Of the Jewish-Chinese exchange, Chen reflects on his relationship with Jewish Americans through food, in dialogue with a historical survey of the Jewish “love affair” for the cuisine. Chen provisionally highlights the African American connection through chop suey and mutual racial violence, but indicates that this encounter requires further study (chap. 5, 100).Īmerican Chinese food-as it developed according to the sensory and cultural encounters constitutive of the migrant experience-would take shape from interethnic encounters.

In explaining the rise of Chinese restaurants, Chen argues that Chinatown tourism-as a site of both abjection and fascination-set the tone for the Orientalist relationship between white consumers and Chinese laborers that would foreground the nature of Chinese restaurants and their popularity (chap. The arrival of Chinese food into the West Coast exemplified what would define the specific cultural node that Chinese cooks occupied: their handiwork glorified and their hands demonized (chap. Chinese cooks are then situated as constitutive of America’s empire-making, catering to the “needs of empire” through domestic service (chap. Chen contends that Chinese American food is “empire food,” permeating the fabric of American foodways by means of domestic consumption and imperial expansion, resulting in the cuisine’s ubiquity and affordability (chap.

In the first two chapters, he deconstructs provisional reasons for Chinese food’s popularity, especially the optimism of Chinese food’s gastronomic merit and theories of cultural transnationalization (chap. In exploring the collusion of these two critical components of the cuisine’s formation, Chen begins with a search for the factors that might account for the “quiet but revolutionary change that enriched America’s palate” (1). Local community dynamics are principal characters in Chen’s work, and his object of study is, perhaps, the most locally experienced subject of all: food.Īmerican Chinese food is the product of the interlocution between Chinese cooking and American consumption. The fine eye to local studies is, refreshingly, not lost.

With scholarly background at the nexus of local and transnational Chinese American studies (particularly on San Francisco’s Chinese American history), Chen’s latest contribution to Asian American studies broadens his transnational and temporal scope to the entire spectrum of the community’s migration across the nation, from the Gold Rush to the present. Rejecting exclusively sensory claims to the cuisine’s proliferation, he shows how the popularity of Chinese cuisine stems from the growth of the United States as an empire, reaching across histories of nationalism, migration, labor, and enterprise. In clear, warm prose, Yong Chen offers a broad and welcoming look into the modern history of Chinese food in the United States. Hand in hand, critical works on food from all practitioners seek to explain the historical, cultural, and synesthetic dimensions of how, what, and why we eat.īut in some dazzling instances, food scholarship and public writing are wrought from the same hand. Scholars and public communicators alike dine together at the table of food studies, problematizing mythologies that are part and parcel of food’s affective and intellectual experience. The past decade saw the sprouts, then the fruits, and then the feasts of this emerging field. Wong’s second cousin, moved from Houston to Butte to help in Pekin’s kitchen, after losing his previous job to a pandemic-related layoff.The taproots of the culinary turn have dug deep into the rich aquifers of Asian American studies. “My dad wanted to show people this isn’t rich people’s food. His father rejected his suggestions to replace deli-style poultry used in the chicken chow mein, or the canned mushrooms used in many other dishes. He said he learned to cook “through osmosis,” having worked there from a young age. Tam, like his father, fills a number of roles at the restaurant, including chef. Wong’s childhood and that of his wife’s native Burma (now Myanmar). The menu evolved over the years, mixing elements of the Cantonese cooking of Mr.

Today’s menu includes dishes that date to the restaurant’s inception, including 16 variations each of chow mein and chop suey. Tam said the Pekin was one of more than a dozen restaurants that served an American variant of Chinese cuisine to local miners.

Johns chop suey