a cultural history of Chinese food in the United States (2024)

Chop suey : a cultural history of Chinese food in the United States

Summary

In 1784, passengers on the ship Empress of China became the first Americans to land in China, and the first to eat Chinese food. Today, the United States is home to more Chinese restaurants than any other ethnic cuisine. In this authoritative new history, author Andrew Coe traces the fascinating story of America's centuries-long encounter with Chinese food. ChopSuey tells how we went from believing that Chinese meals contained dogs and rats to making regular pilgrimages to the neighborhood chop suey parlor. From China, the book follows the story to the American West, where both Chinese and their food struggled against racism, and then to New York and that crucial moment when Chinese cuisine first crossed over to the larger population. Along this journey, Coe shows how the peasant food of an obscure part of China came to dominate Chinese-American restaurants; unravels the truth of chop suey's origin; illuminates why American Jews fell in love with egg rolls and chow mein; and shows how Nixon's 1972 trip to China opened our palates to a new world of cuisine; and explains why we still can't get dishes like restaurants serve in China. The book also shows how larger historical forces shape our tastes--the belief in Manifest Destiny, the American assertion of military might in the Pacific, and the country's post-WWII rise to superpower status. Written for both popular and academic audiences, Chop Suey reveals this story through prose that brings to life the characters, settings and meals that helped form this crucial component of American food culture.

Publisher's Weekly Review

According to food writer Coe, America's taste for Chinese tea goes back more than two centuries, and so does our confusion about the use of chopsticks. In this brief but ambitious volume, he chronicles the back-and-forth story of our relationship to the Middle Kingdom, its people and, above all, its food. Meals eaten by Americans in China in the early years of mercantilism and diplomacy (late 18th and early 19th century) were more European than Asian; the author dates the first record of an American eating indigenous Chinese food only to 1819. The gold rush and other expansionist projects brought thousands of Chinese to American soil along with their culture and their cuisine. Though xenophobia sometimes erupted as violent racism, public eating establishments in some cities began attracting the curious, and fads for such Westernized Chinese dishes as the eponymous stir-fry of the book's title swept urban populations. This short, dense history comes full circle with another American diplomatic mission: Nixon's historic 1972 banquet. Like its subject, the book is a little bit of a lot of different things at once-a solid and comprehensive sampling of a much larger topic. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

The ubiquity of Chinese restaurants throughout the U.S. tends to mask from present-day Americans the astonishing revolutions in cultural attitudes and eating habits that turned Chinese cooking into unremarkably quotidian fare. Ignorance, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness caused the first Westerners who visited China to deem one of the world's most sophisticated cuisines barbaric and horrifying. Missionaries sent back dispatches characterizing the Chinese diet as nothing but rats and puppies, evidence at best of a starving populace. Discrimination, segregation, and outright violence against Chinese Americans only further isolated early immigrants and their cooking. But a few adventurers soon began to appreciate the savory delights prepared in the nation's several Chinatowns, and in a few decades, Chinese food was all the rage, even if it was nothing more than chop suey, a far cry from the elegant dishes of San Francisco's finest Chinese eateries. Coe's ever-surprising history brims with plenty of enchanting anecdotes.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2009 Booklist

Choice Review

Masquerading as a study of limited scope, this delightful, thoroughly researched book is a political, economic, and cultural history of China and the US. Coe details a history of Chinese food viewed through an American lens and adapted to American tastes. This book is also a history of US-China relations from the 18th century to the present, told through food, often weighted in the US's favor. Alternating between revulsion and fascination, Chinese food is the material through which Americans--politicians and suburbanites alike--have expressed their contradictory and racialized views of China. Coe intersperses anecdotes with broader analysis, avoiding academic jargon. Familiar events like President Nixon's trip to China take on new poignancy when food and anxiety about banquet etiquette and handling chopsticks come into play. The shifting geographies of Chinese laborers and Chinese restaurants in the US illustrate how deeply embedded Chinese food is in the US's "Western Expansion." What emerges most powerfully is that for Bohemians, slumming socialites, and middle-class Jewish New Yorkers who made Chinese food an extension of their cultural traditions, Chinese food is American food. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. A. B. Audant CUNY Kingsborough Community College

Library Journal Review

In 1784, the first Americans to visit the Middle Kingdom encountered Cantonese food. It was not love at first sight-only after waves of 19th-century Chinese immigrants brought their daily fare to the new world did Americans come to appreciate the "hashes and fricassees" from a people rumored to eat dogs, cats, and rats. By the 1890s, New Yorkers had gone chop suey crazy, and the die was cast. Verdict Fans of Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles should appreciate this detailed, convoluted history of how Chinese food came to be seen as American as apple pie. Coe's account (he is a food journalist and coauthor of Foie Gras) lacks Lee's personal touch and could use a time line for dates and dynasties. But his research among U.S. sources is solid, and his chronicle interesting and informative, especially regarding Nixon's trip to China. Consider also British historian J.A.G. Roberts's China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West and Jen Lin-Liu's Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China.-Martha Cornog, Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

SD_ILS:1333630

9780195331073

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