After 170 Years, Taishan Style Chinese Restaurants Are Opening Up In The United States

 

As I have often said, few among the American public realize that from the time of the arrival of the first Chinese in America during the gold rush, well into the mid-20th century, nearly the entirety of the Chinese population in the United States was rooted in the villages in or near the rural agricultural area of south China called Toisan, also known as Hoisan, and now referred to in the 21st century as Taishan.   (Note that in this article I will switch between references to Toisan and Taishan, depending on the time period being discussed.)

So with Toisanese migrants being in California since the Gold Rush, how can the first Taishanese restaurants be just be opening now, some 170 years later?  Weren't there Toisanese style restaurants all over the United States in 1800s and the 1900s, since most of the Chinese were Toisanese and they opened restaurants to serve both their compatriots and outsiders?    Not really.  Historically there were never any restaurants in the United States labelled as Toisanese restaurants,  as all Chinese food in the United States was the food derivative from the food brought by those Toisanese migrants, whether for their own consumption, or that which was served to the American public.  

However, this really wasn't true Toisan style food, as adaptations had to be made for the lack of traditional ingredients, the use of local ingredients that were available, and adjustments to suit the palates of the American public which began to develop a taste for "Chinese food" during the 19th century.    In addition there was the "time capsule" effect, imposed by the Chinese Exclusion laws, which after 1882 cut off all but a small amount of migration from China to the United States until the mid-20th century.  This preserved the adapted Toisanese food as brought to the United States by the first generation, irrespective of the subsequent evolution of the food in the homeland.  Consequently, Chinese restaurants in America may have for decades served a cuisine loosely based on Toisanese food of another era, but this certainly was not true Toisanese cuisine.  Rather it was a distinctive cuisine, reasonably consistent throughout the United States.

Now as far as I thought, migration from Toisan to America ended in the 1980s, when we Toisanese brought the last of our close relatives over from China.  Yes, I continued to hear Toisan spoken in the streets of San Francisco Chinatown, but I assumed these were Toisanese who came to the United States decades ago.  As Chinese immigration started coming to the United States from almost everywhere but Toisan, the Toisanese became a very small minority within the Chinese American community.  In 1960 there were 200,000 Chinese Americans, mostly all from Toisan and adjacent areas in rural Guangdong Province.  Today there are perhaps 5,000,000 Chinese Americans, very few of whom are Taishanese or other rural Cantonese. When writer Clarissa Wei interviewed me for her breakthrough article (for both of us back in 2012), she told me that I was the first Toisan person she had ever met. 

So it is against this backdrop that a couple of years ago I visited San Francisco Chinatown and stumbled on a new restaurant on Broadway in San Francisco called Taishan Restaurant.  Now let me say that without a doubt, San Francisco Chinatown is the last bastion of Toisanese culture, a place where I, as a third generation Chinese American, actually revel in walking down the street and hearing old timers speak in the Toisanese dialect.  But there was Taishan Cuisine, brightly lit and serving modern Taishanese Cuisine to a restaurant full of diners of all ages. This modern Taishanese food was an amalgam of familiar Cantonese dishes, peppered with dishes I never heard of.  With the general decline of Cantonese food in the United States, and even non-Cantonese Chinese restaurants starting to make their mark in San Francisco Chinatown, I thought the opening of Taishan Cuisine was a nice, but puzzling event, particularly with the relatively higher prices served here.  However I figured they were charging a premium as the only purveyor of Taishanese food.

 

This spring it was back to San Francisco Chinatown again, and surprisingly Taishan Cuisine had just opened a second branch a few blocks away on Jackson St., called Taishan Restaurant.  In a way this was more startling than finding the original Taishan Cuisine two years previously, and as such I decided to take a closer look at the menu's combination of familiar dishes and dishes we never heard of, which presumably represent modern day dishes of Taishan.  The continuing puzzle was the fact that the prices of just about everything was quite high, something not to be expected  given the peasant background of people from Taishan.  So basically we ended up ordering two of the more economic dishes, the beef chow fun (about $18) and the fish jook, (also $18).  And to our surprise, both dishes were unlike any version of these we ever had before.  

 

 

The chow fun noodles were not the flat noodles we’re familiar with, but rather sort of crinkly, reminiscent of the new style crinkly stone ground cheung fun some of the restaurants serve these days.  When I asked the waitress whether the noodles were made in house, she said they were.  Since the crinkly cheung fun is the new style that has become popular in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the last few years, I presume the same trend has spread to Taishan.   

 

 

And then there was the fish jook.  When I bit into the fish, I thought it was squid–hard and crunchy, but it looked like fish.  So we asked the waitress, and she said it was a special kind of imported fish, grass carp, which is used traditionally to create a crunchy fish jook in southern China.  I must say that the portions were also quite large, so the prices which seemed unreasonable (and which were called out by one Yelp reviewer) actually reflected the portion size, the utilization of rare ingredients, and based on other Yelp reviews from people in-the-know, high quality authentic Taishan cuisine.  

So obviously, there has been a resurgence of migration of people from Taishan recently, confirmed by the manager of the Royal Pacific Motor Inn, Richard Leong, who has been there for over 25 years and now treats us like family when we show up.  He pointed out there are two other Taishan restaurants recently opened in the Richmond district of San Francisco, Taishan Cafe and Taishan Hotpot.   As I mentioned, it’s nice to hear Toisanese still spoken.  But I hadn’t focused before that some of the Toisan is being spoken by younger people.  And indeed I did notice a lot of little school age children on the streets of San Francisco Chinatown going to and from school.  Perhaps this is a new generation of Taishanese in San Francisco Chinatown.

Shortly after returning to Los Angeles I made my way to Bao Kee in South El Monte, another new Taishanese restaurant opening up.  And I've been told there is another new Taishanese restaurant in Boston Chinatown, Su Su Gourmet.  And in retrospect, in the past few years we have run into a number of Taishanese speaking workers in Cantonese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley.  As far as I know, nobody has ever kept numerical track of the regional origins of Chinese migrants to the United States, historic or current.  But it sure seems like there's been a quiet uptick of migration from Taishan recently. 

The fact that the current Taishanese population in China is only one million (indeed, a number which is surpassed by the number of Taishanese abroad, located in the United States and throughout Hong Kong and the rest of the Chinese diaspora), compared to China's current 1.4 billion people vividly demonstrates what a blip the Toisanese who came to America in the 19th and 20th century were on the total face of China. Yet for over a century, most everything that the American people knew about Chinese food and culture was via these Toisanese Americans, which clearly was as unrepresentative of a picture as one could imagine.  Indeed, even though the United States changed its immigration laws in the 1960s, due to the lack of diplomatic relations between China and the United States, migration from other parts of Mainland China to the United States did not occur in any volume until well into the 1980s.

Mistaking of Toisanese-Americans as being representative of China and things Chinese went far beyond the food.  Tales were legion in past decades of well meaning visitors coming to Chinatown or speakers appearing before Chinese American groups saying a few words in Mandarin Chinese—and being met with blank stares, since nearly all Chinese-Americans spoke Toisanese or Cantonese.  

Even in the past couple of years I've encountered examples of people failing to recognize the nature of the Chinese-American community from the Gold Rush to deep into the 20th Century, as being descended essentially from the poorest of the poor migrants, totally unsophisticated, from small rural villages, desperate to travel anywhere in the world to improve the lot of themselves and their families.  As I like to recount, my mom (born in Los Angeles in 1922) often referred to us Toisanese/Chinese Americans as country bumpkins.  Indeed, you would be shocked by the crudeness of everyday Toisanese language.  (For those interested you can check out Louis Chu’s novel of Toisanese life in America, Eat A Bowl Of Tea to discover what a foul mouthed group of people we were.)

The failure to recognize the hegemony of the Toisanese in the United States for so long still affects the way in which Chinese are viewed today.  One example is the debate over the origins of chop suey, the dish that swept the nation's culinary consciousness in the late 19th century, and which is generally considered to have been invented on American soil.  One researcher insists, however, that chop suey is authentically rooted in true Chinese cuisine, as there was a somewhat analogous dish in Northern China in the 19th century.  Except that 100% of Chinese restauranteurs in late 19th century America were Toishanese or other rural Cantonese in origin, and where they would ever hear about a dish served in Northern China?

Likewise, I was recently contacted by a researcher trying to identify the origins of the Chinese buffet, ubiquitous throughout much of the United States.  Based on his research, he had concluded that the buffet could be traced to some kind of elaborate food ceremony practiced by the elite in Peking.  Hogwash!  Any connection to practices conducted by wealthy families in Northern China couldn't have any possible connection to something started by Toisanese restaurant owners.  Chinese buffets actually go all the way back to post-World War II buffets that popped up at the Las Vegas casinos.  

So everything the American public thought they knew about Chinese food was a misconception in the context of what Chinese food was like in most of China.  Clearly the people of Toisan were totally unrepresentative of China as a whole, speaking a dialect unintelligible to most the entirety of China (including Chinese who speak Cantonese) and peppered liberally with crude and disgusting references, eating food foreign to most all residents of China, and who did not come from cities or towns, but small rural villages. (Just think of a reverse analogy.  What if all the Americans in China came from small towns in the hills of West Virginia?) Yet this is the only first hand exposure that the American public had for over a century to things Chinese.  While now all stripes of people of Chinese origin are to be found in the United States, giving the American public a much more accurate view of Chinese people, food, and culture, well over a century of mistaken impressions have yet to be completely overcome.