Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (32 page)

BOOK: Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States

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Figure 7.5. Many storefront Chinese restaurants, like this one in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, are run by recent Fujianese immigrants. Like the chop suey joints of the 1920s and 1930s, they serve Chinese food adapted to American tastes.

In the late 1980s, the restaurant business attracted the attention of one of the largest new groups of Asian immigrants, those from the province of Fujian, just up the coast from Guangdong. After Deng Xiaoping unleashed his free market reforms in the late seventies, the new development zones around the provincial capital of Fuzhou experienced a massive influx of people looking for capitalist opportunities. The economic upheaval caused widespread social dislocation in the region as the old Communist way of life broke down. Like their adventurous South China forebears, many decided to emigrate in order to look for better prospects. Unable to get visas, they paid “snakeheads” tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle them into the United States. Once they landed in New York’s Chinatown, they were steered to a warren of tiny employment offices in the blocks under the Manhattan Bridge, where they found listings for jobs in restaurants throughout the East, from Florida to Maine. After a phone call, they were put on the next bus for Baton Rouge, Pittsburgh, or Winston-Salem, to work as dishwashers and busboys for $1,000 a month.
For these Fujianese immigrants, like others before them, restaurants became a stepping-stone to success. After years of working long hours, a family could amass enough money to buy a storefront Chinese eatery in some Alabama town or across the street from a housing project on Chicago’s South Side. Like the chop suey joint owners of the 1920s and 1930s, these immigrants aspired to nothing more than earning a living. Their menus hewed to the formula of the tried and true: spring rolls, chicken lo mein, beef with broccoli, fried rice, barbecue spare ribs, pork chow mein, and so on. Meanwhile, behind the counter, the Fujianese restaurant workers enjoyed their staff luncheons of noodle soup, greens, and a bit of seafood over steamed rice—the traditional South China family meal. Today, these restaurants represent the vast majority of Chinese eateries in the United States.

The status of Chinese food in the American culinary scene has always been linked, albeit often loosely, to the state of international relations between the two countries. In 1989, the brutal squashing of the Tiananmen Square protest shattered any illusion of China evolving into an American-style democracy. Cultural exchanges ground to a halt; tourists canceled their China trips; and the U.S. government instituted economic sanctions against the Communist government. At the same time, the American culinary world’s attention was directed elsewhere, particularly toward the Japanese and New American restaurants that dominated the white-tablecloth end of the market. These places often paired the French techniques taught at cooking schools like the Culinary Institute of America with Asian or American dishes and ingredients. Still, many in the business believed that Chinese food could continue to draw customers, with a little tweaking. Entrepreneurs started Chinese food franchises like Panda Express (founded in 1973), Manchu Wok,
City Wok, and the more ambitious P. F. Chang’s China Bistro. Featuring streamlined Chinese-American menus, they vied for diners’ dollars wherever the storefront Fujianese eateries were not, particularly in places like malls, airports, and train stations. These competed with either fast food franchises like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut or more upscale “casual dining” chains like Olive Garden and T.G.I. Friday’s. With higher ambitions, cooking school graduates began to “update” Chinese cuisine by applying French techniques to classic dishes like Peking duck. The pioneer in this movement was probably the California-trained chef Ken Hom, who wrote the 1987 cookbook
Ken Hom’s East Meets West Cuisine
. Chinese “fusion” restaurants like Wolfgang Puck’s Chinois-on-Main and Patricia Yeo’s AZ opened on the East and West coasts, featuring food that was adventurously Asian yet accessible. This food was not always very Chinese. The menus at two prominent Chinese fusion restaurants, Susanna Foo’s in Philadelphia and Blue Ginger outside of Boston, listed dishes like goat cheese wontons and sesame Caesar salad with Chinese cruller croutons. Nevertheless, today when gastronomes want to splurge on a “Chinese” feast, they often gravitate toward these more culturally familiar choices rather than the nearest Chinatown.

In August 2008, when an army of American athletes, journalists, and fans descended on Beijing for the Summer Olympics, the world media focused on China once again, reporting on not just the sports but on the nation’s people and culture. For the Chinese government, the Olympics was far more than an athletic event: it was a show of political, cultural, and economic might by a country whose exports of manufactured goods now exceeded those of the United States. The stunning new venues for the Olympic events, designed by the world’s top architects, were just one symbol of China’s arrival as a world power. The integration of China into the world economy meant that to visiting American athletes and tourists—unlike the New England traders who landed in eighteenth-century Guangzhou—the culinary landscape was somewhat familiar. McDonald’s was the official restaurant of the Summer Games, and Kentucky Fried Chicken already had almost fifteen hundred franchises across China. Nevertheless, cultural barriers remained, particularly that language. Few Americans spoke Chinese, and tourist menus in local restaurants contained literal translations of fancifully named dishes like “husband-and-wife lung slices” and “chicken without sexual life.” This increased the visitors’ tendency to see Chinese cuisine as a collection of absurd and exotic dishes, an inclination that was magnified by visits to the Wangfujing Night Market, where grilled scorpions, lizard tails, and horse stew were among the offerings. The
South Florida Sun-Sentinel
ran the headline “From Pig’s Liver to Sheep Penis, Authentic Chinese Food Is Tough to Stomach.” A small contingent of aficionados did scurry down the
hutong
alleyways to find the best local dumplings and restaurants serving obscure regional cuisines unheard-of in the States. But for most, it was enough to eat burgers at the McDonald’s next to the hotel and sample the bland options on display in the Olympic Village canteen. Operated by the American food service giant Aramark, the canteen offered a rotating menu of 460 dishes from all major cuisines, including Chinese. At the start of the Olympics, three hundred roast ducks were delivered every day. The number was raised to six hundred when they began selling out by early evening. Somewhat unexpectedly, it seemed that the whole world loved Peking duck.

Figure 7.6. With hundreds of locations across the country, P.F. Chang’s offers upscale Americanized Chinese food in an exotic “Chinese village” setting. Its menu includes dishes such as Singapore street noodles, “Sichuan from the Sea” scallops, and a “Great Wall of Chocolate” dessert.

Over two centuries have passed since the
Empress of China
sailed up the Pearl River and American traders sampled their first bites of Chinese food. How much has changed in that time? Since 1789, numerous waves of Chinese immigration and cultural influence have profoundly affected American life. Today, more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants dot this country and are a routine part of the American environment, as exciting as the corner gas station or the Super 8 Motel down by the highway entrance. Supermarkets sell an array of Chinese ingredients, from soy sauce and ginger to Napa cabbage, bean sprouts, green tea, and rice noodles. Communities with large enough Chinese populations are also home to markets like the West Coast–based 99 Ranch Market chain, selling a huge variety of products aimed at immigrant cooks and eaters. Many American diners can handle a pair of chopsticks and aren’t afraid to use cooking techniques like stir-frying and steaming in their home kitchens.

Despite this progress, one also sees an incredible resistance to Chinese food—at least as it’s served in China. The editor of
Chinese Restaurant News
has estimated that 80 percent of those forty thousand or so eateries serve a limited Chinese American menu—a short roster of dishes like Kung Pao chicken, hot and sour soup, egg rolls, beef with broccoli, and General Tso’s chicken. Americans have the same taste for spicy, sweet, crispy food that Michael Tong remarked on back in the 1980s, and, just as in the days of chop suey and chow mein, expect Chinese food to be priced low. More adventurous tasters can find alternatives to that menu in the other 20 percent of the restaurants, usually located in immigrant communities. In places like Flushing and the San Gabriel Valley, the food can be exciting, meticulously prepared, even expensive. Think Shanghai soup dumplings made with foie gras.

Diners still need to watch one crucial marker to see how a restaurant will evolve: the ratio of Chinese to non-Chinese diners. Whichever group dominates the seats will inevitably have the most influence on what is served, and how. The restaurant owner has to survive. If you don’t see any immigrants or their descendants at the tables, then you know that American tastes will rule the meal—for spicy but not too spicy food, for steamed vegetables and brown rice, for sushi and Pad Thai noodles. (It’s all Asian, isn’t it?) Like their ancestors fifty and a hundred years ago, most Americans still expect Chinese food to be cheap, filling, familiar, and bland.

PHOTO CREDITS