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July 3, 2018 - December 21, 2019
They had thrown their children into a pool of cultural heritage in America: Chinese Saturday school, Chinese camp, Chinese chorus, Chinese martial arts, and Chinese folk dancing. (Perhaps 90 percent of all Chinese-Americans girls have twirled a silk ribbon at some point in their lives.) Yet on the issue of food, our taste buds were firmly entrenched. They groused about our inability to appreciate “real Chinese food.”
But not everyone finds the terra-cotta warriors charming. “Chinese people would never put that in a restaurant,” Jim told me, pointing at the statues. “It’s not lucky. It’s something you put in burial site! But in America, they think it’s a Chinese thing.” From a Chinese perspective, P. F. Chang’s is decorated with death.
But other New York City Council members expressed concerns over freedom of speech. Misa, too, argued that the menus were little different from the political fliers that were distributed on the streets.
It cannot be denied that the fortune cookie is an odd member of the Chinese dessert family. Traditional Chinese desserts, as any Chinese-American child will tell you, are pretty bad. There is a reason Chinese cuisine has a worldwide reputation for wontons, and not for pastries.
Before Americans loved Chinese food, you see, they loathed it. Because, in part, they feared the Chinamen on their shores. Then along came chop suey, and that changed everything.
The economic and political backlash culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in stages between 1882 and 1902, which restricted Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese arrivals from becoming naturalized citizens. It would be the only law in American history to exclude a group by race or ethnicity.
The budget “Chinatown buses” that shuttle between New York and Boston and New York and Washington originally started out as routes for Chinese restaurant workers, before college students and the Lonely Planet crowd caught on. The buses exploded in popularity in the late 1990s, and the competition sparked violence between rival bus companies.
When word got out that Wonton was thinking of switching to computer-generated numbers, it caused a consumer backlash. One e-mail from a customer in Cranston, Rhode Island, urged them not to switch:
