Read Online Chop Suey : A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States by Andrew Coe - Free Book Online
Authors: Andrew Coe
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instance, Qiying saw no sign that the Americans had advanced in appreciation of Chinese cuisine. The foreigners had attended magnificent banquets where they had been served the most delicate and costly dishes. They had smiled in appreciation of the bird’s nest soup or roast Manchu pig. But then, after all they had been exposed to, the Americans always went back to their stinking, half-raw food! Qiying found their meals so crude that he felt he had to apologize to his emperor for sharing them:
At . . . Macau on several occasions Your slave gave dinners for the barbarians and anywhere from ten-odd to twenty or thirty of their chiefs and leaders came. When he, on infrequent occasions, met them in a barbarian house or on a barbarian ship they also formed a circle and sat in attendance and outdid themselves to present food and drink. He could not but eat and drink with them in order to bind their hearts. 8
Cushing was also proud of his achievement. He had proved his detractors in the local American colony wrong. The terms of the treaty allowed American merchants to do business in the same five coastal cities as British merchants but arguably on better terms. Americans could now own property in China, proof that their rights were fully recognized. Cushing had built a solid foundation for American relations with China, and without a huge fleet of battleships and ten thousand troops. The United States now had a political presence in East Asia, and the door had been opened for a flood of merchants and missionaries looking to convert China to the economic and spiritual glories of western civilization.
Cushing’s return to the United States stimulated a modest China craze among the American public. Thousands of visitors flocked to the “Chinese Museum,” an exhibition of China trade artifacts that opened in Boston’s Marlboro Chapel. (Eight years earlier, a Mr. Dunn had opened a similar but smaller museum of things Chinese in Philadelphia.) The building’s doorway was decorated to look like the ornate entrance to a Chinese temple; characters above the door purported to say “Extensive View of the Central Flowery Nation.” For a mere 25 cents, visitors saw hundreds of paintings and other objects from China, including dozens of lanterns hanging from the roof and a full-size “Tanka boat.” Their tour of the display cases began with figures depicting the emperor and his court and then continued through exhibits devoted to religion, the Lantern Festival, women, farming, printing, and even opium smoking, with a real live “John Chinaman” lying in a stupor on a Chinese bed. At the very end, they finally came to a small collection of Chinese foodstuffs, including dried noodles, birds’ nests, and sea cucumbers. The museum catalogue asserted that “a Chinese dinner would be nothing without stews made of birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, deers’ sinews, bircho-de-mer [
sic
], orsea slugs, and many other such dishes, used and appreciated only by the Chinese, and all of which to the uneducated and barbarous taste of a native of the western world, possess a similarly insipid or repulsive flavor.” 9
Both Cushing and Fletcher Webster took advantage of this enthusiasm by embarking on lecture tours of the major East Coast cities. Webster, the more entertaining of the two, told of the diplomats’ many adventures, including the “horrors” of their Chinese banquets. He may have realized he went too far in these descriptions, because one reporter in the lecture hall wrote: “Mr. Webster went on to say that he did not mean to ridicule the customs of the Chinese, but that on seeing them for the first time, they of course would strike any one as singular.” 10 In his drier and more didactic lectures, Cushing particularly dwelled on the oddness of Chinese customs: “To an American or European, cast for the first time into the midst of Chinese society, everything seems contrary to his own established usages. Not only does he find
At . . . Macau on several occasions Your slave gave dinners for the barbarians and anywhere from ten-odd to twenty or thirty of their chiefs and leaders came. When he, on infrequent occasions, met them in a barbarian house or on a barbarian ship they also formed a circle and sat in attendance and outdid themselves to present food and drink. He could not but eat and drink with them in order to bind their hearts. 8
Cushing was also proud of his achievement. He had proved his detractors in the local American colony wrong. The terms of the treaty allowed American merchants to do business in the same five coastal cities as British merchants but arguably on better terms. Americans could now own property in China, proof that their rights were fully recognized. Cushing had built a solid foundation for American relations with China, and without a huge fleet of battleships and ten thousand troops. The United States now had a political presence in East Asia, and the door had been opened for a flood of merchants and missionaries looking to convert China to the economic and spiritual glories of western civilization.
Cushing’s return to the United States stimulated a modest China craze among the American public. Thousands of visitors flocked to the “Chinese Museum,” an exhibition of China trade artifacts that opened in Boston’s Marlboro Chapel. (Eight years earlier, a Mr. Dunn had opened a similar but smaller museum of things Chinese in Philadelphia.) The building’s doorway was decorated to look like the ornate entrance to a Chinese temple; characters above the door purported to say “Extensive View of the Central Flowery Nation.” For a mere 25 cents, visitors saw hundreds of paintings and other objects from China, including dozens of lanterns hanging from the roof and a full-size “Tanka boat.” Their tour of the display cases began with figures depicting the emperor and his court and then continued through exhibits devoted to religion, the Lantern Festival, women, farming, printing, and even opium smoking, with a real live “John Chinaman” lying in a stupor on a Chinese bed. At the very end, they finally came to a small collection of Chinese foodstuffs, including dried noodles, birds’ nests, and sea cucumbers. The museum catalogue asserted that “a Chinese dinner would be nothing without stews made of birds’ nests, sharks’ fins, deers’ sinews, bircho-de-mer [
sic
], orsea slugs, and many other such dishes, used and appreciated only by the Chinese, and all of which to the uneducated and barbarous taste of a native of the western world, possess a similarly insipid or repulsive flavor.” 9
Both Cushing and Fletcher Webster took advantage of this enthusiasm by embarking on lecture tours of the major East Coast cities. Webster, the more entertaining of the two, told of the diplomats’ many adventures, including the “horrors” of their Chinese banquets. He may have realized he went too far in these descriptions, because one reporter in the lecture hall wrote: “Mr. Webster went on to say that he did not mean to ridicule the customs of the Chinese, but that on seeing them for the first time, they of course would strike any one as singular.” 10 In his drier and more didactic lectures, Cushing particularly dwelled on the oddness of Chinese customs: “To an American or European, cast for the first time into the midst of Chinese society, everything seems contrary to his own established usages. Not only does he find
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