by Coe, Andrew
The case received such widespread publicity partly because “white slavery” was a prominent issue at the time. Many influential people, including politicians, policemen, religious leaders, and feminists, believed that an epidemic of prostitution was sweeping across the country and young women were being forced into lives of shame. This conviction had many roots, including the fact that thousands of women were finding jobs and a new financial independence in cities, prejudice toward the masses of European immigrants (including many single young women) then arriving, and a few actual prostitution cases. The outcry over Elsie Sigel’s murder helped link the nation’s Chinatowns and their thousands of chop suey joints to the white slavery issue. Like public dance halls, brothels, gambling houses, and disreputable hotels, reformers declared that Chinese restaurants were places where unmarried women could be lured into depravity. On Mott Street, where the restaurants did the bulk of their business late at night, the police forced early closing times and temporarily barred unaccompanied white women from the district altogether. In her book The Market for Souls, Elizabeth Goodnow describes her tour of Lower Manhattan’s fleshpots, ending with Chinatown: “We entered a house that had a chop suey place on the first floor. The rest of the house was filled with women and the fumes of opium came down the stairs.”2 Goodnow ascends to the bordello and finds a small room furnished with gaudy Chinese embroidery and a Chinese idol. On the bed lies a white prostitute who has killed herself with an overdose of opium, another victim of the path to ruin that began with an innocent visit to Chinatown. The Chicago Tribune reported:
More than 300 Chicago white girls have sacrificed themselves to the influence of the chop suey ‘joints’ during the last year, according to police statistics . . . . Vanity and the desire for showy clothes led to their downfall, it is declared. It was accomplished only after they smoked and drank in the chop suey restaurants and permitted themselves to be hypnotized by the dreamy, seductive music that is always on tap.3
Meanwhile, in South Bend, Indiana, the Board of Health was more direct, calling that city’s Chinese restaurants “nothing but opium joints with chop suey attachments.”4 The police and other groups continued to associate chop sueys with sin for almost a decade, and news of Chinatown raids dominated headlines.
Back on the women’s page, something very different was happening. Instead of joining in the anti–Chinese food frenzy, syndicated columnists like Marion Harland and Jane Eddington published numerous recipes for chop suey and other dishes, apparently due to public demand. As Eddington wrote in 1914 in the Chicago Tribune, “there is always a demand for chop suey recipes.” One of the most prolific women writers of her time, Harland was always game to try new things, even at age eighty-three:
So many nationalities unite to make up the American people that it is only natural we should have diversities in our bill of fare. For myself, I like it. I enjoy trying new dishes and adding to my table combinations which have had their birth on the other side of the ocean. . . . We have gone further afield and eaten and enjoyed chop suey, and from a number of our constituency have come requests for full and minute directions for making this Chinese dish, for instructions how and with what to serve it.5
The first Chinese cookbook for American readers, Chinese Cookery in the Home Kitchen, had been written two years earlier by another newspaperwoman, Jessie Louise Nolton of the Chicago Inter-Ocean. The recipes replicated the menu of the average downtown Chinese restaurant: boiled rice, multiple kinds of “chop sooy,” “eggs fo yong,” roast pork and chicken, fried rice, and so on.
For more sophisticated housewives, preparing a bowl of chop suey for the family meal was not enough. In 1913, Harper’s Bazaar published a series of articles on how to cook and serve a Chinese dinner, luncheon, and tea party. These pieces were written by one Sara Eaton Bossé, the daughter of a Chinese mother and English father, who lived a distinctly Bohemian lifestyle as a painter and artist’s model in New York. For her, these Chinese parties were theatrical events, a way of escaping from middle-class existence into the realm of East Asian exotica: “A Chinese dinner, properly served, proves a delightful and novel form of entertainment. It should be served, of course, in the purely Chinese fashion, which lends an added charm and mystery to the dishes themselves.”6 Preparation for these parties took days, beginning with trips to Chinatown (those in New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Montreal are listed) to purchase the proper furniture, table settings, decorations, and finally ingredients. Luncheon hostesses seeking more “authenticity” required guests to come in Chinese costume and acquired a Chinese “boy” to wait on table (if not, the maid could be dressed in Chinese fashion and instructed to shuffle noiselessly). Wisely, Bossé advises her readers to first taste the dishes in Chinatown before trying to cook them. The menus are fairly straightforward, resembling the set feasts that restaurants like the Port Arthur served to wealthy white slumming parties. Her Chinese dinner includes bird’s nest soup, sweet and sour fish, pineapple chicken, duck chow mein, “Gar Lu Chop Suey,” sautéed cucumbers, Chinese mushrooms with green peppers, and the usual assortment of preserved fruits and Chinese cakes for dessert. The following year, Bossé and her sister Winnifred, writing under the pseudonym Onoto Watanna, published their ground-breaking Chinese-Japanese Cook Book. This milestone (the first Japanese cookbook written in English and perhaps the second Chinese), representing the cutting edge of cuisine at the time, was a perfect source for the hostess who sought to re-create a bit of Bohemia in her home.
We get another glimpse of how American women used these recipes and the suggestions for Chinese-themed parties in Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 novel Main Street. Born in the small town of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, Lewis excelled at describing Middle America in the post–World War I era. In much of his work, Chinese restaurants (“lanterns painted with cherry-blossoms and with pagodas, hung against lattices of lustrous gold and black”) appear prominently as part of the downtown landscape of midwestern towns and cities.
The protagonist of Main Street is Carol Kennicott, a young woman from Minneapolis who marries a doctor and goes to live in his dreary, conservative hometown, Gopher Prairie. A few months after arriving, she decides to throw a house-warming party, as people do in the city. She spends weeks on preparations, going to Minneapolis to buy supplies, new furniture, clothes, and a Japanese obi to hang on the wall. Her guests consist of Gopher Prairie’s entire “aristocracy”—doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and their wives. They expect a prim and proper entertainment, followed by a filling meat-and-potatoes meal, but Carol Kennicott has another idea: something “noisy and undignified.” After making her guests play a game she learned in Chicago—in the dark, with no shoes, and on their hands and knees no less—she produces paper Chinese masquerade costumes she has bought for everyone to wear. She also changes her dress, becoming “an airy figure in trousers and a coat of green brocade edged with gold; a high gold collar under a proud chin; black hair pierced with jade pins; a languid peacock fan in an outstretched hand; eyes uplifted to a vision of pagoda towers.”7 After regaling her guests with an impromptu “Chinese” concert, she leads them “in a dancing procession” to the dining room, where they find blue bowls of chow mein, with lychee nuts and ginger preserved in syrup. “None of them save that city-rounder Harry Haydock had heard of any Chinese dish except chop sooey. With agreeable doubt they ventured through the bamboo shoots into the golden fried noodles of the chow mein.”8 The eating guests allow Carol to rest for a minute, and she briefly considers one more gesture to shock them—smoking a cigarette—before dismissing the thought as “obscene.” In the social column of the local weekly, the editor (who attended the event) praises the party and its novel diversions, including the “dainty refreshments served in true Oriental style.” But a few days later, Carol’s best friend tells her what the guests really thought: the party was too expensive, and the Chinese theme too novel: “And it certainly is unfair of them to make fun of your having that Chinese food—chow mein, was it?—and
to laugh about your wearing your pretty trousers.”9 Carol bursts into tears, and no more Chinese food is served in Gopher Prairie. (A few chapters later, however, Carol and her husband escape for a quick trip to Minneapolis, where they visit a “Chinese restaurant that was frequented by clerks and their sweethearts on paydays. They sat at a teak and marble table eating Eggs Foo yung, and listened to a brassy automatic piano, and were altogether cosmopolitan.”)10 The Chinese restaurant experience is something only urban sophisticates appreciate, at least in Minnesota in the 1920s.
Mechanical pianos, fixtures in many chop suey joints by World War I, propelled some Chinese restaurant owners into a new phase of business. These machines were the jukeboxes of their day: you put a nickel in the slot, and the piano’s mechanism played fox-trots, jazz tunes, and popular songs. Unsettled by one such piano’s “whang and pulse,” the members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union chapter in Hammond, Indiana, drilled holes in the floor of the apartment above the King Honk Low restaurant and poured dirty mop water onto the patrons in 1913. The mechanical piano’s quick rise to popularity soon inspired entrepreneurial restaurant owners to bring entertainment—music, dancing, and a floor show—into their establishments. (They had been best known as after-theater joints.) One of the earliest of these new nightclub-restaurants was the Pekin, at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, which a 1916 New York City guidebook listed as “an elaborate Chinese show restaurant; cabaret, music, dancing.”11 This trend only accelerated when the Volstead Act banning the sale of alcoholic beverages went into effect in early 1920. In the first years of Prohibition, tens of thousands of restaurants and nightclubs across the nation, from Manhattan lobster palaces to Los Angeles cantinas, went out of business. Chinese restaurants, however, thrived, because they had never served alcohol—tea had always been their most potent beverage.
By 1924, Broadway between Times Square and Columbus Circle was home to fourteen big “chop suey jazz places.” One Chinese nightclub owner, a former Essex Street laundryman, supposedly wore a huge diamond ring, rode in an imported car, and squired around a bottle-blond burlesque dancer. In San Francisco, most of these new nightspots were in Chinatown, probably beginning with Shanghai Low in the 1920s. Featuring all-Chinese singers, musicians, chorus lines, and even strippers, clubs like the Forbidden City attracted a clientele of politicians, movie stars, and businessmen out for an exotic good time. In smaller cities, the entertainment at Chinese restaurants, still revolving around the player piano, was more modest. On Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue, the heart of the African American district, the Lum Pong Chop Suey Place had the danceable “I’ll Be Glad When You Are Dead, You Rascal You” cued up on the piano.
Nearly all of these Chinese restaurant-nightclubs catered strictly to mass tastes; there was never a Chinese version of El Morocco or the Stork Club. A 1934 New York restaurant guide describes Chin Lee’s, one of the largest of these joints at Broadway and Forty-ninth Street, as “chop suey chef to the masses and dispenser of dim lights, ceaseless dance music, undistinguished floor shows, and tons of chow mein.” As for its patrons, they were young, numerous, and hungry:
Figure 6.2. From 1938 to 1962, San Francisco’s Forbidden City nightclub featured performances by Asian-American musicians, dancers, strippers, and magicians. Performers were given such nicknames as the “Chinese Sinatra” to attract non-Chinese clients.
Here at any hour of the day, from eleven to midnight, you may find the girl who waits on you at Gimbel’s, her boy friend, who is one of Wall Street’s million margin clerks, noisy parties of Bronx handmaidens babblingly bent on a movie and subgum spree, college boys from Princeton (slumming, of course), and, perhaps, even your next-door neighbor. Within the not-so-occidental confines of Chin’s, the girls dance with other girls, and the boys dance with anyone handy. The prices are scaled down to suit the toiling thousands, and Chin Lee’s offers its clientele, for 55 cents or 85 cents, their idea of a $5 floor show. Though their idea may be a bit vague and thin, the customers seem to like it and applaud lustily between mouthfuls of fried noodles and oriental onions.12
These restaurant owners were all too aware that they weren’t selling caviar and champagne but chop suey, ham and cheese sandwiches, and the like—food everybody liked but nobody wanted to spend much money on. The real profits were in volume and in liquor; the businessmen rented the largest possible spaces and featured a wide array of exotic cocktails on their menus.
The specialties of the Chinese American menu, from chop suey to moo goo gai pan to pepper steak, eventually lost their exotic associations. In his 1916 novel Uneasy Money, P. G. Wodehouse listed chop suey among the “great American institutions,” up there with New Jersey mosquitoes, the Woolworth Building, and corn on the cob. In big cities like New York, the most popular Chinese restaurant dishes had become everyday food:
[Chop suey] has become a staple. It is vigorously vying with sandwiches and salad as the sometime nourishment of the young women typists and telephonists of John, Dey and Fulton Streets. It rivals coffee-and-two-kinds-of-cake as the recess repast of the sales forces of West Thirty-Fourth Street department stores. At lunch hour there is an eager exodus toward Chinatown of the women workers employed in Franklin, Duane and Worth Streets. To them the district is not an intriguing bit of transplanted Orient. It is simply a good place to eat.13
In midwestern towns like those Sinclair Lewis used as models for Gopher Prairie, Chinese food probably held on to its mystery through the 1930s. (For small-town sophisticates, the local Chinese restaurant was often the only eatery where they could find both glamour and late closing hours.) Beyond these establishments, chop suey was now served in soda fountains, coffee shops, school cafeterias, military messes, church suppers, and even Manhattan’s ultrasophisticated Stork Club (whose version was made with wild rice, butter, celery, spinach, and big rib steaks). Forty years after its appearance on Mott Street, chop suey had become cheap, fun, and filling American food.
Americans’ embrace of chop suey was impelled by more than the assemblage of ingredients, style of preparation, and lingering whiffs of the far-off East: chop suey penetrated the larger culture, mutating and changing its meaning depending on the context. Cookbooks gave housewives one way to prepare chop suey and other Chinese dishes, but soy sauce, bean sprouts, and the like remained hard to find outside big cities. By 1915, regional companies like Chicago’s Libby, McNeil & Libby had started canning chop suey and selling it in grocery stores; apparently, these products were bland and unappealing and didn’t really take off. In 1920, two men in Detroit, Wally Smith and Ilhan New, began growing bean sprouts in Smith’s bathtub and canning them. Within four years, their company, which they named La Choy, had a whole line of canned Chinese foods on the market: bean sprouts, mushrooms, crispy chow mein noodles, Chinese vegetables (mixed water chestnuts and bamboo shoots), “Chinese Sauce” (soy sauce), and “Brown Sauce,” a kind of savory, molasses-based gravy. The labels claimed you could now make “genuine Chop Suey or Chow Mein in ten minutes.” According to the millions of recipe booklets La Choy distributed, all you had to do was fry up some meat, onions, and celery; mix in La Choy vegetables; spoon in the Chinese Sauce and Brown Sauce; and serve the resulting stew over rice or chow mein noodles. Semi-homemade chop suey tasted better than the canned version, and La Choy soon dominated the grocery aisles. (Now owned by ConAgra Foods, it remains the leader in canned Chinese American provisions today.)
Figure 6.3. The 1916 menu for the Oriental Restaurant in New York’s Chinatown contains dishes like birds’ nest soup and sharks’ fins, as well as “chop sooy” and chow mein.
In the early twentieth century, chop suey also took a lexical jump from Chinese restaurants onto other kinds of menus—a testament to its penetration of the culture. Soda fountains began offering “chop suey sundaes,” described as “chopped dates, cherries, figs, raisins, citron and different kinds of nuts, all forming a cherry colored syrup, [and] poured over a round allowance of cream; then . . . sprinkled with more n
uts.”14 Two decades later, this concoction had become a mélange of chopped tropical and fresh fruits flavored with cherry syrup and served over ice cream with sliced bananas, nuts, and whipped cream. “American chop suey,” another faux version of the dish, was invented around the same time. The Alton (IL) Evening Telegraph called the Chinese dish “the high water mark of the delicacy” and then described the American version as perhaps more satisfying to less sophisticated appetites. Here’s the recipe:
Place in a spider a lump of butter, size of a walnut; in this, when hot, brown one and one-half pounds of Hamburg steak; heat a can of tomatoes, fry four medium-sized onions, and boil two cups of macaroni or spaghetti; seasoning each article well; drain macaroni and add it, with the onions and tomatoes, to the meat, and simmer five minutes. No side dishes are needed if this is made for lunch, as it makes a palatable, substantial lunch for six or seven people.15