Chop Suey

Got up half past 4 this mor[ning] and made the graham biscuits for

breakfast. and wash the dishes done clean the stove dust or ashes and made

170 cookies this afternoon . . . and have the apple pie for the dinner. and

translate the second hymn of sweet hours of prayer. read the 4th chap[ter]

of Romans.

These lines are from the diary of Ah Quin on March 12, 1878, when he worked as a cook for a mining company on a small island in Alaska. For Ah Quin, thirty years old, nearly six feet tall and skinny, weighing no more than 130 pounds, this was a fairly typical day during his time in Alaska from 1877 to 1878. The hard- working man got up very early in the morning, and no matter how tired he was, he would always fi nd time to read the Bible and write a diary entry every day— a habit he kept for many years. And the food he cooked at the company was invariably Western. Besides biscuits, apple pies, and cookies, he also had a rather extensive repertoire of things to make: cornmeal pudding, muffi ns, mutton pot pies, pancakes, sponge cakes, donuts, clam chowder, roast turkey, and cod—a repertoire built from his previous experiences as a cook in California following his arrival in the United States in 1868.

The conspicuous absence of Chinese food from Ah Quin’s menu was a com- mon experience of the majority of Chinese domestic servant cooks, a reminder that Chinese entered the food sector not to proselytize the art of Chinese cook-

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EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/22/2022 4:03 PM via HOUSTON COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYSTEM AN: 871562 ; Yong Chen.; Chop Suey, USA : The Story of Chinese Food in America Account: s9009160.main.eds

C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 45

ing but to provide the service needed by their Anglo employers. Cooking was an integral part of domestic service, and it quickly became one of the most promi- nent occupations of Chinese Americans in the post–Gold Rush years. The mag- azine Youth ’ s Companion characterized this development as “The Chinaman’s Conquest.” 1 The entry of the Chinese en masse into servitude as cooks and servants paralleled and was intrinsically connected to their growing predomi- nance in the laundry business. Such service jobs illustrate their historical role as stewards of the emerging empire of consumption and represent a precursor to their future conspicuous position in the restaurant business.

The Chinese presence in the service sector is marked by three features. First, their preponderance in certain geographic areas such as California. Second, long before being offi cially christened as a model minority in the late twentieth century, the Chinese were praised as exemplary cooks and servants, used by white employers as the ideal for personal- and domestic-service work. Third, in time Chinese America would become virtually a population of service workers, cooking food and washing clothes for Americans.

They were also pioneers in cultural change. They navigated the new and often hostile world with much curiosity and courage; they exhibited their autonomy in close interactions with their employers and customers.

T h e N e e d s o f t h e E m p i r e

Rome conquered its world with Roman legions, the British Empire with the Royal Navy, and the United States with its mass consumer culture. In modern history, China has been an empire of cheap labor. Still a pillar of the accelerat- ing Chinese economy, Chinese labor in the nineteenth century started to sig- nifi cantly extend China’s global presence to new markets created by expanding Western capitalism.

As ever, powerful Western empires needed not only soldiers to fi ght battles but also laborers to perform services. In Rome, slaves accounted for a great pro- portion of the population, and their cheap labor constituted a vital foundation for its glory and the prosperity enjoyed by its citizens. 2 As an important part of Roman life, slaves worked on farms and large estates, cleaned roads and streets, and cooked for well-to-do families. In antebellum America, indentured ser- vants and African American slaves carried out such duties. Then came the Chi- nese. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large numbers of Chinese laborers worked as domestic servants, cooking in private homes, in company kitchens, and on oceangoing ships. They and their compatriots in the

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46 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

laundry business joined other racial minorities and immigrants in providing services that satisfi ed the growing appetite among more and more Americans for a more convenient and leisurely lifestyle.

The presence of Chinese service workers fi rst became noticeable in the American West, where anti-Chinese sentiments began to surge in the early 1850s. The Sacramento Union remarked in 1852, “What at fi rst appeared rather novel and interesting in respect to Chinese immigrants, is becoming an alarming evil.” 3 In an 1853 report, Alta California called them “innumerable hordes of semi-human Asiatics.” 4 Rodman W. Paul summarized the quickly deteriorat- ing situation: “In the half dozen years since their arrival in California, they had drawn upon themselves political debates and attacks, and had been the cause of a state-wide popular agitation among the mining class.” 5

The Reverend William Speer was one of the few whites openly sympathetic to the Chinese. Speer had been a medical missionary in the Pearl River Delta, home to native communities of Chinese immigrants. Because Speer knew their “language and the needs,” he opened the fi rst Chinese Christian mission in San Francisco in 1853. 6

While the anti-Chinese antagonism from the working class had an apparent economic motivation, others, who regarded Chinese immigration as another racial element in the political economy, wondered about how to “receive this new element in our republicanism.” 7 Keenly aware of this question and under- standing the socioeconomic status of the Chinese, Speer offered several reasons for their presence in California. One was the need for “the Chinese as servants.” “For patience, docility, willingness to receive instruction, and economy, we have not seen the equals of the Chinese,” he explicated. 8 In a lengthy plea to the Cali- fornia legislature, he reiterated the same reasoning:

Our wives and families have a very deep interest in the presence and labors

of the Chinese. In a country where females are yet few, and the cares of

large households exhausting to their feeble strength, the aid of these pa-

tient, busy, economical people, many of whom have had a previous training

in various departments of domestic drudgery in the houses of American,

English, and other foreign residents along the Chinese coast, has been felt

to be a boon. 9

Other advocates of the Chinese continued this line of defense. In defending the Chinese, they were also protecting the right of American consumers to cheap but outstanding Chinese service. As many of them knew well, it was “a

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 47

blessing” and “a convenience” that “has contributed largely to our prosperity, our comfort and our wealth.” 10

George F. Seward, America’s top diplomat—his exact title was “envoy ex- traordinary and minister plenipotentiary”—to China between 1876 and 1880, accorded Chinese domestics “a high degree of commendation” and cited exten- sive evidence from testimonies collected during the 1876 congressional investi- gation of Chinese immigration to show that “the Chinese do very well as ser- vants.” 11 During the debate about the desirability of the Chinese in 1902, Clara E. Hamilton made the same argument by demonstrating what “Pacifi c Coast life would be like without the Chinese.” Furthermore, she understood that house- hold chores in the private sphere were part of the political economy. The Chinese question, she wrote, “touches the horizon of our own households. This may be ‘personal and circumscribed,’ doubtless, but the domestic affairs of a people fi gure too largely in the prosperity of the commonwealth to be ignored with safety.” 12 Her remarks reveal why topics like the virtue of Chinese domestic servants and the value of Chinese cooks loomed large in political debates of Chi- nese immigration.

In the lexicon of political economy in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century America, the words “servant” and “cook” were often synonymous; most servants also performed cooking duties, except in those families that hired more than one servant. A contemporary American numerated the responsibili- ties of Chinese servants in small families: “They cook and serve meals . . . make beds, sweep, and dust.” 13 Many people commented on the qualities of the Chi- nese both as servants and as cooks. Even before the arrival of large numbers of Chinese servants in the East, for example, the New York Tribune expressed an appreciation of the “domestic aptitude of the Chinese,” which the newspaper noted “fi ts them especially for cook, stewards, and table waiters.” 14

A R a c e o f C o o k s

Chinese food remained a target of ridicule and attack in American society, and this makes the widespread admiration of the Chinese as good cooks ironically worth noting. Anglo commentators frequently identifi ed excellence in the kitchen as a natural trait of Chinese. Indeed, the kitchen became an inevitable destina- tion for many of these immigrants. However, it was a position predestined not by nature but by geo-economic conditions. In a world where the Chinese were looked on as undesirables excluded from most occupations, they began to be seen as valuable only when performing duties shunned by whites. This also

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48 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

explains why idealizing the Chinese as good cooks and servants almost invari- ably focused on Chinese men, who became a major force of cheap labor in the global economy.

The praise of the Chinese for their merits as a cooks became increasingly pronounced in the late nineteenth century. Robert Henry Cobbold, an English missionary of the Church Missionary Society, spent about eight years in the coastal Chinese city of Ningpo. In 1860, he published Pictures of the Chinese , which quickly reached American readers. In it, he noted the quality of Chinese men in kitchen work: “Almost every Chinaman is, by a kind of natural instinct, good both at cooking and at bargaining.” 15 “The Chinese are a nation of cooks,” proclaimed Lippincott ’ s Monthly Magazine in 1892. “There is scarcely no individ- ual in their vast community who is not more or less competent to cook himself a respectable dinner. Chinese tradition points to a date, some thousands of years before the Christian era, at which an inspired ruler of old fi rst taught mankind the application of fi re to food.” 16

Such accolades continued well into the twentieth century. One article noted at the beginning of the twentieth century: “If there is one sphere of European domestic life in which, more than another, the Chinaman fi nds scope for the exercise of his own peculiar ingenuity, without doubt it is in the regions dedi- cated to the pursuit of the culinary art.” 17 Alice A. Harrison put it more bluntly in 1917: “A Chinaman is naturally endowed with Epicurean tendencies.” 18

Yet many white employers exhibited a fondness for Chinese cooks because of the fi ne service provided by the Chinese, rather than because of their culi- nary expertise. The outstanding qualities of the Chinese as cooks listed in 1879 in a missionary tract have little to do with cooking per se: “They are good cooks, the best in the world, the French excepted. They will obey orders to the letter and spirit. They work all day, and are satisfi ed with moderate wages—who says all this? The Pacifi c Mail Company from San Francisco employs only Chi- nese—Chinese sailors, cooks, waiters. They speak in the highest terms of their honesty, sobriety, faithfulness.” It concluded that Chinese possessed “all the qualities of good servants.” 19 According to residents of a “fashionable suburb of Los Angeles” at the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese cooks were “Yellow Angels,” and, again, this was largely because of their patience and loyalty in performing their domestic duties. 20 After all, servitude was what white Ameri- cans saw and wanted in Chinese cooks. Will Irwin, a well-known San Fran- cisco reporter, summarized a widespread sentiment: “The Chinaman was an ideal servant.” 21

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 49

Good Housekeeping, a source of authority on domestic matters, offered an ide- alized depiction of the servant, who by

temperament and training . . . fi tted for the task beyond the dreams of the

eastern house-wife of moderate means. He likes, or at least expects, to work

hard . . . likes the family he works for and has no wish to emulate the lady

of the house, to rise above the caste into which his parents and grand-

parents were born. Furthermore, he is clean, honest, thrifty and methodi-

cal. Like a well-regulated clock he ticks off his duties. By certain hours

each, if you let him alone, your house will be in order; your meals served;

the table cleared and each dish returned to its place.

On the whole, he “will do more work and make less trouble than any other class of servant.” 22

The Chinese were thought to fi t this profi le almost perfectly and thus were bound to become servants. This refl ected a deeply embedded mentality among many Westerners. While in political exile in California in the early 1850s, the Chilean journalist Benjamin Vicuña McKenna got the impression that “the Chinese seem unfi tted for any but domestic service.” The otherwise largely un- sympathetic report of Canada’s Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration noted in 1885: “The universal testimony is that they make good domestic ser- vants.” It mentioned specifi cally that “[o]f all the gifts . . . which the Chinese have given the State of California that, for which many seemed most grateful and about the character of which, with hardly a qualifi cation, all are agreed, is the domestic servant.” 23 Some Americans, who had had Chinese servants while living in China, wanted to bring them home to the United States because of their excellence. 24

The idea of service jobs naturally befi tting the Chinese also illustrates a real- ity in the global division of labor between whites and non-whites, and between rich and poor nations. This labor division was transplanted by international migration to U.S. soil, where the Chinese performed jobs avoided by white Americans. In 1880, after lamenting that “our boys and girls” became “idle, in- competent ‘hoodlums’ . . . ashamed of honest toil,” a middle-class “California housekeeper” praised the Chinese, who “occupy the places which in healthier state of society would be fi lled by men and women, boys and girls, of our own race; but these latter refuse to do the work required.” 25 Ho Yow, the Chinese consul-general in San Francisco, exhibited an awareness of this global division

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50 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

of labor when he stated that “Chinese fi t into the world’s industry in ways which do not confl ict with white labor.” 26 But the statement underestimated the extent to which this racialized division of labor was imposed on the Chinese by whites, especially white workers, who viewed the Chinese with intense hostility. The whites drove the Chinese out of mining, manufacturing, and agriculture; some corporations also made a deliberate policy not to hire Chinese men for more prof- itable jobs. One such corporation was Miller and Lux, a company formed by two German immigrants and a holder of vast lands and water rights. This com- pany decided to use Chinese only as cooks in the late nineteenth century. The logic of its management was, as David Igler reports, “the Chinese as a race were cooks.” 27 But those Chinese working as cooks still did not escape white labor’s wrath. After the Chinese cook was fi red at Gale’s Mining Company in 1909, for example, one of its white workers hoped that the new one would “be white and give us white men’s grub.” 28

In such an extremely anti-Chinese political climate, hiring a domestic Chi- nese cook could be politically dangerous. Governor Henry Gage of California, who had watched his popularity plunge during the bubonic plague outbreak in 1901, was attacked for employing a Chinese cook for his family in 1902. The San Francisco Chronicle remarked that it “does not indicate friendship or respect for free white labor on the part of the Governor.” 29 And indeed, Gage failed to win his party’s nomination as a candidate for governor. In places like Tacoma, Washington, some people feared that using Chinese domestic help could jeop- ardize the safety of their families. 30 Such fear perhaps also explains why some- times even dining establishments like the well-attended Anderson’s in San Di- ego found it necessary to publicly announce that they employed “No Chinese.” 31 The Park Boarding House in Riverside, California, similarly emphasized in an advertisement that that it had no Chinese cooks in its dining room. 32

A target of white labor’s animosity, Chinese domestic workers were at the same time constantly compared by their middle-class employers with white service workers and were used to judge them. White employers generally pre- ferred Chinese servants not just because of their diligence but also because po- litical marginalization made them less likely to be troublemakers. In reference to Chinese servants, Alfred Wheeler testifi ed at the 1876 congressional hear- ing: “I have always found them extremely subordinate and respectful, quiet, attentive, and rather avoiding diffi culties.” 33

The Oregonian proclaimed in the 1880s that “one of the principal reasons that hotel keepers, restaurant men, and others have always given for employing

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 51

Chinese labor instead of that of white men has been that the Chinese could be depended upon, while the white help, after working a week or so, would get drunk and leave their employers in the lurch.” 34

Clearly, Chinese laborers were “model” servants. Clara E. Hamilton, in a 1902 article, bluntly explained the reason why she preferred them: “We need the Chinese here as a check upon our other working people, if for no other rea- son, but we have also a strong partiality for the quality of work of which they are capable. They are entirely reliable. If you have a well-trained Chinese cook you have a treasure. . . . He is quiet, usually respectful, and always orderly, deft and capable.” 35 These qualities were mentioned by many others. In 1936, the San Francisco native and writer Charles Dobie concluded that Chinese servants and cooks were “more effi cient, less complaining, always on the job . . . [and] worked on Sundays, holidays, rain or shine.” 36

“The Chinaman was an ideal servant,” another San Franciscan declared in a letter to the New York Times in 1880—long before Will Irwin in 1909 reached the same conclusion. The letter recounted his family’s experience with ser- vants. The family was middle class or lower middle class and on a limited bud- get, and the two daughters were expected to help with house chores. Nonethe- less, the family had managed to have servants. After the two Irish maids left, the family hired a Chinese, who also assumed cooking responsibilities after the cook left. The family then saw its daily food expenses reduced from $5 to $2 and still lived better than before. The two daughters, now freed from house chores, lived like privileged princesses. 37 Service from the Chinese enabled this and other middle-class households to elevate their lifestyle beyond their means. Charles Crocker testifi ed before the congressional joint investigation commit- tee on Chinese immigration in 1876: “Mechanics who have a family and must have a servant to do a little work, when they could not afford to pay thirty and forty dollars for a female servant. They are willing to take a Chinaman at twenty dollars. They can afford that, but they could not afford forty dollars for white servants.” 38 James Beard, the legendary fi gure in American gastronomy, grew up in the early twentieth century in Portland, Oregon, where his mother owned a small residential hotel. Beard recalled in 1983 that his own middle-class family was “spoiled” by Let, their Chinese chef. 39 From various accounts, we can picture the life of middle-class and sometimes lower-middle-class families with Chinese cooks and servants: the mister rang for water from the comfort of his sofa, the mistress waited in bed for her breakfast, and the whole family enjoyed a quality time over Western meals prepared and brought to the table.

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52 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

A P o p u l at i o n o f S e r v i c e W o r k e r s

Concentration in service jobs was a striking characteristic of the Chinese popu- lation, which joined other minorities and immigrants in satisfying the growing consumption desires of the United States in the years after the Gold Rush. The Irish, the largest immigrant group in this occupation, did so largely in the East, and African Americans did the same in the South. 40 By the 1870s, Chinese ser- vice laborers were predominant in the West, especially in California, where the number African Americans and the Irish was limited. 41

More than 77 percent of the Chinese population was located in California. By 1870, domestic service/cooking had become the third largest occupation of the Chinese in the United States:

Miners 17,069

Laborers 9,436

Domestic servants 5,420

Launderers 3,653

Agricultural laborers 1,766

Cigar makers 1,727

Gardeners and nurserymen 676

Traders and dealers 604

Railroad workers 568

Boot and shoemakers 489 42

While indicating the distribution of Chinese in diverse occupations at the time, the list also shows a clear pattern of the Chinese concentration in the service sector. These numbers most likely did not include those who were hired to perform service duties on a short-term basis; this concentration would become more signifi cant as the number of Chinese in personal- and domestic- service jobs almost tripled in the years between 1870 and 1920. In 1920, those engaged in such jobs represented almost 60 percent of all gainfully employed Chinese. 43

Most nineteenth-century Chinese servants were very young. Of the 159 male servants identifi ed in the 1870 census manuscript schedule for San Fran- cisco, 81 were under the age of twenty; 70 were in their twenties; and only 8 were in their thirties. The youngest was a ten-year-old boy named Ah Kee. There was only one female servant. 44 Domestic servitude was also often the fi rst job that young immigrants took after their arrival in the United States. Lee

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 53

Chew, who worked for the fi rst two years after his arrival in America in the early 1880s as a domestic servant, knew that “my start was the same as that of almost all the Chinese in this country.” 45

These Chinese servants became a major force in western states. In 1880, for example, California alone boasted about eight thousand Chinese servants, rep- resenting 34 percent of the state’s total servants employed. 46 There were more than fi ve thousand launderers, representing almost 80 percent of all laundry workers in the state. Ten percent of the state’s hotel and restaurant owners and employees were Chinese. They also held similar jobs in other western states. A resident of Ellensburg, Washington, wrote to the Oregonian in 1886 after trav- eling along the railroad to the Cascade tunnel: “I fi nd Chinese employed in the kitchens of every hotel and in a large number of private residences. They have almost a monopoly of the laundry business.” 47 By then, a labor market of Chi- nese servants was fairly well established; their service could be secured through the numerous Chinese employment agencies in San Francisco. In 1885, four such agencies ran advertisements in the San Francisco Bulletin , along with the ad of the employment offi ce of a famous anti-Chinese agitator, Denis Kearney. One of these agencies promised to supply “fi rst-class Chinese cooks and waiters, for city and country.” 48

Indeed, the presence of Chinese cooks was found not only in urban white families but also on ranches and farms throughout the West. In Cattle on the Conejo , J. H. Russell recalled that “up to forty or fi fty years ago Chinese were al- most always the ranch cooks.” 49 Richard Street writes that working as farm and camp cooks, “the Chinese did exert an early, overwhelming infl uence,” which lasted for half a century. 50

The Chinese presence could be seen and heard in the western mountains as well. A Chinese cook reportedly gave name to the Tunemah Trail, which stands at 11,894 feet in the High Sierras. 51 We can only guess what thoughts occupied his mind when he uttered the exclamation (supposedly a Chinese curse word), “Tu-ne-mah!” but the echo undoubtedly reached far. So did the socioeconomic impact of his labor and that of his fellow cooks.

This does not suggest that the Chinese story is only a regional one. In 1870, the Chinese were found in thirty-two of the thirty-seven states and in eight of the ten territories. While opportunities in mining triggered the earliest large waves of Chinese immigration to the American West, the need for personal service— generated by accelerated industrialization and concurrent urbanization— provided the initial impetus for the Chinese presence in eastern cities. Chinese workers arrived in increasing numbers to meet such a need in urban America,

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54 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

and their arrival also spearheaded Chinese communities in the East. Of par- ticular importance were the laundrymen.

Chinese laundry workers formed another regiment of a large and growing army of Chinese service workers in the evolving consumption empire. While the Chinese cooks liberated many middle-class families from the tyranny of the kitchen, the laundrymen helped to add convenience and luxury to the life of working-class people. The laundrymen’s experiences are pertinent not only to Chinese domestics but also to Chinese restaurants. The title of a cartoon pub- lished in the New York Tribune captured that connection between the two indus- tries: “Exit Washee. Enter Chop Suey.” The text underneath it reads, “Driven out of business by the Steam Laundry, they changed the lettering of their signs. Instead of ‘laundry,’ they made their signs read ‘restaurant.’” 52 One common thread that linked the laundry shop, the restaurant, and the middle-class fam- ily kitchen: Chinese labor serving non-Chinese clientele.

By the early 1850s, the Chinese presence in the laundry business was already visible in San Francisco, pointing up the importance of the service sector for Chinese America from the very beginning. John David Borthwick, a Scottish journalist, who traveled to the city in 1851, gave a detailed description its Chinese laundry shops:

Owing to the great scarcity of washerwomen, Chinese energy had ample

room to display itself in the washing and ironing business. Throughout the

town might be seen occasionally over some small house a large American

sign, intimating that Ching Sing, Wong Choo, or Ki-chong did washing

and ironing at fi ve dollars a dozen. Inside these places one found two or

three Chinamen ironing shirts with large fl at-bottomed copper pots full of

burning charcoal, and, buried in heaps of dirty clothes, half-a-dozen more,

smoking, and drinking tea. 53

The signifi cance of laundry work became even more pronounced as the Chi- nese moved eastward to swiftly expanding cities. Pittsburgh, the birthplace of America’s steel industry, stood as a leader in the creation of a new “manufactur- ing belt,” which started in the 1870s. 54 Spurred by rapid economic development, Pittsburgh’s population swelled from 77,923 in 1860 to 139,256 in 1870, before rising to more than 450,000 in 1900. 55 As early as 1874, four of the laundries listed in the city directory were unmistakably Chinese, located in different parts of the city. The number increased to eight a year later. 56 Detroit was another

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 55

city that experienced rapid growth in this manufacturing expansion. In 1875, that city had at least four Chinese laundries. 57

Chinese laundries appeared in many cities outside the American West with an amazing level of simultaneity, showing the pivotal role of the Chinese in the emerging service sector within a fast-growing economy. The fi rst Chinese laun- dry showed up in Chicago in 1872, and by 1874 there were four. 58 In St. Louis, there were six Chinese laundries in 1873. 59 Boston had four such laundries in 1875. 60 This seemingly synchronized entry of Chinese laundries into multiple cities in the East is certainly attributable to the rapid improvement in transpor- tation, which facilitated the Chinese dispersal from the western states, particu- larly California. The origins of these laundrymen were common knowledge; for example, in a directory of Boston in 1875, Lee Sing was identifi ed as “Chinese Californian Laundry.”

Before the arrival of their compatriots from California, the Chinese in the East were already entrenched in the service sector. The Chinese in antebellum New York, for instance, included sailors, servants, and cooks, who had been brought to the busy port city by international trade. 61 The New York Tribune esti- mated in 1870 that there were about two hundred Chinese in the city, and many of them were servants. 62 Before an employment agency was established, up- town white middle-class women would travel downtown to the budding Chi- nese quarter around Mott Street to look for domestic help. 63

As in other East Coast cities, laundry work quickly became the dominant occupation among working Chinese in New York and the surrounding areas, providing an important personal service outside white American homes. In the early 1880s, more than one hundred Chinese worked in a laundry company in Belleville, New Jersey. 64 By the late 1880s, the Chinese population in New York was no longer confi ned to Chinatown around Mott and Canal Streets, as Chi- nese laundries sprouted up “all over the city.” 65 The growth met an increasing need of the swelling urban population.

The cost threshold for opening a laundry business was a relatively low, sometimes requiring just a modest amount of about $100 in the 1880s. 66 And in some cities, Chinese laundrymen achieved local dominance. In Providence, Rhode Island, which experienced rapid economic and population growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, two of the nine laundries in 1878 there were Chinese. 67 Two years later, Chinese owned seven of the city’s fourteen laundries. In 1883, they became the major force in that business, owning per- haps twenty-three of the thirty-three laundries, and in 1900, 99 of the city’s

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56 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

136 laundries were Chinese. 68 A similar predominance was found in Chicago, where the most popular names in laundries were Chinese—there were, for ex- ample, twenty-one Sam Sing’s and eleven Sing Lee’s. 69 The pattern simultane- ously repeated itself in Philadelphia, where 511 of the city’s 767 laundries were Chinese. These laundries were so numerous that they commanded their own subheading, “laundries, Chinese,” in the city’s business directory. 70 And in New York, Harper ’ s Weekly reported in 1890 that “it is hard to fi nd any neighbor- hood where there are no Chinese laundries.” 71

Chinese San Francisco in the late nineteenth century had a more diverse economy than many other Chinese settlements, but laundry work constituted an important source of employment. By 1870, the Chinese had become the most numerous group among San Francisco’s more than two thousand launderers. In 1880, the 5,435 Chinese workers represented about 80 percent of California’s labor force in the laundry industry. 72

Chinese laundrymen’s work brought convenience and style to the life of white workers. William F. Babcock testifi ed before the 1876 congressional investiga- tion commission that “the very employment of the Chinese in laundry work causes mechanics to change their clothes much oftener than they did when they paid a high price for their washing. Take the tops of these houses where the Chi- nese laundries are, and look at the lines of ragged clothes, old red shirts, panta- loons, and every common thing, garments that I do believe were washed half as much before, and that were not even fi t for a woman to wash.” 73 By 1910, Chinese service labor had established its presence in most states. The only state that might not have had at least a Chinese servant or laundryman was West Virginia. 74

The labor force in the nation’s service sectors never became entirely Chi- nese, but the Chinese themselves became largely a service-worker population, setting them apart from European groups such as the Irish, Germans, and Ital- ians. For these, domestic service was mainly for certain segments of their com- munities, especially young women. In 1910, for example, the female:male ratio was almost 18:1 among native white servants; it was nearly 24:1 among children of immigrants and more than 14:1 among white immigrants. Among African Americans, domestic servants also tended to be women, for whom the ratio was 5:1. 75 For the Chinese, Japanese, and Indian immigrants, the situation was reversed: the ratio was more than six men for every female servant. Among the Chinese alone, the ratio was undoubtedly even higher. The same pattern was also apparent in another type of personal service: laundry work—a predominantly female occupation among whites and African Americans but that became almost entirely a male line of work for the Chinese.

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 57

Moreover, for white immigrants, including young Irish women, servitude was often a temporary position. An Anglo employer remarked: “It is true that our piquant damsels from the Emerald Isle are very ambitious, but it is in the style of our chignon, and the liberties of the free and equal American citizen, that they would emulate. That these peculiar aspirations do not add to the har- mony of our home is a notable fact. . . . Our German girls, after becoming intel- ligible, are recaptured by young Hans to care for his cabbages.” 76 By compari- son, the possibilities of career upward mobility available to Chinese servants were much more limited, which is one reason that they tended to stay on their servitude jobs. In other words, the Chinese were designated as servants of the empire.

By 1940, almost the entire Chinese population had been relegated to the ser- vice sector. The laundry business and restaurant work had become the two principal occupations of the Chinese, a fact that contemporary Chinese were keenly aware of. In a 1930 investigative report series “The Present and Past of Chinese Restaurants in New York,” published in a New York–based Chinese- language newspaper, an author by the name of Tiexin noted that job opportuni- ties of the Chinese lay mainly in these two areas. 77 Well-educated Chinese were no exceptions. A Chinese man, who received his doctorate in history in 1950, could not fi nd a job in his profession because “Americans thought every Chi- nese was either a laundryman or a cook.” 78

Chinese servitude was an integral part of America’s capitalist economy and budding consumer culture. Lewis Coser once suggested that domestic service is a premodern condition that tends to become obsolete in a modern society. 79 This does not hold entirely true for nineteenth-century America as a whole, as we can see from an analysis of fi gure 1. On the one hand, less “modern” southern states—such as Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee—did have large num- bers of domestic servants and corresponding low numbers of modern facilities like restaurants and saloons. On the other hand, in more capitalistic and indus- trialized states—like New York, California, and Massachusetts—the stronger presence of restaurants and saloons coexisted with a multitude of domestic ser- vants. The enterprising western states, in particular, experienced a rapid increase in the number of domestic servants during the late nineteenth and early twenti- eth centuries. 80 Clearly, the desire for a life of leisure free from household chores knows no geographical or temporal boundaries.

Figure 2 compares the number of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian servants with that of African Americans in 1910 in selected states. It shows the “modern” nature of Chinese domestic service, which was found in capitalist and industrializing

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f i g u r e 2 The number of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian compared with African American ser vants

in selected states, 1910. (U.S. Bureau of the Census, Thirteen th Census of the United States , vol. 4 ,

Population 1910: Occupational S tatist ics [Washing ton, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1914])

f i g u r e 1 The number of food- and domestic-ser vice workers in selected states, 1880. (U.S. Census

Offi ce, Compendium of the Tenth Census [Washing ton, D.C.: Government Printing Offi ce, 1883])

180,000

160,000

140,000

120,000

100,000

80,000

60,000

40,000

20,000

0 CAAL IL IA KY LA MA MI MO NJ NY NC OH PA TN VA WI

N u m

b er

Hotel keepers and restaurant owners and employees

Saloon keepers and bartenders

Domestic servants

State

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 59

states, rather than the less developed South. Furthermore, Chinese servants and cooks tended to work in large metropolitan areas. Because of their close asso- ciation with industrialization, international migration, and urbanization, they were harbingers of modernity.

L i f e i n t h e K i t c h e n W o r l d

Empire building is also a key element in globalization. 81 The evolution of the United States into an empire encompassed a process of cultural encounters. As empire “stewards,” the Chinese laborers in personal service were also active agents of cultural exchange. Working and often living away from their own com- munities, their job was quite personal in nature, putting them in close and con- stant contact with their white employers. The historian Sucheng Chan notes that “other than miners, the only Chinese who interacted with whites were cooks, servants, and laundrymen” in nineteenth-century California. 82 Roi Ottley noted in an article about Harlem in 1936 that “the Chinese are daily in our midst, with their restaurants and laundries.” 83

Of particular importance were those who took on cooking responsibilities. They were directly involved in an essential aspect of the private lives of their employers and, in many cases, lived with them under the same roof. Even those who lodged in Chinatown still spent a signifi cant amount of time interacting with whites on a personal level.

Needless to say, the relationship that Chinese cooks formed with their pa- trons was anything but equal. “Despite its complexity and importance, cook- ing in the home traditionally has been an occupation of low status,” as Rebecca Sharpless notes in her study of African American women domestic cooks in the South. 84 For Chinese cooks, the kitchen could also be a precarious space because of racial prejudice that permeated every corner of society throughout the late nineteenth century. For example, Prentice Mulford recalled in 1869 an incident at the Polyglot House restaurant in what is now Placerville, Cali- fornia, where a Texas man beat the Chinese assistant in the kitchen and de- manded better coffee. 85 A year earlier, the Daily Morning Chronicle reported another incident of bloody violence that took place in the Wilkin’s Hotel at Beckwourth Pass, Nevada: when a white man named Pierce missed breakfast and the Chinese cooks would not send him food, he went to the kitchen and shot them, wounding one and seriously injuring the other. 86 The Independent mentioned that in 1878 a white man killed his Chinese cook but received no punishment. 87

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60 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

Overall, the relationship between Chinese kitchen workers and the recipi- ents of their service was characterized more by immediate personal exchanges than by bloody violence or extremely harsh hostility. Ah Quin left extensive records of his interactions with the whites in the Alaska mining camp. At 10:00 A . M . on June 1, 1878, after he had made breakfast, he called E. T. Gourley to cut his long queue so that he could look more “like the white people.” Gourley and another white workman named A. K. Thompson cheerfully laughed at him, as Ah Quin gave each of them a “few hairs.” 88

Not uncommonly, a personal bond developed between the Chinese cooks and their white employers. Chinese domestic-service laborers, a Chinese reported in 1902, “frequently become much attached to the families they serve, and keep their positions for years.” 89 Richard Street concurs: “Many Chinese cooks be- came best friends with their employers and children.” 90 The words “best friends” are clearly an exaggeration, but many Chinese developed long associations with white families.

One such family, the Roths, employed Kee Low as their cook for more than two generations. The family moved to Filoli, a 654-acre estate located in Red- wood City, California, after it was purchased in 1937 by William P. Roth and Lurline Matson Roth, heir of the Matson Navigation Company. Kee Low contin- ued his job until his retirement in 1961.

In May 2012, I gave a public lecture at the estate, which had been donated by Lurline Roth to the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1975. Lynn Nor- ris, its education program director, invited the grandson of Kee Low to join us for the day. Norris explained, “We consider the Lows part of the Filoli family.” That was a sentiment shared by the Roths, who supported in various ways members of the Low family over the years, paying for the college education of one of Kee Low’s two sons. The Roth children loved Kee’s international cook- ing, which included such things as tamales, curry chicken with garlic and spices purchased in India, and oyster chowder (both Boston and Manhattan) made with broiled California baby oysters, as well as reproductions of dishes that Lurline Roth liked in restaurants. But just as in the case of Ah Quin’s cooking, Kee cooked little Chinese food. The Lows also identifi ed closely with Filoli and the Roths, and Kee’s son assisted in the kitchen and often invited his friends to visit. 91

J. H. Russell, a well-to-do cattle rancher, was born in 1883 and grew up on the Russell Triunfo Ranch in California’s Ventura County. In his memoir about life on the ranch, he wrote about some of the family’s Chinese cooks, who “still stand out in my memory.” 92

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 61

These stories indicate that Chinese cooks’ presence extended beyond urban middle-class homes. There were also Chinese cooks in the U.S. military, serv- ing offi cers, as Ah Quin did on Angel Island and at the Presidio in California from 1879 to 1880. 93

Another Chinese, who worked as a cook in the U.S. military was Richard Wing, one of the four Chinese from Hanford, California, to enlist during World War II. 94 His cooking skills became noticeable while working in the mess hall, and he soon got the assignment as General George Marshall’s personal cook, a position he held for about three years. During Marshall’s trips to China and Moscow, Wing also served as his food taster. The two men developed an ami- cable relationship, which Gerald M. Pops attributes to Marshall’s “egalitarian instincts.” 95 In 1948, when Marshall visited California as President Truman’s secretary of state, he invited Wing, who was no longer his cook, to be his guest. 96

Some white employers developed a dependency on their long-standing cooks, and this became a recurring theme in stories they told. In one such story pub- lished in 1907 in the Overland Monthly , Mrs. Caxton became so dependent on her cook, Ah Gin, that she refused to live with any of her grown-up daughters. The two formed this relationship in part because of the loyalty of Ah Gin, who once risked his own life to protect her house during a terrifying earthquake. 97

But Chinese cooks did not achieve their autonomy and infl uence only through loyalty. In America as well as in China, they did so through their assertiveness and skills. “A widely traveled American said not long ago,” the popular maga- zine Outlook relayed in 1915, “‘You tell your Chinese cook to put salt into the soup and he obeys because he is an admirable servant; but every time he makes the soup he refl ects on your ignorance and lack of cultivated taste in soups.’” 98

In 1895, Manford’s New Monthly Magazine carried a dialogue between a white woman in San Francisco and her new Chinese cook. After the Chinese man told her that his name was Wang Hang Ho, she said, “Oh, I can’t remember all that. . . . I will call you John.” Upon learning that her name was Mrs. Melville Langdon, the Chinese responded: “Me no memble all that. . . . Chinaman he no savey Mrs. Membul Landon—I call you Tommy.” 99 It was one of the popular jokes intended to mock the Chinese for their pigeon English. But its repeated appearance in various publications over the years suggests a widely recognized pattern of Chinese cooks’ autonomy and defi ance of racial and class prejudice. 100

A few Chinese even broke a gigantic social taboo by entering the emotional world of their white employers. Their stories were invariably and predictably represented in the media as being disastrous and even fatal. The Riverside

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62 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

Independent Enterprise , for example, published an article in 1894 about a Chinese cook named Sing Ngui, whose marriage to a “pretty German girl” became like a prison, from which she had to be rescued. 101 The National Police Gazette ran a story, in a harshly disapproving tone, about a beautiful white woman’s love af- fair with her Chinese cook. What made the situation even more alarming for the tabloid is that it took place in San Francisco’s Nob Hill, a “citadel of Wealth, social position and respectability.” 102 She was portrayed as a victim of the “slant-eyed, sleek” Chinese man’s “specious arts and Oriental vices.”

The autonomy of Chinese cooks reminds us that we must not see them merely as victims. In general, they received a share, albeit a small one, of America’s economic prosperity. Contemporary estimates show that their income was rela- tively high in comparison with the earnings of their compatriots in China and America. In 1870, Chinese cooks could earn at least $15 a month and board, and that was considered a low wage for them. 103 In the early 1880s, a servant with some experience like Lee Chew could earn $35 a month with board. 104 A com- petent cook earned about $35 or $45 a month in the early 1890s. 105 According to some contemporaries, the monthly wages for Chinese cooks ranged from $25 and $40 to $70 a month at the turn of the century. 106 Based on Russell Con- well’s 1870 estimate that rural laborers in the immigrants’ native communities in the Pearl River Delta earned the equivalent of $8 to $10 a year, a Chinese cook’s income was at least twenty times higher. 107 Wages in Canton were among the highest in China, where a cook could make as much as $6 a month in the late 1890s, still considerably lower than wages of his countrymen in Amer- ica. 108 Moreover, the cooks’ income also put them at a higher bracket than that of many of their compatriot, such as those working in agriculture in the South, who made about $22 a month at the time. 109 The cooks’ pay-plus-board was also better than the $31 monthly wage of the Chinese railroad workers, 110 who often had to pay for their food and board.

Service work also constituted an important lifeline for the entire Chinese community to sustain the horrendous assaults of anti-Chinese forces, whose goal was “not only to restrict Chinese immigration, but to expel the Chinese from the country.” 111

Finally, in spite of the enormous limitation the Chinese faced in upward so- cial mobility, a number of individual service workers did move on to become small business owners. After he settled in San Diego, Ah Quin started his own retail business, as did Lee Chew, who opened a laundry shop in Chicago and increased his capital to $2,500 in three years before he went to Detroit. Com-

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 63

pared with the previous two cases, John Nipson’s experience is more unusual and colorful. Known among the Chinese as Ah Sing, he spent much of his time before the 1850s as a steward on oceangoing ships and mastered English. He was apparently fl uent in French because he reportedly served as steward to the exiled French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, on St. Helena Island in 1815. 112 In 1856, the sixty-two-year-old Nipson had turned himself into a merchant in im- port and retail.

In 1960, a noted scholar of Chinese America appeared to suggest that Amer- ica’s negative image of China and the Chinese was related to the Chinese pres- ence on the West Coast. 113 It is a sentiment that more than one well-educated Chinese immigrant expressed: those Chinese who held lowly jobs as cooks, ser- vants, and laundrymen caused American society to look down on all Chinese, but I have found no evidence to support that claim. The immigrants’ concentra- tion in less desirable occupations refl ected only the preexisting conditions: the huge economic gap between China and the United States, and the intense anti- Chinese prejudice in American society. Because of the personal nature of their work, cooks and other service workers actually gave many whites their fi rst op- portunity to interact with the Chinese and raise their awareness of Chinese cul- ture. Contrary to the prevailing view in political and legal discourses that the Chinese were not trustworthy, most white employers came to the conclusion that the Chinese were honest and reliable. A number of them, including the Roths, became deeply interested in Chinese art and porcelains, directly and indirectly because of the infl uence of their Chinese domestic workers.

However, Chinese food was not among the things that Chinese domestic cooks introduced to their employers. “The Chinese adopted Western dishes much faster than whites accepted Chinese food,” writes the historian Liping Zhu. 114 Chinese cooks’ deft mastery of Western cooking explains their popularity with the white middle class. Overland magazine noted in 1869 that “our Chinese cooks imitate the American style with a painful accuracy.” Chinese domestic workers continued non-Chinese cooking early in the twentieth century. In the hotel run by James Beard’s mother in Portland, Oregon, its Chinese cooking staff mastered French cooking “technique and style.” 115

In the nineteenth century, those Chinese who could “do fi rst-class French cooking” were deemed “high-tuned” servants. 116 Coming to the United States with limited experience in cooking, not to mention Western cooking, they quickly learned the trade by necessity. Many did so from their employers, who often talked about teaching their Chinese cooks how to make certain foods. Lee

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64 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

Gumbo

Serves 6

Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese domestic servants like Ah Quin

cooked non-Chinese dishes for their Anglo employers. I have not found evidence that

they cooked gumbo, but it is one of the non-Chinese dishes that I have come to love in

America. The recipe is easy and convenient to cook at home, especially for those “ser-

vantless American” households. *

3 lb rotisserie chicken

1 tsp chopped fresh parsley

2 bay leaves

4 garlic cloves, chopped

½ cup vegetable oil

½ cup fl our

½ lb andouille sausage, chopped

1 medium yellow onion, chopped

1 yellow bell pepper, chopped

1 cup chopped celery

1 tsp cayenne pepper

½ tsp salt

dash of black pepper

8 oz okra

Before you leave for work, boil the chicken with the parsley, bay leaves, and

2 garlic cloves in 6 cups of water in a stainless-steel thermal vacuum cooking

pot. Turn off the heat and immediately place the pot in the vacuum fl ask.

Take the pot out when you return from work and remove the chicken from

the pot. Discard the bones, but save the broth. Coarsely chop the breast and

leg meat into 1-inch cubes.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan and add the fl our to make a roux. Stir until

the roux turns dark brown. In a stockpot, sauté the sausage, and add the on-

ion, bell pepper, and celery and cook until soft. Add 2 garlic cloves and stir

2 for minutes. Sprinkle in the cayenne pepper. Add 4 cups (or as much as you

prefer) chicken broth from the pot in the vacuum fl ask. Add the chicken

cubes and the roux, simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, and season with salt and

black pepper. Add the okra, turn to low heat after the soup boils, and simmer

for about 10 minutes.

* Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (New York: Knopf, 2004), 1:xxv.

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 65

Chew learned “how to cook” from the lady of the fi rst household where he worked. 117 Another important but seldom discussed source is cookbooks, which some Chinese like Ah Quin used.

In his diary, Ah Quin inserted four pages of recipes, all for Western dishes, and the ingredients include beef, wheat fl our, milk, butter, sugar, salmon, and potato, which “the American deemed . . . indispensable to a meal,” as a nine- teenth-century commentator put it. 118 We can make an educated guess that these recipes came from cookbooks. Ah Quin did not mention their origins; and his Cantonese-based, idiosyncratic translation renders the meaning of some of the handwritten words illegible, making it diffi cult to pinpoint the sources that he consulted. But we know for sure that Ah Quin read English-language cookbooks because of his language ability. 119 Others unable to read English, however, could resort to translations of Western recipes and cookbooks. One of them was pub- lished in 1910 in Chinese San Francisco.

N a v i g at i n g t h e N e w W o r l d

Cui Tongyue’s Hua Ying Chu Shu Da Quan ( Chinese – English Comprehensive Cook- book ) is not an ordinary cookbook but an extensive multifaceted volume that includes 344 pages of recipes, a bilingual multitopic English-language conver- sational handbook, and a glossary of food words. It is a vital source of knowl- edge on Western cooking as well as a cultural guide to help Chinese cooks navi- gate the New World. This encyclopedic publication is testimony to the continued importance of the cooking job for Chinese immigrants in the early twentieth century, and it also opens a window into the life of the Chinese cook.

The handbook contains a long list of English conversational sentences ren- dered into Chinese. Focused on simulated dialogues with white employers, the fi rst section includes sentences like “Are you a cook?” “ Yes,” and “Where was your last situation? In a hotel or restaurant?” “No, it was in a private family.” This guide taught the readers not only survival skills but also negotiation tech- niques: “What were you paid per month?” “Twenty-fi ve dollars.” “That is not enough for me.” “How much do you want?” “Forty-fi ve dollars.” 120 Clearly, the autonomy and assertiveness of Chinese cooks that we noted earlier were not merely individual behaviors but refl ected a collective strategy and mentality consciously cultivated in the community.

Besides food preparation, Chinese cooks performed other duties, as we can tell from sentences in the section on lunch:

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66 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

Sweep the bedroom.

Change the bed linen.

Pull up the window blind.

We can also picture how a middle-class family got a taste of the lifestyle of the upper class by ordering its Chinese cook to

Bring me a box of cigars.

Take a piece of cloth to dust the piano.

Carry the rocking chair to the library.

Bring me a newspaper from the writing desk.

Take the order down to Mr. J’s Grocery Store.

And one more cup of tea.

The “Travel on a Railroad” and “Travel on a Steamship” sections illustrate the itinerary nature of a cook’s existence. The places that appeared in these two sections included big cities like San Francisco, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Hong Kong as well as smaller paces like Ogden, Utah, showing how widely dispersed Chinese cooks had become. 121

It is also notable that while some of the English sentences were rendered into Chinese according to their meaning, all of them were transliterated based on how they sounded in Cantonese. In other words, the Cantonese-speaking cooks with little English skills could just mimic the sound. It was a practical solution to a daily challenge for both the itinerant immigrants and the English-speaking Americans who interacted with them. In response to such a challenge, several bilingual handbooks had already appeared in the late nineteenth century and were readily available. In fact, one could even fi nd a Chinese-language news- paper advertisement for such a book. 122

One of the earliest books was compiled by a teacher named Benoni Lanctot; his Chinese and English Phrase Book saw its second edition in 1867. Intended to help English speakers communicate with Cantonese-speaking immigrants, this 113-page book provides translations of basic English words and sentences as well as their translations based on Cantonese pronunciation.

Reminiscent of titles like Gardening Spanish , which today’s suburban Ameri- cans can get in print and audio format for communicating with their Mexican gardeners, Chinese and English Phrase Book has a chapter titled “Dialogue on Get- ting a China Boy.” 123 In it, readers without knowledge of the Chinese language could learn to ask questions in Cantonese like “Can you cook?” and “Can you

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 67

wash?” Middle-class Americans with upper-class aspirations could learn to give such orders in Chinese: “Bring me some hot water,” “Make some tea,” “Brush my coat,” “Make some soup,” or “Buy a piece of good beef.” The author considered all these “familiar sentences,” suggesting that many Anglos must have used such commands frequently. 124 With other sections that cover topics clearly related to the work of servants and cooks, such as names of extensive household items and foods, this made a useful manual for those who had Chinese domestic help.

Compiled by “Wong Sam” in 1875, An English – Chinese Phrase Book was one of the earliest bilingual handbooks intended for the Chinese. It is not diffi cult to imagine the popularity of this book, which Wells Fargo printed and placed copies in its 130 offi ces throughout the American West. 125 It offered basic English sentences, each with Chinese translations, on miscellaneous topics ranging from American socioeconomic conditions and legal systems to travel and work. Although not a primary subject, kitchen work was covered in sen- tences like “Put the butter in the cupboard” and “Empty the sugar into the milk-pan.” 126

Chinese service workers, especially those on the East Coast, would fi nd sim- ilar information in another publication, Thomas Lathrop Stedman and K. P. Lee’s Chinese and English Phrase Book in the Canton Dialect , published in New York in 1888. 127 Compared with Wong Sam’s book, it is more structured and contains more comprehensive subjects. Organized into individual lessons, the subjects include such common topics as “The Weather,” “The Seasons,” and “The Time.” Most of the subjects are simulated situations that Chinese immigrants were likely to encounter, such as “A Social Visit,” “At a Police Station, “At Court,” “A General Clothing Store,” “With a Lawyer,” “With a Physician,” and “At the Bank.” The sentences in the two sections of “Travel on the Railroad” and “Travel on a Steamship” give us a clear idea about the physical mobility of the Chinese.

Three sequential situations concerning the Chinese laundry business are covered in three lessons. Lesson 17 is about renting store space for a laundry; Lesson 19 deals with “A Customer in a Laundry”; Lesson 20 contains sentences for dealing with the “Loss of a Laundry Ticket.” In Chinese transliteration, the handbook taught Chinese laundrymen how to say no to non-Chinese customers who had lost the laundry ticket: “Then I can’t let you have your clothes.” This policy was so widely adopted that the phrase “no tickee no washee” (and its vari- ations) became proverbial and eventually found its way into movie titles (Ed- mond F. Stratton’s No Tickee, No Washee , 1915; and Henry D. Bailey’s No Tickee No Shirtee , 1921) and Archer Taylor’s book The Proverb (1931). 128 This kind of deroga- tive slur many Chinese still fi nd offensive, but it must have also refl ected the

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68 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

frustration that many white customers felt at the fi rmness of the Chinese in up- holding the rules of their shops. 129

Five additional lessons deal with matters that would concern Chinese cooks. The beginning of Lesson 27, “Hiring Out as a Cook,” gives us a sketch of young Chinese job hunters, knocking on doors in white neighborhoods fol- lowing the tips from their countrymen: “Does Mrs. Brown live here?” “I hear she wants a Chinese cook.” 130 The subsequent conversation reveals some of the expectations that the white employer had for the prospective cook: previous experience as a family cook, excellent references, the ability to make good pas- try and dessert, being punctual in having the meals ready. Sentences in Lesson 28, “Duties of a Waiter,” also spell out such expectations: “Your hours will be from seven in the morning to nine at night;” “Do you drink? for if you do, I don’t want you.” 131

The remaining three food lessons contain sentences for shopping at grocery stores and meat and fi sh markets, and were clearly for Chinese cooks working for non-Chinese employers. The reason is clear: few Chinese men would fi nd it necessary to memorize English phrases to do food shopping for their individual consumption. They certainly did not have to buy two bushels of sweet potatoes or fi ve pounds of macaroni or four pounds of lamb chops at a time for their personal use. 132

Such sources give us a glimpse into the life of Chinese cooks and servants, who themselves seldom had the time or education to document their experi- ences, but indirect sources like these still leave many questions unanswered. For example, they do not tell us how Chinese cooks felt about having to make Western foods for Anglo employers. Some Chinese American elites expressed such feelings, though. For Cui Tongyue, the editor of the Chinese – English Com- prehensive Cookbook and a man deeply proud of China’s culinary traditions, Chi- nese men cooking American food in order to make a living was a bitter fact that refl ected the geopolitical reality of the time and America’s racism. It was caused by, in his words, “the weakness of our motherland [that] forces us to migrate overseas.” 133 It was also because in the United States, he wrote resentfully, the Chinese were excluded from the better opportunities and “only the occupation of Western cooking was available for the Chinese to make a living.”

Cui Tongyue compiled the volume in order to make sure that the Chinese would keep their advantage in this trade as cooks of Western food in the future. But by the time he was writing, Chinese food had already quietly but surely made an indelible mark on the American palate.

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C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E 69

The development of Chinese food in America’s consumer market is a continu- ation and extension of the historical role of Chinese immigrants as service work- ers. The experience in private kitchens, furthermore, prepared many for entry into the restaurant business. For example, after leaving the Russell Triunfo Ranch, one of the family’s Chinese cooks opened his own restaurant in Chicago. 134 After returning to the family restaurant business in Hanford, California, in Janu- ary 1957, Richard Wing (George Marshall’s former personal cook) expanded his family’s Imperial Dynasty into a famous restaurant that served French-infl uenced food. Its French fl avor remained distinctively clear on the menu that its staff gra- ciously gave me in 2003 with such dishes as Escargots à la Bourguignonne. Most other Chinese who entered the restaurant business in the twentieth century, how- ever, did so in more urban areas and cooked Chinese food.

The rise of Chinese restaurants was part of the story of immigrants and minori- ties laboring to serve the expanding appetite for a more leisurely life style in an emerging empire of consumption. But the socioeconomic interpretation of Chi- nese food’s popularity still has another question to answer: Why have other marginalized immigrant groups, who also perform service jobs, not brought their food to national prominence? One such group are the Filipinos, whose profi le bears striking similarities to that of the Chinese. By 1980, they and the Chinese had become the two largest Asian communities in the United States, 135 and the two groups’ per capita income levels were also comparable ($14,876 for Chinese, and $13,616 for Filipinos), according to the 1990 census. 136 More im- portant, Filipino immigration, which started in the early twentieth century, also represented a fl ow of labor. Like the Chinese, Filipino immigrant labor had long remained predominantly male. And a signifi cant number of them worked as stewards in the U.S. Navy, performing cooking duties—a duty that some Filipinos still carry out. 137

Nonetheless, Filipinos have not put their food on the American gastronomical map. Ronnie Alejandro, a well-known Filipino American chef who has written extensively on Filipino cooking, remarked, “The Philippine cuisine, actually, has never been formally introduced so to speak.” 138 In an article published in New York–based Filipino Reporter in 1994, Edmund M. Silvestre noted, “The Philippine cuisine is still very much out of the ethnic food race and will prob- ably remain so beyond the turn of the century.” His pessimistic projection about Filipino food has remained true. One contributing factor, indentifi ed by Silvestre, is “a lack of restaurant tradition among Filipinos.” 139

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70 C H I N E S E C O O K S A S S T E W A R D S O F E M P I R E

A comparison between the historical experiences of the Filipinos and the Chinese reveals another signifi cant difference: the relative dearth of physical Filipino settlements. While the extent to which this led to the invisibility of Filipino food remains to be examined more precisely, Chinatowns have clearly played indispensable roles in the development of American Chinese food.

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