by Coe, Andrew
This one of the earliest accounts we have of the mixed stir-fry, one of the Pearl River Delta’s village specialties, that would have an outsized influence on the American perception of Chinese food.
During the 1860s and 1870s, New York journalists predicted the imminent arrival of hordes of Chinese immigrants from the West, and these prophecies became more frequent as work on the railroads ended and anti-Chinese violence spread. In reality, those hordes never materialized, and Chinese immigrants continued to flow in, as they always had, gradually. The journalists, following the lead of the San Francisco newspapers, descended on the city’s nascent Chinatown to nose out any signs of gambling, poor sanitation, and particularly opium use. In 1880, a Times reporter visited Mott Street’s little Chinese community expecting to find “dragons’ wings scattered over the floor, and ends of serpents’ tails disappearing under the bed” but admitted: “none of these things are there.” He had to enlist a police officer to take him behind a combined restaurant and gambling parlor to find one tiny opium den where he could indulge his fantasies of Oriental depravity.4 Generally, however, these writers couldn’t muster as much moral condemnation of Chinese vice as had Bayard Taylor. With more curiosity than outrage, they explored the rules and odds of the Chinese gambling games and sampled a few puffs of opium to learn how it was smoked.
This relative lack of hysteria may have been due to the fact that the thousand or so Chinese in New York were only a drop in the bucket compared to the size of other immigrant groups. In May 1880, the Times noted that since the beginning of the year more than one hundred thousand immigrants had passed through the processing facility at Castle Garden on Manhattan’s southern tip.5 The majority were German, English, Irish, French, and Scandinavian. The masses of Italians and East European Jews began to arrive a few years later. Most paused only long enough to collect their baggage before they were whisked off to other parts of the country, but thousands stayed and settled in the crowded immigrant districts of the Lower East and West Sides. The Chinese were certainly the most exotic new immigrants, but they were unlikely to be seen as an economic threat when compared to the flood of Europeans.
Like their compatriots in California, New York City’s Chinese residents soon began to remake their environment to suit their culinary needs. By 1878, a pair of Chinese farmers named Ah Wah and Ah Ling were growing Asian vegetables on a three-acre plot in the Tremont section of the Bronx. (Within a few years they were joined by another farmer in the Bronx and then Chinese farms in Astoria, Queens.) Store owners like Wo Kee sold imported specialties like pickled, salted, and dried vegetables as well as the usual array of Chinese dried seafood. In 1880, an agent of the Ichthyophagus Club scouting Chinatown for piscatory oddities for its annual dinner found sharks’ fins, dried oysters, salted octopus and squid, sea cucumbers, and birds’ nests. The appearance of these alien culinary items soon led to the city’s first controversy over Chinese food. In 1883, a “short, stout, excitable Frenchman” named Dr. Charles Kaemmerer accused a Chinatown grocer of cooking cats and rats. He was visiting a saloon at 199 Worth Street when he noticed a “very peculiar odor” in its back courtyard, which it shared with a Chinese grocery at 5 Mott Street. Looking outside, he saw “some Chinamen standing there handling some things that looked like very small cats or very large rats.” He told a reporter: “I didn’t see them eat the animals . . . but I don’t know why they shouldn’t do so.” (After all, a popular street ditty went: “Chink, chink, Chinaman/Eats dead rats, / Eats them up/Like gingersnaps.”) A reporter later accompanied Dr. Vermilye, the sanitary inspector, to the premises and found:
There was no offal in the yard, nor cat or rat skins, and no stench. By the open window a Chinese cook was seen preparing the dinner. He was making a stew, which was composed of salted Chinese turnips, soft-shelled crabs, and pig’s ears. These and various other articles of food were washed and sliced on a huge butcher’s block with a butcher’s cleaver. The cook was as deft as a hotel chef, and did his work with as much care and cleanliness. He shelled fresh peas, sliced a wholesome-looking cabbage head, and peeled fresh potatoes whose skins were almost white. There was nothing suggestive of rats or cats about the place, and the doctor said that he should report that there was no cause for complaint.6
That wasn’t enough for the editor of New York’s first Chinese newspaper, Wong Ching Foo, who was very different from the rest of the Chinese population. He had been raised in the Shanghai region, not the Pearl River Delta; he had been educated at an elite academy, not a village school, and had even worked as an interpreter in the imperial court. He was also a sharp-tongued gadfly, not afraid to speak out against the California racist rabble-rouser Denis Kearney or anyone else who wished to deprive the Chinese of their rights. In fact, his aggressive defense of his compatriots may be part of why the anti-Chinese movement failed to gain traction in New York. By 1883, the year he founded the Chinese-American, he was the veteran of at least two national lecture tours, one defending his “pagan” beliefs and the other attacking the anti-Chinese movement. When he heard Dr. Kaemmerer’s accusations, he offered a $500 reward to anyone who could “prove that a Chinaman ate rats and cats” and threatened a slander suit. In all his travels through China, he declared, he had never heard of anyone eating cats or rats: “They drew the line at dogs.”7 Nobody took Wong up on his challenge, but the event apparently inspired him to write an article on food, the first in English by a Chinese, for the Brooklyn Eagle:
The epicure flourishes in the Orient as well as in the Occident. In Europe he bows down before the genius of France; in Asia, before that of the flowery kingdom. The renown of Chinese food and cooking is more than deserved. For generations the followers of Confucius and Buddha have studied the art which Brillat-Savarin and Blot rendered famous, and have evolved a system which, while it may not in all respects meet the approval of the Western races, yet possesses an individuality and merit of the highest order.8
Wong goes on to make the daring suggestion that Chinese cooking may be better, because of its far broader range of ingredients and the mandarin gourmet’s preference for “extraordinary” and expensive foods over the European gourmet’s cheap and common turkey, duck, lamb, or beef. To further compare the two styles, Wong uses Caleb Cushing’s old trope of the Chinese as the opposite of the American:
Where the Americans use ice water they use hot tea; where we sweeten tea and coffee they drink these beverages plain; where we salt fish they dress it with sugar; with them the dessert comes in the first stages of the meal; everything in their menu is cooked so thoroughly as to lose entirely its original character, while with us rare meats, raw vegetables, Russian salad, simple fruits, oysters and clams are served almost in their natural condition.
There’s a little confusion between “us” and “them” here; the author is Chinese after all. This confused viewpoint appears in a number of places in his article. No Chinese person would have been likely to say that Chinese food is overcooked, because the Chinese considered Westerners the masters of overcooking. In fact, Wong later praises the Chinese practice of steaming, saying that it lets cooks serve vegetables “with every line and point unbroken.” Yet Wong certainly had noticed the presence of raw and barely cooked food on New York tables. All this leads one to surmise that it’s the editor, not Wong Ching Foo, who speaks in many places in the article.
Wong mentions the Ichthyophagus Club’s work in bringing some of China’s “extraordinary” dishes to Western palates, and then describes some dishes that could be “well adapted for cosmopolitan use,” including hellbenders, sturgeon’s swim-bladders, poultry feet, and sharks’ fins, which he compares (strangely) to both pickled herring and shad. Finally, he arrives at a list of “other special dishes,” giving us the earliest reliable glimpse we have of the ordinary restaurant food of Pearl River Delta immigrants in the United States. Here are sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaf (a dim sum staple), “Wun-hawn,” or wonton; “Yak-o-men,” wheat noodles with meat in broth; “Sai
-fun,” seafood with rice noodles; beef, chicken, pork, or bacon balls (popular in soups or as dim sum); curried rice with meat or seafood; “Bo-ahp,” duck boiled with orange peel; and “Chop soly,” for which “each cook has his own recipe. The main features of it are pork, bacon, chickens, mushroom, bamboo shoots, onion and pepper. These may be called characteristics; accidental ingredients are duck, beef, perfumed turnip, salted black beans, sliced yam, peas and string beans.” This, Wong claims, “may be justly termed the national dish of China.” Having traveled widely in China, Wong must have known this statement was incorrect. Perhaps he included it because “Chop soly” was already becoming popular with Western diners, who knew the dish also as “chow-chop-sui” and later “chop suey.” Wong sums up: “Chinese cooking is better and cheaper than our own. It utilizes almost every part of food animals, and many plants, herbs and trees, both terrestrial and marine, unknown to our pantries.” And those stories about cats, dogs, and rats? Fictitious. Poor people will eat them in times of famine, but those animals “are not recognized articles of diet in the great restaurants, any more than at Delmonico’s or the Brunswick.”9 That was the kind of white lie that would help protect Chinese from the Kearneys of this world.
Wong Ching Foo’s article appeared at a very particular time in the history of Gotham: the middle of the Gilded Age, when the city was awash with money. The newspapers were filled with articles about the lavish homes and outrageous parties of millionaire families like the Vanderbilts, Goulds, and Astors. On Fifth Avenue, old and nouveau riche wealth fought for status against a background of constantly shifting social mores. Those who had “arrived” in high society attempted to keep the socially ambitious out of it by deploying the weapons of snobbery and exclusion. Social arbiters like Ward McAllister limited the elite to four hundred, the number of people who would fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, and devised a series of elaborate rules for their behavior. According to McAllister, no expenditures were too great when it came to entertaining, including on the food one provided. The dishes at a dinner party must be classic French cuisine, so the family’s chef must of course be French as well. In 1890, McAllister wrote: “twenty years ago there were not over three chefs in private families in this city. It is now the exception not to find a man of fashion keeping a first-class chef or a famous cordon bleu.”10 In preparing for a dinner, the hostess must have a detailed knowledge of French cuisine in order to inspire her temperamental chef to new heights and to decide whether he should follow the truffled filet, served with black sauce, with a riz de veau à la Toulouse or a supreme de volaille with white sauce. If her own dining room wasn’t large enough, she would turn to one of the city’s palatial restaurants, Delmonico’s on Madison Square above all, where she would negotiate the menu with Mr. Delmonico or his famous chef, Charles Ranhofer. If her taste proved correctly exquisite—and if enough money reached the right society columnists and editors—then all New York would recognize and reaffirm her status at the top of the social heap. In this world, encompassing not only socialites but jewelers, florists, dressmakers, and journalists like the “fashionable magazinist” in Edwin H. Trafton’s party, there was a right way and a wrong way to comport oneself. You could dine in Chinatown once, and laugh about it over cigars and drinks at the Astor House afterward, but you could not make a habit of it.
However culturally influential the elite were (or thought they were), not all of New York strove to copy their ways. Another group arose that seemed to take pleasure in flouting every rule McAllister’s four hundred held dear. They called themselves Bohemians—a name taken from Henri Murger’s story “La Vie de Bohème,” set in the Latin Quarter of 1840s Paris. Murger’s characters were free-spirited but starving artists; the Bohemians of late nineteenth-century New York were free-spirited but frequently well-fed artists and writers. In fact, one way American Bohemians defined themselves was by where they ate. If Mrs. Astor dined at Delmonico’s, they chose dark and dingy restaurants down in the immigrant districts where the food was cheap and the clientele disreputable; they were the first “underground gourmets” and “chowhounds.” During the 1850s, the favorite haunt of the first generation of city Bohemians (including Walt Whitman) was Pfaff’s saloon, a German beer cellar below the sidewalk at Broadway near Bleecker Street, where they drank, talked, sang, caroused, and made love. Twenty years later, a new generation of writers and artists rendezvoused at eateries like the Grand Vatel and the villainous Taverne Alsacienne in the “French Quarter,” south of Washington Square. At the former, one could order a filling and “not unpalatable” three-course dinner, along with wine, coffee, and a roll, for a mere 50 cents. The purpose of these Bohemian visits to the immigrant restaurants was not just to enjoy cheap food and the company of fellow artists but also to be transported into a milieu that more accurately reflected the true nature of the city than all the Fifth Avenue ballrooms. So when a little community of Chinese appeared along lower Mott Street in the late 1870s, it became a natural destination for Bohemians. With (relatively) open minds, hungry stomachs, and a metaphoric thumb in the eye of the four hundred, they led the charge across the boundaries of taste.
The journalist and editor Allan Forman was tutored in the delights of Chinese food by a friend, a “jolly New York lawyer of decidedly Bohemian tendencies, who one day suggested, ‘Come and dine with me.’” “Where?” Forman asked, knowing the lawyer’s taste for reveling in “dirt and mystery and strange viands” down in the immigrant district.
“Oh, over at Mong Sing Wah’s, 18 Mott street. He is a Celestial Delmonico,” was the reply.
“Thanks awfully. But my palate is not educated up to rats and dogs yet. Let me take a course in some French restaurant where these things are disguised before I brave them in their native honesty,” I answered.
“I’m surprised to find this prejudice in you,” he exclaimed, rather petulantly. “A Chinese dinner is as clean as an American dinner, only far better. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You come with me to Mong Sing Wah’s tonight and I’ll show you his kitchen. If it is not as clean as that Italian place where you eat spaghetti I’ll pay for the best dinner for two you can order at Delmonico’s.”11
So on a bitterly cold night early in 1886, the two white men took the Third Avenue streetcar down to Chatham Square and Mong Sing Wah’s restaurant, hidden in a courtyard behind 18 Mott. The lawyer surprised Forman by greeting the owner and then ordering dinner in apparently fluent Chinese: “‘Chow-chop-suey, chop-seow, laonraan, san-sui-goy, no-ma-das,’ glibly ordered my friend, and the white-robed attendant trotted off and began to chant down a dumbwaiter.” This dinner was not a banquet of rare ingredients imported from China but a meal off the menu—the everyday restaurant food eaten by New York’s Chinese. When the food appeared, Forman seemed to forget his fears about rats and dogs:
Chow-chop suey was the first dish we attacked. It is a toothsome stew, composed of bean sprouts, chicken’s gizzards and livers, calfe’s tripe, dragon fish, dried and imported from China, pork, chicken, and various other ingredients which I was unable to make out. Notwithstanding its mysterious nature, it is very good and has formed the basis of many a good Chinese dinner I have since eaten. Chopseow is perfumed roast pork. The pork is roasted and then hung in the smoke of various aromatic herbs which gives it a most delicious flavor. It is cut into small pieces, as indeed is everything at a Chinese restaurant, that it may be readily handled with the chop sticks. No bread is served with a Chinese dinner, but its place is taken by boiled rice, or fan as it is called in Chinese. A couple of bowls of rice is [laonraan], the F being dropped when the number is prefixed, and such rice, white, light, snowy; each grain thoroughly cooked yet separate. Fish is delightfully cooked, baked in a sort of brown sauce, and masquerades under the name of san-sui-goy.
Forman and his friend washed the food down with tea and little cups of “no-ma-das,” a Chinese rice liquor. At the end of the dinner, Forman was shocked to realize that he had wholeheartedly enjoyed it: “The meal was not
only novel, but it was good, and to cap the climax the bill was only sixty-three cents!”12 For almost the next century, that would sum up the main attractions of Chinese food for Americans: tasty, exotic, and cheap.
In the 1880s, untold numbers of non-Chinese New Yorkers trekked to Chinatown to eat. In 1885, Wong Ching Foo claimed that thousands of New Yorkers had already tried “oriental” dining; three years later, he declared that at least “five hundred Americans take their meals regularly in Chinese restaurants.”13 Almost all of these were situated on the block of Mott Street between Chatham Square and Pell Street. Wong identified Yu-ung-Fang-Lau at 14 Mott as the only high-class restaurant, the favorite of “Canton importers, Hong Kong merchants, Mongolian visitors from Frisco, flush gamblers, and wealthy laundrymen.”14 The half dozen or so other eateries catered to all the rest of the Chinese: servants, cooks, cigar makers, and most of all laundrymen from the poor Sze Yap district of the Pearl River Delta. Very few of them had wives, so during the week they prepared simple meals (rice with a little meat or vegetable) in their workplaces or rooming houses. On Sundays they came to Chinatown to shop, socialize, catch up on the news, and have a meal in a restaurant. If they could afford it, they liked to splurge on pricey imported delicacies from the top end of the menu. The Bohemians and other non-Chinese did the opposite: “Many of these Americans have acquired Chinese gastronomical tastes, and order dishes like Chinese mandarins; but as a rule the keepers do not cater to any other trade than Chinese, because the Chinaman frequently orders two-dollar and three-dollar dishes, while the American seldom pays more than fifty or seventy-five cents for his Chinese dinner.”15 Out of the array of dishes the Americans preferred, the earthy mixed stir-fry called “chow chop suey” stood out as their favorite. “Chop suey” is more accurately transcribed as “za sui” (Mandarin) or “shap sui” (Cantonese). “Shap” means mixed or blended together; “sui” means bits or small fragments. Read together, the most common translation is “odds and ends.” As a culinary term, “shap sui” refers to a hodgepodge stew of many different ingredients; when this dish is “chow,” that means it’s fried. You could call it a stir-fried Chinese hash.