Chow Chop Suey

Food and the Chinese American Journey

Anne Mendelson

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231541299
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Asian American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Chinese food first became popular in America under the shadow of violence against Chinese aliens, a despised racial minority ineligible for United States citizenship. The founding of late-nineteenth-century "chop suey" restaurants that pitched an altered version of Cantonese cuisine to white patrons despite a virulently anti-Chinese climate is one of several pivotal events in Anne Mendelson's thoughtful history of American Chinese food. Chow Chop Suey uses cooking to trace different stages of the Chinese community's footing in the larger white society.

Mendelson begins with the arrival of men from the poorest district of Canton Province during the Gold Rush. She describes the formation of American Chinatowns and examines the curious racial dynamic underlying the purposeful invention of hybridized Chinese American food, historically prepared by Cantonese-descended cooks for whites incapable of grasping Chinese culinary principles. Mendelson then follows the eventual abolition of anti-Chinese immigration laws and the many demographic changes that transformed the face of Chinese cooking in America during and after the Cold War. Mendelson concludes with the post-1965 arrival of Chinese immigrants from Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and many regions of mainland China. As she shows, they have immeasurably enriched Chinese cooking in America but tend to form comparatively self-sufficient enclaves in which they, unlike their predecessors, are not dependent on cooking for a white clientele.

Part I

One

Origins

The Toisan–California Pipeline

The Wayward Province of Guangdong

August 29, 1842, came and went no more eventfully than other Mondays in the twenty-six United States and a negligible hamlet called Yerba Buena in the Alta California territory of Mexico. On the other side of the world, however, the balance of East/West realpolitik was being permanently realigned at the city of Nanjing on the Yangzi River, about eighty-five miles from the eastern coast of China. Attended by phalanxes of British military and naval officers along with a bored-looking spaniel, the representatives of Queen Victoria and China’s Daoguang Emperor sat at a table in the state cabin of HMS Cornwallis to sign the Treaty of Nanjing.¹ This lopsided bargain ended the First Opium War by imposing a long string of British demands on China in return for nothing. It was a decisive defeat in the Qing dynasty’s attempt to turn back, or at least partly contain, the tide of an emerging global economy dominated by stronger and more ruthless powers.

The Qing were the descendants of non-Han aliens, Manchu invaders from beyond China’s northern borders who had seized the imperial throne less than two centuries earlier, in 1644. In many ways, the timing of the new dynasty’s arrival could not have been worse. The business of putting their new empire in order collided from the start with disruptive Western trading interests, now firmly pitched throughout the maritime Far East and scrambling with each other for advantage.

The lands the Qing intended to govern would have presented fearsome challenges in any case. Then as now, China’s climatic, topographical, and human barriers to unification dwarfed those of any other nation on earth. By claim at least, the empire took in the sky-piercing Himalayas in the far west along with innumerable ranges of lesser mountains and hills scattered across twenty-plus provinces; huge deserts and dry steppes stretching far along the old Silk Road in the northwest; the two greatest watercourses of Asia, the Yellow and the Yangzi Rivers, each winding to the Pacific Ocean throughout several thousand miles of stupendously varied terrain; a large, humid tropical and subtropical zone in the far south; and more than nine thousand miles of coastline. It also embraced literally dozens of different ethnicities and languages. The latter included not only a host of speech groups belonging to non-Han minority peoples but at least ten major Han Chinese languages with untold constellations of local sublanguages and dialects. (All the Han tongues were mutually intelligible as written in Chinese characters, but in spoken form might be further apart than Romanian and Portuguese.)

For the Qing authorities in Beijing, one annoying stretch of coastline, the people who lived along it, and the two major languages they spoke spelled particular trouble. The imperial court was obliged to call in interpreters to translate the uncouth speech of functionaries from the far south-southeastern regions—the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian, which lay along what Beijing considered the empire’s most dangerous maritime frontier.

Between them, these two provinces would account for the lion’s share of emigration from China to the rest of the world until after World War II. But while the Qing were struggling to unseat the doomed Ming dynasty in the early seventeenth century, the very concept of emigration was almost impossible to reconcile with some aspects of a widely prevailing Chinese world view. Recent interlopers though they were, the Qing, once victorious, were determined to enforce most of that view.

By Ming and Qing lights, the mere act of travel to foreign parts, at least by sea, implicitly threatened a system of belief that placed China (the “Middle Kingdom”) and its ruler (the “Son of Heaven”) at the center of the universe, with other realms and peoples occupying different peripheral ranks from semicivilized to subhuman.² Even when seagoing Western aliens had proved to be a permanent fact of life, official attitudes toward the planet at large were a strange amalgam of xenophobia and ambivalent acceptance. Leaving the ancestral realm without official clearance was, in theory at least, punishable by beheading.³ After all, it could serve little purpose except treason or merchant enterprise. The second ranked as the least honorable of all lawful human activities on the scale of Confucian values.

Nowhere in the Middle Kingdom did people more openly flout such doctrines than in Fujian and Guangdong. For centuries they had under stood that their coastal waters offered unparalleled access to all of Southeast Asia. They further knew that China could not very well do without many articles of trade shipped from those regions—the “Nanyang,” or “Southern Ocean,” as the lands from Vietnam to beyond the Spice Islands were collectively called—or the revenue from commercial traffic.

The ethnic makeup of Fujian and Guangdong was complex and unruly even by Chinese standards. At different times over many centuries, successive Han Chinese groups had migrated to both provinces from the north, first colonizing farmland, later seeking refuge from northern invaders or a healthy distance from imperial oversight. The Guangdong residents—or “Cantonese,” as the English would later call them—considered themselves more truly Chinese than their northern rulers. Indeed, the difficult spoken languages of both Guangdong and Fujian are believed to resemble the most ancient forms of Han Chinese more closely than counterparts elsewhere, and non-Han genetic admixtures appear to be less prevalent in the southeast than in most of China.⁴

In any case, both provinces were hotbeds of smuggling, piracy, merchantry, and other dubious pursuits. Fujian—pronounced “Hokkien” in the most widespread of the local dialects—was the more active in establishing trading networks throughout the Nanyang. Unofficial Hokkienese outposts had long existed in many corners of today’s Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. People from Guangdong sometimes founded settlements in the Nanyang. But they also were the more adroit at exploiting the arrival of European traders in Chinese waters.

Guangdong, China’s southernmost province, lies about half north and half south of the Tropic of Cancer. It was the southern, or fully tropical, half that eventually would drag China willy-nilly into the early modern global economy. The dominant feature here is the massive delta of the Pearl River, or Zhu Jiang, flowing through verdant hill country into the South China Sea. It furnishes a convenient water route from Southeast Asia as far inland as the port of Guangzhou (Canton city), the provincial capital.

South of Guangzhou, the Pearl River Delta is a perplexed, hilly welter of innumerable tidal channels interspersed with dikes, fish ponds, and pieces of reclaimed ground. In this region, land flat enough for farming was less easily come by than in central or northern parts of the province. There was some cultivation of rice and a newer staple crop, the hugely important sweet potatoes introduced from the Americas in the seventeenth century. Sugar cane was the major cash crop; local tree fruits from oranges to litchis were reputedly among the finest in the kingdom.⁵ In rural districts nearly everyone had a small plot to supply kitchen needs. But the area was less self-sufficient in agriculture than the rest of Guangdong, and the locals had more of a nose for trade.

Only with difficulty could imperial officialdom stop delta residents from welcoming foreign vessels while barely preserving the dignified fiction that goods entering China from elsewhere were really tributary missions to the current Son of Heaven. The mazy backwaters between the sea and the port city were scant barrier to commercial interchange between determined outsiders and equally eager locals and offered endless aid and comfort to smugglers. For centuries, Guangzhou merchants had been selling porcelains, silks, and tea—with or without official sanction—to the Arab traders who plied the Southeast Asian coasts. They hoped to do likewise with the European voyagers who began seeking a piece of the action during the final Qing and Ming struggles for the throne.

It took the Qing six years to conquer the wayward province after coming to power. Afterward, Cantonese readiness to collude with the Portuguese and other foreigners made the situation difficult to monitor from Beijing, more than a thousand miles away. The imperial masters were almost as much at a loss to read the minds of these refractory subjects as U.S. and Canadian authorities later would be in the Far West.

The character of the southeastern Chinese and particularly the Pearl River Delta Cantonese, as it appeared not only to northerners but later to many British and American chroniclers, was indomitably hardy, persistent, stoical, practical, wily, and resourceful. No group more completely personified the xiang banfa instinct. From decades if not centuries pursuing trade opportunities in the Nanyang, they were used to organizing expeditions to foreign parts, where they knew how to hit the ground running. They could endure dreadful conditions with an apparent indifference that non-Chinese often interpreted as a penchant for squalor.

Representatives of the West would soon marvel at the south Guangdong natives’ genius for improvisation and imitation in new surroundings while—like representatives of Beijing—often being frustrated by their skill at getting their own way by open or devious means. In the context of other people’s mores, they could look like congenital liars and lawbreakers. Probably it is more accurate to say that their lives were ruled by a consciousness of community and self almost impossible to communicate to outsiders but ineradicably bred into them as birthright members of tight-knit individual villages and clans in the delta backwaters. This instinctive identification with place and lineage was all the stronger for the spectacular fragmentation of Han sublanguages and dialects in Guangdong. Often people living in one administrative district could barely understand the speech of people from the next.⁶ The more educated might have some command of Cantonese as spoken in Guangzhou. This was officially the standard language of the province, but local speech was a token of jealously ingrained local loyalties expressed in frequent feuds.

It is not surprising, then, that even more than most Chinese, natives of the Pearl River Delta could travel and (for a time) settle anywhere in the world without ceasing to be citizens of some unshakably internalized ancestral domain.

The Canton System

A sometimes neglected truth underlying the Chinese diaspora of modern times is that from the moment the first Portuguese voyagers appeared in Chinese coastal waters not long after 1500, Chinese and Western economic influences throughout the Far East fed each other in a powerful synergy. While Portuguese, Dutch, and English entrepreneurs founded local beachheads and trafficked in an ever-expanding range of goods, Chinese entrepreneurs were doing likewise in all parts of the Nanyang.⁷ Of course most of these exporter-importers were from the untrustworthy provinces of Fujian and Guangdong. Quietly ignoring official prohibitions on leaving the shores of the Middle Kingdom, Hokkienese and Cantonese established berths at useful locations in incipient Western colonies from the Malay peninsula to the Philippines, buying or selling or brokering anything from metal ores to rice. The imperial court frequently viewed these activities as a form of organized crime, and sometimes with reason.

The Ming and (after 1644) Qing emperors uneasily sought to control an expanding flow of goods and people along the long Chinese coastline. Some form of triage was obviously necessary. Since the port of Guangzhou and the shoreline around the Pearl River Delta offered the easiest access to the interior anywhere in the kingdom, Beijing poured more effort into supervising this maritime area than any other. Arriving foreigners were considered national security threats until proved otherwise. The hope was that funneling them into one manageable zone would make other coasts safer.⁸

As early as 1557 the Ming authorities had permitted Portugal to establish the tiny trading outpost of Macau (later to receive the Chinese name of Aomen) on the western shore of the river mouth for regular access to Guangzhou, some seventy miles inland as the crow flies. The real distance upriver was much greater. The difficulty of navigating the shallow, tortuous channels between Macau and the port city without local help offered a good rationale for correspondingly tortuous bureaucratic oversight.⁹

In 1757, realizing that more drastic measures were needed to stop outsiders from doing business in other cities, the Qing regime declared all ports except Guangzhou closed to foreign vessels. This move annoyed both the British East India Company—now the most important Western commercial presence in the Far East—and merchants from every tea-drinking (and to a lesser extent, porcelain- and silk-importing) European nation. But all were obliged to operate under what came to be known as the “Canton system,” a procedural gauntlet that had begun to take shape at around 1700 and would reach full flowering between the 1757 decree and 1800.¹⁰

The system was so obstacle-ridden, and so maddeningly tailored to maintain Western trade deficits, that one of its eventual effects would be to awaken British minds to the charms of opium smuggling. It depended on incessant supervision by numberless functionaries.

The mere size of Western oceangoing ships barred open sailing (or surreptitious sneaking) upriver to the port city. Even going with the tide, the keels of the largest sailing vessels when fully loaded barely cleared the bottom of the deepest channels as far north as the anchorage at Huangpu (“Whampoa” to the English), about twelve miles short of Guangzhou. By law, non-Chinese vessels and personnel had to be attended at all times by successive troops of fee-collecting agents who oversaw every stage of their mission, starting with the hiring of local pilots licensed to take foreign ships upriver from Macau to Huangpu. There the cargoes were off-loaded to smaller “chop boats” leased from Cantonese merchants, for transport through a series of “chops” (toll stages) to the wharves at Guangzhou. All these procedures were under the ultimate control of the Hoppo, or Guangzhou-based imperial customs supervisor, who also superintended the performance of the same steps in reverse order for departing cargoes.¹¹

Foreigners were too dangerous to be left unsupervised for a minute, even for the purpose of going to buy food in Guangzhou, Huangpu, or anywhere else. That job and many others were ultimately controlled by the “cohong,” a consortium of Guangzhou merchants through whom Western merchant captains and supercargoes were obliged to channel all transactions. On behalf of individual European delegations, the different members of the cohong made official arrangements with local purveyors known as “compradors,” a name borrowed from Portuguese. Among other duties, the compradors bought each day’s food supplies for foreign ships’ crews and merchant delegations throughout their stay. Sometimes they also arranged for the hiring of local cooks to prepare Western meals to the visitors’ taste. After several decades the imperial court and the cohongs decide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Romanization and Terminology
• Introduction
• Prologue: A Stroke of the Pen
• Part I
• Part II
• Postscript: What Might Have Been
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List