Chop Suey

This book began with my fi rst arrival in the New World from China in 1985. Now I fast-forward to 1997, when I returned to my homeland after a twelve- year odyssey in the United States. Reminding us that “home” helps individuals relate to the larger world, the scholar Aviezer Tucker writes: “Home is the re- fl ection of our subjectivity in the world.” 1 Indeed, my long-awaited homecom- ing not only brought back previous memories but also was a moment of new revelations about the meanings of Chinese food, the “home” that food signifi ed, and the geo-economic order in the modern Pacifi c world that predicated Amer- ica’s Chinese cuisine as well as my voyage to the United States.

In characterizing my New World journey, I have borrowed the title word of Homer’s epic. Food has served as a vital signifi er of identity in my American journey, as it did in the adventurous travels of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey . He referred to unfamiliar people, such as the “Lotus-Eaters,” “who live on a fl owering food,” in terms of their food habits. 2 Moreover, Odysseus har- bored an uncompromising desire to return to his beloved home on Ithaka, an island off the coast of Greece. Similarly, when I left China for the New World or, more precisely, the upstate New York college town of Ithaca, I had only one intention: to get my doctorate in American history at Cornell University and return home.

Remembrance of home is a universally perennial motif in the experiences of immigrants and travelers. Ah Quin dreamed about his parents back in Kaiping

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174 C O N C L U S I O N

County. 3 He never returned to settle in China before his sudden death in San Diego in 1914. Many early Chinese immigrants also dreamed of returning home to China. Even those who could not afford to realize this dream in their lifetime still wished to be buried in their native place, which is why shipping the dead back to China remained an important task of the Chinese American community for decades. An old Chinese saying poetically conveys this desire: “Falling leaves return to their roots.”

In the minds of these early Chinese immigrants and others, home repre- sented not only a physical location but the way things used to be in the pre- emigration world as well. While living in the United States, therefore, Chinese Americans also tried to re-create a physical and cultural space that they could call home. In doing so, they formed Chinatowns, transplanted and supported their cuisine, articulated the meaning of Chinese food, and affi rmed their iden- tity as Chinese Americans.

Finally returning to his homeland after being away for twenty years, Odysseus reclaimed his home when he destroyed the intruders. But coming back to my na- tive land, “home” became more elusive than ever before. No sooner had I stepped back on Chinese soil than I realized that “you can’t go home again,” the conclu- sion also reached by George Webber, the protagonist in Thomas Wolfe’s novel. 4

People have long associated the concept of home with a physical locus. As John Hollander notes, the English word “home” is derived from the Anglo-Saxon ham , meaning “village,” “town,” or “estate.” 5 Many early Chinese immigrants kept almost photographic memories of scenes around the village, where their ancestral home resided, such as the small creek with water fl owing in a leisurely way and shepherd boys singing joyfully on their way home. 6 Odysseus unwaveringly remembered his physical destination during his two decades of wandering, and even Wolfe’s Webber had a hometown to return to. But home for me no longer meant a particu- lar place. I did not return to the home of my childhood. My retired parents had moved from my native town to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. Located in one of the recently built apartment buildings in Wuchang District, their two-bed- room unit hardly fi t the image of home that I had longed for.

The country itself was also no longer the homeland of my youth. China had embarked on an unprecedented economic metamorphosis that promised to shatter the geo-economic conditions of our world. In a book published in 2005, Ted C. Fishman captures the astonishing pace and depth of the economic change that was under way in 1997: “No country has ever before made a better run at climbing every step of economic development all at once. . . . No country shocks the global economic hierarchy like China.” 7 Figure 7 shows the magni-

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C O N C L U S I O N 175

tude of this historic transformation of the Chinese economy, which would be- come the second largest in the world by 2011.

China’s economic takeoff was fast narrowing its economic gap with the United States, a gap that has been a fundamental feature in the relationship between the two countries, playing an important role in shaping the character of American Chinese food. In the cities I visited in 1997 during my trip, the landscape was way beyond my recognition. As an indication of the drastic phys- ical transformation under way, one-fi fth of all the world’s high-rise construc- tion cranes in operation were now located in Greater Shanghai. 8

Aside from a physical place, we also associate home with food. People often use the word “homemade” to describe the food that we cherish and fi nd famil- iar. This association between food and home is coded in the Chinese character for “home,” ( jia ). The upper part of the word, , represents a house, and the lower part, , a pig. 9 In other words, home is where we expect to fi nd nourish- ing, comforting, and familiar food.

Strolling on the streets of China’s fast-changing cities, however, I could not even smell the once homey aroma of food. New eateries, including KFC and McDonald’s, and often more upscale restaurants had replaced old food places. Back in 1985, there was no American fast food in China’s food market. To get a hamburger in Beijing at that time, one had to go to the few exclusive hotels that

f i g u r e 7 The grow th of the gross domestic product of China, 1980 –2004 . (National Bureau of

Statistics of China)

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176 C O N C L U S I O N

were off-limits to ordinary Chinese, and it cost my American friends Bruce and Sandra 8 yuan , or about one-third of a common worker’s monthly income, to buy my fi rst American hamburger in the Great Wall Hotel. The rapidly expand- ing presence of the Golden Arches and Colonel Sanders in urban China now epitomizes a country in drastic metamorphosis.

American fast food’s swift advance in China stands in sharp contrast to the development of Chinese food in America, which traveled on a long and winding road to mainstream America and consisted largely of small family operations. Backed by big capital, the Big Mac, by comparison, was an instant, spectacular success. The opening of China’s fi rst McDonald’s in Beijing on April 23, 1992, shattered the Moscow opening-day record, attracting some 40,000 Chinese customers to the 28,000-square-foot restaurant, which had twenty-nine cash- register stations to handle the fl ow of customers.

Chinese restaurants rose to serve cheap food largely to underprivileged American consumers. Coming to China a century later, however, American fast food became an important part of the lifestyle of young and affl uent consumers. In 1994, according to the anthropologist Yunxiang Yan, “a dinner at McDon- ald’s for a family of three normally cost one-sixth of a worker’s monthly salary.” 10 In 2004, a relative of mine, who worked at a local bank in Wuhan, spent almost one-fi fth of her monthly salary to take both our families to a KFC. In 1987, KFC was the fi rst American fast-food company to arrive in China, and it has been the most successful. 11 The number of its stores broke the one thousand mark in 2004 and exceeded four thousand in 2012, almost three times the num- ber of McDonald’s outlets in the country, making KFC the largest restaurant franchise in China. When the four thousandth KFC store opened its doors in the coastal city of Dalian on September 25, 2012, the restaurant was serving at least 700,000 Chinese customers daily, or more than 250 million a year.

As in the case of American Chinese food, the spread of American fast food in China is also a socioeconomic, rather than a gastronomic, story. In other words, its success bespeaks the global dominance of America as an empire of mass consump- tion more than the supremacy of its food. Since 1997, the power of the American empire of mass consumption has been ever more evident in China, where the de- sire to live like Americans continues to expand. Even the Chinese premier wanted every Chinese to be able to have half a quart of milk every day. 12 At the same time, the consumption appetites of the more affl uent consumers have made China’s real estate red hot and turned the country into the world’s largest automobile market in 2009. In terms of consumer desires and physical appearance, China increasingly looks more like America than the country where I grew up.

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