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

China’s moral “debasement,” especially the three pages he devotes to female infanticide, than his scholarship about Chinese life and customs.
    When the new crop of missionaries landed in the treaty ports (usually, to their embarrassment, aboard opium schooners), they settled in Chinese neighborhoods and quickly began the tasks of preaching to anyone who would listen, distributing Chinese-language tracts, and building Christian chapels. This description of the Presbyterian preacher John B. French in his home near Guangzhou clearly shows how these new missionaries viewed the world outside their doors:
The sides and rear of his little two story dwelling . . . was [
sic
] closely packed in by small Chinese houses swarming with heathen life—blocked off by narrow, dark, and filthy foot-paths as the only streets; presented but a dismal home for a man in the freshness of youth and refinement of feeling. Still here he lived alone, with a Chinese boy to bring him water and cook his rice, and a Chinese teacher to aid him in the study of the language. And he was happy and cheerful. He had daily communings with the pure above thoughsurrounded by pagans below—and while every thing around him was dark and filthy, and deafening discord—within his heart all was peace, and within his house all was neatness and order. 21
     
    The author of that paragraph was William Dean, a Baptist from upstate New York. When he was first recruited for the mission field, he was “tall, broad-shouldered, with muscles hardened on his father’s farm, with dark brown eyes that could sparkle with fun or glow with the fire of determined purpose.” But after preaching to the “heathens” for fifteen years, six of those in China, he was tired out, weakened by tropical disease, old wounds from Malaysian pirates’ spears, and the deaths of two wives in the Far East. Even in convalescence, he retained his faith in his holy work. In 1859, he published
The China Mission
, a kind of instruction manual for young evangelists. Its four hundred pages include every point he thought relevant about the Middle Kingdom, from geography to religion, as well as inspirational stories about the triumphs of Protestant missionaries—and about their not infrequent martyrdoms. (Many observers noticed that missionary wives seemed to die with particular rapidity in Asia.) He dispatches the cuisine of China in one short paragraph:
If you ask what they eat—we answer, they do not eat beef nor bread, mutton nor milk, butter nor cheese; but they do eat fowls and fishes, pigs and puppies, rats and rice, maize and millet, wheat and barley, pumpkins and potatoes, turnips and tomatoes, ground-nuts and garlics, pears and peaches, plantains and pumeloes, grapes and guavas, pineapples and pomegranates, olives and oranges, sharks’ fins and birds’ nests. But why so much curiosity to learn what they eat, while so little concern for the fact that they are hastening bymillions to a world of everlasting starvation, while we hold in our hands the bread which came down from heaven, of which a man eat he shall live forever—and we refuse to give it to them, at the peril of our salvation and theirs. 22
     
    Cursory and sprinkled with errors (Dean knew from sources like
The Middle Kingdom
that beef and mutton were at least occasionally eaten), this description is typical of missionary writings of the era. There was no reason to dwell on the old, pagan, depraved habits of the Chinese because all of that would soon be swept away by the clean, pure, “civilizing” influence of western Christianity.
     
    There were a few exceptions to this attitude, at least regarding food. Charles Taylor, a medical missionary sent to Shanghai in the early 1850s by the Methodist church, whose 1860 book
Five Years in China
is liberally larded with Christian condemnation, also reveals a scientist’s knack for direct observation. He was curious about every aspect of Chinese life, from housing to criminal