In a country with three times more Chinese restaurants than McDonald’s, it’s hard to believe that Chinese eateries almost went extinct a century ago.
The threat came from legislation passed in Chicago — and around the country — aimed, ostensibly, at protecting young white women from the supposed dangers of chop suey houses.
The folks leading this charge included a unexpected mix of restaurant labor unions, Chicago aldermen and legislators across the nation. Strangely enough, it even included articles in the Chicago Tribune (including the following, that used a racial slur).
A 1910 Tribune investigation charged: “The laws of morality and health, police regulations, and practically all the other protective measures are being violated openly by many chop suey establishments. … Young girls with braids down their backs are daily escorted into many of these oriental places by boys wearing their first long trousers, and are being introduced to cigaret (sic) smoking, drinking and other evils destined to make them the slave wives of Chinamen, or drag them down into lives of more open shame.”
So how did this anti-chop suey hysteria start and how did it all simmer down? That’s chronicled in a recent paper, “The War Against Chinese Restaurants” by University of California at Davis law scholar Gabriel “Jack” Chin. His full report comes out later this year in the Duke Law Journal.
Chin says he got his first inkling of this history when he ran across “this bizarre 1911 case about a law in Massachusetts that prohibited white women from entering or working in Chinese restaurants.”
The law was eventually struck down as unconstitutional, but Chin found similar proposals across the country, including in Chicago, Minneapolis, New York and Boston.
The scholar says the movement started with restaurant-worker labor unions that felt their livelihoods were being threatened by the explosion of (nonunionized) Chinese restaurants in the early decades of the 20th century.
“The union members and their comrades in the labor movement didn’t want the competition, and so they came up with a range of ways to suppress them,” he says.
These ways included telling their members to boycott Chinese restaurants under threat of fines. But that fizzled when the union members kept eating at the restaurants anyway.
“It turned out they couldn’t fight the lure of cheap, tasty food,” Chin said with a laugh.
But then the movement turned legislative. And in Chicago, this meant proposals for the following:
A 1911 ordinance to refuse construction permits to any “Chinamen” in the vicinity of Wabash Avenue and 23rd Street.
A 1906 proposal to restrict men under 21 and women under 18 from entering chop suey joints after 10 p.m. while also banning any live music from the establishments.
A 1906 rule requiring special licensing fees and additional taxes for chop suey restaurants
A 1906 measure to restrict restaurant licenses to only those with American citizenship — something people from China were not allowed to obtain.
When Ald. Daniel Harkin (one of the 1906 citizenship ordinance’s supporters) was informed that the proposed legislation would effectively bar Chinese from the restaurant trade, he responded the city “could get along without any chop suey places,” according to Tribune reports at the time.
It should be noted that many (but certainly not all) of Chicago’s early Chinese restaurants sprang up in Chinatowns that abutted the city’s red light districts (first around Harrison Street and then Cermak Road). Many offered music, kept late hours, attracted a Bohemian clientele and were connected to saloons or gambling houses.
“You could think of them as kind of underground rave or underground dance parties,” Chin says, reaching for a more modern analogy. “They were places of racial mixing, freer from the regulation of a traditional society at a time of cultural change, when women were starting to vote and were headed toward national suffrage. And in the middle of this, emerged a chop suey craze.”
This all came together to produce the kind of fear illustrated in this excerpt from a 1910 Tribune editorial.
“More than 300 Chicago white girls have sacrificed themselves to the influence of chop suey joints during the last year, according to police statistics. Vanity and a desire for showy clothes led to their downfall, it is declared. It was accomplished only after they smoked and drank in the chop suey restaurants and permitted themselves to be hypnotized by the dreamy seductive music that is always on tap.”
So how close did these laws come to 86-ing Chinese restaurants all together?
“We came pretty close,” Chin says. “These laws passed legislatures in places like Pittsburg, Montana and Massachusetts. But, in all of those cases, at the end of the day, cooler heads prevailed. In Montana, the U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan communicated with the legislators that this didn’t make any sense and would make problems for us internationally.”
In Chicago’s case, most of these laws were eventually struck down by the City Hall lawyers who warned the aldermen they couldn’t single out individual types of restaurants for special rules. Still, in 1911, the City Council was able to pass the ordinance to refuse construction and remodeling permits to people of Chinese descent around 23rd and Wabash. The rationale? That “the Chinese of the city of Chicago are invading said neighborhood” and “if they are permitted to settle in said neighborhood it will materially affect and depreciate the value of the property.”
But just because much of the legislation stalled, it didn’t mean the larger movement was stopped. Chin notes that the anti-Chinese movement succeeded in its bigger goal to expand immigration restrictions to Japanese, Filipinos and South Asians. And this goal was achieved with passage of the Asian Exclusion act of 1924, clamping down on immigration of all people from Asia.
So then how did Chinese restaurants continue their steady growth to become one of the most ubiquitous restaurant styles in the country?
That’s a story New York University history professor Heather Lee is cooking up in an upcoming book on Chinese restaurants. In it, she dissects the details of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which, for more than 60 years, barred all Chinese immigrants except students, teachers, diplomats and merchants.
In her research, Lee found a little-known 1915 federal court decision that secured the standing of the “restaurateur” as someone who could qualify under the “merchant” category. It took decades of failed petitions to get there, but once it was established, the chop suey boom was on.
“The number of Chinese restaurants in large American cities rose substantially,” Lee says. “In some places it was eightfold, in other places up to twentyfold.”
This status finally gave the restaurateurs the ability to travel back and forth to China and to bring over relatives who were crucial to their labor force.
“These were usually sons roughly between the ages of 12 and 17 who could go to (American) schools for a few years while working part time in the restaurants,” Lee said. “And when they were old enough, they became full-time employees.”
But it’s not like the process was easy. Applicants had to prove they were operating a “high grade” restaurant, which required raising funds of $80,000 to $150,000 in today’s economy, Lee says.
This may explain why many of Chicago’s early Chinese restaurants — including my great grandfather’s Golden Pumpkin and Hoe Sai Gai — were built as chop suey palaces with lavish decor and live music.
Even after the applicants launched the restaurant, Lee says, rules required that the merchant refrain from any menial labor (cooking or serving) for a year. And two white witnesses (often vendors for the restaurants) had to vouch for their claims.
“But the Chinese were very resourceful, inventive and determined when it came to working the system,” Lee said. “They had to be.”
So the next time you dig into a dish of egg foo young or a steamer of juicy soup dumplings, you may want to think about their complicated journey and challenges Chinese immigrants navigated to bring it to you.
Monica Eng is a reporter at Chicago Public Radio. She co-hosts the “Chewing” podcast with Tribune reporter Louisa Chu at www.chicagotribune.com/chewingpodcast.
