Chinese food in the United States is about as Chinese as, well, apple pie. Through years of cultural fake-outs, white people taking over Chinese cuisine and hungry American families wanting to serve soy sauce next to their frozen dinners, Chinese food didn’t even resemble what it once was.  The cuisine in America went from a Chinese beggar’s meal to food barely resembling its Chinese counterparts for cheap in even the smallest of American towns.

In the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, limited job opportunities for Chinese immigrants forced many of these people into ghettos in their cities, later dubbed Chinatowns.  Immigrants lived in substandard dwelling, cramped rooms and dirty quarters.  As distaste for Asian immigrants grew, ironically so did white American’s fascination with their culture and daily habits.  Chinese immigrants in Chinatowns capitalized on this, decorating exotic “Oriental” palaces and opening up cheap eateries for white Americans to sample their exciting cuisine.

Chinese restaurateurs offered few of the dishes they themselves—often of a wealthier class of people in China—would eat. Instead, in nearly every restaurant, they served popular chop suey. Chop suey was invented in the late 1800’s, but thrived in Chinatowns. Chop suey may have been the only way Chinese immigrants could punish American bigots, though, by serving them the food only a Chinese beggar would eat. In China, chop suey is the food of a beggar. He compiles his meal by collecting the leftovers, like meat and vegetables, from reputable Chinese restaurants and houses.

By the 1920s and ‘30s, Chinese culture began to spread outside of Chinatowns. This move away from Chinatowns also signaled the spread of Chinese restaurants outside of the often isolated Chinatown locations of the teens and twenties. As familiarity with Chinese food grew within white communities, white Americans expected Chinese people to be familiar with these inauthentic dishes as well, and to claim a culinary heritage that wasn’t their own.

By the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the inauthentification of Chinese food was complete-- most Americans didn’t know chop suey and the like wasn’t authentic Chinese food. In addition, white American restaurateurs began opening Chinese restaurants of their own or incorporating Chinese dishes into their otherwise American menus: a plate of hot chop suey might follow a roast beef sandwich or a Cobb salad on a white-run restaurant’s menu. American-run Chinese restaurants often exploited old Chinese stereotypes to encourage patrons to eat at their shops, such as claiming that Chinese-run kitchens were not clean.

Another increase in white control of Chinese food was the creation of Chinese cooking products for the home cook, including modern-day staples like soy sauce. These too helped ease the white cook’s fears about unknowable—and dirty--Chinese kitchens.

By today, you can imagine that most of the Chinese restaurants hocking sesame chicken and Mongolian beef are nothing like the real thing—whatever or wherever that is.  Next time you decide on chow mein or General Tso’s chicken, don’t expect it to be anything like what they’re eating across the ocean.