with the yellow sash that signaled that he and the emperor were kinsmen. The red ball and peacock’s feather on top of his hat denoted his exalted rank. Like all Chinese men, he showed his fealty to the Manchu-ruled Qing Dynasty with his hairstyle: shaved in front, with the long braid called a queue hanging in back. It had been many decades since this corner of China had seen so powerful an imperial official.