Taking Root: The Growth of Asian American Food Cultures

CHINESE AMERICAN FOOD CULTURE

Chinese Cuisine

Scholars and gastronomes have been reflecting on and documenting Chinese cuisine for well over 3000 years, yielding the codification of over 8000 recipes and what may be the largest list of edible foods in the world. The catalog of recipes and edible ingredients expanded over the millennia as wars, conquests, invasions, and trade introduced culinary innovations and foreign ingredients. Countless cooks and dieticians devoted their lives to feeding the myriad kings, emperors, lords, and overlords who ruled China. Over the millennia gastronomic reflection developed into a philosophical pursuit, drawing legendary minds to the task. None other than Confucius taught that the goal of cookery should be to achieve a harmonious balance, such that no single ingredient or flavor overwhelmed another. He likewise underscored the importance of color and texture, an emphasis that would play a fundamental role in the development of Chinese cuisine.

Some of the most revered foods in China, in fact, are valued for their texture. Such delicacies as birds’ nests, sharks fins, jellyfish, and sea cucumber have little flavor, yet are prized for their gelatinous quality. In addition to its focus on texture, Chinese cuisine stands out for its important role in medicine. In Chinese culture, a person’s daily diet determines health and longevity. Foods are classified according to their heating (yang) and cooling (yin) properties. A food’s caloric value, taste, and method of preparation each help determine its classification. Spicy and caloric foods are considered more heating, while bland, watery foods are considered cooling. For the healthy individual, meals entail a balance of yang and yin.

China’s devotion to culinary pleasure and long-held reverence for food as medicine stands in sharp contrast to the country’s long history of widespread drought, famine, and poverty. Upwards of 60 million have died of famine in China within the past 150 years, a fact that has contributed to Chinese mass migration to other Asian countries as well as to the United States.

Early Chinese Immigration

At least a half-century before Chinese food debuted in California in the mid-1800s, American merchants had been profiting from the trade of Chinese delicacies. Americans harvested and traded for some of China’s most prized edibles in order to feed America’s considerable appetite for black tea and fine silk. The first American ship to sail to China landed at Canton (the name Westerners gave the city Guangzhou) in 1784. Over the next fifty years, more than 1300 American ships would land in China, carrying merchandise that garnered high prices on the Chinese market, including spices and other delicacies revered by the Chinese for their health-giving properties. The ships carried with them ginseng roots that grew wild in New York’s Hudson Valley, dried sea cucumbers obtained from Pacific islanders in exchange for guns and gunpowder, and edible birds’ nests made of swiftlet saliva, which were harvested from Southeast Asian caves.

Canton itself served as the entry point for Western influence into China, which, in part, explains why such a large number of early Chinese immigrants to America hailed from the city and the surrounding province of Guangdong. These early immigrants fled their native country to escape a catastrophic combination of Western imperialism, political upheaval, crushing poverty, natural disasters, and religious persecution that blighted the province. Already suffering from overpopulation and poverty, Guangdong experienced even greater economic hardship after the Chinese lost the Opium War (1839-42) to Britain. At the end of the war, China was pressured to sign treaties that exacted heavy indemnities against the government. To help pay these indemnities, the government taxed the rural peasants, thereby exacerbating the widespread impoverishment of the region. Then in 1850, a massive civil war broke out in southern China, known as the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), which alone claimed 10 million lives.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the majority of Chinese migrants fled to Southeast Asia. With the discovery of gold in California in 1848, however, America became a prized destination. By 1860 over 40,000 men from Guangdong province had made their way to what became known among the Chinese as gum san, or Golden Mountain. Whereas the first immigrants arrived as free men, the majority of immigrants arriving in America after 1860 came as contract laborers destined to work in the mines or, after 1865, for the transcontinental railroad. The railroad project, which ended California’s isolation, employed around 10,000 Chinese at its peak. By 1877, around 200,000 Chinese had immigrated to the United States; 90 percent of these were men.

Nineteenth-Century American Chinese Food

Because the vast majority of Chinese arrived in the American West without their families, these early immigrants soon began to establish public dining houses called “chow chows,” which served Cantonese-style meals to suit the Chinese palate. These eateries identified themselves to the public by hanging yellow three-cornered flags with Chinese characters from their storefronts. Noodle houses, rice houses, and street carts served dishes made from local produce, seafood, and meat flavored with ingredients imported from China. Beginning in the 1850s, Chinese-run stores stocked their shelves with such items as pickled duck eggs, dried fish, sharks’ fins, rice, noodles, dried mushrooms, dried bean curd, bamboo shoots, sausages, and hams.

In addition to relying on such imported specialty goods, Chinese restaurants often housed hen coops for a ready supply of fresh poultry and purchased fresh produce and meat from local Chinese fishing villages and farms. Immigrants from the Pearl River Delta built fishing villages along California’s central coast, which not only supplied the local population with fresh seafood but also earned around $1 million a year shipping dried fish and shrimp back to China. Chinese tenant farmers grew asparagus, potatoes, onions, fruits, and nuts. Newly arrived Chinese immigrants also worked as vegetable peddlers, selling such produce as cucumbers, tomatoes, beans, and melons. Some vegetable peddlers worked routes that extended hundreds of miles, a distance they covered in horse-drawn carts. Other peddlers served local clientele, carrying their produce in baskets suspended from a bamboo pole that rested across their shoulders. Both short and long distance peddlers sold to Asian and white clientele alike. Beginning in the early 1870s, Chinese were hired as cheap labor by the Alaskan salmon canneries.

As with most new immigrants, Chinese arrivals were forced to work in jobs traditionally considered women’s work such as cooking and cleaning. As a result, many Chinese people were hired as domestics in middle class houses, where they learned the basic skills needed to open laundries, grocery stores, and restaurants. In the West, Chinese immigrants were preferred as domestics over the Irish, as they were considered more obedient and demanded less pay. As a result, many middle- and upper-class families were fed by Chinese cooks, who were expected to prepare Western, as opposed to Chinese, fare. Working as domestics, Chinese immigrants not only learned to speak English but also how to cook for the Western palate. Many domestics saved enough money to open their own businesses, thereby entering the realm of self-employment.

In addition to the immigrants who arrived on the West coast, around 46,000 Chinese migrated to Hawaii from the mid to the late nineteenth century. Hired by the sugar plantations, these early laborers complained about the lack of rice in their food rations, which consisted of taro, sweet potatoes, pork, and fish. By 1900, close to 6000 Chinese worked in rice cultivation, ensuring a steady supply of the grain for the growing number of Asian immigrants to the islands. In effect, Chinese immigrants helped create the diet of three-grain staples (taro, wheat, and rice) that characterizes Hawaiian food today.

To supplement their daily rations, laborers cultivated vegetable gardens and raised chickens, ducks, and pigs. As they did in California, enterprising Chinese immigrants peddled fish and produce as well as established shops where they sold rice cakes, dumplings, and imported goods from China. Unlike early immigrants to the mainland, who were legally barred from marrying non-Chinese women, many Chinese who worked on the islands married Hawaiian women.

Unlike the mass migration of Chinese to the West coast and Hawaii, immigrants entered the eastern United States in a slow but steady trickle. The first of these were Chinese sailors and merchants who visited between boat trips to and from China. Beginning in the mid-1800s, the occasional sailor or merchant put down roots, sometimes marrying an Irish or a German woman. By the 1880s, an estimated 7000 Chinese individuals had settled in Manhattan, many opening restaurants where Bohemians would dine.

The vast majority of these immigrants were men who either had families back in China or were unmarried. Many of the small number of Chinese women who migrated to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had been sold into prostitution. Suspecting all Chinese women of being prostitutes, the US government enacted laws beginning in 1875 that forbade most Chinese women from entering the country. As a result, unlike their European counterparts, the majority of male Chinese immigrants who had families could not send for their wives once they had established themselves. The laws targeted Chinese laborers in particular. The wives of individuals who could demonstrate themselves to be successful merchants, however, could join their husbands. Merchants only accounted for about 10 percent of the population in big cities and about 3 percent in rural areas and in small towns.

Without their wives or daughters, Chinese immigrants formed what are known as ‘bachelor societies’ within big city Chinatowns. Renowned for its opium dens, gambling parlors, and brothels as well as its restaurants, San Francisco’s Chinatown had begun to draw adventurous tourists from the East coast and Europe by the turn of the century. When the enclave was leveled by an earthquake in 1906 and burnt by the fires that followed, it was completely revitalized and marketed as a clean and safe destination. Tourist numbers skyrocketed and non-Asian locals began to cross into Chinatown, prompting Chinatowns across the nation to market themselves in order to draw outsiders. Some restaurant owners remodeled in order to project an “Oriental” image. They also began to craft menus and dishes that catered to the Western palate, beginning to develop what would eventually become Chinese American food. In the most Western-oriented establishments, forks were offered and the structure of the meal was altered. Soup became the first course as opposed to the last.

Anti-Chinese Violence in the Late Nineteenth Century

By the 1870s, anti-Chinese sentiment had risen to a frenzy, spurred in part by an economic downturn. Murder, arson, and forced expulsion prompted many Chinese to flee the western states for the eastern United States, Canada, Mexico, and even back to China. Chinese homes and businesses were burnt to the ground; Chinese were lynched, shot, and beaten to death. Anti-Chinese mobs forcibly expelled the inhabitants of Chinatowns in cities throughout the West including Santa Barbara, Oakland, San Jose, Sacramento, and Seattle. In Tacoma, Washington, Chinese were herded onto a boat and set adrift. In 1879, the Ninth Circuit Court of California ruled that Chinese immigrants were ineligible for citizenship because they were neither white nor black.

The Anti-Chinese frenzy culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act, which President Chester A. Arthur signed into law in 1882. The law barred Chinese immigration and naturalization. Excepted were merchants, teachers, students, and the personal servants of these immigrants. In 1886, Euro-Americans waged a boycott against Chinese manufacturers. As a direct result, Chinese were no longer able to sell any manufactured goods except ethnic products. Those entrepreneurs who survived the boycott shifted their focus onto ethnic foods such as tofu, soy sauce, and bean sprouts. As far back as 1860, California had begun to levy special taxes against Chinese fishermen as well as Chinese who worked in fisheries. Then in 1888, the Scott Act forbade Chinese who left the country temporarily from returning, so fishermen could no longer journey past the US coastline, or they faced deportation. In response to the mistreatment of Chinese in America and in protest over the Chinese Exclusion Act, China began to boycott American goods in 1905.

Because of violence and legislation targeted against the Chinese, their numbers declined from 118,746 to 85,202 between 1900 and 1920. Burgeoning anti-Chinese sentiment only served to concentrate the number of Chinese working in the restaurant industry. Forbidden to reunite with their wives and children or to marry white women, few Chinese immigrants had a wife at home to prepare their meals. As a result, they relied heavily on restaurants for daily sustenance. They had likewise been driven out of many of the occupations that had sustained them in the mid-nineteenth-century. As a result, Chinese immigrants resorted to self-employment out of sheer necessity. Chinese-owned grocery stores and restaurants, in turn, provided employment for other Chinese immigrants.

Chinese Restaurants in the United States

By the early 1900s, most large cities with Chinatowns had a selection of large restaurants with the facilities needed to serve banquets, meals that are prepared for large gatherings to celebrate special occasions. With the largest concentration of first-wave immigrants, San Francisco had three or four Chinese banquet restaurants by the 1870s. These banquet halls served traditional Chinese fare in rooms elaborately decorated with furnishings and art imported from China. Because early immigrants hailed from Guangdong province, banquet restaurants served the dishes native to this region. Unlike the economical and simple fare eaten on a daily basis, banquet meals were lavish affairs including such delicacies as fried shark’s fin, bird’s nest soup, and sea cucumbers. Many of the dishes were prepared using the recipes of Guangzhou’s finest chefs. Chinese businessmen would occasionally host Anglo-Americans at a banquet dinner, but, by and large, white men expressed distaste for traditional Chinese meals.

The finer restaurants themselves were typically three stories. The first floor housed the kitchen, through which customers would pass on their way to the second and third floor dining rooms.Owners of large restaurants imported this architecture from China, where kitchen entryways had developed centuries before, showcasing to patrons the cleanliness and order of the establishment as well as the quality of the meats and poultry, which were hung on display. The second floor housed the public dining rooms, where simpler, less expensive meals were served. The third floor was reserved for more elaborate banquets and dinner parties. Like most early restaurants, Chinese banquet halls catered to the ‘bachelor’ crowd. Not only was it considered improper for women to dine in public during this era, but few would have been around to do so even had it been allowed, as Chinese women were largely forbidden from migrating to the United States before the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1943.

Not surprisingly, Chinese immigrants who lived and worked within the boundaries of Chinatowns held onto their Chinese culinary traditions far longer than those who lived or worked outside of them. Late nineteenth-century immigrants who had the money to dine at a restaurant boasting a trained chef would have encountered light sauces, roasted and marinated pork, steamed and fried poultry, as well as the gourmet delicacies revered throughout China, including bird’s nest soup, sea cucumber, and sturgeon’s head.

The Chinese restaurant industry experienced a boom in the early nineteenth century, especially in such cities as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco where increasingly more non-Asians were drawn to Chinatowns. Those restaurants that wanted to please the Western palate began to serve heavier, sweeter, and more meat-centered dishes. Whereas most Chinese meals feature a wide variety of stir-fried, braised, and steamed vegetables with light sauces and a proportionately smaller amount of meat, Americans preferred deep-fried dishes and heavy sauces. They also boiled their vegetables for a considerable time as opposed to stir-frying them quickly in order to achieve a fresh, crisp texture. The translation of the Chinese spring roll into the egg roll eaten daily by millions of Americans demonstrates the Americanization of Chinese dishes. Whereas the Chinese spring roll is traditionally served as a light snack, the Chinese American egg roll is a heavy, often greasy appetizer served with syrupy sweet sauce. To please the Anglo-American palate, restaurants began to serve such dishes as chow mein and chop suey, both of which originated in China as a means of using leftovers.

Chow mein, or ch’ao min meaning fried noodles in Cantonese, is a noodle version of fried rice, which usually includes bamboo shoots, bean sprouts, pork and other leftover scraps. Another dish from Toisan, tsap seui (which means odds and ends), or chop suey, became so wildly popular in the United States that Chinese restaurants became known as chop suey houses and many restaurants responded to the craze by advertising themselves with large signs emblazoned with the words “Chop Suey.” The “leftovers” that went into Chinese American chop suey generally included bean sprouts, celery, onions, water chestnuts, green pepper and diced pork or chicken. In order to feed the nation’s hunger for the dish, two entrepreneurs founded the La Choy brand and began to manufacture and sell canned bean sprouts, “chop suey vegetable mix,” and, eventually, even soy sauce. By the 1930s Western diners had begun to feature variations of chop suey and chow mein on their menus, including the chop suey sandwich.

The loosening social strictures of the jazz era coincided with the “chop suey craze” that swept big cities throughout the nation, prompting some Chinese restaurateurs to incorporate music, dancing, and even floor shows into their restaurants. By 1924, Manhattan boasted fourteen “chop suey jazz” establishments along one stretch of Broadway. Chinese dinner clubs also proliferated in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of which, Shanghai Low, was featured in the 1947 film The Lady from Shanghai, starring Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles.

Because the Chinese Exclusion Act largely precluded Chinese immigration from 1882 until its revocation in 1943, Chinese American restaurants eventually began to stagnate. Without new immigrants to breath fresh air into restaurant kitchens, dishes became more standardized and Americanized. The light, healthy, succulent cooking of China had become heavily deep-fried and sweet, bearing little resemblance to traditional Chinese cuisine. By the 1950s restaurateurs had begun setting out to revitalize Chinese restaurant cookery. In San Francisco, Johnny Kan opened Kan’s restaurant in 1953, where he served such delicacies as Peking duck and bird’s nest soup, and in 1961 Cecilia Chang opened the Mandarin restaurant, which introduced many Americans to the traditional dishes of Hunan, Sichuan, and Peking. New York diners swooned over Emily Kwoh’s Mandarin House, which opened in 1958, and Shanghai-born Tsung Ting Wang’s Shun Lee Dynasty became the highest rated Chinese restaurant in the United States, earning 4 stars in 1969 from the New York Times dining critic Craig Claiborne.

JAPANESE AMERICAN FOOD CULTURE

Japanese Cuisine

Although elite Japanese were familiar with and often ate Western-style meals by the 1890s, the lower and middle classes would not be introduced to it for several more decades. Because of the economic upheaval of the Meiji era (1868-1912), the average Japanese household lived on a comparatively frugal diet, with boiled short grain rice serving as the staple food in most regions, providing well over half the calories that an individual consumed daily. In mountainous areas, where rice cultivation was difficult, millet was often mixed with rice or substituted for it altogether. Having been introduced as a food crop in the early 1700s, sweet potatoes served as a rice supplement in southern Japan. The number, variety, and substance of side dishes and soups served at a meal remained, and still remains, largely dependent on family income. Typically miso soup appears at breakfast. Lunch and dinner consist of rice, pickled vegetables, and a side dish featuring vegetables, tofu, or fish. Because of Buddhist beliefs and royal bans against eating meat (game proving the main exception), it was largely absent from the traditional Japanese diet. During the Meiji era, however, the Japanese government began to associate Western military prowess with heavy consumption of meat. In order to Westernize Japan and to strengthen its populace, the government began to encourage meat eating in the late nineteenth century. It would be well into the twentieth century before meat became a significant part of the Japanese diet, however. (Per capita annual consumption rose from 3 kilograms of meat in 1955 to over 28 kilograms in 1990.) Having eaten a diet without meat for hundreds of years, Japanese learned to rely on fish and tofu as their primary sources of protein and on vegetable oil rather than on animal fats for cooking.

The Japanese learned to preserve fish by salting it and wrapping it in rice, a process that pickles the flesh and prevents it from spoiling. This original form of sushi, or nare-zushi, was eaten only after the rice had been rinsed off. In the mid 1600s, vinegar was introduced into the process, which greatly shortened the fermentation period, thereby making the rice itself edible. As a result, sushi became a popular snack food. What we know of as sushi today, or nigiri-zushi (fresh fish served on rice), did not become part of the Japanese diet until the early nineteenth century. By mid-century sushi stalls had begun to proliferate throughout Tokyo (then called Edo) and peddlers traveled the streets with boxes of sushi on their backs. In addition to fermented fish, the Japanese diet also includes a variety of dried fish products. Bonito fish that has been fermented, dried, and smoked serves as an essential ingredient in dashi, the staple broth of Japanese cuisine.

In addition to preserved and fresh fish, side dishes consist of vegetables. Protein-rich soy beans, in particular, serve a foundational role in the Japanese diet. They are eaten fresh and also transformed into a range of products including tofu, natto (fermented soy beans), miso (fermented bean paste), yuba (tofu skins also known as dried bean curd), and shoyu (soy sauce). Other popular vegetables include seaweeds, daikon, burdock, eggplant, and kabocha squash.

In eastern Japan buckwheat noodles (soba) in broth have served as a popular lunch option since the early 1700s while wheat noodles (udon) are more common in western Japan. Ramen did not become a popular Japanese dish until Chinese immigration spiked in the early 1900s. As in the United States, Chinese immigrants opened restaurants and noodle shops, which served “la-mian” (pulled noodles). By the 1930s, the word had become ra-men in Japanese.

The Modernization of Japan and Early Immigration to the United States

The vast majority of early Japanese immigrants left their homeland due, in part, to Western imperialism and the effects it wrought on the political and economic climate of their nation. For over 200 years, Japan underwent a period of self-imposed isolation from the West, a period that ended in 1853 when Commodore Matthew Perry first muscled his way into Edo Bay with the threat of military reprisal should the Japanese fail to comply with his demand—namely that his fleet of American ships be allowed to peaceably anchor and that Japan open its doors to trade with the West.

Coerced like China to sign ‘unequal treaties’ that catered to the trade demands of the West, Japan underwent a period of radical modernization. Determined to avoid what they saw as China’s weak position in relation to the West and to buttress their nation’s political, economic, and military power, Japanese revolutionaries overturned the ruling Tokugawa shogunate in 1868, wresting control from the military in order to restore it to the emperor Meiji. During what became known as the Meiji era (1868-1912), Japan transformed itself from an agricultural economy into an industrial powerhouse, overhauling its legal, economic, and political systems as well as building a formidable navy and army in order to command respect from the West.

The Meiji Restoration marked an era of globalization in which many foreign foods were introduced into Japanese markets. Japan’s embrace of Western ways likewise led to the adoption of Western food and dining styles among the upper classes. Rather than usurping Japanese traditional dining altogether, however, the Western style of dining became a secondary option, one with which diplomats and well-heeled Japanese became culturally fluent. In order to educate themselves, Japanese began to pore over manuals in order to learn the intricacies of Western dining etiquette and cuisine. By 1890, the Japanese elite had mastered the art of Western dining, which differed radically from their own tradition. Whereas Japanese wore kimonos, dined with chopsticks, and sat on floor mats, Westerners wore suits and dresses, dined with forks and knives, and sat well above the ground in chairs. The Meiji aristocracy designated certain meals as Japanese and others as Western, thereby demonstrating a cultural fluency in both Eastern and Western ways.

In order to learn as much about Western culture as possible, Japan sponsored students to travel abroad to study in Europe, England, and the United States. As a result, the first Japanese to emigrate—albeit temporarily—to the United States were wealthy individuals who were well-educated in the art of Western dining. Between 1868 and 1900, the Meiji government sent around 900 of its brightest students to the United States, where they studied Western technology, science, law, politics, and culture. After a course of study, the students returned to Japan in order to educate their compatriots as well as to guide their nation in international development.

The modernization of Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century resulted in a contemporary diet that may be the world’s most multicultural. Initially, however, the process of modernization took a tremendous toll on the rural populace. In particular, over 300,000 farmers lost their land, unable to pay the high taxes levied by the Meiji government to help cover the tremendous cost of industrialization and militarization. The southwestern regions of Hiroshima, Kumamoto, Yamaguchi, and Fukuoka were especially hit by the economic hardship that swept the countryside. As a result, farmers from these regions migrated eagerly to the United States, accounting for roughly half the 142,000 Japanese immigrants who traveled to Hawaii between 1894 and 1908.

The growing impoverishment of the farming class coupled with the tremendous labor shortage on Hawaiian sugar plantations spurred Japan’s decision to allow its citizens to travel abroad, which they began to do legally for the first time in almost 250 years. Hawaii had begun widespread cultivation of sugar after the American Civil War in order to replace the devastated sugar industry of the Deep South. Initially relying on Chinese labor, Hawaiian sugar plantations experienced a labor crisis when the Chinese Exclusion Act passed in 1882, as the law barred Chinese immigration to the United States.

Immigration to Hawaii

In 1885, the Japanese government granted 600 citizens permission to emigrate to Hawaii. In order to recruit contract laborers, plantations paid for their voyage from Japan. By the time the United States passed the Asian Exclusion Act in 1924, the number of Japanese in Hawaii had reached 200,000. Although the majority of these Japanese immigrants arrived in Hawaii under a three-year contract to work on sugar plantations, others were hired by the fruit and vegetable plantations that exported their products to the mainland in order to feed the fast-growing population of the Western United States. Hawaiian farms produced huge quantities of potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, pumpkins, oranges, and pineapples.

Japanese immigrants soon began to dominate coffee production, rice farming, and the fishing industry. By 1914, they produced 80 percent of Hawaiian coffee and had taken over most of the rice farming from the Chinese. They had also revolutionized the fishing industry with the introduction of wooden-hulled sampans, boats that were especially well-suited for the ocean waters of Hawaii. Just as the Chinese had before them, Japanese merchants, tradesmen, and restaurateurs began to supply the growing immigrant population with the familiar foods of their homeland. By early 1900 dozens of Japanese-owned companies had begun to manufacture such essentials as tofu, soy sauce (shoyu), rice cakes (mochi), fermented soy bean paste (miso), rice wine (sake), and pickles. By the 1930s, plantation workers could rely on Japanese peddlers to supply vegetables, meat, sashimi, fishcakes, and canned goods. Honolulu became the site of Japanese noodle soup (saimin) stands and take-away delis (okazuya). Saimin, a noodle soup based on fish or chicken broth topped with sliced ingredients such as fishcakes and seaweed, was served as a staple food on plantations throughout Hawaii, as it can easily be adapted to use whatever ingredients are on hand.

Like the Chinese restaurants of the mainland, these early Japanese eateries in Hawaii soon adapted to suit the local palate. In so doing, they played an integral role in helping to fashion a distinctive twentieth-century Hawaiian cuisine. For example, today the term saimin in Hawaii refers to a variety of noodle soups, which can be topped with everything from oxtail to raw beef slices and mint to eggs and spam. Considered a truly Hawaiian dish, saimin can be found at school cafeterias, at pushcarts and stands, and even at McDonald’s. Like saimin stands, Japanese delis known as okazuya developed as a means of feeding plantations workers and other laborers on the go. The name derives from okazu—the meat, fish, or vegetable accompaniment to rice—and ya, or shop.

Moving to the Mainland

Large-scale Japanese migration to the mainland did not begin until the 1890s, when many Japanese journeyed from Hawaii to the West coast to work in agriculture as well as for the railways and in canneries, fisheries, and mines. Around the same time, immigrants began to arrive directly from Japan in large numbers. They were drawn to the U.S., in part, because of its image in Japan as a sophisticated, modern, and powerful nation as well as by the promise of financial reward. Working in the U.S. also offered tremendous financial reward, as laborers could earn 5 to 20 times the amount they would earn for a given job in Japan.

In addition to laborers, who accounted for the majority of immigrants, this group included a significant percentage of students as well as merchants, the latter of whom began to erect the stores and restaurants that would serve the growing Japanese population. By the time the Immigration Act was passed in 1924, which effectively barred Japanese immigration, 180,000 Japanese had traveled to the mainland from Japan and Hawaii. Before the turn of the century enough Japanese had concentrated in large urban centers to create quarters that provided housing, entertainment, clothing, food, and services, all catering to Japanese tastes. One of the most successful early merchants, Masajiro Furuya opened a tailoring shop and then a grocery store in Seattle in the early 1890s. To meet the increasing demand of Japanese immigrants for goods of their native country, Furuya eventually expanded the grocery store into a six-floor department store where customers could find imported Japanese goods as well as local produce. The Furuya Company became one of the cornerstone businesses around which Seattle’s Japanese community developed.

Having witnessed the growing violence against Chinese immigrants to the United States, which ultimately ended in the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese government determined not to suffer such international humiliation. As a result, it set up consulates and helped establishcoalitions known as the Japanese Association of America in cities where the largest concentration of immigrants coalesced, such as the Japantowns of Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, Portland, Los Angeles, and Honolulu. These consulates were not only charged with preventing the mistreatment of Japanese immigrants but also with ensuring that the immigrants served as respectable representatives of Japan.

The Japantowns, known as Nihonmachis, that sprang up in West coast cities not only catered to those Japanese who lived within their boundaries but also to tens of thousands who labored in the agricultural fields and fisheries that surrounded them. The Japanese who helped transform the Sacramento Delta from a vast expanse of swampland into one of the state’s most lucrative farming communities enjoyed the benefits of Sacramento’s Japantown. Japanese-owned restaurants, grocers, fish markets, lodgings, bathhouses, billiard halls, and barbershops were frequented by the area’s seasonal workers, its merchants, and their employees, as well as large landowners, many of whom began as laborers on the sugar plantations of Hawaii and in the agricultural fields of California. “The Asparagus King” of Yolo Country, Frank Sakata, for example, immigrated to Hawaii as a contract laborer for a sugar plantation before migrating to the mainland to work for the railroads. After years of hard labor, Sakata saved enough money to purchase a piece of swampland, which he soon transformed into the region’s most lucrative asparagus farm.

Like Sakata, many Japanese rose from manual laborers to land owners, a trajectory that was aided, in part, by the families that the early immigrants were able to form. Unlike early Chinese immigration, which consisted almost entirely of men, Japanese immigration included large numbers of women, who traveled abroad with the encouragement of the Japanese government and of the sugar plantation owners. Having learned from their failure to retain single Chinese men, plantation owners realized that laborers with families were more likely to stay rooted in place. Even with wives and children, however, many Japanese left Hawaii for the mainland. Compared to the rigid social and political hierarchy that characterized Hawaii’s plantation-based economy, the more fluid West coast frontier offered greater opportunity for financial success, enabling some enterprising immigrants to achieve positions as merchants, tenant farmers, or landowners.

In 1907, however, the movement of Japanese laborers to the United States was halted altogether with the passage of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, a diplomatic arrangement made between the U.S. and Japan. Unlike the Chinese Exclusion Act which barred immigration outright, the Gentlemen’s Agreement stipulated that Japan would no longer issue passports to laborers who wished to emigrate to the United States. In return, the U.S. agreed not to legislate against Japanese immigrants.

Although the Gentlemen’s Agreement halted the flow of Japanese laborers into the United States, a loophole that allowed for family reunification enabled the migration of women and children into the country. The legal loophole that allowed farmers and businessmen to send for their wives and children would be officially closed in 1924 with the passage of the Immigration Act, which effectively banned the entry of Asians to the United States. Before the loophole was closed, however, around 67,000 women and children entered the United States, enabling tens of thousands of families to form, or reform as the case may be, creating the first American-born generation of Japanese.

The growth of families in the 1920s and 1930s enabled a form of Japanese American home cooking to develop, one that blended Japanese, Chinese, and Western cuisines, a trend paralleled in Japan. The meals prepared by first-generation immigrants tended to resemble the traditional home cooking of Japan far more than those prepared by second-generation housewives. Special occasions, in particular, showcased Japanese dishes and cooking techniques such as rice cakes (mochi), steamed fish cakes, dumplings (gyoza), and sushi. For most Japanese families, pickle and rice featured at every meal no matter how Americanized they might have become. As second-generation women began to start families of their own, the home cooked meals became increasingly Americanized to include such standards as clam chowder, macaroni and cheese, and apple pie. Housewives culled recipes from such divergent sources as Japanese American newspapers and The Joy of Cooking. By the 1930s, Japanese home cooking had begun to supplement traditional Japanese dishes with American classics.

Chinese cuisine influenced Japanese home cooking, in large part, because Chinese restaurants were frequently the only eateries outside of Nihonmachis where Japanese Americans felt welcome. Unlike African Americans who were legally barred from Caucasian restaurants, Asians were not banned outright. They were frequently denied service, however, or, if served, met with malicious stares from Caucasian diners. Their exposure to Chinese American food and its rise in popularity throughout the United States in the 1930s meant that many Japanese American housewives incorporated such dishes as chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo yong into their culinary repertoire.

Anti-Japanese Legislation

The United States ultimately failed to uphold its end of the Gentlemen’s Agreement, and California, in particular, was swept with a wave of anti-Asian hysteria, much of which was aimed at Japanese farmers. From the time of their arrival to the West coast in the 1890s, Japanese farmers numbered among the nation’s most skilled agriculturalists. Success stories included those of the “asparagus king” Frank Sakata, the “potato king” George Shima, who amassed millions of dollars and over 28,000 acres in the Sacramento Delta, and Abiko Kyutaro, who transformed desert land in the San Joaquin Valley into a fertile farming community planted with over 1500 acres of grapes and fruit trees. In 1920 alone, Japanese American farmers in California would produce $67 million worth of land crops.

In order to stymie the enormous success of Japanese farmers, California passed a series of laws that forbade Japanese immigrants from owning land outright or from leasing land for more than three years. Although the Japanese were not named outright, they were the prime target of California’s Alien Land Law of 1913, which made it illegal for anyone ineligible for U.S. citizenship to own land. Since first-generation Asian immigrants were ineligible, this law effectively barred Japanese farmers from owning the land they worked. Washington state would pass its own Alien Land Law in 1921.

Many Japanese farmers bypassed the law by naming their children as owners or by establishing land corporations, a move that enabled them to help transform West coast agriculture into a global breadbasket. By the outbreak of World War II, Japanese farmers were producing over 30 percent of California’s commercial truck crops. First- and second-generation Japanese individuals also dominated the distribution and marketing of produce in key agricultural areas such as Sacramento and Los Angeles. The rural and urban communities were linked via a system of networks that resulted in mutually assured success. Japantowns provided business and social services to rural farmers and laborers, who, in turn, provided a steady supply of fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, and poultry for the urban dwellers.

Japanese farmers not only helped transform California into an agricultural powerhouse, but they also introduced Japanese rice seed to Texas and Louisiana. In the early 1900s, Japanese farmers were invited to Texas in order to advise rice growers on how to increase production. They arrived bearing rice seed as a gift from the Japanese emperor, a gift that would revolutionize the Texas and Louisiana rice industries, enabling them to double production. One of the advisors, Seito Saibara established a pioneering Japanese farming colony with over 1000 acres of rice fields, effectively founding the Gulf Coast rice industry.

With the United States entry into World War II in 1942, triggered by the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, tens of thousands of Japanese American farmers living in California were rounded up and sent to live in concentration camps, where they remained until 1945. In one of the most egregious violations of civil rights in U.S. history, more than 40,000 Japanese and 70,000 of their American-born children, who were U.S. citizens, were forced to leave their West coast homes behind and move inland to detention centers. In particular, the mass detention targeted first-generation community leaders, ranging from Buddhist and Shinto priests and Japanese language teachers to prominent businessmen. Once in detention, Japanese internees were fed in mess halls, which largely precluded families from sitting with one another. The meals themselves varied wildly from what Japanese Americans ate outside of military prison. Instead of rice accompanied by pickled and fresh vegetables or a small portion of meat, internees ate potatoes, canned Vienna sausages, spaghetti, beans, and bread. By war’s end, internees felt relieved and thankful when, on occasion, Japanese pickles, fresh vegetables, and rice cakes graced their plates.

Whereas almost 90 percent of Japanese lived along the Pacific Coast in 1940, after the war many moved to the Midwest, South, and Northeast. Although many of these early migrants eventually returned to the West coast in the 1950s, the total percentage of Japanese Americans living in the Pacific would decline steadily to about 50 percent by 2010. By the 1950s most Japanese Americans had successfully rebuilt their lives and moved into the middle classes. Many chose to live in suburban areas, where they worked diligently to blend into mainstream America. Throughout the 1980s, more than half of third-generation Japanese Americans would marry non-Japanese spouses. Among all Asian immigrant groups, interracial marriage remain the highest among Japanese.

KOREAN AMERICAN FOOD CULTURE

Korean Cuisine

As with Japanese cuisine, the development of Korean cuisine and culture were profoundly influenced by China. These influences include Korea’s adoption of Buddhism and Confucianism, its use of chopsticks, its reverence for rice (or grain substitute) as a staple part of every meal, its strong belief in the medicinal properties of food, and its heavy reliance on a range of soybean products, including soy sauce, tofu, and fermented soybean paste.

Meat eating was a luxury typically reserved for the upper classes or for special occasions or health reasons. Because meat did not play a regular role in the daily diet of most Koreans and because Buddhism is commonly practiced, the preparation of vegetables developed to include an array of techniques and intricate flavors. In particular, Korean side dishes often feature seasonal wild herbs and greens.

Over the centuries, gradual changes to Korean cuisine came about due to improved agricultural practices and the introduction of new ingredients through trade. Perhaps one of the most profound Western influences on Korean cuisine came in the form of the chili pepper. Introduced from the New World via Japan by the early seventeenth century, the chili pepper provides a core flavor of contemporary Korean cuisine and a main ingredient in kimchi, Korea’s most iconic food and a staple without which a meal is considered incomplete.

Wars, Colonization, and Early Immigration

Like many Asian immigrants to the United States, Koreans were driven to leave their homeland due to a series of wars, which eventually led to their colonization by Japan. The roots of the Korean diaspora date back to the late-nineteenth century. During this time, Korea underwent a period of remarkably swift changes due to a series of military conflicts during which Japan, China, and Russia fought for control of the Korean peninsula. Japan would prove the ultimate victor, usurping China as the most powerful force in East Asia.

Just as Matthew Perry forced Japan to open its ports to Western trade, thereby prompting Japan to initiate a series of radical steps toward modernization, Japan forced Korea to open its ports for trade in 1876. The Kangwha Treaty, which allowed Japanese merchants to enter Korean ports, was the first in a series of treaties that required Korea to open its borders to foreign influence. The United States, soon followed by Britain and France, coerced Korea into signing treaties that allowed Western trade access as well as granted the right to proselytize Christianity.

Japan gained control over Korea when it emerged victorious in the first Sino-Japanese War (1894-95). Having wrested the peninsula away from China, Japan allowed Korea to declare its independence. This freedom was short-lived, however, as Japan claimed Korea as its protectorate in 1905 and colonized the nation in 1910. Following the example of Western colonial powers, Japan utilized Korean resources to its own advantage, introducing modern agricultural practices that enabled Korea to supply Japanese urbanites with rice. Rice exports to Japan, however, came at the expense of Koreans themselves, who suffered from rice shortages. In addition to modernizing Korean agricultural, Japan introduced industrial food processing, which, in turn, transformed Korea into a military-industrial base capable of producing the munitions and the rations needed to fuel Japan’s imperialist goals—a task that ended when Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945.

Japan not only controlled the territory of Korea but also Korean migration to the United States. The initial wave of Koreans to arrive in the U.S. landed in Hawaii between 1902 and 1905. They were brought by sugar plantations in order to undermine the power of the Japanese laborers, who had begun striking for higher wages and for better working conditions. As a result, 7500 Koreans were contracted to work on Hawaiian plantations. Once Japan became the protectorate of Korea in 1905, however, it halted Korean migration to the United States in order to protect those Japanese laborers whom Koreans were hired to replace.

Unlike Chinese and Japanese immigrants before them who came from situations of rural poverty, the first Koreans to immigrate to Hawaii hailed from a wider range of economic backgrounds, although the majority still came from the lower classes. Many Korean immigrants arrived in the United States having been previously converted to Christianity by European missionaries stationed in Korea. As a result, they were able to assimilate more quickly than had Chinese and Japanese laborers.

Because working conditions were harsh on the sugar plantations, over 1,000 of these first Korean immigrants traveled onto the mainland to settle on the West coast, where they picked oranges, grapes, and tomatoes for a living. Some farm workers migrated with the seasons to find jobs, calling themselves “flying geese.” Because migrant workers earned such low wages (10 to 15 cents an hour), they subsisted largely on kimchi and rice, with a bit of beef or chicken on occasion. In order to house these migrant workers, Koreans opened hotels in cities throughout California, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Stockton and Riverside. Koreans also opened grocery stores and bakeries to help feed the farm workers.

By 1913 Koreans had begun to succeed as rice farmers by taking advantage of the 10-percent deal, which stipulated that the landowner supply the land, the seeds, and the equipment needed for farming in return for 90 percent of the crop. This deal enabled hard-working laborers to slowly aquire more land for farming. Kim Chong-lim, for example, eventually accrued 10,000 acres on which he grew rice and barley, earning him the short-lived moniker “the rice king,” before a massive flood destroyed his fields in 1920. By the time he lost his fortune, Kim Chong-lim was the largest financial contributor to the US arm of the Korean independence movement and had financed the Korean Aviation School to train pilots to fight against the Japanese.

Fruit farming likewise proved lucrative for Korean Americans. Although unrelated, Harry Kim and Charles H. Kim founded the Kim Brothers nursery in 1921. They earned their fortune by growing and distributing the first commercial nectarine variety. Developed by horticulturalist Fred Anderson, Le Grand nectarine was bred by crossing a peach with a nectarine in order to produce a large, yellow fruit. Because Le Grand was hardy enough to ship long distances, Kim Brothers shipped the fruit from California all the way back east. They were so successful that they would become the first recorded millionaires of Korean descent. Like Kim Chong-lim, the Kims helped fund the Korean independence movement in the United States. Another pair of Korean Americans, Leo Song and Kim Yong-jeung founded K&S Jobbers in 1925, which brokered fruit between growers and wholesalers. They were able to found the company after the Kim Brothers consigned most of their fruit to them and, like other wealthy Korean Americans, were fervent supporters of the Korean independence movement.

Twentieth-century Immigration

Aside from the 800 picture brides who were allowed to enter Hawaii between 1910 and 1924, few Koreans immigrated to the United States before the 1950s; the 1950 census counted only 7,030 Korean Americans living in the U.S. These numbers have grown dramatically, however, over the last sixty years. The 2010 census recorded over 1.7 million Korean Americans. This spike in immigration has been a direct result of heavy U.S. military involvement in Korea.

The Allied defeat of Japan in 1945, which ended Japanese colonization, only inaugurated another long, brutal battle for control of the country—this time between the United States military and Russian forces. During the course of the Korean War, over 5.7 million U.S. troops would serve in the conflict, which claimed the lives of more than 400,000 Koreans in South Korea alone. Many of the millions of Americans who served in Korea eventually brought home a Korean wife; an estimated 28,000 war brides arrived in the United States between 1950 and 1975.

Although these wives learned to cook distinctively American foods for their husbands, they also successfully incorporated Korean flavors into their meals. In turn, many of those soldiers who returned as single men or to a stateside wife brought back with them a palate that had been altered by Korean dishes laden with chili peppers, garlic, ginger, and fermented fish—the signature flavors of Korean cuisine. In turn, Korean Americans and Koreans alike have incorporated iconic American ingredients into their dishes, having been introduced to them during the Korean War. Just a few such ingredients include American cheese slices (often used to flavor ramen); soda pop, which is used for marinades; and hot dogs, which might be topped with kimchi or sliced and tossed with kimchi to form the basis for a stew.

In addition to altering American and Korean palates, the Korean War likewise left millions of orphaned children, many of whom were fathered by American soldiers. The Korean War initiated the widespread international adoption of South Korean orphans. Between 1955 and 1998, approximately 100,000 Korean orphans were adopted by American families. By the 1980s, South Korea was exporting close to 1 percent of its infants, a trend that began to decline shortly after the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Responding to international criticism of its loose transnational adoption policies, the South Korean government instituted limits on the number of children that could be adopted abroad annually and began to actively promote adoption within Korea. Today, adoptees are estimated to comprise 5-10 percent of all the Korean Americans, with the highest concentration—10,000 to 15,000—living in Minnesota.

One of these adoptees, Marja Vongerichten, grew up to host a PBS series that introduces Americans to Korean food. Like the majority of adoptees, Vongerichten grew up eating typical American fare. As a young adult, however, she set out to meet her birth mother and, in the process, rediscovered her Korean culinary heritage, which she famously chronicles in the PBS television series and cookbook The Kimchi Chronicles. The series likewise showcases the influence that Asian cuisine has had on her husband, the internationally renowned chef, Jean Georges Vongerichten. His book Asian Flavors (2007) showcases his culinary style, which fuses Asian flavors with French technique. Another Korean adoptee to hit it big in the culinary world, Danny Bowien grew up in Oklahoma and didn’t taste a Korean dish until he moved to San Francisco at the age of 19. After a few years apprenticing in restaurants, Bowien opened Mission Chinese, which serves Asian American cuisine flavorful and interesting enough to catapult him to culinary stardom; he earned the James Beard award for rising new chef in 2013.

Third Wave Tensions and the Dawn of Koreatowns

The third wave of Korean immigrants, which arrived in the 1970s and 1980s, hailed from largely middle-class backgrounds, with many having trained and worked as medical professionals. Once in the United States, many of these middle-class immigrants found themselves forced to downgrade their occupations as they were unable to find work in the professional fields in which they were originally trained. A large number of these immigrants opened liquor and grocery stores. By 1983, Koreans owned 75 percent of the produce markets in New York. By 1987, Koreans owned 17,105 businesses in Los Angeles County, up from 398 in 1972. One-third of these businesses were located in Koreatown. According to the 1990 census, 145,431 Korean Americans lived in Los Angeles County; only 15 percent of this population was born in the United States.

With the largest Korean population in the United States, Los Angeles has experienced extreme racial tensions between Korean storeowners and the African American and Latino communities that they serve. Seeing recent immigrants from Korea attain a level of success as their lives stagnate, the urban impoverished have found Korean Americans an accessible target for their anger. The tensions between Korean Amerians and African Americans were severely heightened in 1991 by the shooting death of Latasha Harlins. Videotape of the incident showed Harlins punch a liquor store clerk, Soon Ja Du, who then raised a gun and shot Harlins in the head. The ill will that resulted from the highly publicized shooting helped fuel the violence aimed at Korean American store owners during the L.A. riots two years later.

On April 29, 1992, the acquittal of four white police officers who had been videotaped beating an African American man, Rodney King, fueled riots in South Central L.A. Known as Sa-I-Gu (Korean for 4-2-9, or April 29) among Korean speakers, the L.A. riots quickly spread through Koreatown, proving a devastating turning point in the lives of the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who lost their businesses and jobs. Over four days of looting, arson, assault, and murder, 63 people were killed and 4500 stores were decimated. More than half the stores destroyed were Korean owned. The devastation of Koreatown eventually led to serious work by Korean immigrants and African Americans to improve race relations and to bridge the rupture that had violently split their shared community. Through sheer determination, L.A.’s Koreatown has not only been revitalized since the riots, but has even expanded its boundaries.

Koreatowns and the Mainstreaming of Korean Cuisine

Having developed in the 1970s and recovered from the 1992 riots, L.A.’s Koreatown now boasts the largest concentration of Koreans outside of Seoul; many Koreans have subsequently moved to the suburbs of Orange County, creating Korean business districts of their own.The nation’s second largest Koreatown began to take discernible shape in New York during the early 1980s; by the 1990s large enough numbers of New York’s Korean population had spilled into Flushing, New Jersey. to create a thriving Korean district of its own. More recently, a discernible Koreatown has begun to take shape in the Atlanta suburb of Duluth. Large Korean enclaves have also developed in Chicago and in Anandale, Virginia, outside of Washington D.C.

The growing popularity of Korean food within the United States over the past fifteen years naturally corresponds to the rapid rise in Korean immigration. It has also been boosted to some undefinable degree by South Korea’s campaign to improve its image abroad, which was launched by then President Lee Myung-bak in 2009. In addition to establishing a scholarship program for foreign students to study in Korea and promoting such national pastimes as tae kwon do, the nation-branding council has likewise launched a campaign to globalize hansik, or Korean cuisine.

With $40 million earmarked for the cause and with the United States as its primary target, the government ran a campaign to promote the health benefits of Korean food as well as its tastiness. Toward that end, the Korean Food Foundation has published e-book guides to Korean restaurants in L.A., helped Korean restaurateurs to create franchises abroad, and promoted Korean cooking classes at such well-respected schools as the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York, and Le Cordon Bleu in Paris. Culinary classes aimed at the home cook have likewise followed pace; heeding the latest culinary trends, the cooking supply store Sur La Table added Korean cooking classes to its roster in 2011. In these courses, Americans learn how to make the dishes that are most palatable to the mainstream—namely bulgogi (barbecue beef), bibimbap (rice bowl) and pajeon (green onion pancake). The former Korean First Lady Kim Yoon-ok took an active role in promoting her nation’s cuisine, personally performing cooking demonstrations for American veterans of the Korean War in New York as well as for CNN’s feature “Eye of South Korea.”

Korean food companies such as Ottogi and CJ Corp are likewise committed to globalizing Korean cuisine. Toward that end, they export products that range from tofu and ramen to sesame oil and vinegar to Korean and pan-Asian grocery stores throughout the United States. Especially eager to gain a foothold in the American market, CJ Corp began a partnership with Korean American entrepreneur Annie Chun in 2005 before buying the her brand outright in 2009. Since then, Annie Chun has founded GimMe Health Foods, which manufactures snacks made from Korean-sourced seaweed.

FILIPINO AMERICAN FOOD CULTURE

Distinctively Southeast Asian in nature, Filipino cuisine draws from the bounty of its environs. Because the Philippines is an archipelago made up of over 7000 islands, seafood abounds. So too do tropical fruits and vegetables. Strong elements of Chinese cookery are present, first introduced by merchants who traded with and settled in the Philippines as far back as the ninth century. Chinese junks collected raw materials from the islands in exchange for luxury goods, which they brought with them from China. Many of these merchants and crewmembers married native Filipino women and settled in and around Manila. These early merchants brought with them elements of Chinese cuisine, which would become synthesized into the indigenous food culture over several centuries. Chinese ingredients that would become essential to Philippine cuisine include tofu, duck eggs, soy sauce, sausage, noodles, and wrappers.

Western ingredients, dishes, cooking methods, and techniques likewise flavor Filipino food, vestiges of close to four centuries of Spanish and American colonialism. The strong Western influence that runs throughout Filipino cookery began in 1565 when Spain conquered the Philippines, which it ruled until 1898. During this time, Spanish colonial administrators, businessmen, and merchants settled in Manila, where they introduced Spanish cuisine, and Catholic missionaries swept through the Philippines, converting eighty percent of the indigenous population to Christianity by 1898. Whereas Chinese ingredients, dishes, and cooking methods were adopted over a long period and slowly transformed into distinctively Filipino dishes, Spanish cuisine entered the Philippines in a less syncretic manner. Unlike the Chinese who traded with Filipinos and even married local women, Spaniards came to the Philippines as colonizers and worked to maintain a strict hierarchy between themselves and their Filipino subjects, a hierarchy that extended to the dinner table.

As they had in Mexico, Spaniards drew a distinction between their own cuisine and that of the indigenous peoples, characterizing the latter as less prestigious. Not wanting to ingest what they viewed an inferior food, Spanish colonizers worked to reproduce their homeland recipes in the Philippines. In order to do so, they imported ingredients and taught Filipino cooks to prepare their favored dishes. They likewise gave Spanish names to local foods that resembled dishes from their homeland. Preparing Spanish meals for the colonial administrators, Filipinos were taught how to make foods that would eventually become a regular part of the Filipino diet. The Spanish sofrito, made with sautéed onion, garlic and tomatoes, became the flavoring base of many standard Filipino dishes. Beef stew, egg-based tortillas, empanadas, meatballs, bread pudding, marzipan, bunuelos (fried dough balls resembling large donut holes), and hot chocolate are among the foods and beverages inherited from Spain.

In order to reproduce the dishes of their homeland, merchants imported cattle, olive oil, wine, and ham, among many other items. In turn, the Spanish galleon trade between Manila and Acapulco, Mexico, introduced a variety of New World ingredients that Spain had incorporated into its diet, including chili peppers, tomatoes, cacao, corn, avocados, sweet potatoes, and jicama. Many of the dishes introduced during the colonial era were transformed over time and given distinctive Filipino touches. For example, Spanish paella was transformed into Filipino arroz Valenciana, with the substitution of sticky, or glutinous, rice, for the medium-grained Spanish paella rice. Some Filipino recipes also add coconut milk, which gives the dish a Southeast Asian flavor. Many names of Filipino dishes have also been inherited from Spanish colonials. Most famously, the iconic dish adobo was named by Spaniards who likened the dish to their own adobado, a pork dish made with vinegar and spices or with wine and onions. Unlike the Spanish adobado, however, Philippine adobo usually includes soy sauce and can feature a wide range of ingredients other than pork, including chicken, squid, catfish, shellfish, or water spinach.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Filipinos had begun traveling to Europe, where they were exposed to political ideals of the French Revolution. Returning home, they began to organize against Spanish colonialism and had achieved considerable progress by the time of the Spanish-American War in 1898, during which Filipino and American forces drove Spain from the Philippines. Rather than granting the Philippines independence at the close of the war, however, the United States declared it a colonial territory. Filipino nationalists fought to wrest control from American aggressors, initiating the Philippine-American War, which lasted three years. During the war, U.S. forces burned agricultural crops, a move that led to mass starvation and malnutrition. According to some estimates, as many as one million Filipinos died either in battle or from the malnutrition and disease that resulted from the war. President Theodore Roosevelt declared amnesty in 1902, calling an official end to the War, although Filipino guerilla resistance would continue for yet another decade.

The United States initiated sweeping educational and economic changes to its newly acquired territory and declared English as the official language. By 1904, ten to twelve thousand Americans were living in the Philippines with the express goal of aiding in the colonial project. The vast majority of them were teachers and administrators who worked to Americanize the Philippines. One of their first goals entailed teaching English to the Philippine population, which spoke more than eighty dialects and languages. Students were also taught American history. In their determination to instill American values so that Filipinos would be “civilized” enough for eventual self-rule, educators likewise instructed Filipinas in home economics and Filipinos in agriculture.

Like their Spanish predecessors, American colonials derided the local cuisine. Whereas the Spaniards left Filipinos to eat their traditional foods, however, Americans worked diligently to Americanize the Filipino diet. Toward that end, they not only imported American processed foods for their own meals, but also instituted educational reform to teach Filipinos about the inferiority of their native ingredients and to laud the superiority of American imported goods. For example, the standard curriculum in American public schools touted the benefits of condensed milk, which it argued far surpassed those of the local water buffalo milk and coconut milk. Students were taught that Western grains held greater nutritional value than locally grown rice.

Advertisements for American goods trumpeted their health benefits and played up notions of Western sophistication. They also worked to insert their products into daily life in the Philippines. Heinz created ads that positioned its ketchup as an easy replacement for traditional sauces, promoting its ready-made product as a substitute for the sauce of brown sugar, lemongrass, and pork liver that traditionally accompanied spit-roasted pig (lechon). It also promoted its apple cider vinegar as a substitute for the tropical fruit vinegars that flavored the national dish adobo. In a like manner, Lea & Perrins advertised a recipe for adobo that substituted its Worcestershire for the traditional soy sauce. In effect, the colonial project worked to create a Filipino middle class with a taste for American culture and a desire to consume it in the form of processed food.

For those students who did not hail from wealthy families, these initial lessons in Western cookery and the consumption of American goods were theoretical exercises; their homes and their budgets were ill equipped to prepare many of the foods they were taught to make in school, including muffins, jelly rolls, ice cream, puddings, sponge cakes, and cookies. The emphasis on sweets belied the growing American addiction to sugar, one enabled by the annexation of the Philippines and Hawaii and fed by their sugar plantations, where generations of Asians labored under poor working conditions.

As with most imperial conquests, the Philippines was locked into a series of trade agreements that tied the nation strongly to the United States. In effect, the Philippines was transformed into an agricultural economy that exported its crops, namely sugar and coconut, to the United States. In turn, the Philippines was made to import U.S. manufactured goods, including large amounts of meat and dairy as well as canned and bottled goods. In 1900, United States goods accounted for 11 percent of all the imports to the Philippines. By 1934, U.S. imports accounted for 72 percent. When the U.S. finally passed a bill in 1934 that granted independence to the Philippines, it stipulated a ten-year interim period for the transition. The U.S. also mandated that American goods continue to enter the Philippines duty free during this transitional decade, simultaneously stipulating that Philippine exports to the United States be subjected to tariffs. By the end of U.S. colonialism, Filipinos of all classes had adopted U.S. processed foods into their diet. Everyday recipes include such ingredients as Spam, Vienna sausages, canned peaches, and condensed milk.

Early Immigration to the United States

Filipinos first settled in what would become the state of Louisiana as far back as the 1760s. These settlers, known as Manilamen, arrived in the region aboard Spanish galleon ships, which carried goods for trade between Manila and Acapulco, Mexico, from 1565 to 1815. As colonial subjects of Spain, Filipinos were conscripted to work as crewmen on New World trade vessels and Filipinas were sometimes brought along as prostitutes. Once landed in Acapulco, the ships stayed in port for three months at a time to gather goods and replenish provisions for the arduous return home. Because they often spoke Spanish, Filipinos found an easy time blending with the native culture and some chose to stay behind in order to marry or in order to escape harsh treatment aboard ship. As a result Filipino settlements in Acapulco date back to the sixteenth century. By 1763, Filipinos had made their way across the Gulf of Mexico to settle in southern Louisiana, where they built fishing villages in the Louisiana bayous and marshes. Filipinos were drawn to the Louisiana wetlands, in large part, because they resembled those found throughout the Philippines. Skilled fishermen, Filipinos helped developed the first major shrimping businesses in the Gulf Coast.

St. Malo, outside of New Orleans, and Manila Village, in the Mississippi Delta, would become two of the largest Filipino settlements. The first to be established, St. Malo was a community of around 100 fishermen who sold their catch to the Italian and Spanish fishmongers who supplied New Orleans. Built on fifty acres of marshland, Manila Village introduced a method of drying and processing shrimp to the United States that had first been taught to Filipinos by Chinese shrimpers in the Philippines. Both villages housed giant platforms for air-drying the shrimp. After the shrimp had been boiled in brine and then dried in the sun, workers would then separate the shells from the shrimp flesh by performing a slow, rhythmic movement known as “dancing the shrimp.” The “dance,” also known as the “shrimp step,” was sometimes accompanied by guitar.

Pensionados, Navy Veterans, and Laborers

From the time the U.S. established a colonial government in 1900 through the end of World War II, it sought to Americanize the Philippines and to create Western-educated Filipino leaders for the colonial territory. Toward that end, it established the pensionado program, a government-funded exchange that brought promising students to the United States. These students were expected to return home to become leaders in government, business, agriculture, education, and engineering. From 1903 to 1911, 289 Philippine students were educated in U.S. colleges and universities. Placed with American families, pensionados not only received an American education but also learned about American family values and etiquette. Spurred by the success of the pensionados as well as by their own education in an Americanized public school system, around fourteen thousand non-sponsored Filipino students had traveled to the United States by 1938 in order to attend college. Students who arrived without government funding often supported their studies by working in the agricultural fields in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Other early immigrants to the mainland United States included Filipino veterans of the U.S. Navy. Filipinos had been inducted into the U.S. military as part of the colonial project, which worked to create loyal Americanized subjects and to defend the United States’ growing political and economic interests in the region. The extensive U.S. military presence in the Philippines was first established during the Philippine-American War when three Navy bases were built. As late as 1987, the U.S. military was the nation’s second largest employer, only outranked by the Philippine government itself. Although serving in the U.S. Navy was perceived as a desirable job, especially given the comparatively high salary of an enlistee, Filipinos were restricted in their employment opportunities; they could work as mess attendants and stewards. As late as 1970, eighty percent of the 16,669 Filipinos serving in the U.S. Navy ranked as stewards. As a result of their Navy background, many Filipino immigrants to the United States have settled in large port cities such as Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego.

In addition to Filipino students and military veterans, the early wave of Filipino immigration included laborers who worked on Hawaiian sugar and pineapple plantations and served as a major source of agricultural labor along the West coast from the Alaskan canneries to the agricultural fields of southern California. Like Asian immigrants before them, Filipinos found their job opportunities in the United States severely limited. So whether a Filipino arrived with a medical degree and years of practical experience or with little formal education, he would most likely support himself by working as an agricultural laborer. Unlike the previous Asian immigrants who arrived as aliens, however, Filipinos arrived as U.S. nationals. Not only did early Filipino immigrants arrive in the United States with American passports, but well-educated Filipino migrants likewise spoke fluent English, having been taught in an Americanized education system.

Despite the fact that they hailed from an American territory, however, Filipino migrants to Hawaii and the mainland United States experienced strong prejudice and hostility, just as other Asian immigrants did, yet with the added burden of being the most recent group to arrive. By the time Filipinos began to migrate in large numbers, many Chinese and Japanese immigrants had already risen from the ranks of laborers to farm owners or had established themselves as skilled workers, managers, or labor contractors in agricultural fields and canneries. As a result, early Filipino immigrants entered the country at the lowest position in the racial hierarchy and were often forced to work in the least desirable jobs and for the lowest pay.

As U.S. nationals, however, Filipinos were not included in the immigration exclusion laws that barred other Asians. In fact, the 1924 National Origins Act, which prohibited immigration to anyone illegible for U.S. citizenship, resulted in a spike in demand for Filipino labor in Hawaii and the West coast. Between 1906 and 1935 the Hawaiian Sugar Plantation Association hired over 120,000 Filipinos, who became the preferred Asian work force to replace the Japanese laborers barred by the 1907 “Gentlemen’s Agreement.” The shift from a primarily Japanese to a Filipino work force took place over a remarkably short period. From 1915 to 1932, the Filipino labor force rose from 19 to 70 percent of all sugar plantation workers, while the Japanese labor force declined from 54 to 19 percent.

Policies implemented by the United States led to economically devastating consequences in regions of the Philippines, which, in turn, encouraged emigration. As part of the colonial project, the U.S. transformed the Philippine economy into one based on agricultural exports. The Ilocano region, for example, had a strong textile industry. With manufactured goods no longer in demand, the region began to export human resources in the form of agricultural laborers to work in Hawaii and the West coast. Many immigrants also hailed from the hard-pressed eastern region of Visayas. Because the working conditions on the Hawaiian sugar plantations were brutal and demeaning, many Filipinos, like the Chinese and Japanese before them, eventually migrated to the mainland.

Over 30,000 Filipinos had settled in California by 1930. One-third of this population lived in the vicinity of Stockton, which served as a hub for the region’s migratory labor force. From the close of the 1920s up through World War II, Filipinos served as the primary labor force in the agricultural economy of San Joaquin County, which had recently undergone a transformation from small family farms into huge agribusinesses that depended on cheap labor for large profits. Filipinos comprised 80 percent of the asparagus workers in the San Joaquin Delta region and close to 14 percent of all farm labor in California. Asparagus farmers especially prized Filipino workers for their cutting skills. Field workers were expected to harvest eight to ten acres of asparagus a day, seven days a week. In addition to asparagus, Filipino laborers cultivated and harvested lettuce, beets, tomatoes, peaches, apples, berries, melon, hops, celery, grapes, melons, potatoes, Brussels sprouts, artichokes, and onions among many other crops. Whereas men typically worked in the fields, Filipinas sorted and packed the fruits and vegetables for distribution and also worked as cooks at the camps where the laborers slept at night. Since men outnumbered women 14 to 1, however, most camp cooks were men.

Migratory workers often headed to Alaska to work in the salmon canneries for the summer. Some stayed on and married Native Alaskan women and taught them to make their favorite Filipino dishes. In order to save money, canneries sometimes supplied the labor camps with meager and inexpensive rations. When Filipino cannery workers finally unionized in 1937, one of their first demands was for better and more varied meals. Meals served in the farm camps (campos) could be almost as bad as those served in canneries, although they inevitably included whatever produce the crew was harvesting at the time. Those crews fortunate enough to work for a Filipino contractor generally fared best; contractors not only negotiated wages for their crew but also for the quality of their food and housing, the latter of which didn’t include running water or electricity until the 1970s in the San Joaquin and Central Valleys.

During the Depression anti-Filipino sentiment rose sharply, and various forces worked to block further immigration. Such sentiment helped drive the Tydings-McDuffie Independence Act through Congress. The Act, which granted the Philippines future independence, limited Filipino immigration to the mainland United States to fifty persons a year and rescinded Filipino naturalization, a gesture that immediately transformed Filipinos into aliens. The Act exempted those Filipinos who had served in the U.S. armed forces; most of these servicemen had been recruited into the Navy after the United States claimed the Philippines as its territory. During the 1920s and 1930s, Filipinos accounted for about five percent, or 4000, of those active in the U.S. Navy.

Immigration After World War II

When Japan invaded the Philippines just hours after it attacked Pearl Harbor, Filipinos and Filipino Americans alike were eager to fight for and with the U.S. military. Their wartime valor transformed the way Filipinos were treated in the United States. After the war, the United States relaxed the stringent laws against Filipino immigration that had been in place since passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act. This relaxation enabled thirty-three thousand Filipinos to immigrate to the United States before the national origins quota was abolished in 1965. Among these were war veterans and war brides, the latter of whom numbered among the first sizable influx of Filipino women to the United States. In addition to war brides, postwar immigrants included the final group of laborers to be recruited for work on the Hawaiian sugar plantation. With the abolition of the national-origins quote in 1965, Filipinos have arrived in record numbers, surpassing all other immigrant groups with the exception of Mexicans. The 1960 U.S. Census recorded 176,310 Filipinos living in the United States. The 2010 Census counted 3.2 million.

The Making of Filipino American Food

As a result of colonization, early twentieth-century Filipino immigrants had significant degrees of exposure to American foods. They also benefited in many ways from the Asian immigrants who preceded them. Chinese and Japanese farmers had already pioneered the Sacramento Delta rice fields in California and become established truck farmers, often growing and selling Asian vegetables such as bitter melon, eggplant, okra, and sweet potatoes. Short-grain rice and glutinous rice were both readily available. Soy sauce and tofu could be easily found in Chinatowns. Filipino immigrants likewise readily adapted their favorite dishes to accommodate the ingredients on hand. Alaskan adobo, for example, might be made with beaver, moose, duck, geese, or even porcupine. Field and cannery laborers also used inexpensive ingredients such as pigs’ tails, chickens’ feet, pork bellies, and pigs’ trotters, resulting in such dishes as pigs’ trotter adobo.

In the Alaskan canneries, meal rations could be substandard, as managers not infrequently expected their workers to live off a regular diet of rice and fish for lunch and dinner. Breakfast might consist of an unbuttered biscuit or eggs and rice. In order to supplement such imbalanced meals, cannery workers hunted deer and bear, raised pigs when possible, and transformed salmon scraps into two of their favorite flavorings—fish paste (bagoong) and fish sauce (patis). The farming regions of California, Washington, and Oregon likewise teemed with wildlife, enabling laborers to supplement their meals with fish and game. At their best, camp meals consisted of ample rice, fish, meat, and vegetables. Breakfast might include coffee, toast, eggs, and leftover rice from the evening before. When possible, laborers planted gardens that included such vegetables as bitter melon, loofah gourd (patola), watercress, okra, and Filipino medicinal greens such as Malabar spinach (alugbati) and wolfberry, or goji, leaves (gao gei). Laborers also raised chickens. Fishing in local rivers, laborers caught salmon, bass, catfish, river snails, and frogs. Depending on the time of year and their location along the West coast, laborers could hunt pigeons, ducks, pheasants, quail, jackrabbits, deer, cottontails, and even swans. When times were good, crews would often celebrate the end of a harvest with a pig roast (lechon). The pig, which could weigh upwards of 300 pounds, would be spit-roasted whole and its blood used to make stew.

As early as the 1920s, Filipinos began opening restaurants and grocery stores in Chinatowns. While a few of these early restaurants specialized in regional cuisines—namely Visayan and Ilocano—many focused on staple Filipino dishes and melded the regional ingredients and cooking styles. Because of their familiarity with Chinese cuisine and the fact that Little Manilas were dependent on and abutted Chinatowns, Filipinos frequented Chinese restaurants in large numbers. In locations without a Little Manila, in fact, Chinese restaurants might well be the only establishments where Filipinos were welcome to dine.

Little Manilas developed as early as the 1930s in those urban centers with the highest concentrations of immigrants—namely Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Stockton. The first Filipino American grocery chain got its start in Pismo Beach, California in 1936. P. I. Market (short for Philippine Islands) became a hub for the Filipino American community, where people could find out about local job openings, locate families living in the area, and arrange for travel between northern and southern California. P. I. Market eventually expanded to open in three additional California locations—Los Angeles, Salinas, and Montalvo.

VIETNAMESE AMERICAN FOOD CULTURE

Wars, Conquests, and the Making of Vietnamese Cuisine

As with Korea, Japan, and the Philippines, the cookery and the diaspora of Vietnam were profoundly influenced by wars and conquests. Chinese rule, Mongol invasion, the expansion of Vietnam’s borders southward into Cham and Khmer territory, and French colonization all contributed to the development of the nation’s cuisine. Distinguished by the prominent use of fresh herbs, raw vegetables, fish, fish sauce, and fish paste as well as by the absence of animal fat and sparing use of vegetable oils, Vietnamese food is among world’s healthiest.

China ruled Vietnam for 1000 years leaving behind an inheritance that includes the use of chopsticks; the consumption of star anise, rice noodles, and soy products; and the techniques of stir-frying and deep-frying in a wok. The adoption of Buddhism from China likewise led Vietnam to develop a highly sophisticated vegetarian cuisine. Northern Vietnam inherited a taste for beef during the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century, enabling the eventual creation of such specialties as pho (beef and noodle soup), thit bo bay mon (Seven Dishes Beef), and lau (meat cooked in a Mongolian hot pot). Sixteenth-century European merchants introduced New World ingredients such as watercress, peanuts, tomatoes, corn, and potatoes. When Vietnam expanded its southern borders at the end of the eighteenth century, it absorbed Indian spices and coconut milk from the Hindu influenced Southeast Asian cultures of Cham and Khmer.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nearly a century of French colonial rule (1859-1954) embedded French influences into Vietnamese culture. A hallmark of colonization is the use of the colonized country and its people to produce valuable resources for export. Toward this end, the French colonial government turned Vietnam into one of the world’s leading coffee bean growers and the Vietnamese into avid coffee consumers. The French also introduced the consumption of asparagus, dill, charcuterie, breads, and pastries. Each of these ingredients was adapted and transformed, however, to create distinctively Vietnamese dishes. Because of the heat and scarcity of refrigeration, Vietnamese coffee eschews milk and sugar for condensed milk and is frequently served over ice. In Vietnam the rich butter and cream base of the French asparagus velouté soup, which is often garnished with crab, was transformed into the delicate mang tay nau cua (“French bamboo” and crab soup) with a chicken broth, fish sauce, and vegetable oil base. The French baguette spread with cheese or paté became bánh mì, a sandwich that features a combination of protein, vegetable pickle, herbs, and butter or mayonnaise. The Vietnamese baguette typically incorporates rice flour, which gives the crust extra crunch. Favored fillings include Vietnamese charcuterie, grilled or roasted meats, crispy pork skin, Chinese char siu (barbecued pork), tofu, sweet and sour daikon and carrot pickle, chili peppers, cilantro, and a slathering of fatty spread such as butter. One US food historian draws a link between Louisiana’s poor boy sandwich and Vietnam’s banh mi to argue that the two are related in that they were both created by cultures under French domination. Pho (pronounced like fuh) is believed by some to be yet another adaptation of a French dish—namely, pot au feu. In particular, some chefs and historians point to the similarity in pronunciation, the starring role of beef, and the foundation of bone marrow broth for both soups as convincing evidence for their connection.

From French Colonialism to the Vietnam War

From 1862–1893 France incrementally colonized Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, naming the collective regions Indochina. By the 1920s an anti-colonial movement had begun to coalesce in the region. At the outbreak of World War II, the Indochinese Communist Party established the Vietnamese Independence League, or Viet Minh, which was led by Ho Chi Minh. In 1945, the Viet Minh began to capture and control the major cities in Vietnam, and Ho Chi Minh proclaimed Vietnam’s independence. At the close of World War II, France tried to reclaim Indochina. The Viet Minh, backed by China and the Soviet Union, established a resistance movement that led to the First Indochina War of 1945–54. France eventually surrendered, and Vietnam was divided into North and South. At this juncture, the United States, which had paid 80 percent of France’s bill for the first Indochina War, became increasingly involved, backing anti-communist parties. In 1963 the United States began conducting massive bombing raids on the North. The Second Indochina War, or Vietnam War, officially began when President Lyndon Johnson deployed US combat troops to South Vietnam. By the time the United States withdrew from Vietnam in 1975, 2.2 million American soldiers had served in the war.

Having suffered French colonial rule, a temporary Japanese overthrow of French colonial powers from March through August of 1945, and a continuous war from 1954 to 1975, the Vietnamese population had a deep familiarity with food scarcity through much of the twentieth century. Upwards of 1.5 million Vietnamese died of starvation as a result of the Japanese occupation alone. Throughout the Indochina War and its aftermath, the daily diet for many consisted of rice topped with a bit of fish sauce or fish paste, both fermented protein-dense products that can be kept for years without spoiling. When possible, this diet would be supplemented with foraged or cultivated herbs and vegetables as well as fresh fish. For far too many, however, even this meager diet was impossible; Vietnam’s food supplies were devastated by the estimated 20 million gallons of herbicides the U.S. dropped on rice paddies, orchards, vegetable gardens, and mangroves from 1961 to 1971. Rural Vietnamese were often forced to choose between eating poisoned plants or starving.

Variously known as trokuon in Cambodia, pak bong in Laos and rau muong in Vietnam, water spinach played a crucial culinary role in the Vietnam War, serving as essential sustenance for Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians alike. It grew well in the 10 to 15 million craters left by bombs the U.S. dropped on the three countries—roughly 100 times the combined impact of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Because the craters would catch rainwater, Vietnamese soldiers stocked them with fish as well as water spinach. The stocked bomb craters that lined the Ho Chi Minh trail (the main thoroughfare for the Viet Minh) enabled a fresh supply of food for the soldiers. The greens and fish from the bomb craters were also dried in large quantities.

The withdrawal of the United States in 1975 left many southern Vietnamese without the supplemental rations they had come to rely on, especially after the defoliation of much of their countryside. It would take until 1991 for Vietnam to begin economic recovery, after a change in government led to a shift toward a market economy; borders were opened to foreign trade and foreign investment, farms were returned to farming families, and the state loosened its control over rice supplies. Rising production has significantly improved living standards. Restaurants have even begun to thrive in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) and Hanoi.

Immigration to the United States

Before 1975, the few Vietnamese who lived in the United States were mostly students or spouses and children of Americans who had served in the Vietnam War. All that changed in April 1975 when Saigon fell to communist control and the first wave of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian immigration began. This first wave included 130,000 Vietnamese and Cambodians who had strong ties to the United States government or to American officials. The first wave largely consisted of well-educated and comparatively elite individuals; seventy percent hailed from urban centers and forty percent were Catholic, a religious inheritance passed on by French missionaries. President Gerald Ford passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975, which established a resettlement program.

The second wave of Vietnamese immigration began in 1977 and would last for about eight years. Following the Communist victory over South Vietnam, the government implemented economic, political, and agricultural policies, some of which were specifically targeted at those Vietnamese presumed to have been affiliated with or loyal to the former South Vietnamese government. These individuals were arrested and sent to “re-education camps” where they were forced into hard labor and, in some cases, tortured. The Communist government also closed businesses, many of which were owned by ethnic Chinese Vietnamese, and seized land from farm owners. As a result, the second wave included former re-education camp internees as well as Chinese Vietnamese merchants. Many of these second-wave immigrants were Buddhists, and the vast majority hailed from rural backgrounds.

Most of those who fled during the second wave left by boat, and a sizable number of these refugees were brutally killed by pirates or, in the case of women and children, kidnapped and sold into prostitution. Those fleeing by boat included Vietnamese, Chinese Vietnamese, Hmong from the highlands of Laos who had been trained as guerilla insurgents by the CIA, as well as survivors of the Cambodian purge, during which the Khmer Rouge executed around 3 million non-ethnic Khmer. By the end of the 1970s, the mass exodus of refugees from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia had become an international crisis, promoting the UN to intervene and establish The Orderly Departure Program to expedite “family reunion and other humanitarian cases.” Between 1979 and 1989, around 500,000 Vietnamese refugees to enter the United States through the program.

Thousands of these refugees were Vietnamese Amerasians fathered by Americans during the Vietnam War. Known as “the dust of life” or “half-breeds” in Vietnam, these children faced strong prejudice and were often placed in orphanages. The 1982 Amerasian Amendment granted preferential immigration status to any child born between 1950 and 1982 who had been fathered by an American GI. The law, however, did not allow family members of Amerasians to join them. As a result, child custody was effectively revoked from those Vietnamese mothers who were raising their Amerasian children. This legal dilemma was partially corrected in 1987 with the Ameriasian Homecoming Act, which allowed Amerasians born between 1962 and 1975 to immigrate along with their mothers, stepfathers, siblings and half-siblings. In total, about 26,000 Amerasians and 75,000 of their close relatives have immigrated to the United States. The Vietnamese population numbered over 1.5 million in 2010, with approximately two-thirds being foreign born.

The majority of Vietnamese live in coastal fishing regions and in the suburbs of large cities such as Los Angeles, San Jose, Houston, and Washington D.C. Because a large percentage of refugees worked as fisherfolk in Vietnam, many of these immigrants settled in the Gulf Coast to work in the fishing industries, with the majority settling around Houston, Texas. In addition to the Gulf Coast of Texas, coastal Louisiana has drawn a comparatively large number of Vietnamese. With a population of around 25,000, Vietnamese rank as Louisiana’s largest immigrant group. Refugees have been drawn to the New Orleans region in particular. With its French background, large population of Catholics, and subtropical climate, the city proved a natural fit, so much so that Vietnamese were among the first groups to return the city after Katrina in order to rebuild.

Because the Gulf Coast boasted a relatively sparse Asian population prior to 1975, many Vietnamese have suffered racist treatment. In the 1980s, for example, members of the Galveston Bay, Texas, Ku Klux Klan launched a drive to intimidate Vietnamese fishermen. The targeted Vietnamese sued for and won a federal injunction prohibiting the Klan from further harassment. As of 2010, one-third of the commercial seafood workers in the Gulf Coast were Vietnamese Americans. Because of their heavy investment in the seafood industry, Vietnamese were especially hard hit by the 2010 British Petroleum oil spill.

The Dawn of Little Saigons

The large flow of Vietnamese into the Gulf of Mexico, California, and the area surrounding Washington D.C. has given rise to thriving Little Saigons, home to Vietnamese supermarkets, delis, bakeries, coffee shops, pho houses, sandwich shops, mom-and-pop restaurants, and banquet halls. Unlike the early Chinatowns, many of which developed in dense urban areas such as San Francisco, large Little Saigons are most often located in stripmalls in the suburban outskirts of large metropolitan areas.

Located close to Camp Pendleton, which held a refugee camp that housed upwards of 50,000 Vietnamese at one time, Westminster, California, is home to the nation’s most populated Little Saigon. With the largest number of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam, Westminster’s Little Saigon boasts over 4000 businesses and 200 restaurants. On the East coast, a strip mall located at a busy highway exchange in northern Virginia serves as a gathering place for Vietnamese living in the Washington D.C. metropolitan area and beyond. In addition to pho houses, coffee shops, pastry shops, restaurants, and grocery stores, outdoor vendors sell fresh herbs, fruits such as durian and longans, sugarcane drinks, and street food. Like any major Asian gathering center, the area known as “Seven Points” or Eden Center hosts New Year’s and Autumn Moon festivals every year. In addition to such suburban enclaves, Little Saigons have also been established by Chinese Vietnamese in thriving urban Chinatowns throughout the country.

From Vietnamese to Vietnamese American

Vietnamese cuisine values a variety of textures, flavors, and temperatures within a meal. As a result cooked ingredients are frequently mixed with raw ingredients, cold foods served with hot, and spicy or sour ingredients mixed with mild. Freshly picked herbs such as cilantro, basil, mint, and perilla play a starring role as does fish sauce (nuoc mam), which is as essential to Vietnamese cookery as soy is to Chinese. The most common seasonings include chilies, garlic, shallots, lemongrass, ginger, galangal, shrimp paste, turmeric, tamarind, and lime juice. Vietnamese cooking eschews lard and other animal fats in favor of light cooking oils. Unlike Chinese who largely consume cooked vegetables, Vietnamese enjoy many of them raw.

Because Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipino immigrants preceded those from Vietnam, 1970s refugees entered a United States that had a well-developed Asian American culinary infrastructure in key regions, especially California. As a result, a large number of Vietnamese eventually settled in California. Because most Vietnamese who immigrated had extensive gardening and fishing experience, many used these skills to make their livelihood in the United States. As they did in Vietnam, first-generation immigrants from rural areas often grow the vegetables needed for their daily meals as well as for medicinal purposes. In New Orleans alone, Vietnamese market and backyard gardens include a range of tubers, cucurbits, herbs, leafy greens and vegetables, legumes, medicinal plants, and fruit. Much of the cultivated produce had been difficult to find in the United States. As a result, many of the plants were grown from seeds brought directly from Vietnam or from cuttings received from other gardeners. They are likewise cultivated in a way that resembles the kitchen gardens common throughout Southeast Asia. Just a few of the previously rare plants grown in backyard gardens and popularized by foreign-born Vietnamese immigrants include taro, bitter melon, water spinach, perilla, Vietnamese coriander, Chinese celery, Malabar nightshade, and Jew’s mallow.

Such backyard gardening is waning, however, as elderly first-generation immigrants are dying and as the large Vietnamese-owned farms in Houston and southern California begin to dominate the Vietnamese American produce market throughout the United States.