I think a lot of ABCs have a hard time with their identity and that’s why they shun American Chinese takeout. That should be my post, but let me elaborate for a good 10 minute read.
Born and raised in Rochester, NY I never felt fully comfortable in my surroundings even though my family acclimated as well as they could. We had our Chinese friends with their Chinese summer BBQs and our white friends with theirs. Not that they were segregated because of racism, but when everyone is a transplant from an Asian country, they seem to search for any kind of familiarity after moving across the world. It wasn’t as much an act of excluding outsiders as it was forming a new sense of family.
The few Chinese restaurants in Rochester were takeout joints serving sweet and sour, general Tso’s, sesame chicken, beef and broccoli, hot and sour soup, etc. You know the kind. “That’s not real Chinese food,” aunties, uncles and parents would always exclaim in disgust as I ordered sesame chicken when they’d order PiPa Tofu or steamed fish off the secret menu. They turned their noses down at the fried, heavily battered morsels of meat, drenched in thick and overly sweet sauce, heavy on the vinegar and sugar, and undoubtedly with a generous dose of MSG.
And it wasn’t “real” Chinese food. It was a version born from Chinese railroad workers during the California Gold Rush. The majority of the workers came from the Guangdong region, and fun fact – I have an ancestor who was a railroad worker (that’s for another story and it’s a sucky one). But anyway, that’s why most Chinese takeout is a variation of Cantonese food and not Sichuan. The flavor profiles developed to accommodate American taste buds, and this was important considering the only way to stay in the US as an immigrant was to be more pungent, more bold, more fried, more sweet. Flavors changed out of desperation and need to make a living, as restaurant owners were exempt from the Chinese Exclusion Act. What started as a way to feed fellow railroad workers something familar from home, became a need for survival.
Anyone seeing them as sellouts needs to check their privelege.
Flavors didn’t remain delicate and subtle like the dishes from their homeland, where seafood’s freshness would be showcased, with only cooked salt and pepper accentuating it. When I say American Chinese food is bold, it doesn’t mean Cantonese food was bland, as flavors are highlighted in different ways. Freshness also had to do with it too, and creative ways to work with local ingredients. Restaurants originated in San Francisco, moved over to NYC to what you know as Chinatown in Manhattan, then scattered throughout the US.
In 1943, they would repeal the Chinese Exclusion Act, letting in more and more immigrants, and then the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles to come here. By the late 1900s alot of these immigrants (including family members) would be like, the fuck is this American Chinese food?! By then it was generations removed from the traditional Cantonese food it originated from.
I, on the other hand, was born and raised in Rochester, and adored American Chinese takeout. Hating it would be like hating myself – something that came from the original, but slightly (sometimes heavily) influenced by American taste. When the older generation looked down on the sweet and gloppy sauces, it felt like they were looking down on me, never seeing me as fully Chinese as they were. And they were right – not to look down on me, but that I was never going to be fully Chinese. It was so easy for me to accept American Chinese food, but to them it was an abomination and insult to real Chinese food, and one of many barriers between ABCs with their immigrant parents preventing them from seeing eye-to-eye. Enjoying my plate of sesame chicken was a slap in their faces.
So what’s an American Chinese kid to do? Shun the gloriously sweet and gloppy sauces for the more delicate and steamed flavors of whole steamed fish with ginger and scallions over white rice. The need to be accepted by the more traditional Chinese immigrants, and by my more culturally sensitive cousins, started around the same time I gave up wanting acceptance from my white peers, probably during or after college in Upstate NY. I was trying to find myself, and what better way to do it than get back to my roots (I now know these aren’t really my roots). I wanted to stop being called a Twinkie (yellow on the outside, white on the inside) and whitewashed by my cousins, or to be seen as a “jook-sing” while walking through Chinatown. And so, in a rush to establish an identity, I became insufferable.
In my 20s and early 30s, I did what alot of food critics, food writers and yelpers still do – say everything was shit. “There are no good ________ (insert Chinese dish here) in Atlanta, you have to go back to China”. It allowed me to look knowledgable and intelligent without doing any real work, aside from occasionally visiting a random restaurant here and there to establish a comfirmation bias and strengthen my “everything sucks” stance. You know the ones who look down on everyone and every restaurant trying their hardest, only to dismiss them with a “better in NYC/SF/LA/China” comment.
I’m getting sidetracked, back to Chinese takeout. Chinese takeout isn’t bad because it’s not traditional. Dishes will always have different iterations over time, from what local ingredients were available, and what the customer’s palate is. It is just different. Different isn’t bad.
Is there bad Chinese takeout? Of course, but I’m not talking about that. There’s bad restaurants everywhere. I’m calling out the lack of understanding of our history, which prevents us from giving major respect to our Cantonese ancestors trying to make it in the US when they were being excluded. And allowing other restaurants like Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai and Laotian to open without needing to take decades and decades of iterations changing their cuisine, becoming so different that people from their homeland would go “the fuck is that?”
So like, you’re welcome. A part of me is a little bitter that Sichuan food got to shine with more traditional versions of their dishes than Cantonese food ever did. While I understand that not all Sichuan dishes are bold and spicy, and immigrants don’t like being pigeonholed by this stereotype, the bold and spicy ones are unapologetically bold and spicy here, while Cantonese food changed its flavor profile to the point of being its own separate cuisine. And so traditional Cantonese food still never really got its moment. We have the occasional dim sum restaurant, but not a lot of upscale or fine dining Cantonese establishments in every corner of every city, the way Sichuan is scattered all around metro ATL. Sometimes I worry that it’s too late, that people have grown accostomed to Chinese takeout, and see that as Cantonese cuisine.
I’m getting sidetracked again, but what I’m saying is – American Chinese food needs more respect and love. In addition, Cantonese food needs its own distinction from American Chinese food too, and have its moment to shine. If you’re an ABC like me, all I ask is for you to put aside your criteria in determining what is good by equating it with what is traditional or not traditional. I mean, do you like a good General Tso’s chicken or not? “BuT iTs NoT tRaDiTiOnAl” idfc. Don’t be shy and order it from your local mom and pop takeout joint. And give a chuckle if they serve it with a fork, since they don’t want to assume you know how to use chopsticks.
