Chow Chop Suey by Anne Mendelson

Published in the Journal of American Ethnic History 37, no. 3 (Spring 2018): 118-120.

Chow Chop Suey: Food and the Chinese American Journey. By Anne Mendelson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. xx + 330 pp. Notes, glossary, bibliography, and index. $35 (cloth).

Anne Mendelson’s finely detailed examination of Chinese food in America contributes significant research to the growing body of work devoted to the topic. In particular, her focus on the history of Chinese cookbooks in America and on the difficulties of translating Chinese culinary and gastronomic principles for a Western audience provides novel insight into Chinese American studies and American culinary history alike.

Chow Chop Suey begins its journey in China’s Pearl River Delta, where many Chinese first mastered the art of Western cooking in service to American and European merchants and traders. Mendelson argues that at least some of these cooks who “were already familiar with Western appetites” must have been among the Chinese who landed in California during the Gold Rush, a fact that would help explain how so many of the early Chinese restaurants were able to skillfully execute menus composed of Chinese and Western dishes alike (p. 23).

As do other historians of Chinese American food history, Mendelson examines the virulence of anti-Chinese racism and the impact it had on Chinese communities. After the Chinese Exclusion Act, immigrants began to disperse throughout the country, often settling in rural locations without easy access to Chinese ingredients or to stoves equipped for wok cookery. As a result, restaurants began to offer hybrid dishes to clientele who would have had no previous exposure to Cantonese cookery. In doing so, Mendelson surmises, cooks “laid down a small but durable foundation of something quasi-Chinese in mainstream American society” (p. 137). The second half of Chow Chop Suey charts the enormous changes that took place within the Chinese American culinary landscape from the outset of World War II when Chinese diplomats and their cooks took up residence in Washington DC, up through the 1980s. In these sections Chow Chop Suey covers largely familiar terrain.

The book’s most original analysis can be found in Part II, where Mendelson traces the development of English language attempts to define Chinese cookery in ways that would make sense to a Western audience. In particular, Mendelson evaluates the quality of cookery instruction and the capacity (or incapacity, as the case may be) of writers to effectively capture the terms, techniques, and foundational principles of Chinese cuisine. Mendelson’s analysis spans from Wong Chin Foo’s article on “Chinese Cooking” that appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1884up through the publication of Florence Lin’s Complete Book of Chinese Noodles, Dumplings, and Breads in 1986.

As Mendelson shows, early instruction often illuminated seemingly unbreachable divides—linguistic, cultural, and culinary alike. For example, Chiu Wong Chan’s The Chinese Cook Book (1917) contained such awkward word choices as “octagon spicery” for star anise, “gray potatoes” for taro, and “Chinese sauce residue” for fermented yellow bean sauce. As far as cultural blunders, a cooking school instructor in 1906 cautioned her class that some Chinese restaurants served chop suey with a sweetened brown sauce in order to mask the taste of opium. And as late as 1972, the much lauded Chinese Cookbook by Craig Claiborne and Virginia Lee exhibited a “sloppiness about basic principles and procedures” that Mendelson describes as nothing short of “amazing” (220).

As Chow Chop Suey deftly illustrates, Americans, Chinese Americans, and Chinese alike faced enormous obstacles when attempting to translate Chinese cuisine—its principles, its ingredients, its cooking techniques, and its recipes— into the English language. Not surprisingly, the first truly successful English language Chinese cookbook would be written by a bilingual, bicultural, and exceptionally well-educated family. It would be skillfully shepherded through the publication process by none other than Pearl S. Buck.

By the 1930s, Buck had vaulted into literary stardom buoyed by America’s growing interest in China. After marrying her publisher, Richard J. Walsh, Buck would help make his publishing house, John Day, a renowned US publisher of books on Chinese culture. Most importantly for Chinese American food culture, Walsh and Buck published a cookbook that would become “the first English-language Chinese cookbook to benefit from linguistic awareness” (151). Authored by Dr. Buwei Yang Chao and translated by her daughter, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945) likewise benefited from considerable editing by Chao’s husband, Yuen Ren. One of the foremost intellectuals of his day, Yuen Ren taught at Harvard, Yale, and U. C. Berkeley, pioneered modern linguistics in China, and created the system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet, which was adopted by the Chinese government in 1928. He also coined the terms stir-fry and pot sticker while editing How to Cook and Eat in Chinese.

As Mendelson shows, the family endeavor resulted in a “breakthrough” accomplishment. Collaborating as a family enabled the Chaos “to discover the right language for communicating with non-Chinese cooks—to find sturdy, spirited English words for remote Chinese concepts as well as ingenious verbal bridges to the basically nonverbal business of cooking” (p. 164). According to Mendelson, Chao“had done about as much to make the unintelligible intelligible to English speakers as could be accomplished with language alone. But it hadn’t magically abolished the chasm between Chinese and Western ways of ‘seeing,’ ‘hearing,’ and otherwise comprehending either language or food” (p. 191). According to Mendelson, the chasm would not yet be bridged until the 1978 publication of Irene Kuo’s The Key to Chinese Cooking (1978), a book whose “patiently and intricately arranged opening chapters” would lift it “above any predecessor, and most successors” (p. 229).

By charting the highs and lows of Chinese cookbook publishing in the United States, Chow Chop Suey provides a nuanced and invaluable overview of America’s struggle to codify Chinese and Chinese American cooking in English. Overall, Mendelson maintains a compelling narrative that successfully enlivens a story close-to-overflowing with detail. At times, though, the book would benefit from a more cohesive structure and sharper editing. That said, Mendelson’s intense engagement with the topic and crisp, lively prose provide generous compensation for such quibbles.