From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express

Haiming Liu

• Editorial: Rutgers University Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813574769
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Estudios asiaticoamericanos

From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express takes readers on a compelling journey from the California Gold Rush to the present, letting readers witness both the profusion of Chinese restaurants across the United States and the evolution of many distinct American-Chinese iconic dishes from chop suey to General Tso’s chicken. Along the way, historian Haiming Liu explains how the immigrants adapted their traditional food to suit local palates, and gives readers a taste of Chinese cuisine embedded in the bittersweet story of Chinese Americans.
 
Treating food as a social history, Liu explores why Chinese food changed and how it has influenced American culinary culture, and how Chinese restaurants have become places where shared ethnic identity is affirmed—not only for Chinese immigrants but also for American Jews. The book also includes a look at national chains like P. F. Chang’s and a consideration of how Chinese food culture continues to spread around the globe. 
 
Drawing from hundreds of historical and contemporary newspaper reports, journal articles, and writings on food in both English and Chinese, From Canton Restaurant to Panda Express represents a groundbreaking piece of scholarly research. It can be enjoyed equally as a fascinating set of stories about Chinese migration, cultural negotiation, race and ethnicity, diverse flavored Chinese cuisine and its share in American food market today.

1

Canton Restaurant and Chinese Forty-niners

Merchants as the Pioneers

On November 19, 1849, 300 Chinese gathered at Canton Restaurant in San Francisco. At their meeting, they selected Selim E. Woodworth, a merchant and former state senator, as their adviser and arbitrator.1 Through Woodworth, they later purchased a large piece of land in Tuolumne County as a center for mining and agriculture.2 A restaurant with a capacity of 300 seats was huge by any standard at that time or even today. Early California journal and newspaper articles often mentioned this gathering as the beginning of Chinese migration. Canton Restaurant was the first Chinese restaurant in North America. The 300 guests were the first Chinese arrivals from Guangdong, China, during the gold rush. Food importation and restaurant operation were among the earliest economic activities pursued by pioneer Chinese immigrants. With good service, tasteful food, and competitive prices, Chinese restaurants brought to San Francisco material comfort and a taste of urban life. Eating a Chinese meal was a great attraction that many gold rush miners did not want to miss when they came to the city.

As I searched through historical California journal articles, newspaper reports, and some travel accounts and put fragmented pieces together, significant facts emerged about the early Chinese restaurant business in California. Through food and restaurant history we gain a new understanding of Chinese migration in the nineteenth century. Pioneer Chinese restaurants in San Francisco are more than just a part of food history. They reveal many aspects of early Chinese migration that we still have not fully discovered. Restaurant business informs us about how Chinese migration began, who the first pioneer Chinese immigrants were, what their social background was, and how they participated in and contributed to American society. Many existing scholarly and journalistic writings from that time described early Chinese immigrants as illiterate peasants and greedy “sojourners” driven away by hunger, poverty, and social unrest from a poor, conservative, and backward China. While European immigrants came to seek liberty, freedom, and a new life and became settlers, Chinese immigrants were only interested in digging gold, making some quick cash, and then rushing back home. In American immigration historiography, Chinese immigrants were typically labeled as “aliens” and “sojourners” who had no intention and interest of staying in America. Chinese immigrants were “strangers from a different shore.”3

In contrast to the stereotypes, pioneer Chinese immigrants were men of wealth and ambition. Their arrival in San Francisco signaled the beginning of Chinese migration as a transnational flow of people, commodities, and cultural traditions. Following in their footsteps, there would be steady and continuous waves of Chinese immigrants from all social classes. Many more Chinese would come to join them and engage in all kinds of economic and social activities, and make the United States their newly adopted country. With 300 seats, Canton Restaurant was anything but a transient or quick-cash business. A restaurant of this size required a reliable supply of food ingredients, an adequate cash flow to maintain its operation, and good chefs to prepare decent meals. It needed experienced managers and waiters to serve customers, as most of its customers were not necessarily Chinese. Like Chinese warehouses, grocery stores, pharmacy and herbal shops, or lodging houses, Chinese restaurant businesses were often a long-term investment by a wealthy merchant or a group of wealthy merchants exploring the food market in this emerging port city.

As the 300 guests selected an American adviser for future economic endeavors, those participants at the Canton Restaurant meeting in November 1849 were obviously not laborers but merchants who were interested in opportunities outside of China. They had capital to invest, and intended to stay and do business in California. According to the historian Elizabeth Sinn, one of the Chinese forty-niners was Norman Assing (also spelled as As-Sing, whose Chinese name is Yuan Sheng), who left Hong Kong on the Swallow on May 6, 1849. He was the first named Chinese passenger “among all the thousands who made that journey but who were merely referred to anonymously as passengers.” Assing was a Xiangshan (it is called Zhongshan, a city in Guangdong Province today) native and grew up in Macau. He traveled to New York in 1820 and might have been naturalized as a U.S. citizen in North Carolina during his stay on the East Coast. He returned to China and then came back to the United States in 1849. He was the owner of Macau and Woosung Restaurant, another famous Chinese restaurant in San Francisco during the gold rush. While running the restaurant, he was also operating a trading company.4 Assing was one of the first few hundreds of Chinese arrivals in San Francisco who were not here to dig gold in the mining fields but to strike it rich through trade and business.

When gold was discovered in California, soldiers of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) deserted the battlefields for the goldfields. Sailors of all nationalities in San Francisco abandoned their ships. Two-thirds of the American men in Oregon raced southward in search for gold.5 American forty-niners were typically young, able-bodied males who were adventurous, restless, and desperate. Many of them were not necessarily poor but were hardly settlers. The gold rush was not a migration movement that encouraged people to develop a sense of home in California. A small percentage of miners made a fortune through mere luck. But many were bitterly disappointed after months of exhaustive travel and hopeless digging in the field. William Swine, for example, left Youngstown, New York, in April 1849 and reached California by land in late November. Even before digging, Swine wrote to his brother George: “For God’s sake. Think not of it. Stay at home.” Digging could not make money, he concluded, only trade could. In November 1850, Swine boarded a ship in San Francisco to go back home with no cash left in his pocket. “I have got enough of California,” Swine wrote to his wife, “I am coming home as fast as I can.”6 Rootless, homesick, often suffering from hunger, and surviving in a lawless social environment, many American forty-niners were eager to return home.

While forty-niners from the East Coast or other parts of the world rushed to California for a dream of quick gold, Chinese forty-niners had more practical economic goals. Being merchants in social class, they were a different kind of pioneer in California. They were interested in making money through trade rather than digging gold. James O’Meara wrote in 1884: “Among the thousand[s] of pioneers flocking to California during the Gold Rush were Chinese in San Francisco. It is enough to know that in the fall of 1849 the Chinese in San Francisco numbered several hundred. They were not laborers who came; not of the coolie class, at least. Very few of them went into the mining district.”7

Rather than a desperate escape from poverty and hunger, Chinese migration to the United States began with a transplanted social network of entrepreneurs who could run retail and service businesses and bring over commodities for daily needs. O’Meara specifically pointed out that Chinese forty-niners were

men of means enough to pay their own way and here they mainly embarked in mercantile and trading pursuits, in different degrees. A few were mechanics, but as these could not compete with Americans and Europeans, they dropped into other employment. While it had been not [an] infrequent thing to see Americans and foreigners of Caucasian blood working at rough jobs in carpentering, at other trades, and even digging in the banks in San Francisco, in 1849—some of these men educated to professions or accustomed to luxury—not Chinamen was seen [sic] as a common laborer. Some hired out as servants and cooks, but the number was small. Trade seemed to be their element, their ambition, their choice.8

In 1849, the Chinese community in San Francisco consisted mostly of merchants, traders, grocers, herbalists, warehouse owners, and, of course, restaurant operators. They came from Canton, the capital city of Guangdong Province, South China. The city was a famous international trading center long before the gold rush in California. Many Chinese forty-niners had rich experiences in the import and export trade. They had mingled with Westerners before. As merchants, they were here to develop trade and establish businesses such as boardinghouses, tool stores, herbal medical shops, or restaurants. A rapidly growing population in the mining area and San Francisco as an emerging port city probably attracted the pioneer merchant Chinese more than the gold. When other forty-niners rushed to the mining fields and focused only on digging gold, Chinese forty-niners saw other opportunities for making money. With restaurants, lodging houses, and grocery or hardware stores, they served both Chinese and non-Chinese customers. They encouraged and facilitated continuous waves of Chinese immigrants. Equally eager to strike it rich, Chinese forty-niners seemed more rational, calculating, and patient in making money. They brought with them trade, business, and laborers. They made San Francisco a better place for settlement.

The Chinese migration flow trickled from a few dozens in 1848 to a few hundred in 1849.9 In the first three months of 1849, vessels from China never carried more than ten passengers. Then in August, sixty-two Chinese arrived. On October 15, the British ship Amazon disembarked 101 Chinese passengers in San Francisco.10 Those few hundred Chinese immigrants were mostly merchants who could speak some English, had capital to establish businesses, and would function as sponsors, job brokers, potential employers, or social networks to encourage their fellow Chinese to join them in the near future. Quickly the number of Chinese immigrants jumped from a few thousand in 1851 to 20,000 in 1852.11 In that year, ocean transportation between Hong Kong and San Francisco was significantly improved. Many ships began to carry 500 to 600 passengers. Some ships could reach San Francisco from Hong Kong in thirty-five to forty days, while others took forty-five to sixty days. Obviously, many Chinese arrivals in 1852 were labor immigrants ready to enter the mining fields. By then Chinese merchants had already established boardinghouses, grocery stores, herbal shops, restaurants, and, more important, a social and communication network to facilitate a rapidly growing migration flow from Guangdong Province to California.

Chinese forty-niners represented a general pattern of Chinese migration. Merchants tended to be the pioneer immigrants. They established businesses, and then encouraged people of lesser means or labor immigrants to join them in the new country.12 Such a pattern sustained a momentum in migration movement, developed a sense of roots and community for later waves of immigrants, and established a social network among Chinese immigrants. Following the merchants, there were Chinese of different social classes. But they were not coolie laborers as white American labor unions labeled them in the 1870s. Elizabeth Sinn pointed out that even E. T. Bush, American consul in Hong Kong in 1851, strongly rejected the suggestion that Chinese immigrants leaving for California from Hong Kong were coolie laborers. The British governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Bowring (1854–1859), was also keen to clarify that many Chinese immigrants were merchants. They were in fact “a superior class.”13 Chinese migration to Canada, Australia, Southeast Asia, or elsewhere in the nineteenth century or earlier often followed a similar pattern.

There was a long tradition of migration and ocean travel in Guangdong and Fujian. Cantonese merchants had dealt with Westerners for centuries. It was not surprising that the Chinese merchants arrived in San Francisco shortly after gold was discovered in California in 1848. Long before the gold rush, American merchants in New England lobbied the U.S. government to acquire California for the purpose of the China trade. Trade between American merchants in New England and Chinese merchants in Canton, China, in the 1790s brought American merchants’ attention to California, which was geographically a lot closer to Asia than to the East Coast.14 Their goal was accomplished when California became a U.S. territory after the Mexican-American War. Chinese merchants in Canton were also familiar with the China trade. When gold was discovered, and more and more people rushed toward California, they saw opportunities and quickly established their commercial base in San Francisco. They knew that the city would become a significant Pacific link in the China trade.

As the historian Sandy Lydon pointed out, for Chinese immigrants, California was not the end of the continent but the nearest shore of a land stretching eastward. “Seen from our perch above Hawaii it is the European presence in California which becomes extraordinary (and even tenuous).”15 During the migration process, some Chinese stayed in the new country while others returned home. But there were always new arrivals to join the process. Like European immigrants, many Chinese were sojourners. Going back home rich was a Jinshan ke, or a Golden Mountain, man’s dream. Families left behind were waiting for their return. However, some people soon saw the new country as home away from home and wanted to stay. Many sojourners would be settlers when they became more familiar with the country and when the social and racial environment improved.

Canton as a Metropolitan City

Pioneer Chinese immigrants were mostly Cantonese. When gold was discovered in California, it quickly drew the attention of Cantonese merchants. As a metropolitan city in South China, Canton had been an international trading center for centuries because of the maritime trade. The Qing government established the famous “Canton System” during 1757–1842. According to this system, the imperial government designated Canton as the only port city open to foreign trade before the Opium War (1839–1842).16 The “Thirteen Hong” merchants were the only merchants who could conduct international trade. Many American missionaries and businesspersons were working and living in Canton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Boston businessman John P. Cushing, for example, became a long-term business partner of Wu Binqian and other “Thirteen Hong” merchants. Wu was the wealthiest Hong merchant at that time. Cushing himself returned home as a wealthy merchant after living and doing business in Canton for decades.17

In distance, Canton was a lot closer to San Francisco and took much less time to reach than coming from New York or Boston. It was about thirty-five to forty-five days by ship from Canton or Hong Kong to San Francisco in the mid-nineteenth century. Long before gold was discovered in California, Cantonese merchants were involved in the maritime trade with Europe, South America, and Japan for silver, and with Siam, Malaya, the Philippines, and Indonesia for pepper, coconut oil, rice, brown sugar, copper, wood, and sea slugs. Compared with the maritime trade route between Acapulco, Mexico City, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and the South Coast of China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the trip from Canton to San Francisco was a lot easier and closer.

As a metropolitan city in China, Canton was a well-known name among Westerners. Tea, silk, porcelain, and furniture as highly demanded commodities were exported overseas in large quantities from here. It was an era when average families in London spent 10 to 15 percent of their income on Chinese tea and wealthy families in North America drank more tea than coffee in elegant porcelain tea sets made in China. In the early gold rush days, there were Chinese merchants who built large tea warehouses in San Francisco and amassed “snug fortune.” They were regarded by Americans as “the aristocrats of their race.”18 It was not surprising that Chinese forty-niners named their first restaurant in America after the city of Canton.

In his book about Canton, missionary doctor John G. Kerr observed that close to the Hong merchant residential and Western merchant office area, there were fruit stalls, tobacco shops, and, of course, large and fancy restaurants. Several fine teahouses with gardens were also found there.19 In Canton, teahouses served not just tea but a...