by Coe, Andrew
In company with the Rev. Dr. Newman, Mrs. Newman, and Rev. Dr. Sunderland, of Washington City, and Dr. J T. M’Lean, of San Francisco, I once took a Chinese dinner at the restaurant on Jackson Street. Dr. Newman took hold and ate like a hungry man, and when I thought he must be about filled, he astonished me by saying that the meats were excellent, and were it not that he had to deliver a lecture that evening, he would take hold and eat a good hearty dinner. Dr. Sunderland did not seem to relish things quite so well. But Mrs. Newman relishing some of the meats, and failing to get the pieces to her mouth with the chopsticks, wisely threw aside all conventional notions, used her fingers instead of chopsticks, and, as the Californians would say, “ate a square meal.”27
In nineteenth-century America, the idea of a cultured, Christian lady tossing aside manners to stuff herself with strange pagan food was shocking. Then again, these were visitors from the East, perhaps with more sophisticated ideas of right and wrong.
In fact, tourists often eagerly embraced the experience of eating in the quarter now known as Chinatown. San Franciscans only visited the district if they had to; but visitors from the East and Europe considered it a must-see stop on the city’s tourist trail. According to one local correspondent, the typical tourist “wants to see it all”:
He wants to be shocked by the Oriental depravity that he has heard so much about, or if he is one of the large class who believes that the Chinese are a much-maligned race of virtuous and enlightened people, he desires to see for himself that John Chinaman has been libeled . . . . The great majority indulge in this Oriental “slumming.” They come out of it with a confused impression of tortuous alleys, underground dens reeking with the odor of tobacco and opium, and faces so villainous that they haunt one’s dreams like the Malay that tyrannized over De Quincey’s opium-fed imagination.28
To see beyond the facades of the curio shops to the “inside” Chinatown, tourists would hire a local police officer, particularly for nighttime tours of the district’s netherworld. The itinerary usually included the Chinese temple, a barber shop, the Chinese theater, a “thieves’ lodging house” (where one officer amused visitors by “playfully jerking the long cue of one or two Chinamen he could reach without trouble”),29 a gambling hall, an opium den, and a restaurant or two.
Paying 5 or 10 cents a meal, the mass of Chinese city-dwellers of modest means found regular sustenance at these eateries, which were usually below street level and furnished with benches and tables that served as beds at night. Typically, the kitchen setup was of the most basic kind, “with its rickety little furnace, lumps of pork frying and sputtering, bowls of rice, square bags of sausage meat, fruit, fresh and dried fish, chop sticks of the approved style, and a general flavor of the cook shop grown old and stale.”30 The tourists would never think of eating at one of these establishments, but they did like to peek into the pots:
The raw material, so far as we could see with our inexperienced eyes, consisted of the sprouts growing out of potato-eyes, pig’s (or dog’s) ears pickled, and green leeks. (Now, I don’t want to say anything mean against the Chinese; but I do believe that the funny little things we saw at the bottom of a deep earthen jar were rat’s-tails skinned).31
The local Chinese also ate at their places of work, which were equipped with kitchens and dining areas. The employees of a well-to-do merchant enjoyed the traditional communal meals: “Their meat and vegetables are hashed, or cut into small pieces, and are brought to the table in a common dish, from which each one helps himself with his chopsticks. It is the usual custom to have two meals a day, one about eleven o’clock, and the other late in the afternoon.”32 At the opposite end of the spectrum, the district’s poorest residents could buy from street vendors who sold “fish, vegetables, rice-cakes and innumerable nameless Chinese comestibles,”33 or cooked modest meals on small charcoal braziers set up on balconies or even in apartments, creating one more Chinese threat for nativist agitators to attack.
The other culinary sight on the typical Chinatown tour was one of the fancy, three-story banquet restaurants, like Hong Heong. Sometimes the tourists went in simply to stare at the diners, but more often they actually sat down for a bite to eat:
Try some of this unbaked biscuit with the red letter painted on top. It is a sort of pallid doughball or dumpling filled with dark and finely cut meat: it certainly does not look edible, and its faint flavor suggests—well, nothing at all: it is entirely negative. Then here is a block of pure white marble two inches square, and on its polished top again the red-painted character: this is fairly artistic in its perfect resemblance to a block of stone with clear-cut edges and sharp corners. It is some preparation of rice flour, about the consistency of stiff jelly or blanc-mange, and is of a pleasantly sweetish taste and fairly good, or at least very unobjectionable as food. We are getting reassured and bold: let us try a sample of this yellow affair. It is round like a biscuit, but a brilliant saffron-yellow in color, with of course the omnipresent red character painted on top. Shut your eyes and bite boldly. Dust and ashes! what can this be? Do they use the sacred dust of their ancestors to feed the barbarian on? Bah! this mouldy medicinal taste, this mouthful of dry yellow ashes, is positively nasty. No more, thank you! and please pass the sweetmeats: let us forget in the familiar taste of ginger this tidbit from the tombs. Finish, if you like, with the dried sweets and the pellucid and cloying syrups: I have had enough, and shall be glad to get out.34
What this author is describing, of course, is a meal of dim sum—tea with some savory and sweet snacks. The “pallid doughball” is probably char siu bau, a steamed roast pork bun, while the block of “marble” is likely an almond-flavored agar jelly, both mainstays of the dim sum table. The tourists usually tried them once—for the adventure and so they could tell their neighbors back home about it—and then returned to more traditional restaurant fare. For the Chinese of San Francisco, these snacks may have been largely an upper-class pleasure. In 1868, the Overland Monthly reported that the “tea gardens and tea halls” of the Middle Kingdom had been replaced by “the restaurant and coffee stand”: “These are much frequented on holidays and at evening. But California Chinese are frequently seen calling for the cup of coffee and cigar, instead of the tea cup and the long pipe with the mild Chinese tobacco.”35
Eventually, a few white San Franciscans swallowed their prejudices and began to frequent a handful of Chinese restaurants, including Tune Fong’s at 710 Jackson Street. What drew them was not food but fine, aromatic Chinese tea: “genuine, delicate, strong as old wine of the cob-webbed vintage of ‘36. This was what our grandmothers who chinked up their hearts on ‘washing-days’ with Cowper’s ‘cup that cheers,’ sighed for, and like the ancient leader, died without the sight. It sets tongues running.”36 For local artists under the influence of the Orientalist aesthetic, the ritual of tea preparation was also a ceremony worthy of admiration:
Figure 4.4. A lavish San Francisco banquet restaurant, c. 1905, the year before the great earthquake. Tourists visited these eateries for Chinese teas and sweets, not full meals. Tourists drawn to the décor of multi-story banquet restaurants were sometimes tempted to try the food, but it was not until after the 1906 earthquake that Chinese cuisine gained traction with California European-Americans.
Watch him as he brings the tea, and learn the only true and proper way to concoct the beverage. First, two little pewter holders, in which the cups are set, and so prevented from tipping; then some tea leaves, I don’t know how many or how much; then the cups are filled with boiling, fiery, red-hot water, and covered in a trice with saucers fitting just inside their rims. We stand our cups in saucers; he stands his saucers upside down in the cup. The tea-kettle, though, is a regular copper-bottomed Yankee affair, not particularly pleasing, perhaps, to the aesthetic eye, but encouraging, as a sign of the advance of our Western civilization. After waiting five minutes or so, take the cup with the thumb and second finger, with the forefinger resting on the cover, and tilting it gently, pour th
e tea—real tea it is—into that other cup standing before you. Skillfully done, you will have a cupful of amber, with the perfume of “Araby the Blest.”37
(Of course, tea came from East Asia, not the Middle East, but never mind.) Chinese restaurateurs learned that white tea-drinkers had no stomach for the savory side of the dim sum menu. With the beverage, they now only served sweets: ginger chow-chow, candied and pickled fruits, and the like. The repast became more like English afternoon tea, an established part of the European American culinary tradition, than the traditional Cantonese morning snack. Most white San Franciscans did not acquire a taste for any other type of Chinatown meal until after Chinatown itself was transformed in the wake of the great earthquake of 1906 (see chapter 5).
Despite their aversion to the food of China, many white city residents had Chinese cooks in their home kitchens and regularly ate western food prepared by Chinese hands. The average middle- and upper-class household needed servants to clean, wash, shop, deal with tradespeople, and cook. In San Francisco in the 1860s and 1870s, the choice was between Irish and Chinese servants, and most chose the latter: “Irish house-servants demand $25 and $30 per month for chamber-work, cooking, or general housework. The Chinese, who as soon as they learn a little English, are much superior to the Irish as servants, ask $12 to $16.”38 The “Bridgets,” as the Irish servants were known, had a reputation for being stubborn and wasteful; the Chinese were considered quick and careful, if a little devious. One housewife found her perfect servant in one Hop Sing. After a little glitch was straightened out (he secretly rented his basement room in the family home to “a goodly throng of unwashed Celestials”) he became a trusted servant: “And he was such a cook! Beefsteaks tender and juicy, roasts done to perfection, feathery breakfast cakes, and delicious bread regularly proceeded from his bony yellow hands. His teaspoonful of soda or cream of tartar was judiciously piled to the same height at each baking, and the result was that he could always be depended upon.” When he had saved $600, his employer wrote, he planned to return home and “live like a grandee on lizard pies and rat catsup for the rest of his life.”39 One couple with three children had a “white woman” to take care of the upstairs tasks and a Chinese cook in the kitchen, where he prepared “a divine salad, an incomparable lemon pie, and coffee that is a continual temptation.”40 In many households, the work in the kitchen was probably more like this lesson from a phrasebook for Chinese immigrants: “Boil some wa-ter. Boil the rice. Cook the meat. Bake the bread. Make tea. Get some bread. Broil some beef. Fry the beef rare. It is not done yet. It is done. Come to din-ner.”41 We never hear of Chinese cooks preparing their own dishes in whites’ kitchens, although they presumably cooked rice and toppings and the like for their own consumption. Nor is there any evidence that white employers were curious about whether their Chinese cooks really ate lizard pie and rat catsup. The stereotype of Chinese food as odd, smelly, and repulsive was so ingrained that no housewife would think of tasting it, even in the privacy of her own kitchen.
San Francisco’s Chinese community was North America’s largest and most vibrant but by no means the only one in California or in the American West. From the earliest days of the Gold Rush, Chinese immigrants pursued opportunities that took them to some of the rawest and most remote outposts in North America and carried their culinary traditions with them. A provision network that transported foodstuffs, kitchen equipment, and tableware extended from the Pearl River Delta to San Francisco, up to the gold fields via Sacramento or Stockton, and further into the interior. In 1856, the missionary William Speer wrote that miners up in the hills could buy Chinese rice, tea, soy sauce, preserves, sugar, and candy, as well as Asian spices like star anise, cassia, “China root” (probably of the sarsaparilla family), cubeb, galangal, and turmeric. In addition to these imports, the miners consumed “potatoes, cabbage, pork, chickens, flour, and almost every article of vegetables raised in this State.”42 The daily diet of the Chinese workmen was the South China staple of rice with a little vegetable or meat as seasoning. Whatever food they bought they supplemented with what they gathered or grew in little gardens next to their camps. On holidays they liked to splurge. In 1857, a miner and storekeeper named Herman Francis Reinhart, who probably lived on salt pork, beans, pancakes, and coffee, was invited to dine at a nearby Chinese camp on Sucker Creek:
They were called very frugal in their meals and considered close to their provision as to cheapness but these I knew [had] once invited a lot of us storekeepers to a great dinner for the Americans, and they had a special table with the best of victuals, such as pies, cakes, roast pig, oysters in soup, or oyster pie, and all kind of can goods and fresh meats the market afforded in great profusion. And only us white[s were assigned] to the same table; they had their own table to themselves, and they waited on us as gentlemen; after eating they had wine and lemonade and nuts and oranges, figs and raisins and apples—in fact, as well got up as we could have done ourselfs.43
From San Francisco, Chinese immigrants also moved north and south along the Pacific coast, finding work in farming, fishing, and logging, and further inland as they followed the trail of gold and silver. In 1859, just as California’s gold mines were becoming depleted, an enormous silver lode was discovered just over the border at Virginia City, in what would become Nevada Territory. In the rush that followed, the Chinese came to dig wealth out of the mines or to earn their livings as shopkeepers, vegetable gardeners, laundrymen, servants, or cooks. At its height, Virginia City’s “Chinese quarter” had a population of seven hundred (out of a total of twenty-five thousand), mostly living in a jumble of one-story wooden buildings. In 1863 or 1864, a young writer who used the pen name Mark Twain described a tour of this district for the local Territorial Enterprise, including a visit to a Chinese store:
Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wang Street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies, with unpronounceable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of porcelain. He offered us a mess of birds’-nests; also, small, neat sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse and therefore restrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe. His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.44
The latter were probably palatable only to the Chinese, because they sound exactly like thousand-year-old eggs, with their distinct odor of sulfur and ammonia. Despite Twain’s obvious biases against Chinese food, he did stop in a “celestial” restaurant to sample some “chow-chow with chop-sticks.” This account is a rarity, one of the only descriptions we have of a white eating Chinese food in the western territories. In fact, most of what we know about the diet of Chinese in the interior West comes from archaeological excavations. Even in the most remote mining districts of northern Idaho, with their short growing seasons, the Chinese planted vegetable gardens in which they raised both their own sustenance and cash crops. They also purchased imported provisions from San Francisco. In Pierce, Idaho, a mining camp where hundreds of Chinese lived during the 1860s, archaeologists have found soy sauce jars, ceramic pots for imported pickles, and cans of vegetable oil for cooking. Despite great distance and adversity, the Chinese miners still managed to find ways to enjoy the foods of their native land, somewhat augmented by the miraculous canned American specialties like corned beef and oysters.
In 1865, the railroad magnate Charles Crocker hired fifty Chinese men as an experiment. Construction had just begun on the Central Pacific Railroad, which would link California and the Ea
st, and he was having trouble finding workers. The whites he found, mainly Irish immigrants, were often drunk and unruly, so he decided to try Chinese laborers. By 1868, the Central Pacific’s workforce included twelve Chinese men who were digging and blasting their way through some of the most treacherous mountain passes in the West. The white laborers had been hired as individuals; the Chinese were hired in work gangs, each with its own Chinese “agent,” who mediated with the contractors, and its own Chinese cook. The whites ate the usual frontier diet of company-supplied “beef, beans, bread and butter, and potatoes.” The Chinese had their own store in a car that followed them as they laid track. In 1872, Charles Nordhoff, a travel writer and correspondent for the New York Tribune, visited a railroad under construction in the San Joaquin Valley and explored the wares of one of these traveling stores:
Here is a list of the food kept and sold there to the Chinese workmen: Dried oysters, dried cuttle-fish, dried fish, sweet rice, crackers, dried bamboo sprouts, salted cabbage, Chinese sugar (which tasted to me very much like sorghum sugar), four kinds of dried fruits, five kinds of desiccated vegetables, vermicelli, dried sea weed, Chinese bacon, cut up into small cutlets, dried meat of the abelona [sic] shell, pea-nut oil, dried mushrooms, tea, and rice. They buy also pork of the butcher, and on holidays they eat poultry. . . . At this railroad store they also sold pipes, bowls, chopsticks, large, shallow, cast-iron bowls for cooking rice, lamps, Joss paper, Chinese writing paper, pencils, and India ink, Chinese shoes, and clothing imported ready from China. Also, scales—for the Chinaman is particular, and reweighs everything he buys, as soon as he gets it to camp. Finally, there was Chinese tobacco. The desiccated vegetables were of excellent quality, and dried, evidently, by a process as good as the best in use by us.45