Dishing Out Chop Suey: What Was It Like to Work in a Chinese Restaurant?
Because Shuck Wing spoke no English and was now an ocean away from Dragon Village, the Chin family in North America helped him settle into his new life. The day the U.S. Immigration Bureau released Shuck Wing from its custody, he rode the Jeff D. Milton ferry from the detention center on Angel Island across San Francisco Bay.23 His friends and family awaited him at the Chin family clubhouse in Chinatown at 150 Waverly Place. A four- story building, the family headquarters housed Tsui Gee Chong and Co., an all-purpose trading company, on the ground floor and new arrivals and pass- ersby on the fourth floor. On the middle two levels, the Chin men socialized, exchanging news about people in China and information about business opportunities in the United States. Through these fellow wanderers, Shuck Wing heard about jobs in New York City and booked a ticket east through Tsui Gee Chong and Co. As he planned his next move, he received a dis- heartening letter from an uncle back in China. The Chins had lost their bid to buy a fertile plot of land in Dragon Village, and the family was not earning enough to make ends meet, so his uncle had decided to leave for Southeast Asia. Motivated by news of this hardship, Shuck Wing continued eastward to pursue job leads in New York.24
In New York, the first Chinese restaurants date to the 1870s and catered almost exclusively to the city’s early Chinese immigrants. Located in the trian- gular intersection of Mott, Pell, and Doyers Streets known as “Chinatown,” a half dozen Chinese eateries served the everyday food of rural, southern China to Chinese laborers and “lower classes of white people.”25 For special occasions, Chinese merchants threw large banquets for their clansmen at one of New York’s “high-class” Chinese restaurants. Ordered several days in advance, these extensive meals included as many as forty courses. Guests savored these indul- gent repasts in lavishly appointed dining rooms, on whose walls hung scrolls of Chinese poetry and maxims. “Chinese lanterns are suspended in reckless pro- fusion from every available point,” commented Louis J. Beck, a journalist who wrote a book on New York’s Chinatown. “The most gorgeously decorated and illuminated buildings in Chinatown are those occupied by these restaurants.”26 Located in the heart of Chinatown on Mott and Pell Streets, these eight high- end restaurants were busiest on Sundays when “the Chinese laundrymen of New York and neighboring cities come in [to Chinatown] for a general good time.”27 In the United States, Chinese laborers earned decent wages and could afford to eat foods that had been too expensive for them in China. On their
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days off, Chinese laundrymen indulged in food and the company of their peers at the same restaurants as Chinatown’s business elite.28 While some Americans also patronized these restaurants, these early restaurants did “not cater to any other trade than [the] Chinese,” because other customers added little to the restaurants’ bottom lines. Wong Chin Foo, a writer and contemporary of Louis Beck, deduced that Chinese restaurant keepers paid no heed to white custom- ers because “[the] Chinaman frequently orders two-dollar and three-dollar dishes, while the American seldom pays more than fifty or seventy-five cents for his Chinese dinner.”29 Moreover, Chinese patronage of Chinatown restau- rants indirectly supported a diverse array of food businesses throughout New York State. Farmers in the Bronx, Queens, and Long Island supplied fresh produce, and Chinatown grocers imported preserved foods to feed a growing population of Chinese immigrants who craved a taste of home.30
Within twenty years of New York’s first Chinese restaurants, some Chi- nese entrepreneurs had established a specialized set of restaurants to serve New Yorkers who were curious about the city’s “Chinese colony.”31 During the late nineteenth century, newspapers like the New York Times, the New York Tribune, and the New York Sun regularly published articles on New York’s Chinese, a fascinating topic to readers because the Chinese were still con- sidered recent and exotic arrivals to the city.32 Bertram Reinitz’s predecessors who wrote for major New York newspapers taught their readers to dine at Chinese restaurants. In their articles about New York’s intriguing newcom- ers, they promoted Chinese food as exciting and delicious and helped read- ers through their first experiences with a cuisine they probably found intim- idatingly different from their usual fare. Journalists published the addresses of tourist-friendly restaurants, described and evaluated the dishes, and gave instructions on using chopsticks. Enough New Yorkers accepted these invi- tations to try Chinese food that tours through Chinatown grew into a spe- cialty business. Former policemen and English-speaking locals organized tours of “slummers” or “rubberneckers”—as tourists were called—to see the Chinese temple, hear a snippet of Chinese opera, gawk at opium addicts, shop at a knickknack store, and, finally, to dine at a Chinese restaurant.33 Of all the items on a Chinese restaurant menu, “slummers” relished chop suey. Canton- ese for “different pieces,” chop suey is made of bite-size pieces of meat and vegetables in a brown gravy and is served over rice or noodles. This simple dish originated in southern China, where most Chinese immigrants, including Shuck Wing, came from. A series of prominent articles on a Chinese diplomat who preferred chop suey to Anglo-American foods during his goodwill tour of the United States ignited a “chop suey craze” in New York. By the 1920s,