A decade later, Mark Twain recalled that, visiting Mr Ah Sing’s restaurant, he and his friends had been offered ‘several small, neat sausages, of which … we suspected … each link contained the corpse of a mouse’.ĭespite such prejudice, the Chinese community flourished. On 18 June 1853, the Weekly Alta California sneeringly claimed that the ‘Celestial’ shunned beef and bacon in favour of ‘rats, lizards … terrapins, rank and indigestible shellfish’, and ‘small deer’. Attention often focused on the supposedly ‘bestial’ character of Chinese food. As a consequence, they were much in demand – so much so that, by late 1852, American miners feared they might soon be out of a job. While this minimised linguistic difficulties, it also meant that they were paid less than Westerners, who tended to be employed as individuals.
They were then attached to a gang and hired out as a group. When they landed in San Francisco, they were met by Chinese merchants who were contracted to supply the major mining firms with labour. But they did so in a manner of their own. Inevitably, an ever growing proportion began to go into mining. In 1851, around 2,700 people arrived in California a year later, there was almost ten times that number. Though Chinese dishes were on offer, much of what they served was western in origin – and with rare exceptions, their ‘European’ customers were happy to stick to what they knew. An all-you-can-eat meal could cost as little as $1 – less than half the price of the meagre platters on offer elsewhere. They soon won a reputation for high-quality food and unusually low prices. Though some headed to the gold fields, most set up as merchants, or as restaurateurs and before long, a host of eateries festooned with yellow flags had sprung up all over town. It was to this need that the first wave of Chinese immigrants applied themselves. They lacked tools, clothing and, above all, provisions. Most of the new arrivals were men, with little more than a knapsack to their name. Barely more than a village when the Gold Rush began, it was now thronged with people of every nationality – and was growing every day.
San Francisco was their first port of call. Carried by clipper ships, word soon reached Hong Kong, Macau and Guangzhou that the pickings were so rich that it was possible to dig up as much as a kilo or more each day and within months, hundreds of eager Chinese were flocking across the Pacific Ocean in the hope of making their fortunes. But when gold was discovered in California in 1848, all that changed. At first, their numbers were small, and most stayed only for short periods of time. Consciously created to mask culinary realities with nativist pretentions or (in Lem Sen’s case) naive self-interest, the tales told about chop suey are a testament to the United States’ conflicted relationship with Chinese immigrants – and a witness to almost two centuries of curiosity and contempt.Ĭhinese people began settling in the US in the early 19th century. Even today, the expression ‘as American as chop suey’ can still be heard. Over the next few decades, newspapers regularly claimed it as Uncle Sam’s own and mocked those who were ‘gulled’ into believing that it was really Chinese. But the myth of the dish’s ‘American’ origins persisted. Through his lawyer, he demanded that restaurants stop making chop suey – or pay him for the privilege of using his recipe.
His recipe had been ‘stolen’ by an American diner, who had since grown rich off the profits.
In fact, he had invented it a decade before, while working at a ‘Bohemian’ restaurant in San Francisco. Chop suey, he claimed, was ‘no more Chinese than pork and beans’. A few days earlier, a chef named Lem Sen had arrived from San Francisco. Every night, restaurants along Moot and Pell were thronged with sophisticates clamouring for a taste of ‘authentic’ Chinese cooking. For the past 20 years, it had thrived off the city’s seemingly insatiable appetite for chop suey. On the night of 14 June 1904, New York’s Chinatown was plunged into a deep gloom.
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