Chinese food was the first Asian cuisine to land in the New World. Chinese food was the first ethnic cuisine to be highly commodified as a type of food primarily to be prepared and consumed away from home at a national level. By 1980 Chinese had become the most popular ethnic cuisine in the United States as a result of changes in Chinese immigration. Moreover , Chinese food has also been a vital lifeline for Chinese Americans, existing as one of the two main sources of employment for them (the other being the laundry business) for decades. Its development, therefore, is an important chapter in American history and a central part of the Chinese American experience.
Yet, Chinese food has not received the attention it deserves. Despite the fact that it stems
from one of the world’s oldest and most sophisticated cuisines, and that it's been in the country for more than 160 years, it has largely remained at the lower end of America’s gastronomical hierarchy. Second and equally important, few systematically studied its history until the first decade of the 21st century.
the development of America’s Chinese food have four stages:
1. An integral part of Chinese immigration, traditional Chinese food was consumed almost exclusively by Chinese immigrants and for decades remained a prominent marker of their community and identity . At the same time, mainstream American society rejected it for a long time, a rejection that paralleled the growing 19th-century political movement to exclude the Chinese.
2. In the late 19th century, in a second stage, when the anti-Chinese movement succeeded in curtailing Chinese immigration and confined the Chinese population in urban enclaves, white middle-class tourists and food connoisseurs “discovered” Chinese food as a culinary novelty.
3. A third stage emerged around the turn of the 20th century, when Chinese restaurateurs promoted and tailored their food to meet the demand of customers of varied backgrounds, especially those on the social margins.
4. the arrival of new waves of Chinese immigrants in the post-1965 era marked a fourth stage. Coming in greater numbers and from backgrounds different from that of earlier Cantonese immigrants, they have significantly expanded the scope and meaning of Chinese food in the United States.
The Transplantation of Chinese Food
Chinese food arrived in America in the Gold Rush era. Chinese immigrants brought their food to the New World not because they wanted to proselytize their cuisine among non-Chinese but because of its extraordinary importance in defining their community and identity.
Chinese food’s transplantation paralleled the creation of Chinese communities. In major cities in California, such as Sacramento and San Francisco, food businesses represented a vital sector in the Chinese ethnic economy during this period and constituted the core component of the commerce inside Chinatown and defined its meaning.
Many of Chinese foods, especially the exquisite Chinese ingredients like orange skins, tea, bamboo shoots, shark’s fins, bird’s nest, and sea cucumber , were imported directly from China to ensure the continued existence of Chinese cuisine in the New World.
Serving such foodstuffs, Chinese restaurants constituted another important attraction of Chinatown to Chinese immigrants and revealed the central significance of food for the Chinese community. Indeed, Chinese restaurants’ appearance invariably marked the beginning of a community.
Several reasons explain the importance of restaurants:
1. the absence of family life stemming from the extraordinary sex-ratio imbalance in mid-19th-century Chinese immigrant communities in America.
2. coming from a society where cooking had long been regarded as women’s responsibility, most immigrant men had no prior experience in cooking.
3. many Chinese worked as miners, farmhands, railroad workers, and domestic servants and did not have the time or space to cook their own food.
Chinese restaurants provided culturally familiar food at affordable prices. Moreover, Chinese dining establishments represented a culturally important space to rest and socialize.This characterization captured the critical social and cultural significance of Chinese restaurants for the early immigrants.
For many immigrants, Chinese food was important not only because of its familiar tastes but also because of the memories it carried.
Examining the development of Chinese food in America helps debunk an idea shared by many Chinese since the early 20th century, namely , that Chinese food has achieved enormous popularity in the country because it is the best in the world.15 Given mounting anti-Chinese racism in the United States, few 19th-century Americans expected it to become popular . Even early in the 20th century, when its appeal already became quite palpable, mainstream commentators remained cautious about its future.
Nonetheless, Chinese food’s transplantation brought to the New World new ingredients such as Chinese vegetables and tofu, new cooking methods such as stir-fry, and new ways to consume meals such as communal-style dinners. All these planted a potent seed of change. But what would cause the despised cuisine of a numerically small ethnic population to become enormously popular is not so clear.
White Americans’ Discovery of Chinese Food in Chinatown
In the late 1880s, Chinese food largely remained confined to Chinese settlements but also began to gain increasing acceptance among non-Chinese consumers.The Chinese restaurant sector became the mainstay of the tourism-based Chinatown economy . These developments reflected key demographic and occupational changes in Chinese America:(1) the geographical redistribution of its population, marked, first and foremost, by Chinese America’s urbanization.At the same time, Chinese Americans increasingly moved out of the West to other parts of the country. This movement reconfigured the regional distribution of the Chinese population.(2) Occupational marginalization also increased as American’s Chinese population grew, especially in cities outside the West. For many Chinese immigrants, opening a laundry became almost the only viable way to make a living. The expansion of the Chinese restaurant industry later was a logical extension of this trend.
The transformation of the metropolitan Chinatown as a prominent tourist attraction accompanied Chinese America’s urbanization and occupational marginalization. During this period, the intense sense of danger and enmity that had characterized Americans’ mentality about Chinatown in the previous stage started to subside. It was gradually replaced by curiosity because the perceived threat from the Chinese had been curbed.
Chinatown transform the epitome of an exotic and backward China to one of a more benign image and social function.Indeed, going to see Chinatown became a national pastime around the turn of the 20th century. Characterized as a form of “harmless” entertainment,26 organized tours to Chinese settlements became increasingly popular in major cities across the nation, including New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. As Chinese Americans were excluded from many occupations, tourism became a vital economic lifeline of the Chinese community.
Dining establishments have since remained central to the Chinatown tourism infrastructure
for several reasons:
1. they constituted noticeable landmarks of the Chinese enclave.
2. they were not as controversial as some other Chinatown attractions like opium dens, which often generated strong objections.
3. restaurants were Chinatown’s most enduring attraction throughout the country.
4. among all Chinatown attractions, the restaurants were the most important source of revenue and employment.
The Birth of “Chinese-American Cuisine”
In the early 20th century, when Chinese restaurants ventured to non-Chinese neighborhoods, starting to create an omnipresent presence across the nation.During this period, the spread of Chinese restaurants outside Chinatown created a Chinese cuisine unique for American consumers.
Chinese food’s spread benefited from two important experiences that many Chinese Americans had had in the service sector: first, their work as domestic servants, which gave them significant knowledge about serving food to a non-Chinese clientele; second, their occupation as laundrymen, from which they learned how to run businesses in non-Chinese neighborhoods.
The consumers that helped turn Chinese food into the first non-Anglo cuisine to achieve national prominence in public consumption were not middle-class tourists and privileged connoisseurs but whites on the margins of society , such as bohemians, African Americans, and immigrants like Jews from Eastern Europe.
The Chinese restaurants outside Chinese enclaves during this period bore striking differences from Chinatown establishments in earlier years.
l The latter depended on a predominantly Chinese clientele, and many of them offered a wider repertoire ranging from inexpensive foods to lavish meals featuring exquisite items like shark’s fin and bird’s nest.
l The former, by comparison, left behind Chinese cuisine’s delicacies and served instead simple dishes streamlined under a few categories. they also tailored their food to their patrons’ palate. In so doing, they created “Chinese-American cuisine.”
This raises an extremely important and complex question: Is the Chinese food in non-Chinese neighborhoods authentic? Authenticity is an extremely complicated and highly contested issue in gastronomy and beyond. In the minds of many food connoisseurs, the question was whether America’s Chinese food was the same as the food found in China and enjoyed by the Chinese. For those who went to Chinatown in search of authentic Chinese food, therefore, the answer is no. But it would be a historical and gastronomical mistake to deny that American Chinese food has been deeply rooted in China’s long gastronomical tradition.
Nevertheless, it is also problematic to characterize America’s Chinese food during this period as entirely authentic. Chinese restaurateurs made significant adaptations, in part because of the lack of sufficient ingredients.America’s Chinese food stayed predominantly Cantonese until the 1970s, representing only one of the many culinary regions of China, rather than “Chinese food” in its entirety.
The Expansion of Chinese Immigration and Chinese Food
Two events marked the beginning of the fourth stage:
1. The first is Nixon’s highly publicized visit to China in 1972.
2. the 1965 immigration reform act. Abolishing the racist quota system established in 1924, it drastically increased the Chinese American population.
The new Chinese immigrants provided the necessary labor force for the continued expansion of Chinese restaurants.36 The Chinese restaurant industry , in turn, afforded them economic opportunities. Coming from more diverse geographical origins, many post-1965 Chinese immigrants opened restaurants and introduced China’s regional cuisines outside Guangdong. In cities like New York, Cantonese cooking started losing its overwhelming dominance in the Chinese-food market early in the 1970s.
By 1980 Chinese food had clearly become the most popular ethnic cuisine in the realm of
public food consumption, constituting about 30 percent of America’s major ethnic cuisines. Chinese restaurants continued to multiply and remained an important source of employment for Chinese. Chinese food has also maintained its position as the leading ethnic cuisine in America.
The proliferating Chinese restaurant industry is becoming more multilayered than ever
before. In previous decades, a prevailing trend was to make Chinese food more suitable for the American palate; but in this period, the Chinese food in the American metropolis
increasingly resembles the food in different regions of China, exhibiting a “return to
authenticity.”
Meanwhile, the traditional American Chinese food featured in chains like Panda Express as well as independent establishments still demonstrates a remarkably steady longevity. Old signature dishes such as chop suey , while being dethroned by new non-Cantonese ones like“Kung Pao,” continue to be popular , especially in African American neighborhoods in cities like Detroit and St. Louis.
However, despite such efforts, Chinese food continues to be viewed as an inexpensive and convenient type of food. The average annual revenue per Chinese restaurant is at least 40 percent lower than the national average in the restaurant industry as a whole. The new immigrants from China in recent years, including those undocumented immigrants who came from Fujian province, have also started another national trend: Chinese buffets at extremely affordable prices. Reminiscent of Chinese restaurants in earlier decades, these buffet places continue to function as a source of livelihood for common immigrant laborers from China.
The rise of Chinese food was not a purely story about changes in palate but was intimately intertwined with historical developments that shaped and transformed the United States and Chinese America after the mid-19th century. It also bespeaks the historical agency of Chinese Americans in their efforts to maintain their identity and pursue the American dream in defiance of racist forces that despised their culture and desired to exclude them.Therefore, Chinese food remained largely a convenient and inexpensive type of food. It would not receive the recognition and appreciation it deserves until American society
fundamentally altered its perceptions of the Chinese and their culture.
