Chop Suey

“The Chinese are here by the order of Providence, the principles of the Declara- tion, and the provisions of treaty,” proclaimed the Reverend M. C. Briggs in 1876. 1 So was Chinese food—it was carried to the American shores and palate by the same forces that generated Chinese immigration and transformed the United States into an empire.

The spread of Chinese food was inseparably connected to the geographic and socioeconomic expansion of the United States. This connection is best captured by the notion of “empire food,” which was created in the process of empire build- ing for the pleasures of its citizens. Consumption was indeed a signifi cant goal and consequence of empire building, and recognizing Chinese food as empire food helps us appreciate its basic characteristics: ubiquitous but cheap.

Many Americans have been unwilling or unable to see their country as an empire. Different from many other traditional empires, the United States is, none- theless, an empire of consumption characterized by extraordinary material abun- dance. It is the kind of empire that an American founding father like Thomas Jefferson aspired to build in order to ensure freedom and liberty, and it also ex- plains the enormous appeal of the United States to prominent foreign visitors ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Boris Yeltsin as well as millions of immi- grants. Standing as an important event in the expansion of the American empire, the multiplication of Chinese restaurants expanded the meaning of American freedom and abundance by extending the dining-out experience to the masses.

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22 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

E m p i r e F o o d

The concept of empire food underscores that consumption, including food con- sumption, has been an extremely important goal and benefi t of the process of empire building. It also recognizes that process as one of the vehicles for the global movements of food.

The transfer of food through imperial expansion is not entirely separated from culinary crossings beyond cultural and national boarders engendered by other historical forces, such as human migration, trade, and government or cor- porate interventions. But empire food has distinctive characteristics, evident in the individual foodstuffs that modern Western empires have produced—such as chocolate, sugar, coffee, pineapple, and tea—about which scholars have written in other contexts. 2

These foods were “discovered” and spread in close association with the over- seas conquest by modern European empires. They originated in non-Western societies and evolved into extremely important and popular commodities in mass consumption. They were often produced by those who were not citizens of the empire, especially non-white laborers. The introduction of such foods ac- companied the transformation of the diet and lifestyle of western European countries. Sidney Mintz has argued that the introduction of sugar profoundly altered the starch-centered diet of what would become the United Kingdom within a century after 1650. 3 Such foods were also integrated into the social and cultural fabric of the empire. Tea, for example, evolved as a symbol of the Brit- ish Empire and culture. Empire foods also marked the division of the globe into two—the world of production and that of consumption—a division often drawn along racial lines.

Chinese food is another signifi cant empire food. But it also bears important differences from the individual foods mentioned earlier. First, the Chinese food we discuss in this book is a food system , rather than a singular food item. Second, tea has become part of the British identity, and coffee has been gentrifi ed by corporations like Starbucks in the United States; yet the intimate relationship that Chinese food developed with mainstream America since the turn of the twentieth century has not evolved into a marriage of equal partners. Instead, its status reminds us of a humble maid or a Chinese servant in a nineteenth- century white household, who was sometimes regarded “as family,” but whose real purpose of existence was there merely to serve. 4

As the fi rst class of food made for public consumption, Chinese food was a forerunner of McDonald’s, another food system that appealed to the desires of

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 23

the growing mass consumers for convenience and service in the postwar years. The expanding Chinese restaurants played an important role in the develop- ment of the American empire and its way of life, a role that McDonald’s also assumed with low-paid workers. But when traveling to China, McDonald’s re- semblance to American Chinese food dissipates. Armed with American corpo- rate muscle and cultural hegemony, McDonald’s penetrated Chinese markets with stunning swiftness and became a favorite destination of well-educated and successful Chinese. By comparison, American Chinese food encountered much prejudice and resistance after its arrival on American shores, and it has not achieved much social respectability.

Chinese food, I must add, is also quite different from what Cecilia Leong- Salobir calls “colonial food,” which Britain’s colonizers embraced in its Asian colonies. 5 First, American Chinese food was initially patronized largely by those on the margins of society rather the social and political elites. Second, while British colonial food incorporated native and British dietary components, Chinese food retained its distinctive identity. Many Chinese restaurants served “American food,” but it was invariably kept separate from things Chinese.

The development of American Chinese food followed the trajectory of Amer- ica’s evolution as an empire. The origin of its transpacifi c journey goes back to the transpacifi c commercial and religious expansion of the United States dur- ing the post-Revolutionary period. It led to the initial Chinese presence in the New World, consisting of a limited number of sailors, students, merchants, cooks, and servants in the Northeast. These pioneers were followed by the Chinese forty-niners, who arrived in California during the Gold Rush years and fi rst transplanted Chinese food to American soil.

Moreover, extending its global presence, the United States also experienced a tremendous growth in its economy and consumption at home, and the rise of Chinese food constituted a signifi cant landmark in this domestic expansion. Scholars have written about the Chinese contributions to freedom and democ- racy in the legal and political systems; 6 equally important, the Chinese have played a vital role in democratizing consumption. Readily available in different parts of the country from the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese food helped to turn the luxury of enjoying meals prepared by others into a univer- sally affordable experience, engendering an indispensable component of the modern world’s most powerful empire of mass consumption. Ching Chao Wu, a doctoral student in the Sociology Department of the University of Chicago, put it in plain language in 1928: “If the poor and out of luck wanted cheap and substantial meals, they patronized the Chinese restaurants.” 7

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24 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a well-traveled white epicure char- acterized chop suey as “the great contribution of the orient to the occident.” 8 Reminiscent of the famous travel writer Norman Douglas’s notion that curry is “India’s gift to mankind,” this seemingly complimentary characterization un- doubtedly refl ects an Orientalist and condescending view of China. 9 At the same time, chop suey’s enormous popularity does symbolize the contribution of Chinese restaurant workers to the expansion of the American empire’s lifestyle.

E m p i r e i n D e n i a l

The use of the appellation “empire” to characterize the United States will cer- tainly raise eyebrows among many Americans. As citizens of a nation liberated from an oppressive empire, they have tended to view that term as a dirty word, associating it with evil, as Ronald Reagan did in reference to the Soviet Union in a speech he gave in 1983. 10 Walter Lippmann perceptively pointed out in 1927 that “all the world thinks of the United States today as an empire, except the people of the United States.” 11 Echoing Lippman, William Appleman Williams wrote in 1980: “The words empire and imperialism enjoy no easy hospitality in the minds and hearts of most contemporary Americans.” 12 In the twentieth-fi rst century, the United States largely remains “an empire in denial”—in the words of Niall Ferguson, the conservative British historian and advocate of the Ameri- can empire. 13 In the commencement speech he delivered at West Point in June 2002, President George W. Bush repeated the long-standing idea that “America has no empire to extend.” Knowing that Americans resent the appellation, the scholar Charles S. Maier avoided “claiming the United States is or is not an empire,” even though it “reveals many . . . of the traits that have distinguished empires.” 14

Throughout the world, the notion of empire since the late nineteenth cen- tury acquired negative connotations due to of its connection to European impe- rialism and colonialism: the exploitation of distant peoples and natural re- sources, dominance, subjugation, and conquest. Of all the 193 member countries of the United Nations as of 2011, not one calls itself an empire.

D e f i n i t i o n o f E m p i r e

Since the nineteenth-century debates on empire and imperialism, there have been various theories on the topic. In this book, I use the word “empire” as a his-

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 25

torical concept. Empire is a centuries-old form of human government and orga- nization, marked by the domination of one nation over other peoples. It has the following four features.

First and most basically, it is the expansion of one nation’s sovereignty and territory at the expense of others. Second, as John Gallagher and Ronald E. Rob- inson pointed out in the context of the British Empire, such domination had also existed informally. 15 Third, informal and formal empires share the same goal of economically benefi ting the mother nation. Consumption is the end of empires, simply put. Needless to say, the privileged got fed extremely well in private homes and public events, sometimes with exotic foods from faraway areas that only an extraordinary empire could reach. The following quotation is perhaps the only menu from such an event at that time, showing the food served at a dinner party that Julius Caesar presented to the college of high priests in honor of the ap- pointment of Lentulus Flamen Martialis around 70 B.C.E .:

For hors-d’oeuvres sea urchins, as many raw oysters as they wanted, palourdes,

mussels, thrushes under a thatch of asparagus, a fattened chicken, a patina of

oysters and palourdes, black piddocks, white piddocks; then more mussels,

clams, sea anemones, blackcaps, loin of roe deer and wild boar, fowls force-

fed on wheatmeal, Murex trunculus and Murex brandaris . The dinner was ud-

der, the split head of wild boar, patina of fi sh, patina of udder, ducks, roast

teal, hares, roast fowl, frumenty and Picentine loaves. 16

Rome also strove to feed the rest of its population. As Caesar admitted in 71 B.C.E ., Rome provided free food to as many as 150,000 residents (Rome’s total population was about 463,000 in 86 B.C.E .). 17 Giving food to their citizens was a predominant concern shared by other empires, such as imperial China, where population was counted in terms of the number of “mouths” that had to be fed. The lifeline of the British Empire was, essentially, a food line. The imperial poet Joseph Rudyard Kipling understood this well, as he wrote in “Big Steam- ers,” a poem published in 1911 in A School History of England :

“Oh, where are you going to, all you Big Steamers,

With England’s own coal, up and down the salt sea?”

“We are going to fetch you your bread and your butter,

Your beef, pork and mutton, eggs, apples and cheese.”

“And where will you tech it from, all you Big Steamers,

And where shall I write you when you are away?”

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26 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

“We fetch it from Melbourne, Quebec, and Vancouver,

Address us at Hobart, Hong Kong, and Bombay.”

“But if anything happened to all you Big Steamers,

And suppose you were wrecked up and won the salt sea?”

“Why you’d have no coffee or bacon for breakfast,

And you’d have no muffi ns or toast for your tea.”

. . .

“Then what can I do for you, all you Big Steamers,

Oh, what can I do for your comfort and good?”

“Send out your big warships to watch your big waters,

That no one may stop us from bringing you food.

For the bread that you eat and the biscuits you nibble,

The Sweets that you suck and the joints that you carve,

They are brought to you daily by all us Big Steamers

And if anyone hinders our coming you’ll starve!” 18

This also reminds us that that empire building is the extension of individual consumption desires, spilled over the national boundaries. Gary Okihiro writes, “Desires have fueled travel to near and distant seas and lands in the form of exploration, trade, and conquest.” 19

Fourth, in spite of the tendency to distinguish empires from nation-states, the two have coexisted for centuries. 20 The distinction between empires and states—especially those multiethnic states that have formed and developed through physical expansion and exercised hegemony beyond their borders—is not as clear-cut as some have assumed. In fact, we may legitimately use the term “empire-states” to characterize such multiethnic entities, which came into exis- tence as a result of territorial expansion. At the same time, however, they pos- sess important characteristics of nation-states, including a shared language and a strong sense of common national identity. China clearly fi ts the characteriza- tion, as does the United States.

R e s e m b l a n c e t o O l d E m p i r e s

By Niall Ferguson’s tally, the United States is the sixty-eighth empire of the world—and he counts Communist China as the sixty-ninth. 21 In many ways, indeed, America looks much like empires of the past, such as those of Rome and Britain. After independence, the United States legally diminished and overtly denied the property rights of Native Americans in order to conquer their land. 22

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 27

It has also taken land—by force or money—from other native peoples in the Pacifi c, from European powers, and from Mexico. Its physical size has grown fourfold from about 820,000 square miles in 1783 to 3.79 million square miles today. 23 Ellen C. Collier, a specialist in U.S. foreign policy, identifi es 234 in- stances of American military interventions abroad from 1798 to 1993. 24 In the fi rst decade of the twenty-fi rst century, as Herfried Münkler notes, the country had 250,000 troops stationed on more than 700 military bases in more than 150 countries. 25 Acting like a traditional empire, the U.S. government also thinks like one. Before its integration into the State Department in 1999, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) developed individual country-based commu- nication (propaganda) plans. In 1952, one such plan under the agency’s auspices directed its overseas posts to collect information on the Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and the attitude of the host country toward them.

The Pentagon divides the globe into fi ve regional commands: Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, the Pacifi c, and North America. Although Americans love to call their country a republic, the United States—with its daunting global presence and dominance—reminds us more of Imperial Rome than of Athens. Also similar to what Rome did in its heyday, the American empire devotes in- creasing resources to entertain its populace and feed some of its poor, begin- ning after World War II, when it became the most powerful and richest country on earth.

The American empire bears particular resemblance to its British predeces- sor. Like Britain, it has exerted its global infl uence “informally,” using its soft power in popular culture. Besides its global military installations, it has seven hundred Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) test centers in more than 160 countries, as just one example of its cultural domination. On the front of food consumption, McDonald’s serves 68 million people in 119 countries each day. Economically, the United States has succeeded Britain as the world’s most vocal and most aggressive player in international trade. At the fi rst World’s Salesmanship Congress in Detroit in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson told the more than three thousand salesmen, executives, and managers in various in- dustries: “You are Americans and are meant to carry liberty and justice and the principles of humanity wherever you go, go out and sell goods that will make the world more comfortable and more happy, and convert them to the principles of America.” 26 Promoting American goods and businesses has since been an unoffi cial but important job description of every president. The position of the U.S. dollar as the unrivaled world currency—established fi rst at Bretton Woods after World War II and then reinvented when it was coupled with petroleum in

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28 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

global transactions after its delinking from gold in 1971—has marked America’s dominance in world trade and turned the U.S. Treasury into a magic cash cow.

Nonetheless, I use the word “empire” not simply to condemn or criticize America. It undoubtedly deserves to be rebuked for its horrendous atrocities, immoral activities, and high cost, as numerous Americans on both the Left and the Right have noted. 27 At the same time, however, the country has stood from its beginning as a symbol of freedom and liberty. Its association with freedom is not merely rhetorical or self-proclaimed but also one of its most remarkable features in the minds of many people around the world. In Communist China, both political dissidents and high-ranking Communist offi cials have sought U.S. protection when their liberty and safety were in jeopardy.

Ronald Steel wrote in 1996 of America’s difference from traditional em- pires: “[W]e are not content to subdue others: We insist that they be like us.” 28 But not so infrequently did the United States have to do much insisting because many have aspired to be like Americans or to live like Americans. Millions of people have turned to the United States for the freedom from want. The number of annual immigration went over the 200,000 mark for the fi rst time in 1847 and rose to almost 500,000 in 1900, when the country’s total national popula- tion was under 76 million. 29 For more than a century, the U.S. government has actively trumpeted its political values—freedom and democracy—around the world, but it is America’s unsurpassed capacity to satisfy people’s consumer de- sires that has had a lasting and profound impact on the rest of the world.

T h e U n i t e d S tat e s a s a n E m p i r e o f C o n s u m p t i o n

The enormous international and domestic appeal and infl uence of the United States as the home of a “people of plenty” sets it apart from other large empires of the past. Powerful empires left their own distinctive footprints in history: the Chinese emperors put up great walls; Rome built roads; the British Empire turned the tongue of an island nation into a dominant global lingua franca. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the United States pushed consumer aspirations to levels the world had never before thought possible. Noting Amer- ica’s “unprecedented affl uence” in the 1950s, the economist John Kenneth Gal- braith reminded us that nearly all nations “throughout all history, have been very poor.” 30 This does not mean that the United States has always had a better standard of living than all other countries. Australians, for example, were eco- nomically better off than Americans around the turn of the twentieth century. 31

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 29

But what makes America different is its promise of a better life for an ever- growing number of people.

The American empire of consumption—called “a way of life” by William Appleman Williams—is not only enjoyed by its citizens but also desired and seen as a trademark of the country by millions of people around the globe. Alan Thein Durning points out the American origin of infl ating consumption aspi- rations: “In the perception of most of the world’s people, the consumer life-style is made in America.” 32 Lawrence B. Glickman writes in like fashion: “Con- sumption has long been central to American identity, culture, economic devel- opment, and politics.” 33

Consumer desire is not uniquely American. The anthropological economist Marshall Sahlins reminds us that “it is not that hunters and gatherers have curbed their materialistic ‘impulses’; they simply never made an institution of them.” 34 In spite of their mutual enmity during the Cold War, the capitalist West and the Communist countries shared the same objective: building a supe- rior consumer society. Although the soldiers of the United States and the Soviet Union never faced each other in combat, President Richard Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushchev had a personal face-off in 1959 at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, turning the American model kitchen into a Cold War battleground of ideology. During the famous “kitchen debate,” the two men pledged that their countries would enter into a contest “in the production of consumer goods.” Khrushchev declared: “The system that will give the people more goods will be the better system and victorious.” 35 In the late 1950s, the Chinese leaders also made it a goal for the young Communist country to “sur- pass Britain and catch up with America” ( chao ying gan mei ); this led to the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in the starvation of as many as 38 million people, according to the controversial book Mao: The Unknown Story . 36

Nor was opulent living an American invention. Old World empires like China had boasted luxurious styles of consumption long before the United States came along, but lavish life remained for centuries a privilege of the rich and powerful. What is distinctive about the United States is that it developed the world’s fi rst extensive system of mass consumption. This new model demo- craticized for increasing numbers of common people once exclusive luxuries like meat consumption or meals prepared and served by others, and it has af- fected the lives and aspirations of millions of people around the globe. At a level of infl uence that few other empires had seen, America became a model for the world—not as a puritanical “city upon a hill” envisioned by John Winthrop but as a consumer’s paradise.

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30 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

The democratization of consumption marks the internal expansion of the empire of consumption, extending its appeal and benefi ts to its critics. Among them, racial minorities have criticized Jefferson’s empire of liberty as a racially exclusive one of and for white men. Besides upholding slavery, the critics point out, the nation deliberately prohibited non-white immigrants from naturaliza- tion from the very beginning. Such a racial defi nition of America laid a crucial legal foundation for subsequent exclusive measures like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In many cases, however, such criticism largely represented a desire to be accepted by and included in the kingdom of consumption. Some even fought battles on behalf of America in imperialist wars. While such minorities and immigrants desired to join the empire, others were born into it. William Appleman Williams, a most vocal critic of the empire, acknowledged that “I was born and reared in our American womb of empire.” 37

Noting the intrinsic democratic nature of mass consumption, the Ameri- can economist George H. Hildebrand asserted in 1951 that “consumer sover- eignty and the liberal system . . . stand or fall together.” 38 Over time, the demo- cratic characteristic of mass consumption grew more obvious, as working-class people in England in the 1960s and elsewhere could live like the middle class, and consumers would fi nd a sense of freedom through consumption choices. 39 In 1992, the conservative commentator Ben J. Wattenberg declared that the remote-control television zapper, as a symbol of the consumer culture, was “one of the great democratic instruments in history.” 40 About the political meaning of such choices, Gary Cross writes: “In the context of consumerism, liberty is not an abstract right to participate in public discourse or free speech. It means expressing oneself and realizing personal pleasure in and through goods.” 41

T h e B e g i n n i n g : A C o u n t r y o f A b u n d a n c e a n d a n E m p i r e o f L i b e r t y

In a letter to Judge Spencer Roane written on September 2, 1819, in which he insisted on the authority of the federal government over state courts, James Madison explicated that “in the great system of Political Economy having for its general object the national welfare, everything is related immediately or re- motely to every other thing.” 42 To understand the United States as an empire of consumption, we must recognize the connections and interdependence among four of its fundamental components: abundance, expansion, consumption, and liberty and freedom.

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 31

Essential to America’s evolving consumer society is its extraordinary mate- rial abundance. Sustained and increased by the continued territorial expansion of the United States, it has provided not only an enviably high standard of living but also a critical foundation for American freedom and liberty. The interde- pendence of such key aspects of American life was keenly appreciated by the nation’s founders like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

In creating a country of liberty, they also wanted to build an empire. Madison advocated empire building, arguing that the “Republican Government . . . in order to effect its purpose, must operate not within small but an extensive sphere.” 43 In his mind, a nation with an extended territory would help to preserve liberty and freedom by preventing the majority political faction from having absolute power over minorities. 44

Jefferson was the primary architect of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which nearly doubled the land size of the United States. The purchase contra- dicted Jefferson’s anti-federalist ideals, such as states’ rights and strict construc- tionism. Acquiring such a large piece of land would change the terms of con- tract between the states and the federal government, signifi cantly amplifying its power. 45

In Jefferson’s mind, only an expanding empire could continuously provide the material abundance so essential for the principles of liberty and freedom. He wrote in defense of the Louisiana Purchase, “The nation’s best interests de- manded the extension of the empire for liberty.” 46 In a message to the legisla- ture of the Indiana Territory in 1805, Jefferson argued that “by enlarging the empire of liberty, we multiply its auxiliaries, and provide new sources of reno- vation, should its principles, at any time, degenerate, in those portions of our country which gave them birth.” 47 Jefferson was infl uenced by Thomas Mal- thus’s theory that all societies were bound to become overpopulated, corrupt, and senile because of the limitations of resources. 48 But the United States was to be different.

The difference was in its economic abundance, which was on the minds of colonial Americans from the early years. In New - England’s Plantation (1630), Francis Higginson drew food pictures of such abundance, an idea that appears repeatedly in the following passage:

This country aboundeth naturally with store of Roots of great variety and

good to eat. Our Turnips, Parsnips and Carrots are here both bigger and

sweeter than is ordinarily to be found in England. Here are also store of

Pumpions, Cowcumbers, and other things of that nature which I know not.

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32 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

Also, divers excellent Pot-herbs grow abundantly among the Grass, as Straw-

berry leaves in all places of the Countrey, and plentie of Strawberries in

their time, and Penyroyall, Wintersaverie, Sorrell, Brookelime, Liverwort,

Carvell, and Watercresses; also Leeks and Onions are ordinary, and divers

Physicall Herbes. Here are also abundance of other sweet Herbs, delightful

to the smell, whose names we know not. 49

Economic plenty became amply evident in the years leading to independence. 50 American colonists acquired a taste for imperial commodities, especially tea, which they enjoyed extensively. A historian of colonial America writes: “Ameri- cans looked at eighteenth-century England with new eyes, admiring its cosmo- politan culture.” 51

Territorial acquisitions added to the resourcefulness of the young nation. The material plenty of the United States became one of its most striking fea- tures in the eyes of foreign visitors in the early nineteenth century. One of the numerous well-educated and perceptive visitors was Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the country in 1831 and 1832. In Democracy in America , he wrote: “[T]he country is boundless, and its resources inexhaustible.” 52 People from the out- side world continued to be awed by America’s material plenty. Michael Schud- son remarked that “it takes an immigrant or outsider to speak of American abundance in beatifi c terms.” 53 This has proved especially true when the for- eign visitors were from places of food scarcity. More than a century and a half after Tocqueville’s visit, Boris Yeltsin was astonished by the quantity of goods he saw in American supermarkets during his tour of the United States in 1989, noting: “You can’t imagine it. It makes the people secure.” He wanted at least 100 million Russians, especially their leaders, to come to “the American school of supermarket.” 54

M e at a s a S y m b o l o f A b u n d a n c e

The plentitude of food, particularly meat, became an unmistakable symbol of America’s abundance. In fact, meat eating was a sign of status and power in many cultures. In ancient China, for example, the phrase “meat eater” specifi - cally referred to rulers of the country. During the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 B.C.E .), when a farmer named Cao Gui was recommended to serve as the military adviser to the king of the Lu Kingdom, one of his fellow villagers thought that he should not go because of his low social status: “The meat-eaters are making the strategies. Why do you want to intermeddle?” 55 At that time, as

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 33

a physical manifestation of the effect of meat eating, social elites were said to have a face without darkness, which was regarded as a sign of malnourishment and poor health. 56

Meat remained a precious commodity in China for a long time. In 1873, the New York Times reported that a Chinese commoner “rarely indulges” in meat at all. 57 A late-nineteenth-century missionary handbook informed prospective China-bound missionaries that “meat is a luxury” in that country. 58 During the Cultural Revolution years, the monthly meat ration per person in Hubei Prov- ince was less than a pound—even poor nineteenth-century Englishmen had twice as much as we did. One of the things that struck my mother the most dur- ing her visit to the United States in 1992 was steak, which she considers as some- thing extremely American and extravagant—in Chinese cooking, expensive cuts of meat usually have to be fi nely sliced or chopped to be served in small quanti- ties. The scarcity of meat was also a prominent feature of the diet of common people in nineteenth-century Italy. In the weekly journal All the Year R ound , Charles Dickens reported in 1870 that “the peasantry of the Tuscan Alps rarely, if ever, eat meat, except on Sundays and the holidays of the Church.” 59

Meat was a luxury for most people in western Europe throughout the nine- teenth century. As Vaclav Smil notes, in the 1860s the bottom half of English society had barely more than twenty pounds of meat a year per person. And it not until after World War II that the wealthiest European countries attained the meat-consumption levels that the United States had reached more than century earlier. 60

During the nineteenth century, the United States developed a reputation not only as an abundant and free nation but also as the home of a carnivorous peo- ple. In the Civil War, a time of food shortages in both the North and the South, an English visitor was impressed by the availability of meat, noting that Ameri- cans “usually have meat three times a day, and not a small quantity at each meal either.” 61 Americans themselves knew that they were devouring a lot of meat. A southern planter stated in 1841: “There are few things in the habits of Ameri- cans, which strike the foreign observer with more force, than the extravagant consumption of food—and more especially of meat. Truly we may be called a carnivorous people.” 62

Representing America’s material abundance, meat was also associated with the Anglo male identity. It was commonly believed that meat was a sym- bol of macho manhood. In fact, meat consumption “is seen, in a sense, as the ingesting of the very nature of the animal itself, its strength and aggression.” 63 Jeremy Rif kin reminds us that “the identifi cation of raw meat with power,

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34 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

male dominance, and privilege is among the oldest and most archaic cultural symbols still visible in contemporary civilization,” 64 which helps explain why the anti-Chinese forces characterized its campaign to exclude the Chi- nese as a struggle of “Meat vs. Rice” and of “American Manhood Against Asi- atic Coolieism.” 65

As an emblem of abundance, America’s carnivorous habits have also left ir- reversible marks on its natural environment. The country developed a love af- fair with beef, which intensifi ed after 1870 as a result of railroad development, improved food refrigeration, and the demographic changes of immigration and

“Fish” Eggplant

Serves 2

In the nineteenth century, the United States became not only a global power but also a

carnivorous country that privileged meat over vegetables. As a balancing act, I se-

lected an eggplant recipe. The eggplant in the Chinese diet and in the American super-

market is a product of global cultural crossings. Domesticated in South or Southeast

Asia, it is believed to have been introduced to Africa by the Persians and to Europe by

the Arabs and reached China by way of Southeast Asia. *

2 Chinese eggplants or one large eggplant

6 tbsp vegetable oil

2 tbsp minced garlic

2 tbsp minced fresh ginger root

2 tbsp chopped green onion

3 tbsp soy sauce

Cut the eggplants into ½-inch slices. Deep-score on one side to form a dia-

mond or rectangular pattern (do not cut through). Heat 5 tbsp vegetable oil

in a sauté pan, turn the heat to medium. Brown the scored side of the egg-

plant slices. Transfer the eggplant to a plate and keep warm.

Heat 1 tbsp vegetable oil in the pan; sauté the garlic, ginger, and green

onion for 1 to 2 minutes; then add the soy sauce. Gently put the eggplant

slices back into the pan until heated through. Pour the soy sauce mixture

evenly over the top of the eggplant. Serve with the scored side up.

* Frederick J. Simoons, Food in China : A Cultural and Historical Inquiry (Boca Raton,

Fla.: CRC Press, 1991), 169.

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 35

urbanization. 66 The Daily Picayune declared in 1898 that beef was Americans’ “most important food.” 67 This was also an expensive love affair (the amount of feed for producing one pound of beef can produce more than four pounds of poultry and about two pounds of pork), which engendered an important impe- tus for continued land expansion. 68

Visitors to central and northern Illinois and Iowa may fi nd it hard to imag- ine that the vast cornfi elds there were once part of the “prairie triangle,” which during the nineteenth century was completely and swiftly turned into farm- land. Allan G. Bogue writes about this region: “In 1830 the farm-makers had hardly begun their task; by the 1890’s the land was tamed, the corn belt a fact.” 69 Much of the corn was grown to feed cattle in order to satisfy the increasing de- mand for beef. The physical transformation from prairie to farmland also took place elsewhere in the Midwest. A lengthy survey of American meat production in the 1880s reported that “Eastern Kansas is now mainly a great corn region, and feeds grass-grown stock from Western Kansas for beef.” 70

O v e r s e a s E x p a n s i o n a n d P o l i t i c a l R a m i f i c at i o n s o f M at e r i a l A b u n d a n c e

Thomas Jefferson’s legacy lived on. After the end of the frontier, the United States increasingly relied on overseas expansion to enlarge its material wealth. As Alexis de Tocqueville had already noted in Democracy in America ,, “Reason shows and experience proves that no commercial prosperity can be durable if it cannot be united, in case of need, to naval force.” 71 In 1894, in the midst of rapid U.S. global expansion, John G. Carlisle, secretary of the treasury in Grover Cleve- land’s cabinet, explained to Congress how it benefi ted the domestic conditions: “The prosperity of our people . . . depends largely upon their ability to sell their surplus products in foreign markets at remunerative prices in order to secure money or establish credit abroad with which to pay interest and dividends upon loans and other investments which our customers there have made here.” 72

In the twentieth century, the conviction persisted that “America’s domestic well-being depends upon such ever-increasing overseas economic expansion.” 73 And this is exactly how the American global dominance has worked, according to the William Appleman Williams–inspired scholar Andrew Bacevich: “Ex- pansion made the United States the ‘land of opportunity.’” 74 The German scholar Herfried Münkler concurs: “From World War II into the 1960s, more power abroad meant greater abundance at home, which in turn, paved the way for greater freedom.” 75

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36 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

Sustained by a growing empire, the material abundance of the United States predicated the nation’s liberal, democratic political system. Tocqueville real- ized the political ramifi cations of American abundance when he wrote: “It is in America that one learns to understand the infl uence which physical prosperity exercises over political actions, and even over opinions.” 76

Despite its narrow perceptive on the frontier as a one-directional process and its other defi ciencies, Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis echoes Tocqueville, recognizing the profound political effects of America’s burgeoning material plenty as a result of its westward expansion. 77 Turner wrote: “Not the Constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fi t people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire.” 78 Others also regarded material abundance as a foundation of America’s political freedom. In 1954 ,the historian David Potter argued that “economic abundance is conducive to political democracy.” 79

American Cold Warriors often interpreted the meaning of freedom in terms of consumer goods available to American consumers. The short cartoon Desti- nation Earth (1956) describes the benefi ts of a petroleum-based free market econ- omy and shows the connection between freedom and consumption abundance and how it could undermine Communism. 80 In “What Freedom Means to Us,” a speech delivered at the American National Exhibition on July 24, 1959, Rich- ard Nixon emphasized to his Russian audience that “the great majority of American wage earners” owned nice consumer goods, such as houses, televi- sion sets, and cars.

America has also used its material plenty as a tool to deal with domestic so- cial problems. Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out in a refl ective examination of the nation’s past that “through a strategy of commercial and territorial expansion, the United States accrued power and fostered material abundance at home. Ex- pectations of ever increasing affl uence in turn ameliorated social tensions and kept internal dissent within bounds, thereby permitting individual Americans to pursue their disparate notions of life, liberty and happiness.” 81 Social ten- sions were particularly high in industrializing and urbanizing European coun- tries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leading to tre- mendous labor unrest and the rise of radical political ideologies (such as socialism in European countries). Europeans wondered why American society, including its working class, seemed relatively immune to socialism and Marx- ism. In an essay “Why There Is No Socialism in the United States,” the contro- versial German sociologist Werner Sombart provided his answer: “All socialist utopias come to nothing on roast beef and apple pie.” 82

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 37

To the list of roast beef and apple pie as social and racial painkillers, Thomas Nast added turkey. A popular and infl uential nineteenth-century illustrator, Nash created such American cultural icons as the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey. He painted a famous Thanksgiving dinner scene in 1869, a time when rapid socioeconomic changes intensifi ed social confl ict. Two short phrases at the lower corners of the painting read: “Come one; come all,” and “free and equal.” 83 The painting projects an image of men and women of differ- ent races—besides whites and African Americans, there was a Chinese man with the pigtail hanging down his back—coming together to share and celebrate American abundance.

Reminiscent of Rome’s pledge to provide food for its populace, American presidential candidates have often promised to bring abundance to the dinner table of the American people. “A full dinner pail,” William McKinley’s presi- dential campaign slogan from 1900, featured prominently in the Republican presidential campaign of 1928 as a potent metaphor for American prosperity. In his presidential nomination speech, Herbert Hoover vowed to top it: “Our work- ers with their average weekly wages can today buy two and often three times more bread and butter than any wage earners of Europe. At one time we de- manded for our workers a ‘full dinner pail.’ We have now gone far beyond that conception. Today we demand comfort and greater participation in life and lei- sure.” 84 In a campaign speech in October 1928 in New York, Hoover articulated clearly and loudly his belief in the interdependence between economic prosper- ity and political liberty: “Liberalism is a force truly of the spirit, a force proceed- ing from the deep realization that economic freedom cannot be sacrifi ced if political freedom is to be preserved.” 85 Franklin Roosevelt understood this in- terdependence between economic and political freedom as well. In a speech delivered in Pittsburgh in October 1932, the presidential candidate accused the Republicans of “shifting the boast of the full dinner pail, made in 1928, to the threat of the continued empty dinner pail in 1932.” 86 The “four freedoms” that FDR proposed in 1941 as his vision of the new world order includes “the freedom from want.” For him, evidently, a hungry world could not be completely free.

In the minds of so many American policy makers, it would be impossible to uphold the United States as a country of freedom and democracy without eco- nomic abundance—a point that they emphasized during the Great Depression, when such abundance was gravely threatened. Gardiner C. Means, who served on the Consumer Advisory Board under the National Recovery Administration, suggested that safeguarding the interest of the consumer “may well be the key that will open the way to a truly American solution of the problem which is

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38 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

leading other countries in the direction of either fascism or communism.” 87 As FDR’s principal architect of the New Deal, Harry Hopkins was more blunt: “This country cannot continue as a democracy with 10 or 12 million people un- employed. It just can’t be done.” 88 Jefferson would have agreed.

To C o o k o r N o t t o C o o k : T h e C h a n g i n g M e a n i n g o f A b u n d a n c e

To understand the importance of Chinese food as a critical part of the emerging empire of consumption, we have to recognize that for those in pursuit of Amer- ican abundance, it entailed not simply the multitude of goods but also the qual- ity of life. In the realm of food, it involved not only its quantity. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, it increasingly meant how food was prepared and consumed.

The growing empire of consumption extended its socioeconomic boundaries to include a growing number of non-elite white Americans, which is clearly seen in the emergence and growth of the middle class. Historians do not have a consensus on precisely when and how the American middle class emerged. But a sure sign of its appearance is the effort by more and more American house- holds to enjoy and emulate the consumer goods and the lifestyle of the upper class. Besides carpeted fl oors, comfortable sofas, and a piano, the rising middle class in the nineteenth century also had better food and more refi ned table man- ners than before. Men learned, in Stuart Blumin’s words, “to eat more slowly, and with a fork rather a knife.” 89 Men’s unhurried eating meant that the meals of middle-class families became more elaborate, as did their dining rooms. 90 More elaborate meals also meant more work for the women, who were urged to follow the Victorian “cult of domesticity” by staying home to take care of their children and husbands. Increasingly, middle-class families hired domestic ser- vants. 91 As the middle class continued to expand during industrialization and urbanization, personal service became an important occupation. There were 22,243 servants in 1850, which grew to about 730,000 in 1870 and had passed the 1 million mark by 1880. 92 The number of people engaged in domestic and other personal service jobs more than doubled from about 1.4 million in 1880 to over 3 million in 1890, and grew to more than 4.7 million in 1900. 93 I must add that cooking became a top responsibility of servants.

Having the service of other people for basic personal needs like cooking con- stituted a vital marker of social distinction. This was manifested most clearly in

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 39

food consumption, where the society was conspicuously divided into those who cooked and those who did not. Keenly aware of this division, many early cook- book writers consciously wrote for the former. For instance, Amelia Simmons, once a servant herself, wrote American Cookery (1786) for domestic servants.

In the nineteenth century, having their meals cooked by others was a par- ticularly important threshold in the middle class’s aspirations to emulate the lifestyle of the top strata of society. Having a cook was not as prohibitively ex- pensive as certain other aspects of being upper class, such as owning large real- estate properties; the presence of plenty of racial minorities and immigrants as low-paid servants increased its affordability.

Moreover, because of America’s material wealth, the gap between the top strata of society and all the rest seemed quite bridgeable in the area of consumer goods. The historian Daniel Boorstin notes that by the mid-nineteenth century “in America, it was far more diffi cult than in England to tell man’s social class by what he wore.” 94 Similarly, luxury-food consumption was not entirely off- limits to the non-wealthy. One example is the drinking of imported tea in colo- nial America. In 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, a physician who immigrated to America from Scotland and became known for his acute social observations, traveled along the Hudson River. In the cabin of a poor family, he and his com- panion spotted superfl uous consumer goods: “Half a dozen pewter spoons and as many plates, old and wore out but bright and clean, a set of stone [stoneware] tea dishes, and a tea pot.” 95

Technological improvements in the kitchen, such as the woodstoves that re- placed open hearths after the Civil War, did not necessarily ease the burden of labor, especially for women. 96 Nineteenth-century Americans knew very well how arduous housework was at the time. In Edward Bellamy’s science fi ction novel, Looking Backward , the young protagonist, Julian West, wrote about his world: “In my day, even wealth and unlimited servants did not enfranchise their possessor from household cares, while the women of the merely well-to-do and poorer classes lived and died martyrs to them.” 97 Having others do the chores, such as cooking, was a widespread ambition of the middle class. As Alice A. Deck illustrates, food advertisements that adopted the image of African American women as domestic cooks in the fi rst half of the twentieth century reveal “white middle-class America’s deep-laying desires [for] black domestic servants.” 98 When these servants were not around, white middle-class Ameri- cans turned to young Irish women, and they also found Chinese immigrant men to be desirable servants.

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40 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

N o O n e L i k e s t o C o o k : M a r x ’ s D e f i c i e n c i e s

The desire to avoid home cooking is a universal human tendency and an espe- cially important part of being middle class in America.

Undoubtedly, many individuals have enjoyed cooking throughout the centu- ries. But no one likes to cook when it is not a choice but represents compulsory, strenuous, routine, and tedious work. Extraordinarily diligent and idealistic people who take pleasure in work for the sake of work itself might strongly disagree with my proposition. 99 Karl Marx would be one of them. An idiom that I became familiar with as a child in China captures the essence of the Marx- ist vision of the ideal society, where work becomes an end itself: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” 100 Yet this idiom con- tains two defi ciencies in Marx’s understanding of human nature. 101

The fi rst stems from a mistaken premise that human beings would be intrin- sically willing to work on their own and based on their abilities. Like Marx, Thorstein Veblen regarded work, or what he termed “workmanship,” to be a human instinct. But he nonetheless acknowledged that leisure became “honor- able” and “imperative” when work was divided into “noble and ignoble employ- ments.” 102 Even the Bible, which often expresses a positive view of work, prom- ises leisure (rest) from labor as part of eternal life: “Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours” (Revelation 14:13 [KJV]). A fundamental demand of work- ers in industrializing societies is therefore shorter hours of work and more lei- sure time.

Nineteenth-century white, middle-class American women exhibited a similar attitude toward kitchen work, which Catherine Selden loathed as “the tyranny of the kitchen.” 103 Writing in a women’s magazine in 1870, Minna Wright ex- plained middle-class women’s resentment of confi ning kitchen chores: “With weak nerves, precocious children, and the great social problem of the age to solve in societies and meetings innumerable, we have neither time nor strength left to be queens of the kitchen.” Without servants, they just could not sustain a “New England Kitchen,” she concludes. 104 In the minds of people like Wright, evidently, home cooking was the antithesis of being middle class.

This attitude about home cooking continued to manifest in the twentieth century. In the 1940s, The G ood Housekeeping Cook Book simply referred to home cooking as “the meal problem.” 105 In 1960, in her enormously popular I Hate to Cook Boo k , Peg Bracken openly admitted her resentment toward cooking, calling it one of three activities that “become no less painful through repetition” (the

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 41

other two being childbearing and paying taxes). 106 Resonating with American audiences, the book sold more than 3 million copies and made Bracken a house- hold name. 107

This loathing for household chores like cooking was not confi ned to white middle-class women. Many years later, the African American author Toni Mor- rison spoke of housework as “drudgery.” 108 Cooking was an activity largely shunned by men, particularly men of high social status. A member of the social elite of his time, Confucius cherished meat and stated that he would offer in- struction to anyone who brought him a bundle of dried meat. 109 But he exhorted that a gentleman should stay away from the kitchen and the slaughterhouse. 110

Compared with traditional Chinese society, cooking as an occupation gar- nered even less respect in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Amer- ica, where cooks—especially women—were usually regarded as synonymous with servants. Even the Bureau of the Census did not make a clear distinction between these two kinds of work in collecting occupational data. 111 In 1894, Ah Yow, a Chinese proprietor of a restaurant in Seattle, was barred by the collector of customs from reentering the United States upon his return from a visit to China. A district judge by the name of Hanford denied his petition because, in the judge’s view, “a restaurant keeper, [who] is a caterer, who keeps a place for serving meals, and provides, prepares, and cooks raw materials to suit the tastes of his patrons . . . is not a merchant.” 112

Edward Bellamy’s Julian West, the narrator of Looking Backward , woke up from his hypnotized state to fi nd himself in a utopian society in the year 2000 where people no longer had housework, including cooking, to do at home. West exclaimed, “What a paradise for womankind the world must be now!” 113

The other defi ciency in Marx’s comprehension of human nature was his fo- cus on need or necessity as a timeless, natural constant. When talking about human nature and human needs, however, Confucius spoke about desire as that which encompasses both the physical necessity of humans and the social needs that are continually refi ned by changing social conditions. The energy that the adult human body needs to keep it going is about two thousand calories a day, which can be generated by about twelve medium-size (6 ounce) baked potatoes. 114 Thus once people sustain the most rudimentary bodily calorie and nutrition needs with regularity, they then desire to consume better foods such as meat and wine in greater variety. In addition, they want to have such foods prepared by others. Such desires help us understand the historical conditions and forces that brought Chinese immigrants and their restaurants to a promi- nently dominant position in food consumption.

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42 T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D

T h e C h i n e s e C o n t r i b u t i o n t o t h e D e m o c r at i z at i o n o f D i n i n g O u t

With the growth of the emerging middle class in both size and appetite came the increasingly diffi cult question of who would do the work in the kitchen. Immigrants and racial minorities were the answer. In the South after the Civil War, freed slaves assumed the duties of slaves as domestic servants, “adding a despised race to a despised calling.” 115 In other regions, immigrants became an increasingly important force in domestic service. 116 From 1880 to 1890, the number of immigrants engaged in domestic and personal service increased from 967,094 to 1,438.080. 117 By 1910, immigrants, their children, and racial mi- norities outnumbered native whites by nearly 2.5 times in such jobs.

Outside private homes, the public-service sector also grew in the late nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries to meet the needs of those who could not afford domestic help. Here again, immigrants and minorities fi lled service jobs. The historian William Leach reports that “the number of service workers, in- cluding those entrusted with the care of customers, rose fi vefold between 1870 and 1910, at two and half times the rate of increase of industrial workers.” 118 Many service workers were immigrants and racial minorities. Like middle Amer- ica, the U.S. Navy also used minorities, notably African Americans and Filipinos, as domestics with the offi cial designation “stewards.”

In the American West, the despised race was Chinese, and they increasingly became domestic servants in both private homes and the public-service sector. Other immigrants took similar service jobs. For Europeans like the Germans, Irish, and Italians, however, domestic service was more of a temporary position, and it involved only certain segments of their communities. For the Chinese, however, it was a predominant and lasting occupation.

The rise of Chinese restaurants is a logical extension of the Chinese presence in domestic service. The shortage of servants helped to spur the growth of the restaurant industry. “As it became increasingly rare for middle-class families to have full-time, live-in servants,” Andrew P. Haley writes, “restaurants offered an alternative to eating and entertaining at home.” 119 In spreading to cities across the nation, Chinese restaurants not only created its fi rst lines of standard- ized restaurant foods but also turned dining into a form of mass consumption. In these establishments, Chinese Americans continued their designated role as personal-service providers in the emerging consumer economy. In this role, they helped to extend the material abundance (in the form of lifestyle) of the empire not merely to the middle class but also to marginalized groups.

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T H E E M P I R E A N D E M P I R E F O O D 43

Gary Okihiro acknowledges the contributions of marginalized minorities like the Chinese in preserving and advancing “the principles and ideals of de- mocracy” and in making America a freer place for all through their political struggle for equality. 120 In addition, the Chinese have also played an indispens- able role in extending American democracy to the market of consumption. As providers of cooked meals and other personal services, they helped the United States to fulfi ll its promise of an abundant life to more and more people, and this of course included the less privileged groups. In a word, they were empire stewards. Fulfi lling an important social need, the food they served in Chinese restaurants was indeed an empire food.

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