The United States of Chinese Food

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So there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald's, Burking, Wendy's, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined.

It's actually almost, if it hasn't exceeded 50,000 already, it's, you know, the most popular ethnic food.

That's Jenny Aitley, the author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and a co-producer of the new movie The Search for General So.

Both her book and the movie are all about the weird phenomenon of American Chinese food.

How did it become so popular?

What the hell is chop suey suey anyway?

And is MSG as bad as people believe it is?

We have got all that and more in this episode, including the secret, scandalous, gender-bending history of Chinese restaurants in 1920s New York City.

Welcome to Gastropod.

I'm Cynthia Graeber.

And I'm Nicola Twilley.

And now, back to the salty, savory, crispy delights of Chinese American cuisine.

It's part of American tradition now to go to Chinese restaurants.

I'm from a small town in Montana, Missoula, Montana.

And I remember going to, you know, the pink and the red booths with the neon and getting the white takeout boxes with the fortune cookies.

We had a favorite Chinese restaurant.

It was called

W-A-I, W-A-I-Y-Y.

And it was about maybe what, a mile from

the house.

Yeah.

We were there a lot.

They had the best Chinese buffet you've ever had.

Mom doesn't want to cook, oh, let's call in for Chinese.

It's fast, it's easy, and you don't have to do any dishes because everything is right there for you.

They even throw in a plastic fork.

This spring, I went to the movies with a couple of friends to see a new documentary called The Search for General Tzo.

It's a great movie.

For those of you who did not grow up in America or are not Chinese, General Tso is a real general from China.

But more to the point, General Tzo is the name of the most common Chinese chicken dish in the entire United States.

Although, I've never actually tried it.

I'm not sure I have either, maybe when I was a kid.

But it sounds good.

It's fried breaded chicken in a sweet and spicy sauce.

So, I mean, that sounds tasty.

Certainly, millions of Americans do agree with you.

Director Ian Cheney and co-producer Jenny Aitley went on a search for the original general and the original recipe.

We're going to leave that for all you listeners to watch on Netflix, and you should definitely watch it.

But the movie got me thinking about one particular story: how and why Chinese food in America became so different from Chinese food in China.

And so incredibly popular over here.

The first huge wave of Chinese immigrants came in the mid-1800s and there were a couple things that were going on.

So one,

in the southeastern corner of China, there was basically like this apocalyptic like rush of things, right?

So there was a flood, there was famine, and there was war.

So it pushed huge numbers, hundreds of thousands of Chinese men overseas in order to support their families.

And you know, when they looked across the globe, one of the magnets was California with a gold rush.

So there's what economists call a push and a pull factor going on there.

Apocalypse at home, the chance of unimaginable riches in California.

No wonder so many Chinese came to the U.S.

And not surprisingly, there was a lot of racism towards these immigrants.

White guys thought they were stealing the jobs.

And so you had huge waves of anti-Chinese violence sort of coursing through the United States in the latter part of the 1800s, with the sort of deepest violence being obviously towards in the West.

I mean, there were lynchings and shootings and beatings and hangings.

At the time these Chinese immigrants were not running restaurants.

They just worked in mines and fields and factories like everybody else.

What's interesting is when the Chinese first arrived in America, they didn't cook, right?

Because at that point, Chinese food was like bizarre and strange.

You know, there's actually an article in the New York Times from around that era where the reporter asked, in all seriousness, do the Chinese eat rats, right?

So, you know, if they didn't eat rats, they ate cats.

If they didn't eat cats, cats, they ate dogs.

It was very exotic.

Like, these people ate rice with sticks.

Like, how strange.

You know, that was actually a defense that a lawyer had for a Chinese murder kind of suspect, which is, Your Honor, like, what do you expect?

They eat rice with sticks.

As though that was sort of an excuse.

And he was a defense lawyer, so I have no idea what the prosecutor sort of made in terms of the arguments.

And if you look at the early descriptions of Chinese food in the writing of that era, it's very kind of disparaging, right?

So it's like bean cheese, which which is basically tofu, or you know, these weird sausages, like who knows what's in them.

That sort of prejudice translated into violence.

And as the violence directed at the Chinese increased, two things happened.

So one was it pushed the Chinese away from the West Coast, where the violence was most virulent, and into other parts of the country.

And so, you know, with them, they took some of their traditions.

And the other thing was it actually drove the Chinese men into

two very specific occupations.

So one, as we all know, is laundries, Mr.

Lee's cleaners, and then the other one is restaurants.

And you've used kind of stop and you think about it, you're like, why of all the different occupations did they end up in these two?

And then you realize they represent cleaning and cooking, which are both women's work, and so that not as threatening to the American male.

And so you have this, they've been sort of bucketed into sort of safer areas.

Okay, so now they're working in restaurants.

That helps protect them from some of the worst of the prejudice and violence.

But they still have to find a way to get Americans to change their mind about Chinese food.

Right, because like Jenny said, white Americans thought that Chinese immigrants made their food from rats.

The solution was chopped sui.

I like to say that chopped suey is one of the biggest culinary jokes that one culture has ever played on another.

And essentially, you know, chop suey in...

Mandarin is jasu, which basically means odds and ends or leftovers.

And so what happened was there is a dish.

It is incredibly popular.

And it's a curious combination because essentially meat, usually chicken or pork or beef.

So something that is very familiar to Americans, mixed with things that are just slightly exotic.

So water chestnuts and snow peas and bean sprouts.

And these are actually really interesting vegetables to pair with because they're essentially have like cool, interesting textures, but they have no flavor.

Like there is no bitter melon actually in, you know, chopped suey.

So you have a mixing of the familiar with the foreign and then packaged for the American public.

There is no general in this particular case.

So, who was the genius, or I mean, I guess I should say the joker, behind Chop Tzui?

The debate over who invented Chop Tzui is sort of a historical mystery.

There are a lot of legends that are like, oh, it was, you know, kind of made in conjunction with a visit of a Chinese diplomat named Li Hongzang.

And it's interesting because if you go back and you actually see the very, very careful coverage of his diplomatic sojourn to the United States, it was so carefully covered that anything like chop suey would have come in that.

I mean they they had an article in the New York Times about when his luggage left England for the United States.

I mean it was like brangelina but like actually a lot more in intense.

According to Jenny, given that there was brangelina level attention paid to him, then if chop suey had been invented for that particular diplomat, we'd know.

Okay, it wasn't the diplomat.

There is an article that I found in the New York Times in the early 1900s that actually has a Chinese guy who claims that he invented chop suey at the behest of a basically a white restaurant owner who wanted a dish that would serve the American palate.

And so he claims that he invented it and this guy stole his recipe.

The guy in question was called Lem Sen.

He had this whole spiel, he told the judge.

He had been born in San Francisco, he had never even been to China, and chop suey was about as Chinese as pork and beans.

These things are probably true.

But there's a small problem with his story too, which is that chop suey suey first got popular in New York City, not San Francisco.

And chop suey's popularity actually goes from New York and then out.

And you can see that pretty well documented, which is kind of very interesting because if you think about it, the heaviest Chinese immigrants were originally in California.

Yet this dish kind of, if you trace its sort of popularity, basically starts in New York around, you know, 1896 to like 1920, it just becomes this huge cultural phenomenon.

It was like how you impress dates, like you would take them out for a night of chop suey, which is a way you could show you were cosmopolitan and like sophisticated, not only as a guy, but as you know, upper-class societal ladies.

So chop suey became like this kind of hallmark of distinguishing that and mahjong together.

That was how you show you were cool.

That kind of sounds like my grandmother.

She did love her mahjong.

So racism forced Chinese immigrants into cooking and chop suey was their ingenious way to get Americans to fall in love with their food.

But meanwhile, the restriction on Chinese immigration to the U.S.

kept getting tighter and tighter.

Until in 1882, the U.S.

government passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

That banned any immigration from China at all.

And that was that until 1915.

The irony, I think, of the effort to keep the Chinese out, particularly Chinese laborers out of the United States, is that it created opportunities for different kinds of Chinese to come in.

So, particularly ones that were willing to invest capital in a certain way.

That's Heather Lee.

She's a postdoc at MIT and soon to be an assistant professor at NYU in Shanghai.

And she's working on a book about Chinese immigration to America.

These opportunities to immigrate were heavily sought after by the Chinese because they had pressures after many generations of sending people to the United States to continue sending them.

So when there was an opportunity, there was a 1915 court case that determined if you owned and operated a Chinese restaurant, you were allowed special immigration privileges.

So, after that, the Chinese seeing a great opportunity in there, everybody was suddenly a Chinese restaurant owner.

What was lucky for the Chinese, too, that this case happened in 1915, was that there was an expansion of consumption during this period.

There was a growing generation of people who were able to spend money on eating out and these kinds of luxuries that didn't exist beforehand.

So, So, from the Chinese side, they were interested not in cooking chop suey for late-night crowds.

Nobody really wants to do that, but they did see a chance to come to the United States, make money, send money home, and perpetuate a kind of cycle that had been going on since the mid-19th century to the United States.

Getting one of those special restaurant visas involved jumping through a lot of hoops, but it also meant you could bring in four or five people at a time.

So, in order to take advantage of this special immigration privilege, the Chinese had to demonstrate a lot of things to immigration authorities.

They were really draconian in the way they monitored who got to take advantage of these opportunities.

So, a Chinese restaurant owner had to come in and say, hey, you know, I have a Chinese restaurant.

It's got roughly $18,000 in capitalization in roughly $19.20,000, let's say.

And I have four other partners, and one partner is the manager, usually the person who's doing the interview.

One person is the accountant, one person is the head waiter, one person is the head cook.

And we all take these different responsibilities and all of my partners contribute a certain amount of average capital.

And in this way, the Chinese sort of equalized the opportunity for many people to get into the country because to open one Chinese restaurant was oftentimes beyond the means of one individual.

So you would split the burden and what you'd also do is split the opportunity.

So you would trade the role of the manager amongst one another so that there were roughly five people that were qualified at some point within the short life cycle of a Chinese restaurant to come in and out of the country.

And what's interesting is that some of the immigrants in New York opened up an entirely new type of Chinese restaurant.

Remember how chop suey was a hot date?

Well, these new restaurants take hot dates to a whole new level.

And they were particularly receptive to men and women doing all kinds of scandalous acts right there open in the public.

This kind of Chinese restaurant, the kind where you could do naughty things alongside eating chop suey, they had a special name.

They were called Dine and Dances and they were huge in the 1920s.

In terms of how Chinese restaurants spread, I think there's an often overlooked moment in the early 20th century when Chinese restaurants were part of the big nightlife culture that was emerging in cities at the time.

And young men and women were interested in finding spaces where where they could meet and talk and explore what it meant to be a modern man and woman.

The dine and dances were often close to New York's theaters, and they'd stay open until 2 or 4 in the morning.

Dine and dances were catering to as broad of a population as they could possibly imagine.

So there was literally an American side menu and a Chinese side menu.

And like Chinese restaurants even today, there were about 500 choices.

The food wasn't the only attraction, though.

Red was a her favorite color.

And there were oftentimes Oriental-esque wood moldings.

They were, of course, weren't as beautiful as some of the ones you would find in Chinatown, which were actually imported by craftsmen in Guangzhou or other parts or Hong Kong as well.

But

there would be all kinds of silks,

symbols of, I think, what to the American audience would remind them of the audience.

So it was a kind of transformative experience.

You might have been listening to a big band, a big jazz band, but you would be dancing and eating in an oriental environment to their eyes.

And not just dancing and eating.

The city's anti-vice investigators had a field day with all the shenanigans that went on in this kind of Chinese restaurant.

Oh, there are so many things scandalous about this period, especially when we're talking about what was happening in juxtaposition to men and women interacting maybe just a few generations ago when they would only see them each other in the company of their parents.

So in these dining dances, you have women initiating contact with men, so women taking the prerogative of inviting a man to her table, oftentimes a table of girlfriends, by winking at him, smiling at him, or gesturing him to come over.

You also see women drinking in public.

This was also a time of prohibition, so they were breaking not only social rules, but legal laws.

And you also saw women being very physical with men, kissing, touching.

And I think I remember this moment, I think a couple years ago when I was looking at anti-vice records in the archive and reading about one woman in particular in this booth of a Chinese restaurant lifting up her skirt.

to a vice investigator and he was so scandalized he asked her to bring down her skirt.

So

women were very open with their sexuality and it was a place where waiters and managers that were Chinese often let slide the experimentation that they saw going on because they, I think, treated it as not part of their own world.

But it might have been part of my family's world.

A lot of these restaurants were on the Lower East Side.

Heather said that many of the young women who went to the dine and dances, they were of Eastern European descent and many worked in the garment industry around there.

And she says she thinks from their names that a lot of them were Jewish.

That makes sense to me.

My family lived in New York and was super, super liberal in the 1920s.

Some lived in the Bronx in a lefty cooperative established by Jewish communist garment workers.

My great-grandparents didn't even get married for a long time because it was far too bourgeois.

I totally bet I had relatives hanging out and flirting in those dark, exotic, scandalous establishments.

I love the idea of Chinese restaurants as this place to explore new roles for women and allow them to express their sexuality.

It's awesome.

As if somehow the fact that the food is different means that you can be different too.

And this all brings me to another reason I am kind of obsessed with this topic.

You Jews and your Chinese food.

This was another thing that actually had to be explained to me when I first moved to the U.S.

from England.

You know, one of the big questions I had is like, why is Chao Maine the chosen food of the chosen people?

And it's been really fascinating because I grew up in New York City, so I didn't actually realize that this was unusual.

I actually thought that Jews were equivalent to being white if you grow up in the upper west side of New York City.

My parents used to go out for Chinese in New York in the 1950s.

I grew up going out to Chinese restaurants all the time, and for decades it has been the tradition.

American Jews go to Chinese restaurants on Christmas.

So why are we so in love with Chinese food?

You have a couple things that are sort of pushing the whole like sort of Jewish passion for Chinese food.

So one is Chinese food doesn't use dairy, unlike the other two main ethnic cuisines in America, which are Mexican and Italian.

So at a time, you know, this a couple of generations ago, when most Jews kept kosher, you could go into a Chinese restaurant and not kind of feel like it was, you know, being mixed up.

The other interesting thing is that Jews and Chinese are two largest non-Christian immigrant groups to America.

So, Italians, Mexicans, still very Catholic or other forms of Christian.

And as a result, Chinese restaurants were open when Jews wanted to eat.

And this is like kind of hard for us to kind of wrap our mind around in the era of 24-hour ATMs and the fact that now I can

press a button and there's like an Uber that just sort of is on demand.

But there was a time when like restaurants closed and they often closed one day a week and often like at a certain time.

So if you wanted to go out on Sunday or on Christmas, the Chinese restaurants were there and they were open.

So that's one answer.

Chinese restaurants were probably some of the only restaurants open on Christmas.

Another thing that's

key is at least in New York City, there were huge waves of Jewish immigrants that went through the Lower East side.

I think at this point, it's something like 80% of all Jews in America have had an ancestor that passed through the Lower East Side between like 1880 and 1920.

And that part of the Lower East Side is very close to Chinatown, in fact.

So close that in many cases, they are Chinatown.

It is Chinatown now.

Okay, so we were both non-Christian immigrants.

Chinese restaurants were open on Sundays and Christmas, and our communities lived right next door to each other.

But there's more to it.

Just like in the dine and dances, a Chinese restaurant is a strangely safe place to break the rules.

Because meat that's all chopped up in an egg roll or in wonton soup doesn't look like what Jews thought of as pork.

It's like safe tray.

Yeah, it's like total plausible deniability.

I think something that's been really interesting for me to meet, so people my generation who are Jewish, they will not eat pork except in Chinese restaurants because that is like the family rule.

And I'm like, does that make sense?

I was like, why?

And they're like, I don't know.

It's just always the way that my family has done it.

And the thing about pork in Chinese food is it doesn't look like bacon and ham, which I think look very porky

to Jews, even though because those kind of manifestations of the pig are ones that they sort of associate with like being offlamits and trif.

But Chinese food, like in the egg roll, if you can't see it, you didn't really eat it, right?

You know, Nikki, this goes back to something we talked about in our last episode, all about the pig, about how even Jews who eat non-kosher food like shellfish still won't eat pork.

It's this division that's lasted for thousands of years.

Well, right.

Jews have self-identified and basically separated themselves out as the people who do not eat pigs.

Exactly.

My mom is a great example of this.

She loves shrimp and scallops, but she says she doesn't eat bacon.

But, and here we get back to Chinese food, she does eat wonton soup.

She knows there's pork hidden in there, but she can sort of pretend she didn't see it.

I asked my mom if I could expose her secret, and she said I could as long as I didn't make her sound like a total hypocrite.

I don't actually think she is, and after learning so much about the history of the pig and now the history of Chinese food, I understand her logic as crazy as it seems.

Another reason why I think that Chinese food became really popular among Jews is that like it just tastes good.

Like there's a reason why the Chinese opened restaurants and the Irish opened bars and the Germans opened neither.

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Throughout the 20th century, Chinese restaurants continued their stealth colonization of America.

New immigrants who wanted to start a restaurant would show up in New York, and the first thing they did was stop in at the Regional Association for their native province back in China.

And then they'd literally be sent out to small towns all around the country.

They'd be given almost a template for starting a new restaurant.

This is something they talk about in the movie The Search for General Tsu.

What happened happened is the Regional Chinese Association basically assigned territories.

Even to this day, if you go to the Chinatowns, you'll see a lot of buildings that say, you know, Wang Association or, you know, Fujian Association.

All the take-down restaurants, they sell these dishes everywhere.

Everywhere.

You know, I know.

i'm in charge of this organization this is one of the oldest organizations in chinatown we're 113 years here this is the first step you know a lot of the new immigrants they just come here and if the organization can help them to set up the business in a proper way i mean register them they teach you how to call step by step

The economics of all of this are really interesting.

One of the reasons there are actually more Chinese restaurants than there are McDonald's is that the number, the population that you need to support a Chinese restaurant is about 700, 800 in a town is actually enough to have a critical mass.

Whereas for McDonald's, you're looking at least in the thousands.

So

what is going on is, you know, they're trying to spread out and they just literally have maps of the United States and they kind of just...

you know, drive until you find a town that doesn't have a Chinese restaurant.

And one of the fun things about the Chinese restaurants is how cheap they can be.

Like, I would say that if you can buy a Chinese restaurant for like $50,000 to $70,000, I mean, you are not making a lot of money out of it.

In many cases, you know, the people who are staffing it are your own family members.

But you can make a passable living with a family in a very safe town.

So oftentimes, you know, the family will be the only Chinese family or Asian family within like a pretty significant radius.

You know what's also funny?

McDonald's is a franchise and everything has to be identical.

Chinese restaurants could serve anything, and yet somehow they all end up serving the same things.

The successful dishes spread around the country as chefs moved around and restaurants copied each other's menus.

Well, I think one of the funnest things about Chinese food is that it's sort of like open source, like forking and remixing before GitHub and Linux were cool.

And so you just had people who would copy literally the menus.

And in many cases, you actually have the same menu printers working for all of these different restaurants.

There's another reason why those dishes became so popular, and it also has to do with the menus.

For me, actually, one of the more interesting questions when I was writing my book, which is back in the mid-2000s, was like, why hasn't Korean broken out?

Like, almost all other cuisines had broken out.

At that point, you had Vietnamese and Thai and Japanese and Indian and Chinese and even like Malaysian, but Korean just like couldn't get it up.

And so one of the reasons I think is because Chinese food actually is very descriptive about what it is.

So it's like shrimp and broccoli, right?

Or chicken with snow peas.

Whereas Korean dishes were very scary.

It's like bulgoki and kalbi.

And like, you know, they didn't come up with a standardized name to call things when it's essentially just like beef that tastes good, right?

Heather has another hypothesis for why Chinese food has somehow managed to stay so popular in America over so many decades.

One hypothesis is that the Chinese were really capable at adapting to different sort of political moments.

So I think one sort of moment I like to go back to is think about when did pineapples become part of Chinese dishes?

And it corresponds very closely to Hawaii becoming a state.

So once Hawaii joined the union, Chinese restaurants started adding what they call Polynesian flavors to the menu.

So you see throughout the 20th century as other ethnic restaurants are not able to transition into these different political fascinations with otherness

as well as the Chinese do.

But the story of Chinese food in America hasn't been smooth sailing all the way.

In the 1960s, suddenly everybody freaked out about MSG.

There are two things that people really don't like.

And number one, they don't like things that sound like chemicals, which means that if you refer to MSG as monosodium glutamate, people will be terrified of it.

But all of the natural sources of MSG, or any of the chemical sources where they say take a bunch of yeast and then they boil it in acid cause the yeast to self-destruct and then that yeast tastes rather tasty as a result of MSG those things just slide on by people and they don't mind the other half of the equation I would say is xenophobia so whenever MSG first started getting a bad rap there were a lot of questions about what were Chinese people putting in the foods.

Were people putting in in dog meat?

Were they, you know, throwing in dirty things?

Were they trying to poison you with these crazy chemicals that you had never heard of?

And I think that between the two of those, MSG has had a pretty long life as a much maligned additive.

That's Jonathan Soma.

He's the co-host of an event series called MSG.

It's short, in their case, for Masters of Social Gastronomy.

He shares the stage with Sarah Lohman, our Ambergree ice cream expert.

We asked him about the other MSG.

So MSG itself is just a white crystalline powder.

So you can find MSG or some form of MSG

in all sorts of processed foods.

Probably any processed food that you eat that has anything on the back like yeast extract or beef extract, anything hydrolyzed, that's all more or less MSG.

Then in nature, MSG can be found in pretty much everything that tastes good, from broccoli to parmesan cheese to soy sauce and fish sauce, meats.

MSG is more or less everywhere.

Monosodium glutamate is in food already.

In our body, it breaks down into sodium, that's salt, and glutamate.

And glutamate is an amino acid.

It's one that our bodies make naturally.

It's one of the chemicals that about 80% of the nerve cells in our brains use to communicate.

But the thing about it is we can taste it.

Our taste buds can sense glutamate the same way they sense sugar and salt.

And it tastes delicious.

So what MSG really is, is a signal to our brains that we are eating protein.

So protein is made up of a ton of different amino acids.

And one of those is glutamic acid, one of those is glutamate.

And what happens in our brain is instead of detecting all of these different kinds of of amino acids that are in protein, our tongue just decided, hey, I'm going to acknowledge that I have protein in my mouth when I taste glutamate.

And so when glutamate goes in your mouth, you think, I am eating something meaty.

I am eating something savory, whether it is a Dorito or broccoli or a vegetarian soup.

It's the flavor that we now call umami.

In fact, the Japanese word for delicious is umai.

MSG was first isolated from seaweed by a Japanese doctor in 1908.

He was wondering why his wife's soup tasted so good, and it turned out to be because of the naturally occurring MSG in the seaweed she used for her dashi, or stock.

He published his findings and patented his process for isolating the MSG from seaweed.

His vision was that sprinkling powdered MSG on veggies and whole grains would help people eat more of them by making them taste like steak and parmesan.

I should say, I think veggies and grains are already pretty damn delicious, But I do love those umami flavors and parmesan and mushrooms and seaweed, so I can see his logic.

Anyway, MSG in the powdered form caught on.

It became a hit all over Asia and was used in Chinese restaurants in the U.S.

But then, in 1968, a letter was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Where this doctor basically wrote in and said, Hey, everybody, do you notice that after you eat a lot of Chinese food, you feel kind of weird?

And I think maybe it's the cooking wine, or maybe it's this MSG stuff or it's the salt.

He spent probably a quarter of the letter writing about how it was probably just the result of having too much salt in the food.

But because of the fact that everyone thought, oh, monosodium glutamate, what is that?

People latched on to MSG as being the culprit.

And because of this letter to the editor, they latched on to it also being as a result of eating Chinese food.

Over the decades since then, hundreds of studies have been done on MSG.

The ones that supported the doctor's hypothesis were, frankly, horrible studies.

For instance, scientists gave mice enormous doses, doses meant for horses, and they injected the MSG under the animal's skin.

None of us eat MSG by injecting it under our skin.

Meanwhile, the good studies showed no harm.

Zero.

None whatsoever.

The science is flat out: MSG does not cause problems.

MSG doesn't do anything bad to anyone ever.

I actually have a shaker of MSG in my kitchen, and let me tell you, my scrambled eggs are famous as a result.

You can make them for me next time I'm in New York City.

Okay, so MSG has been vindicated.

If you get a headache after eating at a Chinese restaurant, maybe you're coming down with the flu or you didn't drink enough water that day.

Fortunately, just a few years after the MSG scare, Chinese food got a much-needed PR boost.

Premier Choenlai, on behalf of the government of the People's Republic of China, has extended an invitation to President Nixon to visit China at an appropriate date before May 1972.

President Nixon has accepted the invitation with pleasure.

There can be no stable and enduring peace without the People's Republic of China.

When Nixon visited China, the bamboo curtain lifted.

On February 21st, 1972, Nixon was hosted at a banquet by Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

And live on national television, Americans saw him eat real Chinese food.

And they salivated the.

That is from the movie The Search for General Tzu.

And Nixon's visit was in the 70s when General Tzu's chicken was invented.

You'll have to watch the movie to find out who invented it.

But if you want to know just how mainstream and popular breaded chicken with a sweet and spicy sauce became in the 70s and 80s.

Just look at McDonald's.

They introduced chicken McNuggets in 1983, breaded deep-fried chicken that came with a set of sauces.

If you look at the original chicken McNuggets from McDonald's, two of the original four sauces were hot mustard and sweet and sour, which are Chinese-influenced.

Coincidence, I think not.

Chinese food has just kept anticipating what we want before we even know we want it.

Over the past 20 years, the biggest shift has been to the buffet form, particularly in the middle of the country.

The buffet is actually partially a function of the waves of the Fujianese immigrants that have come to the United States over the last 20 years.

This is a new wave of immigrants, and they don't tend to speak English.

And this is another example of interesting economics.

In a buffet, your food costs tend to be higher.

What's nice about a buffet is you don't need people who speak English because it's a buffet.

And so if you don't have a labor force that is pretty sophisticated, then you have basically this kind of veering towards the buffet as a preferred way.

And then, on the other hand, from the customer point of view, it's a buffet.

It's as much food as you can pile on your plate, which Americans love.

And you don't even have to try to pronounce General Sow.

I must have 15 different spellings of so in my menu collection.

It's T-S-O, so it's SOW.

How do I pronounce it again?

I don't know if you say the T or not.

I just kind of blur of it, and that way no one really knows if I'm saying it right or not.

But I get mine over brown rice.

It's my healthy thing for the day.

Chinese food is seriously one of the ultimate American comfort foods.

Jenny told us they even serve it to the armed forces in Iraq.

It's been served on all seven continents, even Antarctica, because Monday night is Chinese food night at McMurdo Station, which is the main scientific station in Antarctica.

If our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie, you should ask yourself how often you eat Chinese food versus how often you eat apple pie.

And so to many Americans, Chinese food is just part of their regular ritual.

Of course, American Chinese food isn't China Chinese food.

As we've been talking about, it adapted to American tastes.

But what's fascinating is that each country where there were Chinese immigrants, each one of those has its own type of Chinese food.

In Korea, there's a dish called ⁇

which the equivalent of in China is definitely much more meaty and it's gotten kind kind of warped as it became Korean.

And then in India they have a whole like set of dishes that are very popular from like chicken Manchurian, tahaka noodles to lollipop wings, which is very strange.

They have a dish that involves like fried chicken wings.

It's incredibly popular nowhere else but in India.

In Peru it even has its own cuisine name.

It's called chifa.

The chifas are so dense.

In Peru, it's like Starbucks in lower Manhattan.

It's like every other block.

There will be a chifa.

And they have like different food than us.

Like their go-to dishes include lomo satado.

It's like Chinese stir-fried, but instead of on rice, they put it on potatoes and there's also tomatoes.

And it's sort of very different interpretation.

And then they have a dish called elo porto, which is actually something I did as a kid, which you mix the noodles with the fried rice into one solid dish.

Heather told us that the American version of Chinese food has even ended up having an impact in China.

Of course, it's the source of a lot of the money that immigrants sent home.

I think one of the surprising byproducts of Americans eating tons and tons of cheap chop suey is that this money went back to China to support families, support people's education, to build infrastructure, hospitals, schools, roads, train railways, so on and so forth.

Actually, even movie theaters too.

And not only that, on a private scale, it also modernized a particular part of southern China where most of these immigrants were from.

They built these really elaborate Western-style Chinese homes.

They were four to five stories tall.

A nuclear family would live on each floor.

They were made to the specifications what they saw as modernity in the West.

They were oftentimes made of imported concrete or steel, and they were also incredibly strong, too.

There are stories of them being able to help families fend off the Japanese during the Japanese invasion during this period, too.

But what's even crazier is that Chinese people in China are now starting to eat American Chinese food.

You also have Panda Express opening up its first branches in China now.

So, I mean, to the Chinese, this isn't Chinese food.

So this to them is American food.

And they're really fascinated by American food.

And

but yeah, there's a kind of recirculation of food going back and forth.

American Chinese food is just its own thing now.

It coexists alongside Chinese Chinese food, like a distant cousin or something.

Both Jenny and Heather grew up eating home-cooked Chinese food, but they also loved American Chinese takeout.

I loved American Chinese food growing up.

Like roast pork lomain and beef with broccoli were like my go-to dishes.

And it was really kind of like, I was so confused as like a 10-year-old when we would go and order these dishes in like a Chinese restaurant in like Flushing.

And my parents are like, oh my God, you're so American.

And I'm like, what are you talking about?

This is like Chinese food.

Like we get it at the local Chinese restaurant, you know, on the Upper West Side.

And it was only when I went to China that I realized these dishes were not actually from China.

For Heather, American Chinese food was a bit of a rebellion.

She did eat it.

Yes, but without the supervision of my parents.

So having Americanized Chinese food was something I did with my girlfriends when we went out to the mall and spent a day wandering around.

So

it was part of my suburban growing up experience to have Americanized Chinese food.

And I actually remember the first moment I had General Sso's chicken.

I was running cross-country during this time, and my mother was tired of cooking.

I had evening runs, and my mom was tired of cooking meals at two different times.

So she started getting Chinese takeout for me.

And she had General Sso's for the first time with her coworkers and said, I want you to try this really delicious dish.

So I think I I must have been around 14 or 15 years old running cross-country and having General Sows after my family had eaten because my mom just simply didn't want to cook anymore.

Did you like it?

Yeah, I was going to say,

how did this Americanized Chinese food taste to you?

Yeah, how did it compare?

It's delicious.

It packs a lot of protein and it's cheap and fast.

The same reasons why everybody loves General Sow.

But here's what I was wondering.

With today's food trends for farm to table and better ingredients and more authentic international cuisines, is the kind of crowd-pleasing but sort of dumbed-down American Chinese menu, is that going to become an endangered species?

I mean, today you can find Chinese restaurants from specific regions of China.

There are Cantonese restaurants and Sichuan restaurants and all sorts of tongue-burning dishes that are not familiar to most American palates.

So, has chop suey disappeared?

I actually think that American Chinese cuisine is like coming into its own.

Nikki, when you came to Boston, my partner Tim and I took you out to my favorite American Chinese restaurant.

It's called May May Street Kitchen.

It uses all local meats and ingredients, and it is super creative.

We're definitely gonna have to get the main seaweed in honor of Seaweed Episode.

We need to get that.

We need.

It's hard.

I'm very intrigued by this Kung Pao chicken dip.

It sounds like the combination of

about five different dishes.

Like,

I think it sounds really good.

Not all of them Chinese necessarily, but yeah.

Oh no, because it has all that cheese and whole wheat crackers with it.

In New York and San Francisco, you have Mission Chinese doing a similar thing.

It's American Chinese food doing what American Chinese food does best, adapting.

There are still lots and lots of Chinese buffets all over the country doing great business, serving general south, chicken, etc.

But Chinese restaurants are also figuring out how to serve a new set of customers.

They're making American Chinese food that appeals to the kind of people who like to shop at farmers' markets, people who are looking for something creative and different.

And so, the American Chinese food tradition continues.

Yeah, I think we're ready to order.

Should I do it?

Okay.

I'm gonna do it.

We are gonna get the steamed buns, the sweet corn fritters, and the stir-fried greens.

And then we are also gonna get the soy ginger noodle salad,

the pierki dumplings,

the lamb noodles, and the kung pao chicken dip.

And then we're gonna roll out of here on our way back.

Thanks to Ian Cheney and Jenny 8 Lee, they're the director and co-producer of the movie The Search for General Tzu.

We have links on our website.

You should definitely see it.

Thanks also to Heather Lee.

She's working on a book about Chinese immigration to the U.S.

that is going to be really interesting.

So watch that space.

Thanks to Jonathan Soma, who shared his wisdom about the safety of MSG.

He's the co-founder and co-host of the Masters of Social Gastronomy event series, but he also runs the Brooklyn Brainery, where you can take amazing classes of all sorts, including authentic Sichuan cooking.

Till next time.

This month on Explain It to Me, we're talking about all things wellness.

We spend nearly $2 trillion on things that are supposed to make us well.

Collagen smoothies and cold plunges, Pilates classes, and fitness trackers.

But what does it actually mean to be well?

Why do we want that so badly?

And is all this money really making us healthier and happier?

That's this month on Explain It To Me, presented by Pureleaf.