Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe

punishment, and his section on foodstuffs shows clearly that he actually tasted, and enjoyed, bamboo shoots, frogs’ legs, and ripe persimmons. He is not put off when his Chinese host ladles soup into his bowl with a spoon that has touched his own lips or cleans his guest’s chopsticks with his fingers—“after having sucked them clean.” And he is one of the rare Americans of the nineteenth century who admits to having enjoyed the occasional formal Chinese banquet:

     
    Figure 2.3. An American missionary with her Chinese converts in Fuzhou, c. 1902. After the signing of the Treaty of Wang Xia, most Americans in China were either missionaries or traders.
     
The variety of preparations is certainly very great, and many of them are as delicate and well-flavored as any one could desire. Such at least is my own opinion, founded on actual experience; for just in order to inform myself, I have done what, perhaps, few foreigners who visit China venture upon—imagining the presence of some canine or feline ingredient—have tasted most of the dishes at a fashionable Chinese dinner, even when the appearance and odor suggested something disagreeable, and have found them exceedingly palatable. 23
     
    The Americans who lived and worked in China during that time were mainly interested not in what it was but in what they thought it should be—an economically and technologically modern Christian nation. To them, imperial China was an antiquated monolith akin to ancient Egypt or Rome and best relegated to the dustbin of history. Even by the 1890s, few Americans had seen much more of the country than the coast and a few inland cities, and only a small minority had mastered Chinese. Their culturally limited viewpoint profoundly influenced the reception on American soil of Chinese immigrants and Chinese food.

CHAPTER THREE
Coarse Rice and Water
     
    In 1795, when the Americans were still marveling at Chinese food from the confines of Guangzhou, the Middle Kingdom’s most famous poet, Yuan Mei, wrote of the deterioration caused by advancing age:
     
When I was young and had no money to spend
I had a passionate longing for expensive things.
I was always envying people for their fur coats,
For the wonderful things they got to eat and drink.
I dreamt of these things, but none of them came my way,
And in the end I became very depressed.
Nowadays, I have got quite smart clothes,
But am old and ugly, and they do not suit me at all.
All the choicest foods are on my table;
But I only manage to eat a few scraps.
I feel inclined to say to my Creator
“Let me live my days on earth again,
But this time be rich when I am young;
To be poor when one is old does not matter at all.” 1
     
    Yuan Mei was born poor in 1716 in the city of Hangzhou. His teachers realized the power of his intellect very early; after he passed the official examinations, he became a district magistrate in the city of Nanjing on the lower Yangzi River. Passionate, irreverent, and disrespectful of authority, he soon realized that he was unfit for official life. Already famous for his poetry, he decided to take up the writing life full time. In 1748, he resigned his posts and retired to a sprawling estate—the Sui Gardens—he had built in the outskirts of Nanjing. His gardens included twenty-four decorative pavilions, a scholar’s library and studio, arched bridges over a pond, and a kitchen. There, for the rest of his life, he devoted himself to poetry and friends, sexual indulgences, and refining the gastronomic arts.
     
    Like many with sensitive stomachs (probably caused by too much early indulgence), Yuan Mei was obsessed with food. He hired a chef, Wang Xiaoyu, who shared his culinary passion and aesthetic. Wang told him:
To find an employer who appreciates one is not easy. But to find one who understands anything about cookery, is harder still. So much imagination and hard thinking go into the making of every dish that one may say I serve up along with it my whole