Free The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8 Lee Page B

through the newly digitized files of old New York Times articles, stretching back to 1851, when something caught my eye. The headline was “Chop Suey Injunction: Len Sem of ’Frisco Here to Al ege Copyright Infringement”; it was dated June 15, 1904.
    The story unfolded: Chinatown was plunged into gloom, an air of silent preoccupation overhanging the habitués of Mott and Pel Streets. Word had spread of an economic crisis. Earlier in the week, a San Francisco Chinese man had walked into the soaring twenty-six-story St. Paul Building on Broadway. Armed with a sheaf of legal documents, he’d headed into the law offices of Rufus P.
    Livermore, who ran a distinguished smal -time practice just southwest of Chinatown. The San Francisco visitor’s name was Lem Sen. He told Mr.
    Livermore that he was the inventor of chop suey and had the documents to prove it. And in an aggressive, sophisticated assertion of intel ectual property rights, he wanted to file an injunction to stop the
    “manufacturing and serving” of chop suey in New York City.

    This claim surprised Mr. Livermore, but it did not come total y out of the blue. He had already sensed that something was amiss with chop suey.
    Like most Americans, he had long assumed it was the “national dish” of China, but only a few weeks earlier he had heard a story that had cast a seed of doubt. That month, a Chinese envoy to the St. Louis Exposition, Pu Lun, had paid a visit to New York. As Mr. Livermore heard it, one of the guides tried to please Pu Lun during his tour of Chinatown by tel ing him, “And now, your highness, we wil soon be dining on your national dish, chop suey.”
    “What is chop suey?” the prince asked innocently.
    Now in front of Livermore was a man who claimed that chop suey was no more the national dish of China than pork and beans. He asserted that there was not a grain of anything Celestial in it. He said that he’d been employed at an American-owned restaurant when his boss told him to manufacture some weird dish that “would pass as Chinese and gratify the public craze at the time” created by a visit from a high-level Chinese diplomat. In an expression of his humor, Lem Sen christened his dish “chop suey,” a term often used in Cantonese for “odds and ends” or “bits and pieces.” But then his recipe was stolen, and spread across America. Lem Sen wanted these copycats stopped.
    The reporter quoted Lem Sen: “Mel ikan makee thousand dol ar now. Lem Sen, he makee, too. But me al ee time look for Mel ican man who stole. Me come. Me find! Now me want papel back, and al stop makee choop soo or pay me for al owee do same.”
    Was this the answer? Had it been lying in the depths of newspaper archives for al that time, unlocked by the magic of optical recognition? It had appeared several years after the span that Ren, the historian, had examined in the historical record.
    Digging through more records, I discovered a brief, four-paragraph wire story describing the Waldorf-Astoria banquet. The article, which ran across the country, listed “chop suey” as the food that was brought to Li Hongzhang—the first time that name may have appeared in print as such. But the dishes served to him had been, specifical y, boiled chicken and rice. I knew enough about how reporters groped through unfamiliar situations to guess that the wire-service reporter might have asked someone what Li Hongzhang had been served, been told “odds and ends” in Chinese, and interpreted it as a name of a single dish.
    If so, then Lem Sen’s story held a grain of truth. Everything fit: the purposeful myth that connected it to the diplomat Li Hongzhang; the sudden rise in popularity of Chinese restaurants within a decade; why the term “chop suey” appeared in print before 1896 but only as “chow chop suey”; how chop suey later emerged as its own dish everywhere. Had this short wire story spurred a national American demand for something cal ed
    “chop suey,”