Free The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee Page A

variations. In fact, both stories are so firmly accepted that they are repeated in history books, newspapers, and on the Internet, to the point where they have taken on the tenacious quality of historical truth.
    In the first tale, white railroad (or mine) workers come to a Chinese restaurant just before (or after) its closing in San Francisco (or the Wild West).
    They are drunk (or just hungry) and order (or force) the cook to prepare something for them to eat. He takes the scraps (or leftovers) from the kitchen and whips up a random concoction of vegetables, meats, and brown sauce. The workers, of course, love it and ask the poor cook what the dish is cal ed. Since it real y doesn’t have a name, he makes one up, cal ing it
    “chop suey.” The workers are satisfied and wander off. Somehow, from that, a craze is born.
    The second tale is more historical in nature, tying itself tightly to an 1896 visit to the United States by a prominent Chinese diplomat named Li Hongzhang. The details vary but are very specific in how they vary: Li is a guest (or host) of a dinner in New York (or Washington, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco). At the dinner a dish is summarily thrown together by a Chinese cook (or Li himself) because Li has indigestion (or does not like the Western dishes available or the Western guests do not like the Chinese dishes available). When the guests (or newspaper reporters) ask for the dish’s name, they are told it is cal ed chop suey. The dinner that is most specifical y cited is a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in August 1896.
    The Li Hongzhang story is cited so often, with so much detail, how could it not be true? But the menu from that Waldorf-Astoria banquet was actual y French: consommés and soufflés. After nibbling a bit, Li had his servants bring him a tray of boiled chicken, white rice, and vegetable soup, according to the detailed account provided by the New York Times.
    The definitive scholarly paper on the origins of chop suey was published some twenty years ago, in 1987, by a then graduate student named Renqiu Yu, in the journal Chinese America: History and Perspectives, which I found devilishly hard to track down.
    It was a few months before I met up with Ren Yu. We agreed to have lunch at Big Wong King Restaurant one September afternoon; the shops already had their moon cakes on display for the upcoming Mid-Autumn Festival. Ren told me that he first became interested in chop suey when he moved to New York City to earn his Ph.D. at New York University. As a single graduate student, he ate out a lot and noticed that chop suey was on the majority of the menus. He never ordered the dish, but he observed others savoring it.
    He spent almost three years doing his research, including a summer in NYU’s library scrol ing through microfilm of the New York Times, looking for any early mention of chop suey. Chop suey was not created from whole cloth, Ren believed. An actual Chinese dish cal ed “chow chop suey” (or
    “chow chop sui” or “chow chop sooy”) was being served among the Chinese themselves by the 1880s and early 1890s; “chow” means to stir-fry and “chop suey” often meant animal entrails—livers, giblets, and the like.
    That fit with what I’d found, that there were early mentions of something cal ed “chow chop suey”
    before the Li Hongzhang visit, a dish described as being made with gizzards. But the new dish had suddenly taken off after Li Hongzhang’s visit, in part because of the way it was (deceivingly?) associated with him. “You have a celebrity culture in America,”
    Ren mused. “If it is associated with a name of a celebrity, it wil sel very wel .” He rattled off a list of things: clothes, sneakers, perfumes. “What is wrong with the Chinese practice of an American commercial skil ? Sel ing a dish by attaching his name?
    “That’s my hypothesis,” he said. “There is no documentation.”
    But there was yet another claim. One night I was scrol ing