Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (2 page)

A month into the voyage, the
Empress
landed at the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Africa. Leaks in the side were caulked, and the crew loaded more water and fresh food for the officers: chickens and goats, two pigs, and some oranges. The next leg of the journey lasted three months and 18 days, during which the men hardly sighted land or other ships. It was “one dreary waste of Sky & water,” the purser wrote. Toward the end, the men were so starved for fresh meat that they captured and threw in the pot some booby birds that appeared and flew around the ship. Samuel Shaw, an officer, noted that they “were lean, very fishy, and but indifferent food.” The crew also attempted to snare an albatross, but it broke the line and escaped.

Shaw was the
Empress
’s periwigged supercargo: its business agent, and the second most important man on the ship. Aged twenty-nine, he was a native of Boston and from an early age had been “destined for commercial pursuits.” In 1775, he had enlisted in the American army and risen to the post of aide-de-camp to one of George Washington’s most important generals. At the war’s end in 1783, Shaw had been recognized as a young man to watch. According to his biographer, “the judgement, fidelity, and capacity for business, which he had displayed in the American army, attracted attention and general interest; and an association of capitalists, who had united for the purpose of opening a commercial intercourse between the United States and China, offered to him the station of factor and commercial agent for the voyage.”
¹
Ambitious, and with barely a penny to his name, he had accepted immediately.

Figure 1.1. Samuel Shaw (1754–1794), supercargo of the
Empress of China
and a pioneer of Chinese-American trade. Shaw’s journals chronicle the first American encounters with Chinese cuisine.

In mid-July, the men finally sighted Java Head, the tree-covered promontory on the Sunda Strait, the channel between the islands of Java and Sumatra. Their ship dropped anchor in Java’s Mew Bay, where it was met by Muslim natives in two canoes proffering chickens, fish, turtles, vegetables, fruits, coconuts, and even live monkeys for sale as sailor’s pets. Already at anchor in the bay were two French ships, including the
Triton
, which was also heading to China. The bonds of friendship between French and Americans were then particularly strong, thanks to the French backing of the Americans’ side in their war for independence. Shaw and the other American officers were invited to dinner aboard the
Triton
—“as elegantly served as if we had
been at an entertainment on shore.”
²
The French captain offered to guide the
Empress
on the last leg of the journey, a proposal the Americans gratefully accepted because of the many islands and uncharted shoals between Java and China. Just before they set sail, the French and Americans spent a day planting Indian corn, oats, peas, beans, and potatoes on a nearby island. At the end of their work, they toasted the success of their garden, which they hoped to harvest on the return voyage, with bottles of Madeira wine and French champagne.

On August 23, 1784, after six months at sea, the Americans finally came within sight of the Chinese mainland. They had arrived at the coast of Guangdong Province, at the mouth of the Pearl River in southeast China. Here they encountered a Chinese fishing boat, crewed by the first Chinese they had ever seen, and for $10 hired its captain to guide them up the river. After maneuvering past some rocky coastal islands, the
Empress of China
and the
Triton
anchored off the city of Macau, on the river mouth’s western banks. Administered by Portugal since the sixteenth century, this settlement had a distinctly southern European aspect, with large whitewashed houses, narrow winding streets, and green trees and gardens. The
Empress
fired a salute of greeting, which was soon answered by a salute from the city’s fort. Shaw had the honor of hoisting the red, white, and blue colors of what was then called the Continental flag, the first “ever seen or made use of in those seas.” Early the next morning, a silk-robed Chinese customs inspector climbed aboard and took down the particulars of the boat and where it was from. He then impressed a piece of paper with the large seal that gave the
Empress
permission to travel further into China. After he left, the American ship was swarmed by little Chinese boats whose owners offered eggs, sugar, and breadfruit for sale. Two days later, the
Empress
raised anchor and set sail
up the Pearl River for the city of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, sixty miles to the north.

The journey from Macau to the anchorage at Whampoa, twelve miles down the river from Guangzhou, was a favorite subject of the era’s travel writers. This two-day passage gave European and American voyagers their first real encounter with the people and sights of one of the world’s most fabled lands. As they sailed north, the river was increasingly crowded with all kinds of boats, including odd-shaped fishing boats, enormous flat-bottomed cargo boats, and the war junks of the Chinese navy. Some of the boats were evidently home to whole families and the flocks of ducks they tended. Others were piloted by fishermen who used tame cormorants to catch their fish, preventing the birds from swallowing their prey by fastening iron rings around their throats. The Western ships sailed past Chinese forts whose gun emplacements were painted with fearsome tigers and demons. As the land flattened out, the sailors saw bamboo and banana trees and then miles and miles of rice paddies as far as the eye could see. After two days, they arrived at Whampoa, the furthest upstream a deep-drafted ship could travel, where a line of tall masts was already waiting.

The
Empress of China
anchored at Whampoa on August 28, 1784, and fired a thirteen-gun salute to the other ships already riding there. French, Danish, Dutch, and English boats all returned the salute. Soon Shaw and Captain Green were visited by the officers of these ships, starting with the French, who assisted the Americans in getting moored and arranging their passage into Guangzhou. For anyone who hadn’t yet heard of the American victory over the British, Captain Green carried copies of the articles of peace and the treaties between the United States and the various European powers. Two days later, the American officers took a Chinese “chop” boat into Guangzhou. As they
approached the city, the sights and sounds and smells—the culture shock of being in China—would have overwhelmed them, as they passed pagodas nine stories high, temples, rice paddies, orange plantations, more forts, and hundreds or even thousands of boats painted with glaring colors. Every now and then they would have heard the crash of cymbals and gongs the Chinese boats used instead of cannons to greet each other.

From the river, the Americans could just barely glimpse the city itself. The view was blocked by a seemingly interminable line of one-story buildings, mostly warehouses that crammed the waterfront. Here and there between these buildings, the Americans would have glimpsed the crenellated city wall and behind it an occasional rooftop, a distant pagoda, and the roofs of some of the larger temples of the city, all topped with tile roofs. During their four months in Guangzhou, Green and Shaw were never allowed to enter the city proper. Instead, they landed on a wharf attached to a twelveacre compound on the riverfront at the southwest corner of the city wall. Here the Chinese had built thirteen two- and three-story warehouses with white facades and columned verandas fronting the river. These buildings were called “factories” because they both housed and provided work spaces for the foreign “factors,” the business agents of the European trading companies. According to imperial edict, this compound was the only place in China where Western nationals could come and go more or less freely.

After he returned to the United States, Shaw presented a report about his venture to John Jay, the U.S. secretary of foreign affairs (precursor to the secretary of state). Unlike many European travelers, Shaw did not feel that he could discuss Chinese life and culture:

In a country where the jealousy of the government confines all intercourse between its subjects and the foreigners who visit it to very narrow limits, in the suburbs of a single city, the opportunities of gaining information respecting its constitution, or the manners and customs generally of its inhabitants, can neither be frequent nor extensive. Therefore, the few observations to be made at Canton cannot furnish us with sufficient data from which to form an accurate judgment upon either of these points.
³

This statement was something of an evasion, particularly considering Shaw’s status as leader of the first American expedition to China. Numerous writers with even less direct experience of China than Shaw penned extensive works both before and after his visit. It’s more likely that he was actually not that interested in China itself. He was the first representative of the group that dominated American contacts with China for the next half century—the canny but narrow-minded New England traders. The vast, complicated, exotic, and ancient country of China lay just outside the door, but all they focused on was making a profit. Indeed, Shaw’s description of his time in Guangzhou begins: “to begin with commerce,—which here appears to be as little embarrassed, and is, perhaps, as simple, as any in the known world.”
⁴

The Guangzhou factories were owned by a small group of wealthy Chinese merchants who had received imperial permission to trade with foreign trading firms. The most powerful of these, the British East India Company, also known as the “Honorable Company,” occupied a sprawling factory in the heart of the compound, right on the central square; the Union Jack flew out front. British traders and Chinese authorities had a complicated relationship. Each side accused the other of arrogance. Backed by the
mighty British navy from its base in Calcutta, the East India Company had established trading ventures throughout South and Southeast Asia. In China, however, the emperor limited their business to Guangzhou, cutting them off from the rest of the vast China market, and refused to meet with their representatives or even the English king’s own emissaries. In Guangzhou, British traders occasionally vented their frustrations by beating any coolies who had the misfortune to bump into them on one of the compound’s crowded streets. On the Chinese side, the main advantage of trading with the East India Company was the substantial revenues it brought to the emperor’s personal coffers. The main disadvantage was, as the Chinese saw it, that the foreigners were crude and quarrelsome, pushy and utterly unwilling to adapt to Chinese customs. The emperor believed that letting them come any further into his empire would only upset the harmony of Chinese society. For now, the trade continued because it was profitable, although both sides could see the possibility of conflict further down the road.

Shaw’s sympathies lay naturally on the European side of this relationship. However, as a newcomer to the region, and from such a young country, he wasn’t exactly in a position to take a stand. His first concern was the business at hand: selling his ginseng. The Americans first stayed in the factory rented by the French but soon secured their own place of business. The first floor of their factory was divided between a warehouse, a counting room, and a treasury; the American living quarters were on the second floor. The landlords provided a phalanx of Chinese servants, from cooks to porters, to carry the Americans’ goods and cater to all of their needs. In order to communicate with both these servants and the merchants, the Americans had to learn the crude local trade jargon known as pidgin Chinese.

The word “pidgin” probably derives from the word “business,” and appropriately so, because it was primarily used for commercial transactions. Pidgin was a unique combination of Portuguese, English, and Cantonese, with a few words from India thrown in. The jargon had evolved from necessity; the disparate trading communities from the Bay of Bengal to the western Pacific needed a way to communicate with one another. “Go catchy chow-chow” meant “fix something to eat” in pidgin, which sounded very much like a parent talking to a recalcitrant and somewhat deaf child. Neither the Chinese nor the Europeans had bothered to learn their trading partners’ native tongues, so pidgin was used in all interactions between them. (In a sense, both sides were talking down when they used pidgin. However, in contemporary English and American accounts of life in Guangzhou, we only hear the Chinese side of the conversation. To readers, this has the affect of infantilizing the speakers; it’s hard to respect someone who talks in such an ungainly manner.)

For Shaw, his first problem was explaining to the Chinese exactly who the Americans were:

Our being the first American ship that had ever visited China, it was some time before the Chinese could fully comprehend the distinction between the Englishmen and us. They styled us the
New People
, and when by the map, we conveyed to them an idea of the extent of the country, with its present and increasing population, they were not a little pleased at the prospect of so considerable a market for the productions of their own empire.
⁵