Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States
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Today, chop suey is a relic in most parts of the United States, another food fad that has ended up on the trash heap of culinary history. Those who remember it at all know it only as a preparation of sliced pork or chicken cooked with bean sprouts, onions, celery, bamboo shoots, and water chestnuts until everything is mushy and flavorless, then served with a gummy, translucent sauce over white rice. Yet in nineteenth-century New York, the definition of chop suey was anything but fixed. Most early descriptions tell of chicken livers and gizzards, or perhaps duck giblets, stir-fried with tripe, bean sprouts, “fungi” (probably wood ears), celery, dried fish, and whatever else the cook felt inspired to add, including spices and “seow” (soy sauce). Wong Ching Foo and other reporters describe chop suey as the staple food of the New York Chinese and even the “national dish of China.” In 1893, now an expert on the subject, Allan Forman wrote: “Chow chop suey is to the Chinaman what the olla podrida is to the Spaniard, or pork and beans to our own Bostonians.”16 Considering the vast, ancient, and complicated tradition of Chinese cuisine, this clearly was not true. But if Forman had only been exposed to Chinese from the Pearl River Delta, then he may have been correct in noting their preference for chop suey. In any case, there’s little doubt that this dish—in its manifestation as a stir-fried organ meat and vegetable medley—originated in the Sze Yap area around Toishan. Decades later, a distinguished Hong Kong surgeon named Li Shu-Fan reminisced about a childhood visit to Toishan, which was his ancestral home:
I first tasted chop suey in a restaurant in Toishan in 1894, but the preparation had been familiar in that city long before my time. The recipe was probably taken to America by Toishan people, who, as I have said, are great travelers. Chinese from places as near to Toishan as Canton and Hong Kong are unaware that chop suey is truly a Chinese dish, and not an American adaptation.17
Now launched on a slow but sure path to acceptance, Chinese food, and in particular chop suey, was poised to become a national fad. In the spring of 1896, New Yorkers learned that one of China’s most powerful statesmen, the de facto foreign minister, would be visiting their city that year. American China watchers considered Li Hongzhang, the viceroy of Zhili (the provinces around Beijing), as China’s best hope for strengthening and modernizing China. The purpose of Li’s visit was to shore up relations with the United States and to protest the unfairness of the Exclusion Act as well as the mistreatment of Chinese immigrants. (This might, in turn, shore up his reputation at home, then under a cloud due to the recent humiliation his force had suffered at the hands of the Japanese navy.) In late August, he arrived in New York harbor aboard the steamship St. Louis. From Chinatown to Fifth Avenue, all of New York was agog at this elderly and somewhat frail man, wearing a magnificent yellow silk jacket. A troop of cavalry escorted him from the pier up to the Waldorf Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, where he was installed in the royal suite. Every step of the way, teams of reporters from the city’s many competing newspapers recorded his actions.
On Mott Street, at Delmonico’s, and in the Waldorf kitchens, phalanxes of chefs made preparations to feast the famous visitor. Meanwhile, anxious to pick up any scrap of color to entertain its readers, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal planted reporters in the Waldorf’s kitchen to record every move of Li’s four chefs, who had traveled with him from China. A sketch artist drew them at work, depicting their tools and the lacquer tray that was used to carry the viceroy’s food up to his suite. At public events, journalists watched every morsel of food that passed Li’s lips—or at least some of them did. The Times reporters at the Waldorf banquet in Li’s honor wrote that he ate sparingly from the classic French menu but dove in when a servant brought his Chinese food: “It consisted of three dishes. There was boiled chicken cut up in small square pieces, a bowl of rice, and a bowl of vegetable soup.”18 This was the food of either an invalid or a gourmet in the spirit of Yuan Mei. The Washington Post reported of the exact same event: “At the table he barely nibbled the delicate dishes before him, and would not touch the wines. This was noticed by his hosts, and in a few moments chop suey and chop sticks were placed before him, and he ate with relish.”19 According to the Journal’s careful accounting, Li never ate chop suey during his New York stay, but many other newspapers and the wire services that sent articles across the country repeated the news that he had done so—simply because chop suey, the only Chinese dish most white Americans had tasted, had become emblematic of Chinese food as a whole. (The Chinese diplomats reading those accounts must have been shocked by the idea that a high official from Beijing would stoop to the level of Pearl River Delta peasant food.)
Figure 5.2. Li Hongzhang’s 1896 visit to New York stimulated a craze for Chinese food. However, the one dish he did not eat was chop suey.
Li Hongzhang spent a little more than a week in the United States, traveling to West Point, Philadelphia, and Washington before heading north to Toronto and then across Canada to take a boat home. (He purposely shunned California because of its mistreatment of the Chinese.) Meanwhile, New Yorkers went China mad. They flocked to Chinatown to buy curios and eat chop suey. The Brooklyn Eagle advised: “The woman who is looking for something in the way of novelty for a dinner may find it in this suggestion: A real Chinese dinner may be gotten up from the favorite recipes of Li Hung Chang’s cook, and which were prepared for the great and quaint Chinese statesman during his stay at the Waldorf in New York.”20 Those dishes were lifted from a full-page spread entitled “Queer Dishes Served at the Waldorf by Li Hung Chang’s Chicken Cook” that had appeared in the New York Journal’s Sunday supplement. These recipes included boiled rice, bird’s nest soup, fricasseed giblets (“chow chop sui”), chicken soup, pork sausage, shark’s fin soup, and many others; they were almost the first Chinese recipes printed in the United States. Here are the directions for chop suey, a dish the author admits had already achieved some celebrity:
Cut up equal amounts of celery, and wash and soak some dried mushrooms and bits of raw ginger. Fry the chicken giblets in peanut oil until they are nearly done, then add the other ingredients and a very small quantity of water. A favorite addition to this dish is scraps of pork and slices of dried cuttlefish, also rice which has been left on a damp floor until it has sprouted. These sprouts, about two inches in length, are remarkably tender and palatable. A little soy should be put into the chop sui while cooking and peanut oil to furnish the grease. Eat freely of it. If you can digest it you will live to be as old as Li Hung Chang.21
This is still the earthy mixed stir-fry, but not one that was ever prepared for Li Hongzhang. In fact, this list of recipes is remarkably similar to the menus of the Cantonese restaurants that lined Mott and Pell streets in Chinatown, leading one to suspect that it came from a local restaurateur. No matter; that’s how the story that Li Hongzhang introduced chop suey to the United States was born—an urban legend that’s still repeated today.
Li Hongzhang’s visit ushered in an era when American attention was suddenly and aggressively trained on the outside world. The turning point came on February 15, 1898, the day the United States battleship Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana harbor. Deliberate or not, journalists and military men seized on that violent event in order to revive the somewhat moribund concept of Manifest Destiny and demand that the United States invade Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean and across the Pacific. Their not-so-hidden agenda was to assert America’s “God-given” right to expand its territory. One of them, the journalist Margherita Arlina Hamm, a prominent suffragist and one of the first “globetrotting” woman reporters, had lived in China as the wife of a United States consul. In 1895, an article she wrote for Good Housekeeping, “Some Celestial Dishes,” presented the first Chinese recipes published in the United States.22 (Although she claims she has learned these recipes—including one for chop suey—in China, they are thoroughly westernized, containing ingredients like tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and potatoes.)
Hamm had no patience for Chi
na’s traditional way of life or its system of government. To her, the only hope for civilizing China was for the western powers, including the United States, to divide it up into protectorates. The Chinese, of course, had other ideas. In 1899, the Society of the Right and Harmonious Fists, known in the West as the Boxers, began an effort to violently expel all foreigners and foreign religions from the Middle Kingdom. With the backing of the dowager empress, this movement culminated in 1900 with the siege of Beijing’s legation quarter, where, ironically, trapped Westerners were forced to eat taboo foods they’d looked down on for so long: horse meat and rice. The siege was finally lifted, and the Boxers were defeated by an eightnation force made up of soldiers from Japan, the United States, and the European powers, who promptly went on a looting rampage in the Chinese capital. Back on Mott Street, these events seemed to cause no animosity toward the local Chinese community (whose members had little sympathy for the Manchus who ruled in Beijing). In fact, the episode generated curiosity about the culture, at least to the extent that people bought souvenirs, toured opium dens, and ate Chinese food:
The streets of Chinatown yesterday resembled Coney Island walks with a few hundred Chinese thrown in. The newspaper prominence which the quarter has had since trouble began in China brought curious crowds from all parts of the city. . . . The Chinese restaurants, of which there are many, attracted the young men who were showing their best girls through Chinatown. One couple at least knew a great deal more about Chinese food after finishing their first meal than they did when they started. They studied the bill of fare so long that even the lazy stoic who waited on them grew tired.
“We’ll have chop suey soup,” said the young man at last. “I’ve heard a lot about that, and I don’t believe there are any rats in it.”23
The rumors about Chinese eating vermin lingered, but whites were able to put them aside as they discovered the “safe” side of Chinese restaurant menus.
That same year the first Chinese restaurants appeared outside Chinatown; rather than wait for customers to come to Mott Street, restaurateurs now took chop suey to them. They opened “chop sueys,” as the restaurants became known, on Third Avenue, along Sixth Avenue in the Tenderloin nightlife district, up on Long Acre (now Times) Square, even in Harlem. Their menus were much shorter than those on Mott Street, focusing on chop suey, chow mein, and yat gaw mein (or yokaman, yock a main, etc.), a wheat noodle soup containing boiled chicken and hardboiled egg. As cooks catered to the more conservative tastes of uptown diners, chop suey, the dish of odds and ends, lost all of its earthy and mysterious ingredients and became a bland stew of some readily identifiable meat or seafood with a mélange of bean sprouts, bamboo shoots, onions, and water chestnuts, all cooked to exhaustion.
Figure 5.3. The Latest Craze of American Society, New Yorkers Dining in a Chinese Restaurant, a 1911 magazine announces. Chinese cuisine had by then spread far beyond the bounds of Manhattan’s Chinatown.
Although the chow mein that was cooked in the Pearl River Delta was a distinct dish, as served in the uptown joints chow mein was simply chop suey over fried noodles instead of rice. (In Roy L. M’Cardell’s humorous column “Conversations with a Chorus Girl,” his attractive but ditzy protagonist touts the wonders of chow mein: “Gee! I like it. You’d think the vermicelli was Saratoga chips [i.e. potato chips] cut into strings.”)24 Customers found these restaurants fit their tastes precisely. They liked the cut-rate, exotic décor of red lanterns and prints of pretty Chinese girls and landscapes; the savory, filling, and inexpensive food (a bowl of chop suey cost a mere 25 cents); and the distinctive ambiance, utterly unlike the rude bustle of the cheap lunch counters or the stuffiness of Delmonico’s:
There is also a free and easy atmosphere about the Chinese eating house which attracts many would-be “Bohemians,” as well as a goodly share of the class below the lowest grades of the city’s many graded Bohemia. Visitors loll about and talk and laugh loudly. When the waiter is wanted some one emits a shrill yell which brings an answering whoop from the kitchen, followed sooner or later by a little Chinese at a dog trot. Any one who feels like it may stroll into the kitchen and try a little pidgin English on the cook. The proprietor will teach anybody to use the chopsticks and roar with laughter over the failures of the novice. Everybody does as he or she pleases within certain very elastic bounds.25
In the Tenderloin and on Long Acre Square, the late hours kept by these “chop sueys” also made them a favorite of both the after-theater set and nighttime revelers who wanted some food in their bellies before they stumbled home to bed. As long as customers behaved themselves—and paid their bills—the proprietors didn’t discriminate as to whom they served. In the tenement districts, the cheapest Chinese restaurants catered to “the rounder, the negro and the wandering poor.” Indeed, African Americans were the main customers in some neighborhoods: “They seem to like the Chinese,” one reporter wrote, “and, indeed, the noise in the kitchen reminds one of the similar condition of Southern kitchens under negro management.”26 Meanwhile, the “real Bohemian” remained down in Chinatown, looking for new culinary adventures:
It is the Bohemian fad to expatriate himself, to seek strange and bizarre environments. As soon as a place begins to attract civilization he flees it for some new hiding place. When he chooses a Chinese dinner he must have a restaurant where no white man has ever before trod, if he can find one. . . . As soon as others begin to frequent it also, again he flies.27
Up and down the East Coast, chop sueys spread to all the big cities and many of the larger towns, a tribute to both the business acumen of Chinese restaurateurs and the attractions of their food. The Chinese communities of Boston and Philadelphia were founded around 1870, again beginning with a handful of laundries and grocery stores. At first, the natives kept their distance from Chinese food, warned by reports of suspicious sauces, appallingly “fresh” entrees, and odd eating implements. Less than a decade later, the Boston Daily Globe admitted that the “chop sui” at Moy Auk’s at 36 Harrison was “very palatable.” In 1891, one of the Globe’s reporters, stopping by another restaurant, heard music from above and investigated up the stairs:
A door, the upper half of glass, met him. Another rest was taken, when lo, before him and within he caught sight of some of the 400 of Boston, ladies and gentleman, gathered at a feast. The reporter stood entranced. What next? The cream of society eating Chinese viands in a Chinese restaurant, served by Chinese waiters and breathing in soulful Chinese music.
Among the dozen members of the city’s Brahmin elite present were Mr. and Mrs. William Dean Howells, the Orientalists Ernest Fenollosa and Edward S. Morse, and sundry academics and artists dining on bird’s nest soup, duck, chicken, sturgeon, rice, and, of course, chop suey. With such a testimonial, the reporter decided, “it’s plain, the Chinese must not go.”28 In Philadelphia, meanwhile, the city’s Chinatown had formed along Race Street, where by 1899 nearly a dozen “chop sueys” had opened and were very popular with the late-night crowd. As in New York and San Francisco, many of the ingredients were imported, but the fresh vegetables came from nearby Chinese farms that had been established just over the New Jersey state line. The little Chinatown of Washington, D.C., for better or worse, was the social center of the local Bohemian set:
As for this new Bohemia—this imitation of an imitation—I went down the other night to see what it was like. I really have a dark brown taste in my mouth yet. It was simply unutterable. . . . There were several women in the front room, painted, soggy creatures in loud clothes. In the middle room sat two or three Johnnies, out for the “devil of a time.” They were very much frightened and cast apprehensive glances at the men about them. No wonder. . . . Most of the animals fed on noodle soup and chop-suey. If you want to see a sight, go and watch one of them get hold of the end of a six-foot noodle and commence to consume it. The chop-suey was a nasty-smelling dish, fairly bathed in grease.29
A few critics notwithstanding, these restaurants continued to spread in
to communities that had only small Chinese populations, carrying with them their very particular mix of food, price, customers, and atmosphere. From Atlanta to New Haven to Portland, Maine, eating a bowl of chop suey at midnight among a crowd of ruffians, fallen women, and thespians meant that you had achieved a state of worldly, urban sophistication.