by Coe, Andrew
In the Midwest, the arrival and acceptance of Chinese food followed a similar if somewhat delayed timeline. The first Chinese to visit the region were likely a troupe of jugglers who traveled up the Mississippi in the early 1850s. A handful of Chinese opened stores in Chicago and St. Louis during the following two decades, but the first groups of Asian immigrants didn’t arrive until after the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869. They founded little Chinatowns along Clark Street in Chicago and “Hop Alley” in St. Louis, once more earning their livelihoods by running laundries and shops and working as servants. In 1889, the Chicago Tribune noticed two Chinese stores in the city, as well as three vegetable farms, two butchers, and a basement restaurant where the owners “welcome Americans if they come to get a meal, but . . . fear the scoffers who gaze impudently at them, and enter only to ridicule.”30 For the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, some local Chinese businessmen opened a “Chinese Village,” complete with a theater, temple, tea garden, and café. They didn’t trust Americans to have a taste for Chinese food: the café menu listed mostly American dishes (cold corned beef, egg sandwiches, potato salad, and the like) along with “Chinese style” rice, “Chinese Cakes & Confections,” preserved fruit, and tea—in other words, all the fixings for a Western-style Chinese tea party. The following year, a young writer named Theodore Dreiser (six years shy of publishing his novel Sister Carrie) visited St. Louis’s Chinese quarter to find some journalistic color. But he couldn’t unearth any “opium joints” or gambling dens; he just found a block of South Eighth Street between Walnut and Market Streets where the immigrants liked to mingle on Sundays. Still looking for the unspeakably exotic, he arranged for a meal at one of the district’s Chinese-only eateries, sampling duck, chicken, chicken soup, and something called “China dish”:
This dish was wonderful, awe-inspiring, and yet toothsome. It was served in a dish, half bowl, half platter. Around the platter-like edge were carefully placed bits of something which looked like wet piecrust and tasted like smoked fish. The way they stuck out along the edges suggested decoration of lettuce, parsley and watercress. The arrangement of the whole affair inspired visions of hot salad. Celery, giblets, onions, seaweed that looked like dulse, and some peculiar and totally foreign grains resembling barley, went to make this steaming-hot mass.31
Maybe this too is chop suey, but who knows? Dreiser is too busy preserving the mystery to bother asking the restaurant owner. The article ran with an engraving showing the restaurant’s supposed interior: three Chinese men holding their chopsticks wrong and eating bowls of rats beneath a sign that reads “Stewed Rats Onions 15 Cents.” Old stereotypes die hard. Less than a decade later, the Chicago Tribune blared “Chop Suey Fad Grows,” as midwesterners crowded into Chinese restaurants in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, and beyond. The Kansas City Star remarked: “There are several chop suey restaurants in the city, but in none of them is real Chinese cooking served.”32 It would be decades before anyone would realize what they were missing.
Finally, we retrace our steps to the West, the last holdout against the enticements of Chinese food. In the early 1900s, San Francisco newspapers reported fights that started over “chop suey,” usually involving Irish immigrants or African Americans who refused to pay the Chinese owners of cheap eateries, but the actual dishes involved usually turned out to be American specialties like ham and eggs and potatoes. In 1903, the city’s most avant-garde hostess, Mrs. Russel Cool, attempted to break cultural barriers by taking guests dressed in Chinese costume to a Chinatown banquet, “from soup to soup again, all the way through chop suey and paste balls and bird’s nests.” Sadly, she was ahead of her time, as “the few who were brave enough to swallow the courses had difficulty in picking up enough to swallow.” “I felt dreadfully guilty about it,” she later admitted.33 The following year, a young society beauty broke numerous taboos by visiting Los Angeles’s Chinatown every night, driven by her lust for noodles. At eleven o’clock, she would sweep into a joint “where the chief patrons are outcast negroes and white damsels of no reputation,” give the customers a haughty stare, and exclaim: “Pigs! All of you. Pigs!” Then she would order three bowls of Chinese noodles, each “large enough to satisfy a hippopotamus,” consume them with fastidious manners, and depart into the night, sated.34 By 1906, Los Angeles had chop suey restaurants like the Shanghai Chop Suey Café, where the local Credit Men’s Association held its annual banquet. The menu included pork soup with vege-tables, ham omelettes, boneless duck with ham, chicken with chestnuts, chicken stuffed with birds’ nests, and preserved fruit, tea, and cakes, along with the namesake dish.35
Figure 5.4. A postcard for the Guey Sam Chinese Resturant in Chicago, 1958. Chinese-Americans changed little between 1900 and the 1960s.
Early on the morning of April 18, 1906, San Franciscans were thrown from their beds by the shocks of a massive earthquake. Rushing into the streets, they saw that the initial tremors had destroyed some buildings and damaged many, ruptured gas lines, and sparked fires. As aftershocks rattled the city, property owners set fire to their own buildings to try to recoup their losses (their insurance policies covered fire but not earthquakes). The city caught fire, and five hundred blocks were burned beyond repair. Within hours, troops were called from the Presidio military base and began patrolling the streets with orders to shoot looters on site. Chinatown was not spared the chaos, and eyewitnesses saw many whites, including National Guardsmen and “respectably-dressed women,” pawing through the rubble looking for spoils. (Decades later, shame-faced descendants were still donating looted Chinese goods to local museums.) The local newspapers cheered the destruction of Chinatown, which they long had claimed was the city’s largest blight, an overcrowded ghetto teeming with crime and immorality. A committee was formed to forcibly remove the entire community from San Francisco, but the Chinese fought back by pointing out that they were property owners, too, and the city would lose huge amounts of trade if they moved their businesses elsewhere. Within weeks, they began to rebuild Chinatown—bigger, cleaner, and with more Oriental flair. Gone, or at least better hidden, were the opium joints and the dark haunts of the hatchet men. This “new look” Chinatown attracted businessmen, tourists, and even local San Franciscans eager for an evening’s amusement. In early 1907, the San Francisco Call ran a small ad for a restaurant named The China, located at 1538 Geary Boulevard and serving “novel Oriental dishes that please your palate,” including chop suey, noodles, tea, and preserves.36 White San Francisco’s fall into the clutches of Chinese food had finally begun, perhaps impelled by the shared suffering during the earthquake and its aftermath. Two years later, chop suey had so overwhelmed the West that the head of the California State Association declared that “if chop suey houses and Chinese laundries were not eliminated from the United States the next century would be one of demoralization and decay.”37 His finger in the dike was not enough; the chop suey flood continued, overrunning even the communities in the West that had been most adamantly opposed to Chinese immigration.
From the distance of over a century, it’s hard to understand the reasons behind chop suey’s phenomenal popularity. To current tastes, the dish is a brownish, overcooked stew, strangely flavorless, with no redeeming qualities, and redolent of bad school cafeterias and dingy, failing Chinese restaurants. Any redemption is only possible through nostalgia; perhaps a forkful of the dish evokes memories of Sunday evening family meals down at the corner Chinese American eatery. To American diners of a century ago, chop suey was the food of the moment, both sophisticated and enjoyed by everyman. They liked chop suey because it was cheap, filling, and exotic, but there was something more. Chop suey satisfied, not just filling stomachs but giving a deeper feeling of gratification. This links it to an important part of the western culinary tradition. Since at least as early as the days of ancient Rome, peasants and urban laborers in the west have subsisted on jumbles of meat and vegetables boiled down to indecipherability: mushes, porridges, burgoo
s, hodgepodges, ragouts, olla podridas, and the like. Perhaps in chop suey westerners tasted a bit of the same savory primal stew that has fueled them for so many centuries.
Inevitably, just as the craze for chop suey peaked, the backlash began. Its first act was comic, at least in the rendering of a New York Times reporter. It seems that in 1904, a cook named Lem Sen, fresh from San Francisco, appeared in a Lower Manhattan lawyer’s office claiming that he was the inventor of chop suey. Further, he remarked that “chop-suey is no more a national dish of the Chinese than pork and beans. . . . There is not a grain of anything Celestial in it.” To the contrary, he claimed, he had concocted the dish in the kitchen of a San Francisco “Bohemian” restaurant just before Li Hongzhang arrived in the United States: “The owner of the restaurant . . . suggested that Lem Sen manufacture some weird dish that would pass as Chinese and gratify the public craze at the time. Lem Sen says that it was then he introduced to the astonished world the great dish.” Then, he said, an American man stole his recipe, and Lem Sen wanted compensation: “Mellikan man makee thousand dollar now. Lem Sen, he makee, too, but me allee time look for Mellican man who stole. Me come. Me find! Now me wantee [recipe] back, an’ all stop makee choop soo or pay for allowee do same.” (American newspapers of the time typically reported the speech of immigrants and African Americans in demeaning dialect.) Lem Sen’s lawyer threatened to obtain an injunction “restraining all Chinese restaurant keepers from making and serving chop suey.”38 He never followed through, perhaps because New Yorkers knew that Len Sen’s claim was absurd; they had been eating chop suey down on Mott Street for over a decade before Li Hongzhang’s visit.
The idea that chop suey was not Chinese, though, had staying power. The following year, the Boston Globe ran a photo of six Chinese students at a textile trade school in New Bedford, Massachusetts, each neatly dressed in a Western suit and tie, beneath the headline “Never Heard of Chop Suey in China.” The students, two from the Yangzi River area and the others from Guangzhou, claimed that “not one of them had ever heard of chop suey until they came to this country.” Rather, it was “a cheap imitation of a dish which pleased Li Hung Chang at a banquet a dozen years ago.”39 Of course, Li actually never ate chop suey, but never mind that detail.
Stories of the “chop suey hoax” proliferated from then on; the gist of the story was always that the dish was a fraud, invented for Americans too ignorant to recognize real Chinese food. The sources were American travelers just back from China or more often Chinese themselves, often highly educated diplomats or businessmen from anywhere but the hinterland of the Pearl River Delta. With their deep knowledge and experience of the Middle Kingdom, they uncovered an alternate tale of the dish’s creation. It seems that in China, some beggars carry copper pots and go to the kitchen doors of houses pleading for leftovers. When they have enough scraps, they put their collection over the fire and cook up a miscellaneous “beggar’s hash” or, as the Chinese call it, chop suey. The dish was first presented to Americans on some fateful night in Gold Rush–era San Francisco, in a Chinese-run boardinghouse—or was it a restaurant? Carl Crow, an American businessman in Shanghai, told the most elaborate version of the story, which he got from a Chinese diplomat:
Soon after the discovery of gold the Chinese colony in the city was large enough to support a couple of restaurants conducted by Cantonese cooks, who catered only to their fellow-exiles from the Middle Kingdom. The white men had heard the usual sailor yarns about what these pigtailed yellow men ate, and one night a crowd of miners decided they would try this strange fare just to see what it was like. They had been told that Chinese ate rats and they wanted to see whether or not it was true. When they got to the restaurant the regular customers had finished their suppers, and the proprietor was ready to close his doors. But the miners demanded food, so he did the best he could to avoid trouble and get them out of the way as soon as possible. He went out into the kitchen, dumped together all the food his Chinese patrons had left in their bowls, put a dash of Chinese sauce on top and served it to his unwelcome guests. As they didn’t understand Cantonese slang they didn’t know what he meant when he told them that they were eating chop suey, or “beggar hash.” At any rate, they liked it so well that they came back for more and in that chance way the great chop suey industry was established.40
According to a Philadelphia Inquirer headline, the moral of this tale was “The Origin of Chop Suey Is an Enormous Chinese Joke.”41 Even today, the dish is described as the “biggest culinary joke played by one culture on another.”42 In every version, the butts of the joke were the Americans who were too stupid to know that they were essentially eating garbage.
In reality, of course, the Sze Yap–born residents of Chinatown apparently liked chop suey just as much as the barbarians, and there is no evidence of white San Franciscans eating chop suey before 1900. So why did the “experts” repeat a story that appears to have no basis in fact? Well, the tale about the bullying of the Chinese restaurant owner does ring true, and the punch line about eating garbage suggests a veiled revenge (analogous to the chef spitting in the soup) for decades of mistreatment. Call it a myth that conveys a larger historical “truth.” Despite these stories, the hungry American masses kept on gobbling chop suey with gusto, for now.
CHAPTER SIX
American Chop Suey
In 1909, Elsie Sigel, age nineteen, lived in New York City’s Washington Heights and liked Chinese food and, apparently, Chinese men. Elsie’s mother, devoting her energies to converting the Chinese to Christianity, regularly visited a mission down on Mott Street. Both mother and daughter frequented two “chop sueys”—the one in their Upper Manhattan neighborhood and a high-class Chinese restaurant down on Mott Street named the Port Arthur. The Sigels’ apartment was decorated with vases, tea sets, and other curios from Chinatown. Elsie’s father, Paul Sigel, a government clerk whose father had been a revered general in the Civil War, detested his wife’s mission work and often threatened to eject any Chinese men he found visiting the Sigel household. In fact, Chinese men often did visit; they came to ask for Mrs. Sigel’s help and to court her daughter. Though not considered a beauty—she had a broad, flat nose and bad teeth—Elsie was pleasingly plump, dressed well, and possessed an agreeable, soft-spoken nature. Attracted by these qualities, both Leon Ling, the suave and well-dressed ex-manager of the Washington Heights chop suey, and Chu Gain, the manager of the Port Arthur, were among her suitors. Mrs. Sigel favored Chu Gain, who was rumored to be wealthy, but Elsie preferred Ling and had been writing steamy notes to him for over a year. Many guessed that she and Ling were having an affair. However, in the spring of 1909 Elsie seemed to be tiring of Ling and, swayed by her mother, turning her affections to Chu Gain. Those who knew the trio sensed that something bad might happen: Leon Ling was persistent and known to have a violent streak.
Figure 6.1. Elsie Sigel’s unsolved 1909 murder, dubbed the “Chinatown Trunk Mystery” by the national media, reinforced misgivings about the exotic world of that neighborhood. The police description of the main suspect as a “Chinaman” who “usually dresses like an American” and “talks good English” did not allay unease.
On the morning of June 9, 1909, Elsie Sigel told her mother that she was going to visit the grocer, the butcher, and then her grandmother in the Bronx. She made the first two stops but never arrived at her grandmother’s. By evening, the family was worried, their fears only partially alleviated by the arrival of a telegram from Washington, D.C.: “Don’t worry. Will be home Sunday noon. E.J.S.” Sure that her daughter had eloped, most likely with Leon Ling, they nevertheless hurried to Chinatown the next morning to see if they could locate her. (Fearing a scandal, they didn’t report the disappearance to the police.) They scoured the neighborhood between Broadway and the Bowery, running into Chu Gain, who joined the search for Elsie, but not Leon Ling. Sun Leung, the owner of a restaurant over a bicycle store at Eighth Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, was also looking for Leon Ling, who worked ther
e as a waiter. Ling shared an apartment with two other Chinese men on the fourth floor of the restaurant’s building. Sun Leung knocked on the door of his room again and again over the next few days, until on June 18 he smelled a foul odor coming from behind the door. He ran for a policeman, who soon arrived with a locksmith to open the room. Inside the small, neat bedroom, they found a black trunk bound with rope. The policeman cut the rope, pried open the lid, and uncovered the decaying corpse of a young woman, wrapped in a blanket. Nothing in the trunk identified the body, but investigators found a letter in a bureau addressed to a “Miss Elizabeth Sigel.” They hurried to Washington Heights.
Paul Sigel admitted that his daughter was missing, but on viewing the body, neither he nor his two sons would confirm that the young woman was Elsie. Positive identification came from Mrs. Florence Todd, the head of the Mott Street mission, and two days later the Sigel family held a private funeral at the Woodlawn Cemetery. Afterward, Mrs. Sigel retired to a sanatorium in Connecticut, and Elsie’s father and brothers refused to make any further comment about the frightful case. Throughout the city and indeed across the nation, an uproar arose about the murder. “Chinaman Is Supposed to Be the Murderer of Young Girl” blared the Ogden Standard out in Utah, one of the many newspapers that led with the story. In response to the outcry, the police began an intensive manhunt for Leon Ling, wiring descriptions of him around the country. They rounded up all the Chinese people associated with the case and submitted them to questioning that sometimes turned brutal. Out on the street, any Chinese man who looked “Americanized”—in Western clothes and without a queue—was viewed with suspicion. In upstate New York, Pennsylvania, Chicago, California, and elsewhere, local whites turned in dozens of Asian men, both Chinese and Japanese. Despite a watch kept at every major railroad station and the Pacific Mail steamship docks in San Francisco, the presumed murderer remained elusive. The New York police declared that they would soon get their man, but William M. Clemens, the Chicago Tribune’s “Famous Expert in Crimology,” thought otherwise: “The New York sleuths did not reckon with the Chinese mind. . . . A race that drinks its wine hot, shakes hands with itself in greeting, eats its eggs and melon only when old and dried—such a race in criminal things can be looked upon for unexpected cunning.”1 Ling was never caught, and the real story of how Elsie Sigel died remains a mystery.