Image from The Search for General Tso

Why is Chinese food in America so different from what we see in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong? The film, The Search of General Tso, provides an insight to this phenomenon as it traces the history of a dish particularly popular with the Americans — General Tso Chicken. The film brings its audience to Hunan, China where the namesake is from, and to Taiwan to locate the creator of those sweet-spicy deep fried chicken. What at first looks like a superficial quest to ascertain the ownership of a dish turns out to be a bigger story about Chinese American history.

Since the late 19th century, Chinese labours in the west coast experienced severe social and economic discriminations. Many Chinese Americans are in the laundry and restaurant businesses today because those were the only jobs that the white Americans wouldn’t do and breaking into those industries required little capital and English. Despite hating the Chinese, whom they previously accused of monopolising industries and later, during the Cold War, for essentially being Chinese like Chairman Mao, Americans loved Chinese food. The American Jews (and the Christians who happen to hate spending time with their family) ritualistically order Chinese takeout during Christmas; in Sex and the City, Miranda has a Chinese take-out on her speed dial, and Carrie dates Mr Big in a Chinese restaurant. Chinese food in America is for special occasion and for everyday meals.

Winning a nod from a largely unwelcoming society would not have been possible if the Chinese in America had not cooked what the dominant population liked, for example, sweetness. Alterations of any cuisines, often seen as a betrayal to long standing cultures, have frequently been dissed, but as this film rightly points out, General Tso Chicken and the rest of Chinese American cuisine are testimonies to the Chinese’s resilience and adaptability. Chinese American cuisine is not bastardised Chinese food but another of its renditions (along with Southeast Asian Chinese or Taiwanese food) that reflect the unique social and cultural conditions in which the food producers live.

(image from School of Visual Art’s Container List)

The items found in New York City’s Chinese groceries today, I can imagine, are baffling to Chinese and non-Chinese alike. What is one to do with a whole packet of duck tongues, black fungus, and dried bean curd sticks? (Answer: braise it, stir-fry it, and stew it, respectively) The very same items in the 1970s, a time when Chinese and all things about them were very much considered exotic, would have been deemed mysterious, or even dangerous, and required a caption to go along for the uninitiated. Perhaps seeing a need there, Milton Glaser, the man behind the overly adapted I love New York logo, created a chart-like poster to guide one through a Chinatown grocery. It explained items like preserved celery cabbage, thousand-year eggs, and even provided instructions for calculating with an abacus.

Commissioned by the International Design Conference, the poster was created in 1972—the same year Nixon went to China after decades of hostility and distrust between the two nations. Then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou En Lai hosted a meal in Nixon’s honour and the live broadcast sparked off an explosion of interest in Chinese food. Prior to that, during the Cold War, communist and Chinese were synonymous to the Americans and so was their hatred towards them. Therefore, only in 1972 and the subsequent years would Glaser’s poster be of use to the mainstream Americans.

I have always wondered why in my family, it is my father and my grandfather who cook. Now, we are not Americans, we are Singaporean Chinese, but like the story of many Chinese in the United States, my grandfather and his kinsmen from South China sought jobs in a foreign land. Women didn’t tag along, so the men cooked for themselves.

I wondered if this was the case for the American Chinese. Indeed, this was what sociologist Rose Hum Lee observed in her 1956 study on the marital relations of Chinese families in San Francisco. She noted that the husbands brought home groceries and taught their wives cooking. This was unthinkable in a patriarchal Chinese society.

Well, the men in America were no typical Chinese. They came to the United States in their youth and reached adulthood without too much womanly concern for their welfare, until the US government loosened its grip on Chinese immigration in 1947. Prior to that, the Chinese were the most hated community in the United States, because of reasons illustrated in the following picture. They were perceived as economic enemies who monopolized the industries, leaving the white men jobless. The results were institutionalized discriminations that I argue attributed to the egalitarian division of labor in Chinese’s marital homes as observed by Lee.

A grotesque octopus monster (left) working tirelessly in every industry, leaving the white men (right) jobless. (The Wasp, March 3, 1882 illustration from Yellow Peril!)

In 1882, United States enacted the Exclusion Act to restrict Chinese immigration to the United States. Prior to that, the Chinese community was already a predominantly male society because Chinese female immigrants were thought to be prostitutes, and therefore denied entry. Married Chinese men had little chance to reunite with their wives, while the bachelors could not start a family. Because these men could not demonstrate heterosexual norms, there were doubts on their sexuality. The early Chinese immigrants in the United States sustained the image of lesser men.

This feminine stereotype was reinforced by the economic restrictions imposed on these immigrants. White laborers who felt threatened by the competition from Chinese workers protested against enterprises that employed the Chinese in preference to whites. Violent anti-Chinese riots forced the Chinese into low-end wage labor in restaurants, laundries, and garment factories. Since cooking, washing and sewing had prevalently been women’s work, the Chinese men in these professions were thought to be “belonging to a feminized race.”

Racist stereotypes of Chinese men found their way into trade cards. The following image is one of the many that feminized these men. Notice the laundrymen had rosy cheeks and lips, as if they had put on make up. They also have long and delicate fingers like women’s.

Chinese laundrymen with rosy cheeks and delicate fingers like women’s. (Courtesy of Anderson Gallery, Drake University)

In the 1900, union leaders called for the preservation of “racial purity” and “western civilization” to spark anti-Asian legislation. They succeeded. American citizenship was granted exclusively to white males up until 1870, after which men of African descent could become naturalized, but Asian men were denied US citizenship up to 1952. Because the masculinity of a citizen was first inseparable from his whiteness, as the state denied the Chinese citizenship, it formally excluded them from the institutional and social definitions of maleness.

I argue that the Chinese men’s immigration to the United States produced what Raewyn Connell called a “contradiction within masculinity.” Hegemonic masculinity guaranteed Chinese men a dominant social position within their community, but subordinated their manhood to the white American males. To hang on to their masculinity and legitimize their professions, the Chinese reconfigured a manhood that was non-sexist and non-patriarchal. Lee’s observation that the “husbands enjoyed their protective roles and not a few declared they gained satisfaction in being accorded status,” proves that the men had not been strip of their manhood, but conceived a modernized gender relation.

Additionally, these men developed masculinity in an all-male institution that presented domestic cooking as a task appropriate for men. The 19th and early 20th century Chinese immigrants, like the men we see in the picture below, prepared their own meals. Men raised in such environment would consequently think it is normal to hold the cleaver at home.

Chinese men in 1900 San Francisco preparing their meals during the Bubonic Plague (Harper’s Weekly 1900 illustration from The Coming Man)

The wives in Lee’s study on other hand, grew up in families that received financial support from their fathers and brothers who were working in the United States. Academics coined married women who were left behind in China the “separated wives”. Past literature show that the separated wives assumed total family governance during the prolong absence of their husbands. Having been raised by separated wives, I argue that the women in Lee’s study expected the same independence and power in their own marital homes.

When these women were finally permitted entry to the United States, they too were implicated by the restrictions imposed on their husbands. Because the standard of living in the urbanized society was high, and Chinese men were banished from employment in government and private sectors, the wives had to supplement their husbands’ income. Newly arrived Chinese women typically worked in restaurants and sweatshops for long hours, leaving them little time to fulfill their domestic responsibilities. The need to re-divide the household chores between men and their wives, coupled with their reconstructed gender expectations, would ultimately contribute to the unusual kitchen dynamics Lee observed.

In the comments section of the announcement published on BU Today, a news and information website managed by the university’s marketing and communications office, a student named Phyllis wrote, “I am from Beijing, China. The sad thing about this news is that none of the new added food item I have eaten or even heard of when I was in China… It is still American-Chinese food.”

Adding new Chinese dishes was part of BU’s effort to retain the Chinese students in campus housing after the mandatory stay period in freshman year. While 75 percent of American and non-Chinese students return to campus housing in their sophomore year, less than half of Chinese students do so, according to BU Today.

Other BU students from China and Taiwan expressed a similar sentiment. Most found dishes like “Sichuan chili chicken and eggplant, sticky rice”, “pho chicken bowl, ramen noodles” and “soy caramel beef lettuce wrap, glass noodle salad” perplexing. “Caramel beef?” said Jiaan Yu, a sophomore from Nanjing. She frowned and pulled back her head as she read the list of dishes. “Seriously these are Chinese food?”

The university’s particular interest in the Chinese students was also a reaction to their burgeoning population in recent years. China was the biggest single-source country of BU’s overseas students in 2013, representing 35 percent of the university’s international student body. Taiwanese students, comprising four percent, was the fourth largest foreign contingent.

BU is one of the many universities across the United States that are becoming more ethnic aware and responsive about varying student needs, according to John-Eng Wong, visiting scholar in ethnic studies at Brown University’s Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity. At the University of California Santa Barbara, there are various ethnicities represented in the cafeteria menu. The Rhode Island School of Design added Korean dishes to cater to its significant Korean student population. “I would say that it’s a good thing that universities try to respond to the evolving character of their student bodies. It wasn’t always that way,” said Wang.

But BU’s grasp of Chinese food falls short of its desire to win over the Chinese population.

Ten Chinese students interviewed said they wouldn’t call the 15 dishes Chinese. Among them, “steamed orange white fish with baby bak choy and rice noodles” received the most objections. “No, we don’t use fruits in our cooking, maybe only pineapple,” said Qi Suo, president of the university’s Chinese Student Association and a senior from Beijing. “Steamed orange white fish? I don’t think any part in China cooks fish with orange,” said sophomore Jing Zhen Zhang, another Beijing native.

In addition to inaccurate cooking techniques, the dishes also incorporated Japanese and Vietnamese ingredients, such as udon and pho. Americans always mix various Asian elements, said Zhang. “Chinese food here is fusion,” He said. Shanghaiist, a China-based blog that publishes Chinese-related news and commentaries, picked up the story on BU Today and pointed out that the university had homogenized various Asian cuisines in the dishes. “Aside from lumping all Asian cuisines together,”said the website, “the 15 new Asian dishes on their menu seem just as bastardized as the aforementioned American-Asian food…”

To make matters worse, the dishes do not represent the regions of china where most of BU’s Chinese students are from. Huaiyan Wang, owner of Beijing Café, a northern Chinese restaurant at Commonwealth Avenue popular with local students, said that most of the dishes are Cantonese. “Bak choy, we never say that, we say napa. That is very typical Cantonese. Like hoisin, people from the north never use that. Egg noodles, people from the north never eat egg noodles,” she said.

The gravitation towards Cantonese cooking, also evident in Chinese restaurants across the United States, has a lot to do with the first large-scale Cantonese migration to the country, said Merry White, a BU anthropology professor. “But the food Chinese workers cooked for others was an invention. Chow mein, chop suey, and egg foo yung had antecedents in China but were invented here,” she said. Homogenizing various Asians and their cultures, White explained, is a propensity the Americans picked up from the British to mean “a geographical entity, a cultural form, a racial category, and a culinary template.”

But not all Chinese favor Cantonese cooking, said Wang. “I’m Chinese. When I stayed in Guangzhou, I got stomach upset. The food is good, they’re fresh. Just the way it’s cooked, and my stomach doesn’t like that.”

According to BU’s Chinese Student Association, most of its members are from Shanghai, Beijing, Sichuan, Nanjing, and Hangzhou. (Suo believes there is also substantial number of students from Guangzhou, but they tend not to join the association because they do not speak Mandarin, the language of most members.) Each of these cities has its characteristic cuisine. Zhang said that the Chinese food in America was too sweet for his liking. “I’m from northern China. Our food is salty and with heavier flavors,” he said.

Taiwanese food is an entirely different cuisine. “Because Taiwan was ruled by Japan for 50 years, Taiwanese cuisine is an amalgamation of Chinese and Japanese techniques. Taiwanese food is more light-handed with the seasonings compared to Chinese food in general,” said David Huang, president of BU’s Taiwanese Student Association. To illustrate the difference between Taiwanese and Cantonese cuisine, he added that Taiwanese’s preferred noodles are rice vermicelli, cellophane noodles, and rice flour noodles (also known as rat noodle because of its shape), none of which were included in the 15 dishes. Another Taiwanese student, Kevin Huang, said he hoped to see the iconic scallion pancake, salt and pepper chicken, and Taiwanese beef noodles in the university’s dining menu, but he might be disappointed.

“It’s very difficult for us as a dining service to meet the needs of every student on campus. The variety of food from the regions is so different. What’s available, how they cook, what they have had at home…” said Christopher Bee, BU dining services executive chef. “The cooking style is different as well. Our kitchens aren’t really equipped to move forward with high heat cooking, very rapid pace cooking.” All except three of the 15 dishes, Bee said, were developed for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, for which BU’s caterer, Aramark Holdings Corporation, was the official catering service provider.

That said, Bee emphasized that the 15 dishes were not a be-all end-all offering to the Chinese students. “This is new for us. We put this together to begin a process. The continuing development of this thing is what’s really important to us. As we do more research, as we speak to folks to get some feedback,” he said.

To get the ball rolling, White suggested, the university could refrain from blending various ethnic cuisines into one. “Just because there are Pan Asian, or fusion restaurants doesn’t give the kitchens a free hand to misname things. Since students will care. Why don’t they hire Chinese cooks to make ‘real’ dim sum, if they want Cantonese specialties? Or get a noodle chef to pull noodles?” she asked.

Then again, some students didn’t mind eating fusion dishes. Suo said she was open to all kinds of dishes because she “loves all Asian food”.

Shigang Zhu, a junior at the College of Arts and Sciences, said, “I can’t really distinguish authentic Chinese or Asian Chinese food. If the food tastes good, I’ll eat.”

*Written for Sheryl Julian’s food writing class at Boston University, where I am pursuing a MLA in Gastronomy.

The operatic sounds of boisterous voices, and rice bowls jingling as chopsticks dig in.

The ceramics clanging in the hands of acrobatic servers, among the familiar din of a Chinese restaurant

that comforts a lonely sojourner.