Free The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee

(5,000); and house servants (4,500). Laundrymen (3,500) appeared just before enslaved prostitutes (2,600). Laundries had long been a domain of Chinese workers, ever since 1851, when Wah Lee first hung up a sign for “Wash’ng and Iron’ng” in San Francisco and drove down the prices for starched col ars and hard-boiled shirts. The Chinese had a near lock on laundries on the West Coast, and those continued to grow and thrive.
    Why was there suddenly an entrepreneurial explosion of restaurants, and why, of al smal businesses, did laundries survive?
    Cleaning and cooking were both women’s work. They were not threatening to white laborers.
    The Chinese did not survive as restaurateurs by sel ing American diners “waxen meats,” “bean cheese,” or shark’s fin soup. Americans had once sneered at Chinese food, but by the turn of the century they
    were
    flocking
    “zombielike”
    to
    Chinese
    restaurants, which had proliferated across the country.
    In 1900, the New York Times declared that New York City had experienced an “outbreak of Chinese restaurants al over town.” Diners were being drawn by something dazzling! Something sophisticated!
    Something exotic! Something that had taken the country by storm. Something cal ed . . . chop suey?
    In a cooking tradition hostile to excessive spices, sharp flavors, and “foreign” ingredients, chop suey meant new textures. Thin, squiggly white bean sprouts. Crispy, round water chestnuts. Gravy! New York City had gone “chop suey mad.” Chop suey parlors lined the streets of downtown Brooklyn, Washington, and Des Moines. Instead of the Yel ow Peril, the Chinese-Americans had been transformed into benign restaurateurs sel ing a saucy vegetable-and-meat concoction.
    The dish became a national addiction. Men impressed their dates with their sophistication by taking them out for chop suey, while they themselves could order from the safer, less adventuresome dishes on the “American” side of the menu: hamburgers and gril ed pork chops. A fifteen-year-old Chicago girl stole $3,400 from her parents, using fake checks, and spent it on chop suey; she was put on probation by a juvenile court in 1923. Attempts to prove that she had used the money for things other than chop suey failed.
    Chop suey even became a government-tracked commodity. In 1920, a dozen Chinese restaurant owners were hauled in front of a Chicago city council committee investigating living costs. They were gril ed about the price of the ingredients and their profit margins on every kind of chop suey, from plain to chicken with fine white mushrooms. The aldermen then declared that chop suey prices were too high.
    Middle-class women examined newspaper and magazine recipes, trying to make their own brown sauce, vegetables, and rice taste as authentic as that of the chop suey parlors. (The secret, they were told, was soy sauce and sesame oil.) Chop suey, along with chow mein and egg foo yong, were added to the bible of American domesticity: The Joy of Cooking.
    Chinese restaurants became so common in New York that in 1952 a prominent German restaurant final y caved in and restored to its name the umlaut that had been removed during World War I. Lüchow’s owner had gotten tired of tourists coming in and ordering chop suey and egg rol s.
    There was one smal point that the restaurateurs were careful not to emphasize to their customers: the dish Americans knew as chop suey was al but unknown in China. In fact, the dish was reported in China decades after it appeared in the States. During World War I and its aftermath, local Chinese cooks hung up
    “chop suey” signs to attract American soldiers as customers.

    The magic behind chop suey was that it was familiar but exotic. Chinese restaurant owners would use this formula again and again—with fortune cookies, with General Tso’s chicken, with other dishes.
    But where had chop suey come from? And how had it spread so fast?
    Two tales are commonly cited, each with