Americanized Chinese Food IS Really Its Own Style of Authentic Chinese Food

Until fairly recently, the mere suggestion that Americanized Chinese food items like chop suey, egg drop soup, moo goo gai pan, egg rolls, General Tso's chicken, orange chicken and all of its cousins were authentic Chinese food would have been laughable.  Certainly, few residents of China would have identified any of these items as being Chinese in origin.  And likewise, Chinese Americans themselves recognize that Americanized Chinese food and authentic Chinese food are poles apart, and that members of the American public eating such items and believing they were eating real Chinese food were deluding themselves.  Indeed, I myself chuckle when reading many Yelp reviewers praise a Chinese restaurant for serving “authentic” Chinese food like broccoli beef or orange chicken. 

However within the last decade, something has happened which spotlights why Americanized Chinese food may in fact be its own genre of authentic Chinese food.  Historically, Chinese restaurants in the United States have been operated by Chinese immigrants as an available pathway to earn a living.  Few, if any of these immigrant restauranteurs saw their operation as a business to be passed on to the next generation.  Rather, their goal was to be able to have their children go to college and forge careers which would raise them to levels far beyond that of their parents.  And indeed, this turned out to be a strategy which was very successful over the decades.  

But in the 21st century, things changed.  Food became a much more important facet in the lives of many Americans.  And the next generation of Chinese Americans developed its foodies who started to enter the food industry.  But not by taking over their parents' Chinese restaurants, but rather as professional chefs working in non-Chinese kitchens, in many of the best known restaurants in the country.  Some became well known on the food television competition shows, others from their prestigious resumes.  

With this food industry experience, starting a few years ago a growing number of these Chinese American chefs made an interesting pivot.   They decided they wanted to focus their talents on the Chinese food of their childhoods, not necessarily replicating, but interpreting Chinese cuisine in America.  While this manifested itself in different ways, in many cases this involved the reinterpretation of historic Americanized Chinese food, an idea which many observers found horrifying.  The general thinking was that Americanized Chinese food was as inauthentic as could be, and I was largely in agreement.   Indeed, when I do write about one of these next generation restaurants I'll get comments from fellow Chinese Americans like "Well, I'll never eat at a place like that."     But if these traditionally trained chefs viewed Americanized Chinese food as an authentic style of its own, I certainly needed to reevaluate my thinking.

 The realization that Americanized Chinese food might have its own authenticity actually dates back a few years when peripatetic Chinese American author and journalist Clarissa Wei wrote an opinion piece for CNN declaring that “American Chinese Food Is Real Chinese Food.”  Her rationale is that what became known as Americanized Chinese food was cooked by Chinese food for Chinese people, making that food authentic Chinese food.  While it never dawned on me that Americanized Chinese food could be considered authentic in any way, her article started to change my thinking.  Certainly the premise is that food cooked by and for Chinese people is authentic makes sense.   However, that by itself did not end the discussion about the authenticity of Americanized Chinese food.   After all there were numerous dishes on Americanized Chinese restaurant menus past and present that I and others certainly would not care to eat, like crab Rangoon, Pupu platters, or even these days, chop suey, and hence would fail the "cooked for Chinese people" portion of the test.

Now even before the current debate, and indeed, for as long as I have thought about it, I have been bedeviled by the interplay between Americanized Cantonese food and the Chinese restaurant food which I ate while growing up, largely in the "secret", real Chinatown of Los Angeles from the 1930s to the 1960s near the City Market produce terminal, which emerged when Old Chinatown was torn down in the 1930s to make way for the construction of the Union Station.   I resolved to write an article on this interplay a dozen years ago, as soon as I figured it out.  And it's taken me this long to come up with the answer.  

The existence of the Chinese restaurant named Paul's Kitchen, still operating in the City Market near downtown Los Angeles capsulizes both my dilemma and the solution.   Paul's Kitchen is the last remaining Chinese restaurant on San Pedro Street in the City Market and is the oldest continuously operating Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles, having opened up in 1946.  It is universally conceded to be Los Angeles’ quintessential example of old time Americanized Cantonese food, and would fail the test of Chinese food being cooked for Chinese people since few of its customers today are Chinese.  But the rub is that decades ago in the 1950s, 1960s and even later, Paul's Kitchen, and the neighboring Man Fook Low, New Moon, Modern Cafe, Li Wah Cafe, Paul's Cafe and On Luck were the primary restaurants where our family and our fellow Chinese Americans ate whenever we went out.  Clearly back in the day, these restaurants  would have passed the Chinese cooking for Chinese people test and making them authentic.   So did Paul's Kitchen somehow evolve from being authentic to inauthentic, essentially without it changing its menu?

While you can see where I'm headed, the answer to this riddle is more complicated and goes beyond Paul's Kitchen, as it requires going back to the earlier days of Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles.  Before 1900, Los Angeles was a relatively small town, and with a very small Chinese population.   At the turn of the century, the census of Los Angeles counts a population of around 100,000 including about 2,000 Chinese.  Moving forward from this point in time, Chinese restaurant dining begins to catch fire across the entire country.  Unlike places like New York, where large Chinese restaurants were opened outside of Chinatown to service non-Chinese diners, most of the city’s Chinese restaurants were in Chinatown or the City Market.    This means Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles served a combination of Chinese and non-Chinese customers, some menu items appealing more to Chinese diners, while other items appealing more to non-Chinese diners.  Some restaurants had separate dishes called "Chinese chop suey" and "American chop suey."  

Early 1930s Chinese Restaurant Menu, Old Los Angeles Chinatown

 

As Hollywood evolved into a major entertainment center, Chinatown became a movie industry hangout, meaning even more non-Chinese diners coming to eat at Chinese restaurants.  Restaurants like Tuey Far Low and Man Jen Low were regularly mentioned along with non-Chinese restaurants around town in the press as centers of celebrity dining.  The City Market was not immune from this Hollywood influence, as Mae West was an avid fan of Man Fook Low, on San Pedro St., just up the street from Paul's Kitchen.  Man Fook Low was also our sole source of dim sum when I was a kid.   (Dim sum was more of a snack than a meal back then, and indeed the menu at Man Fook Low did not show dim sum.  Rather you went to an outside window and ordered it separately.)   So side by side you had Chinese and non Chinese dining together in Chinese restaurants, sometimes eating the same dishes, sometimes not.

Complicating the analysis is the change in the Chinese community as time went on.  By the mid-20^th century, the Chinese American community turned majority American born.  This was the result of the Chinese Exclusion Laws which were enacted in 1882 and not fully repealed until 1965, and which eventually slowed migration of Chinese to America to a trickle.   Many old time Chinese immigrants either died off or returned to China to retire if they did not raise a family in the United States, while World War II and then the establishment of the Communist regime in China shut off the potential for any younger migrants to go to the United States.  That left the Chinese community here consisting largely of immigrants who had been able to start families here, with their American born children and grandchildren.  So with the majority of the Chinese being American born, the Chinese restaurant food became less rustic.  My mom’s home cooking reflected this with a mish mash of American food, along with Cantonese home favorites, but without owning a wok. And the American born Chinese like myself (now identified as “ABC's”) were receptive to, if not wholly thrilled by the arrival of new and exciting foods from Hong Kong and Taiwan brought to town by post-immigration law change migrants, starting in the late 1960s.  

Of course we ABC's did not totally forget the Chinese food that we grew up with, and even through the 1990s our family would cater our parties from Paul's Kitchen, New Moon and Man Fook Low, notwithstanding the fact that we also enjoyed the "authentic" brands of Chinese food that had made their way to Los Angeles from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and eventually Mainland China.  As such our style of what may have been regarded as Americanized Chinese food still retained its authenticity for us.  But at some point, the local Chinese population had been so swelled by new migration, the historic Chinese American population with its rural Cantonese roots was no longer a significant portion of the Los Angeles Chinese community (and we gladly converted to the new Chinese food in town anyway), such that the old style Chinese food was basically ceded to non-Chinese diners.

That was Los Angeles.  A lot was going on around the rest of the country too.   The explosion in the interest in Chinese food reached all across the country, as Chinese food rolled out from Chinatowns to every corner of the United States.  In the 1960s, before the new Chinese immigration wave, when my family made a 1,500 mile road trip on the newly constructed Interstate 10, we were amazed to see at least one (and usually just one) Chinese restaurant in every single town of size that we passed through.  Not surprisingly though this was usually a primitive version of the Chinese food found in Chinatowns.   

There were a number of reasons for the degradation of Chinese food as it fanned out. Many important Chinese ingredients were unavailable away from Chinese population centers, adjustments were made to suit tastes of the local population, the operators of these restaurants often had little experience in operating a Chinese restaurant, while the locals so were enthralled by the mere fact of having Chinese food available, they were not terribly discerning.  Indeed, besides the interest in Chinese food creating an interest in Chinese restaurant dining, it also spawned the creation of national canned Chinese food brands Chung King and La Choy.  And I swear, at least in one of my earliest road trips in the 1970s, that part of my meal at a Chinese restaurant in Fargo, ND, came out of a can.     

This analysis finally makes it clear to me that the oldtime brand of Chinese food in America was its own separate style of authentic Chinese food for roughly 150 years.  I don’t think the fact that the Chinese Americans who ate that food, and shared it with non-Chinese local residents, and then blended into the new and much larger Chinese American community, leaving that food to non-Chinese diners, can retroactively negate that fact.   Nor can the fact that besides being subsequently watered down, completely new dishes were added to the pantheon of Americanized Chinese dishes in the post-immigration reform era.

But even though we may have passed Clarissa Wei’s authenticity test of being cooked by Chinese people for Chinese people,  this conclusion would be hard to swallow by the majority of Chinese eaters who absolutely reject the idea of Americanized Chinese food being an authentic form of Chinese food.   In a viral social media reel, Chinese American influencer Emily Lin screams “Panda Express is not real Chinese food.  It is an American adulteration.”  (The reel then ends with a brief scene of her sheepishly ordering orange chicken at Panda Express.)  Then there are all those videos of people from China trying Panda Express for the first time opining that they weren’t eating Chinese food.  The message is that Americanized Chinese food doesn’t taste like anything from China, and therefore cannot be some kind of authentic Chinese food. 

But that line of reasoning misses what is the most important point of all.   Americanized Chinese food is undeniably rooted in China.  But not in the major cities of China that everybody has heard about.  Rather it was rooted exclusively in and around Taishan, a locale in the far south of China that most people in China never heard of.  That’s because with a current population of 1.4 billion people in China, the population of Taishan is 1 million, hardly a blip on the face of the country.  The Taishanese who came to the United States were poor people who did not even live in cities, but rural villages, who ate the most basic foods, who spoke a dialect largely understandable to people in nearby Canton and Hong Kong, and who left China for America as the best alternative for feeding their families.  If you had asked today's critics to taste the food of 19^th century Taishan, they probably would say it didn't taste like Chinese food either, but there would be no denying the authenticity.

The test of authenticity is not a taste test, and it doesn’t matter if you do or not like or recognize the food.   The great thing about authentic Chinese food is that it continues to evolve.  Chinese diners from all regions are always looking for newer and better food dishes.  Chinese food is continually evolving to meet this demand.  Today's authentic Chinese food isn't the same authentic Chinese food that was eaten in the 20th century as many new dishes have been added, while others fall by the wayside.  If you look at all the restaurant chains from Mainland China that are now opening up in the United States it’s generally not Chinese restaurant chains that have been operating for many many decades, but rather those that are currently popular and have a relatively short, but successful history.  This evolution within an authentic cuisine doesn’t make that cuisine less authentic, and indeed strengthens the cuisine.  

In the case of Americanized Chinese food, its evolution may have been for the worse as Chinese Americans stopped eating that type of cuisine.  But even if the cuisine happens to evolve for the worse, that doesn’t change the fact that the food is rooted in authenticity.  And now we have a new generation of Chinese American chefs who are trying to make Americanized Chinese food great again.  One of these chefs, Bryant Ng, whose Jade Rabbit in Santa Monica, California has been acclaimed for its culinary reimagination of Chinese express takeout food, has stated this perfectly.  " I see Chinese American food as a regional Chinese cuisine where the region is America. Just as mainland regions are shaped by local people, customs, and ingredients…so is Chinese American food. It deserves recognition within the broader Chinese culinary family, distinct yet connected; more gradient than wall, with constant cross-pollination."