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Chinese-American Food: More American than Chinese

  • Heidee
  • April 19, 2010

Chinese-American Food: More American than ChineseIf you live in The U.S., chances are that you’ve had takeout cartons of Chinese food and why wouldn’t you, when there are more Chinese restaurants in this country than McDonald’s, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy’s combined? 40,000, actually. Don’t look so shocked.

Chinese restaurants have played an important role in American history. The Cuban missile crisis was resolved in a Chinese restaurant called Yenching Palace in Washington, D.C., which unfortunately is closed now, and about to be turned into Walgreen’s. The house that John Wilkes Booth planned the assassination of Abraham Lincoln is actually also now a Chinese restaurant called Wok ‘n Roll, on H Street in Washington. And Americans loved their Chinese foods so much they’ve actually brought it into space. NASA, for example, serves thermal-stabilized sweet-and-sour pork on its shuttle menu for its astronauts.

What’s even more interesting than this tidbit is that most of these so-called “Chinese” food aren’t actually authentic Chinese cuisine – if you took a carton of one and showed it to some locals on the streets of mainland China, well first they would comment on how quaint your takeout box is as it’s also not theirs, then they would ask you what kind of food it is and where it came from. This is according to Jennifer 8. Lee, former writer for The New York Times, who gave a humorous yet enlightening talk about the history of Chinese food in America. She took a bunch of fortune cookies back to China and gave them to Chinese folks to see how they would react. They were all amazed to see the slip of paper inside, some even thinking that it was a prize they had won.

So in that case, where did these famous fortune cookies that are so characteristic of Chinese restaurants came from, and how did they become “Chinese?” They started being made in Japan over 100 years ago, 30 years before they were introduced in the United States. But theirs are brown and flavored with miso and sesame paste, less sweeter than the US version. Some Japanese immigrants brought them over to this country, then World War II broke out and the Americans locked up all the Japanese. This was when the ever entrepreneurial Chinese saw a market opportunity and took over, and from then on, fortune cookies were a Chinese thing.

There’s General Tso’s Chicken, originally named The Long March of General Tso. Sweet, fried, and chicken – all things that Americans love. He has marched so far indeed that the chef who originally invented the dish doesn’t even recognize it.

We also have beef with broccoli. The funny thing is, broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable and is actually originally Italian. It was introduced into the United States in the 1800s, but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s. The Chinese have their own version though, called Chinese broccoli, but they import American broccoli as some sort of exotic delicacy.

And finally there’s the grandfather of all Chinese-American dishes – chop suey. It was introduced around the turn of the 20th century. It took about 30 years before they realized that it was actually not known in China. Chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means tsap sui, which, if you translate back, means “odds and ends.” So those people going around China asking for chop suey, they are like Japanese guys coming to America and saying, “I heard you have a popular dish here called leftovers.”

So you see, these so-called Chinese cuisine is actually more American than Chinese. But this kind of idea of Chinese-American food doesn’t exist only in America. Chinese food must be the most pervasive food on the planet as it is served on all seven continents, including Antarctica, where Monday night is Chinese food night at McMurdo Station, the main scientific station there. And in all these places, they have been changed to suit the local scene. There are several versions of “Chinese food,” from the French-Chinese salt and pepper frog legs to the Italian-Chinese fried gelato which is served in lieu of fortune cookies. There’s Indian Chinese food, Korean Chinese food, Japanese Chinese food, Peruvian Chinese food, Mexican Chinese food – you name the place, there’s most probably Chinese food there. And when you go to China, you’ll probably be surprised that none of their food tastes familiar to you at all, that all these years you thought you knew what Chinese food was supposed to taste like, you had been wrong.

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