Fuleen: A Chinese Restaurant Naming Mystery, Solved

Fuleen:  A Chinese Restaurant Naming Mystery, Solved - Menuism Dining Blog, February 26, 2018

 

A recurring theme in our articles has been the continous change in Chinese food in America, particularly since the 1960s changes to American immigration laws which triggered the diversification of Chinese food in America, which continues to accelerate to this day.  Naturally a corresponding evolution in Chinese restaurant names in the United States would be expected to reflect changing times, so where Golden Dragon or China Inn would have been the norm decades ago, more descriptive names like Sea Harbour or Sichuan Impression are better suited for today’s Chinese restaurants.  

 

I have noticed the thoroughly puzzling proliferation of a previously unknown restaurant name—Fuleen.   And to make the mystery even deeper, all of the Fuleen restaurants that sprang up are located east of the Mississippi River.   What forces could possibly be at work here?

 

My first Fuleen restaurant encounter was less than 15 years ago when I ate at Fuleen Restaurant, on Division Street in Manhattan Chinatown.  This Fuleen Restaurant was and continues to be one of the better Chinese seafood restaurants in New York City, and one of the more enduring restaurants in Little Fuzhou, that section of Manhattan Chinatown which is east of Bowery.  When I first went there I didn't pay any attention to the name, since Chinese restaurants often have odd names, particularly restaurants not catering to non-Chinese diners.  When I subsequently ran into Fuleen Palace in Howard Beach in Queens, which serves Americanized Chinese food, my initial inclination was that this probably had the same owner as the Fuleen in Manhattan Chinatown, despite the radical difference in food offerings.

 

However that theory went down the drain when I started seeing variations of Fuleen, such as Chen Fulin Kwok in Brooklyn Chinatown, FuLoon Restaurant in suburban Boston and Fully Bakery in Elmhurst.  My suspicions raised, I did an internet search which to my shock pulled up many, many other "Fuleen" Restaurants as well as its phonetic equivalents, "Fulin" and “Fu Lin.”   There's actually a chain of Fulin Chinese restaurants in Tennessee and Alabama.  And there are other variations, such as Fullin, Foolin, Fu Leen, and who knows what else may have proliferated.

 

At that point the question of what Fuleen or its variations stood for started to drive me crazy particularly since these restaurants were only in the eastern United States.  Mention Fuleen to anybody on the West Coast as a restaurant name, and you get blank stares.   And why did this name come out of nowhere into a status widespread usage in just a few years?

The fact that all of the Fuleen restaurants are located in the eastern United States provided the ultimate clue to the origin.  As I wrote in my Menuism article on Monday night wedding banquets in Manhattan Chinatown, there is a network of Chinese restaurant owners and workers tethered to the Fujianese community in the eastern part of Manhattan Chinatown.  These Fujianese Americans have fanned out throughout the eastern United States, via a network of Chinese bus lines radiating from Manhattan Chinatown to points north, south and west.   However, the Fujianese have only travelled as far as these Manhattan Chinese bus lines go, since many Fujianese are undocumented and are unable to travel by airplane or train to more westerly destinations.  But in spreading throughout the eastern half of the country, the Fujianese have come to control a large portion of the Chinese restaurants in their territory.  Clearly the name Fuleen and its derivations is coincident in both time and geography with the control of the Chinese restaurant industry by Chinese originally from Fujian Province in China. 

But what of the name Fuleen itself?  It turns out that the answer to this question isn’t as complicated as the geography and the timing of the rise of Fuleen. The answer to this piece of the puzzle is found in the Chinese language name of the Fuleen restaurants.  The Chinese name used by enterprises calling themselves Fuleen Restaurant 富臨 has no English equivalent, but is a term that connotes wealth and joy.  Propitious naming has always been a hallmark of Chinese businesses, restaurants and non-restaurants alike, so Fuleen would be a very appropriate Chinese restaurant name. There is nothing particularly Fujianese about the use of the term in the Chinese language, and indeed a check of pre-Fujianese era Chinese restaurants in the US that I had eaten at does uncover an occasional Fu Ling and Fu Lin (which are slightly different Romanized pronunciations of this Chinese term).   At the time of these earlier encounters I had assumed that these were just random Chinese words, quite possibly used to give the restaurant an air of exoticness, but in hindsight these were part of the naming convention of the day.