March 12, 2010
Many significant social changes occurred following WW II. Better acceptance of Chinese, reflected by the repeal of the 1882 Chinese exclusion act, opened avenues to professional careers for young educated Chinese who no longer were relegated to taking over their family cafes. The pioneering Cantonese restaurants were losing their novelty and some jaded non-Chinese diners sought new tastes which they found by the 1960s in northern China cuisines such as Hunan, Szechewan, Peking, and Shanghai. The old mom and pop restaurants faced new forms of competition from other Asian cuisines as well. Chains, fast food franchises, and corporate owned and managed Chinese restaurants further speeded up the end of the family-run Cantonese restaurants by the last quarter of the past century.
Posted by John Jung.
March 12, 2010
As the hostility and violence toward Chinese on the west coast escalated during the later part of the 19th century, more Chinese moved toward the middle of the country toward safety. For a while, many of them opened laundry businesses but by the 1920s, they found it more attractive to start family-run restaurants. Although they were run by Chinese, most of these restaurants beyond Chinese communities served mostly American dishes and only a few Chinese-like dishes such as chop suey, egg foo young, chow mein. These family operated businesses enabled many of the children to go to college; however, until after WWII, many of these college-educated Chinese could not get jobs due to racial discrimination and often settled in working in their parents' restaurants. The restaurant, like the laundry before it, became strongly associated by the public with Chinese people.
Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants
March 12, 2010
The earliest Chinese were peasant stock, and their food, considered disgusting by whites, did not make their restaurants or 'fan deem' attractive to non-Chinese. Much ridicule was heaped upon the Chinese and their food preferences which were quite foreign to non-Chinese. It was not until whites became fascinated by news of a dish called "chop suey" that suddenly Chinese restaurants became popular, especially among well-to-do whites who regarded it daring to go 'slumming' and eat in Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco. Before long, chop suey became the rage, and middle class housewives sought recipes for making the dish at home themselves. They were not that successful, but soon entrepreneurs were marketing canned versions of chop suey for home consumption.
Posted by John Jung.
March 12, 2010
For someone who never ate in a Chinese restaurant until he was 15, mainly because he grew up in the 1940s in a place where not a single Chinese restaurant existed for over a 100 miles, it is odd that I would find myself writing about this ubiquitous and widely popular 'institution' for eating all across the world.
Had it not been for the fact that a retired Chinese restaurateur in attendance at a talk I was giving about Mississippi Delta Chinese grocery store families approached me afterward to suggest that I consider writing a book on the topic, I doubt that I would have ever undertaken the project. However, as I pondered whether I could manage to write a useful book on the topic, I came to realize that such a book would fit in well with my other Chinese American history books which focused on the lives of early Chinese immigrants engaged in the few forms of self-employment that white society permitted: laundries, grocery stores, and restaurants. My aim in these books has been to document the history of these endeavors through the eyes and voices of these families. Thus, I am interested mainly in a psychological approach to this history rather than a chronology of dates and places.
Posted by John Jung. Posted In : Chinese restaurants
After retiring from a 40-year career as a psychology professor, I published 4 books about Chinese immigrants that detail the history of their laundries, grocery stores, and family restaurants in the U. S. and Canada.
