This past spring, the oldest continuously operated family-owned Chinese restaurant in the United States served its last plate of chop suey. Pekin Noodle Parlor had been an institution in Butte, Montana’s Chinatown since 1911, long outlasting the town’s gold-rush boom, but according to its final, fifth-generation owner, it couldn’t survive changing attitudes toward dining out in the twenty-twenties. Whether or not COVID-influenced habits or delivery-app addiction are to blame, the Pekin’s closure constituted an occasion to reflect on the history of American Chinese food, and its rapid evolution into a distinct cuisine unto itself.
Take chop suey, which was advertised on the Pekin’s neon sign in lettering larger than the name of the restaurant itself. Often cited as an early “Chinese” dish actually invented by Chinese immigrants in the United States, it may have a certain basis in the tsap seui eaten in Guangdong province from which many of them had come.
But even there, it amounted to a technique for throwing together a hodgepodge of leftovers in a palatable manner; only with its Americanization did it acquire a distinct set of flavors and textures. A similar process seems to have produced General Tso’s chicken, broccoli beef, lo mein, and all the other dishes that the movies have convinced the world Americans eat directly from wire-handled paper boxes.
Whatever Hollywood’s tendency to exaggerate, the popularity of domestic Chinese food is real. According to the Business Insider video just above, Chinese restaurants outnumber even McDonald’s franchises in the U.S. How they reached that point owes more than a little to immigration, as anyone would expect, but also, less obviously, to restrictions on immigration. “Anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in America in the early 20th century — and had been since the latter half of the 19th century, when as many as 300,000 Chinese miners, farmers, railroad and factory workers came to the U.S.,” writes NPR’s Maria Godoy. The negative reaction to that influx underlay the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Immigration Act of 1917, with its “Asiatic Barred Zone”; and the Immigration Act of 1924, which introduced a national-origin quota system.
Despite the ostensibly severe restriction on Chinese immigration per se, the law allowed that “some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list. Voila! A restaurant boom was born.” Ditching their traditional businesses like laundries, Chinese in the U.S. would “pool their money to start luxury ‘chop suey palaces,’ then each investor would take turns running the joint for a year or 18 months” in order to earn merchant status. What sustained it all was the increasingly insatiable American demand for the food these immigrants had perfected, from chop suey to kung pao chicken to moo goo gai pan and beyond. The story neatly arrives at an American-style moral: where there’s a will, there’s a way — or rather, yǒu zhì zhě, shì jìng chéng.
Related content:
The 63 Cuisines of China Explained in 40 Minutes: A Complete Primer
A Brief History of Dumplings: An Animated Introduction
Colorful Animation Visualizes 200 Years of Immigration to the U.S. (1820-Present)
Bob Dylan Potato Chips, Anyone?: What They’re Snacking on in China
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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