Chop Suey, USA by Yong Chen

Author:Yong Chen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC043000, Social Science/Ethnic Studies/Asian American Studies, CKB017000, Cooking/Regional & Ethnic /Chinese
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 4 The number of times the names of popular dishes appeared on the menus of one hundred Chinese restaurants. (Data from Yong Chen, menu samples)

FIGURE 5 The number of Chinese restaurants in which the names of popular dishes appeared at least once on the menu. (Data from Yong Chen, menu samples)

Moreover, chop suey’s popularity started to slide gradually but steadily in the postwar years. By the early twenty-first century, it has retained its past prominence only in African American neighborhoods in cities like Detroit and St. Louis. An analysis of menus from one hundred Chinese restaurants in non-Chinese communities in twenty states and Washington, D.C., reveals the diminished presence of chop suey and other traditional popular American Chinese dishes (figure 4).115 The “big three”—chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo young, the most popular names of food in early-twentieth-century Chinese restaurants—still appear in a large number of dishes.116 But this is in part because those Chinese restaurants that serve them tend to offer multiple dishes under each of these three names.

When we look at the top ten names among the dishes offered in the one hundred restaurants, it becomes clear that the old “big three” have conceded their predominance to new food names like Kung Pao, Hunan, Sichuan (Szechuan), and General Tso’s (figure 5), and chop suey did not even make the list.117 The national pattern is mirrored locally in southern California. Of the nineteen restaurants I surveyed in non-Chinese communities in Huntington Beach, Tustin, Costa Mesa, Westminster, Newport Beach, and Irvine in 2003, for example, only three served chop suey dishes, a significant drop from 1997, when ten such restaurants in a corresponding sample had offered such food.118

In Chinese communities, chop suey has virtually disappeared, as we can tell from an analysis of menus from thirty-eight Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles’s Chinatown and Monterey Park (a post-1965 suburban Chinatown) conducted in the summer of 2003: only one of them served chop suey. This is also the case in Chinese communities in other areas, such as the Bay Area, Houston, and Greater New York.

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