Have you ever laughed at American Chinese food like "psh,
that's not REAL Chinese food?"
What made you think that?
Is there this notion in your mind that American Chinese food
is inherently fake and inferior to food from China itself?
See, I once thought that too, but then my mind was changed
after I looked deeper into the history of American Chinese food.
I realized that it's honestly incredible that a bunch of amateur
cooks working with unfamiliar ingredients managed to create a
cooking style that captivated America
even though there was so much anti-Chinese discrimination going on.
So lemme tell you a bit about that history.
To start off, most of the first Chinese immigrants to
America were male laborers from Toishan in Southern China,
where the tastes tend to skew sweeter.
And most of these laborers were leaving China because southern China
at that point of time was like,
embroiled in Chaos, especially because of the Taiping rebellion.
And since cooking was seen as exclusively a woman's job back
then, these single men arrived having no idea how to cook...
at first.
Yeah, they improvised real fast with local tools and ingredients.
This is why you better not let any man convince you that
he is incapable of cooking,
so you have to do it for him.
Leave him alone on a new continent and see how quickly he finds out.
Don't fall for that strategic incompetence, okay?
Anyway, back in China, there was a very developed restaurant
culture, so by the mid 1800s,
the first Chinese restaurants opened in San Francisco.
There were a few fancier ones that catered to the richer Chinese
Americans, but most existed in the nooks and crannies of Chinatown and
served mainly other Chinese laborers.
White people were too terrified to go to them because of rumors that
they cooked with rats and dogs.
So Chinese Americans mostly kept to themselves,
until the Gold Rush ended.
White Americans then started throwing hissy fits about
"IMMIGRANTS TAKING OUR JOBS,"
as usual, and blamed all their economic misfortunes
on Chinese immigrants.
This escalating discrimination culminated in the 1882
Chinese Exclusion Act,
the very first time that America banned immigration
from a specific country.
This act essentially legitimized discrimination in American culture,
making white mobs feel free to storm into Chinese communities,
trash their houses, and throw their stuff out onto the streets.
Chinese Americans were also driven out of the paid labor force,
so most could only go for self employment options like establishing
laundromats and restaurants.
It's not a coincidence that these are both traditionally
seen as women's work.
Like washing clothes and cooking food and all.
The feminization of Chinese men can be traced way back to the
beginning of the colonial era.
They were seen as "less masculine" because of their
long hair and long robes.
So doing women's work, doing these service jobs, was often the only
way that they could make a living after the gold mines dried up.
But the anti-Chinese discrimination only got worse,
especially on the West Coast.
And so Chinese immigrants fled east across America on the
very railroads they built.
They opened restaurants in towns far apart so they didn't
compete against each other.
Around the early 1900s, Chop Suey was invented.
The name actually just means "bits and pieces" or "leftovers,"
but for some reason, white hipsters looking for "exotic
food" went NUTS for it.
They thought they were eating some secret oriental delicacy when it
was really just random improvised ingredients thrown together to vaguely
resemble what was eaten back in China.
But hey, the dish spread rapidly across America.
Then, because these middle-class white Americans were all
YEAHH!!!
CHOP SUEY!!!!
WHOOOOOO!!!!,
Chinese restaurant owners were among the few classes of immigrants that
became eligible for visas in 1915,
then Chinese restaurants gained steady popularity throughout the 1920s.
In 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act was finally appealed altogether…
but then mainland China had a communist revolution.
And so Chinese restaurants were shunned.
It wasn't until 1972, when Nixon visited China, that interest in
Chinese food became mainstream again.
The photos that came out of the Nixon visit, especially photos
of the banquets he ate in China,
made people curious about the "actual" Chinese food he was served.
Meanwhile, the Communist takeover in the mainland also drove waves
of immigration out of Taiwan,
some of whom had fled the mainland because of their ties to the
Nationalist Party of China,
such as the inventor of General Tso's chicken.
He was Peng Chang-Kuei, the Nationalist government's banquet chef.
General Tso's chicken was inspired by his roots in Hunan cuisine
and named after General Zuo Zongtang, a famous military
leader from the Qing dynasty.
So no, the general himself didn't invent it.
His descendants don't even know what the dish is.
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Anyway, the wave of immigration from Taiwan after the Chinese
Civil War expanded the flavors of American Chinese cuisine,
which can be argued to be the first fast food.
It was Chinese restaurants in New York in the 1970s that pioneered
delivery, something we should all be very thankful for in this pandemic.
In the 1990s, mainland China finally opened itself up, and
so even more diversity was brought to American Chinese food.
Though by this point, the expectations for what Chinese
food is was so set in the American cultural consciousness that new
restaurants had to go with what sold.
If you're wondering why every small town in America seems to have a
Chinese restaurant, it's because opening a restaurant became the THING
that regional Chinese associations set new immigrants up to do.
They were taught how to cook all the popular American Chinese
dishes, provided with a starter pack to open an instantly
recognizable Chinese restaurant,
and sent off to assigned territories, maxing out their
coverage like cell phone towers.
So really, it kind of worked like chain restaurants.
And the reason it worked so well was because people
LOVED American Chinese food!
This distinct style of cuisine that was developed by a greatly
oppressed people across at least 150 years of history.
I would say that the case is very similar to Italian American food.
We know it's basically nothing like the food that gets served
straight in Italy, but does it matter if it's delicious?
I think we could benefit from a change in perspective in how we think about
culture created by diaspora groups.
There's an urge to slap the label "FAKE" on anything not directly from
the sourceland, but really, we COULD just make the healthy distinction
between diaspora and native.
Chinese American can be a distinct identity, no less valid
than being native-born Chinese.
And so can American Chinese food.
It's just one more branch of Chinese cuisine, which is not a
monolith and is always evolving.
Though because of how its history is so tangled up with poverty
and racial discrimination,
American Chinese food has the unfair reputation of being dirty and
suspicious, on top of being "fake."
The biggest example is the whole MSG drama.
MSG is not inherently bad for you.
It's not some suspicious artificial flavoring synthesized in a lab.
It's found in a lot of natural foods, and is extracted
from natural foods too.
It was first isolated from wheat and soybeans in 1908 by the
Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda.
He was inspired to seek out this umami flavor when he noticed that
his wife's dashi stock was EXTRA DELICIOUS when she
would add kombu seaweed to it.
Eventually, he identified the chemical source as glutamate, and believed
humans found it so delicious because it was associated with protein.
The only danger that comes from MSG is eating too much of it
because of its sodium component.
It's the same type of danger that would hit you if you guzzled down
a pile of salt in 30 seconds.
Use common sense, and it won't kill you.
But where did this whole idea that MSG was dangerous come from, then?
Well, it all started when one specific doctor wrote to the New England
Journal of Medicine in 1968 like
"OH MAN, EVERY TIME I GO TO A CHINESE RESTAURANT, MY HEAD
HURTS AND MY LIMBS TINGLE.
I THINK IT MAY BE ALL THE MSG THEY PUT IN THE FOOD?"
I don't know why I was doing this Southern Accent.
Mind you, this was just a letter to the editor, not
an actual scientific study.
There's even some dispute over the true identity of the doctor,
but I-I won't get into the mess.
I'll leave a link to an article about it in the description.
Just know that after the letter was published, other doctors
piled on with their testimonies of
"OH MY GOD THAT'S TOTALLY TRUE, CHINESE FOOD ABSOLUTELY WRECKS ME."
But what the greater public didn't realize was that many of these
responses were supposed to be JOKES.
They were being IRONIC.
They were saying stuff like
"on three occasions I experienced a tightening of my masseter and
temporalis muscles, lacrimation, periorbital fasciculation,
numbness of the neck and hands, palpitation, and syncope within 20
minutes of eating Chinese food."
They were MEMEING, not being serious.
But because they were memeing in a respected scientific
journal, somewhere you would not expect to find ironic memes,
news outlets began reporting on these exaggerated accounts in full
seriousness, and often very racistly.
This conspiracy theory of "CHINESE RESTAURANTS ARE MAKING YOU SICK
WITH THEIR MSG" just fit too well with the narrative that Chinese
food is dirty and dangerous.
So the theory soon spiraled wildly out of control, and then scientists
who weren't in on the joke
started treating Chinese Restaurant Syndrome like a real thing, and
they did studies to prove that MSG caused adverse symptoms,
except these studies were highly flawed because the participants KNEW
they were getting MSG, and sometimes the MSG was given INTRAVENOUSLY.
What did you expect would happen if you shot something that's
supposed to be eaten straight into someone's veins instead?
Later on, when scientists actually did blinded tests, not telling
the participants whether they were eating food that had MSG,
they couldn't find any links to any symptoms, even in people who
claimed they had an MSG sensitivity.
So, MSG has been scientifically proven safe for literal decades.
Why has this hoax about it being dangerous persisted
in the public mind, then?
Because it fits the narrative.
It fits the racist preconception that Chinese food is dirty and cheap, so
obviously, it must cause disease.
I often see Chinese restaurants and food products try to distance
themselves from this stigma
by slapping on a "NO MSG" label, and it makes me sad because
they're just taking out all that deliciousness for no good reason.
You know what other foods use a ton of MSG and never have
to worry about their use?
Chick-fil-A.
Doritos.
I mean, those have other problems, but no one ever
brings up their MSG content.
So it's important to be aware of the cultural context around
American Chinese food, or you might engage with it in harmful ways.
Like that white lady in New York who opened a "clean" Chinese restaurant
called Lucky Lee's that claimed its food wouldn't make you feel
"bloated and icky" afterward.
That is gentrification that exploits racist stereotypes.
The problem here is that she is a member of the dominant majority
trying to take business away from a disadvantaged minority
group by claiming she can do their thing better than them.
Ultimately, my point is that diaspora history is still important history.
Fortune Cookies may not be found in China itself, but there's a tragic
history to be learnt in how they were actually a Japanese creation,
but then the Japanese American factories got taken over by Chinese
Americans during World War II…
because Japanese Americans were all sent to internment camps.
And then there's how orange chicken was invented by Chef
Andy Kao in a Panda Express.
And speaking of Panda Express, that itself is a billion-dollar
company still privately owned by a Chinese American family.
It's definitely not any measure of "white people's version of
Chinese food" because it was all done by Chinese Americans.
This isn't some New York white lady faking it.
Just because all of these things have nothing to do with
China itself, doesn't mean that they're not real or impactful or
didn't leave a lasting legacy.
When you see someone eating American Chinese food, your concern
shouldn't be whether they're eating real or fake Chinese food,
but whether they think that this particular style is all
there is to Chinese food.
Every region the Chinese diaspora has settled in has developed a
unique branch of Chinese cuisine with the ingredients available to them.
That's what happens with culture; they're ever evolving.
And that's not even getting into the incredible diversity in China itself.
Northern Chinese cuisine has lots of flour-based foods
like noodles and dumplings,
very hearty flavors that skew salty.
And Jiangnan food, referring to the region south of the Yangtze river,
has mild yet incredibly aromatic flavors, and the ingredients
are mostly fresh and prepared in a very technical way.
Sichuan food is very spicy and bold.
That's the home of hot pot.
Their spicy flavors are so famous that even the women there are stereotyped
to be aggressive and confident.
Then Cantonese food tends to skew toward sweet
flavors and small portions.
It's the home of dim sum.
There's a lot of braising and stewing of seafood.
And then Western China has heavy Muslim influences,
with lots of lamb dishes.
Honestly, when you're in China and you mention what
province or city you're from,
the first thing to pop into people's minds is that
region's signature dishes.
Like if you said, "oh yeah, I'm from Nanjing," they'd be like
"oh my god, salted duck!
Duck blood vermicelli soup!"
Which is basically IMPOSSIBLE to get outside of China, by the way.
It's an issue with ingredient supply, you know.
You're not gonna find local places supplying duck blood if there's
only one restaurant using it.
And it doesn't taste the same if the blood is shipped frozen.
Anyway, some of my favorite native Chinese dishes are Peking duck,
Cantonese wontons, Lanzhou pulled noodles, Sichuan boiled fish,
and Xi'an roujiamo.
To find restaurants that make this kind of food that's like as close
to that in China as possible,
you're gonna have to talk to your local Chinese community.
Because you're looking for restaurants that cater specifically to immigrants,
where the menu doesn't even bother to tell you what's
in the dishes in English.
On that note though, I also gotta address this stereotype that Chinese
people eat strange and bizarre things.
It's very true that SOME Chinese people eat foods that I find
to be strange and bizarre.
And so do some French people.
And so do some Icelandic people.
Food is extremely subjective, and I don't think it's
fair for Chinese culture,
and other Asian cultures by extension,
to bear the burden of being seen as THE weird food eaters of the world.
And we shouldn't ignore the extent to which Western colonial propaganda
contributed to this idea that European food is all refined and fancy
while Asian food is…not.
I swear, French people especially are the absolute
best at hyping their cooking up.
When I went to France, I ordered a very expensive
dish of the fable ESCARGOT,
and then after the first bite, I realized that it tastes exactly
the same as the river snails I used to eat in China by the bucketful.
I don't know what I expected, but it really wasn't anything mindblowing.
I've had people ask me to clear up the "misconception" that
Chinese people eat cats and dogs.
The thing is…why do I need to?
Why is eating cats and dogs seen as morally inferior in the first
place, if the meat is sourced from factory farms just like beef or pork?
Pigs are intelligent.
They dream.
We put millions of them through slaughterhouses anyway.
There is no moral superiority to eating any kind of meat.
And yes, there IS an issue in China of butchers snatching
people's pets off the streets, but plenty of Chinese animal
activists are fighting against that.
These things can only be solved internally, not by
outsiders pointing fingers.
My point is, Chinese people don't need to defend what kind
of meat they eat, especially in light of this COVID situation.
It's Westerners who need to rethink their judgmentalness.
A pandemic could have also easily started from some American hunter
who was dining on a bear they shot.
Though honestly, many Chinese people, especially diaspora who
are second generation and above, need to rethink our judgementalness
toward American Chinese food too.
Many of us have a tendency to look down on this style of cuisine as
we're finding out our identities while caught between East and West.
But really, American Chinese food deserves our respect.
They are the legacy of the diaspora that came before us.
Chinese Americans knew people wanted comfort food, so they
adapted and adjusted until even racists couldn't stop coming
for their fried chicken balls.
Therefore, the next time you're eating Chinese takeout, and someone's like
"Agh, can't believe you're eating that fake Chinese food,"
look them right in the eye and go "actually, it's real
CHINESE AMERICAN food."
Anyway, big thanks again to HelloFresh for sponsoring this video,
and also to my generous donors on Patreon, especially my Guardian Lions:
Benji Sudolcan, blemlemblem, Darion, do-it-out-of-spite,
Jose Velazquez, Kakuga, Kytes Universe,
Molly McAllister, and Nikolas Coates.