 There's history here. And here. There's history there. History is everywhere. When I was a teenager, growing up in the outskirts of a small town on the Oregon coast, I was full of angst, and frustration, and a wish that I could be somewhere else, anywhere else. The world was full of something else and somewhere else, and I wasn't there. Only I could escape. Well, there was seaside. One of the escapes into the exotic, the somewhere, the something else, without parents. Circuit 1964 was to drive to seaside Oregon, perhaps through rain, almost always through rain on the Oregon coast, with my friend Trudy to Cairns Hancau Inn. And indulgent, chop suey, chow mein, pork fried rice, sweet and sour spare ribs, green tea, fortune cookies, egg-foo, young, of course we couldn't afford all of those, but one or two we could afford. The Hancau Inn was someplace else. And the people who ran it were people from someplace else, or so they seemed. They were a family, a Chinese-American family. They were here, but they were not of here, not of seaside somehow. The food was here, but not of here. And the Chinese restaurant was one of our few glimpses into the wide world that we knew lurked out there somewhere beyond high school. When I was a teenager, I thought that just as every town had a post office and a grocery store and a sawmill, it had a Chinese restaurant. That since persisted through college and beyond, as I eat in Chinese restaurants not only in seaside and Roseburg and Pendleton, but also beyond Oregon, in New Mexico, in the town of Las Vegas, in Providence, Rhode Island, in Juneau, in San Francisco, in Butte, Montana. So there's a lot of top suey in my past. Chinese sojourners and immigrants were a notable component of Oregon's population from the 1850s into the 1920s. They were visible and they faced discrimination in working and living here. Initially, there were very few, very few Chinese women and very few Chinese families or children. Many families remained in China as husbands came to the U.S. and many, many single men came to the U.S., a number of whom might go back to China and marry and have a family there and then come back here again to work. Cooking became one of the avenues to acceptance for Chinese, particularly Chinese men. First for single men who worked as cooks in homes and cafes and hotels and then as proprietors of restaurants that catered to both American tastes then hamburgers and french fries and to Chinese tastes. In time, the Chinese American Cafe, Cantonese cuisine, often a family-run institution, as families became gradually more familiar and possible in Oregon, became an institution both in Portland and in many, many small towns throughout the state. Yep. Are we not going to move? There we are. Chinese mining, yes. As it happens, Oregon's story of Chinese sojourners and immigrants is quite different from their story in New Mexico or Rhode Island or even California. Before we get to the food part of the story, we need to take a quick look at the nation's Chinese sojourners and immigrants. It starts with gold, gold in California. The discovery there of gold in 1848 quickly brought fortune seekers from the east to west, the north to south, from Chile, from Germany, from wherever. Among the first to hear of the discoveries were farmer's settlers in Southern Oregon and Valley of Oregon. Many of them ran off quickly to find gold. Many of them came back and decided they could make better money by growing wheat and shipping it to miners in California and getting the gold that way. And traders around the port city of Canton. Canton, as known today as Guangzhou, it's in the province of Guangdong, which used to be called Canton, and that's the area around Hong Kong, Macau, and Guangzhou. For Oregon farmers, California was a fairly quick journey by land or by sea. For the Cantonese, it was a reasonable sea voyage away along established trade routes. Canton province in the 1850s sent many thousands of its residents to California. Most of them were young, unmarried, and poor. Canton province was poor and economically depressed in the 1840s. And many of these, in fact perhaps most, came essentially as indentured servants. They owed their passage money to labor contractors who paid their passage and they had to pay that back. Most hoped to find gold and come home, go home to China. Those are the people we call sojourners. They were temporary residents. But many stayed. Those who stayed faced many obstacles to a decent livelihood. There was widespread discrimination based on the many differences in skin color, religion, customs, language. While Chinese on the west coast found employment in railroad construction in the 1860s and 70s, many followed other gold rushes into Oregon, Washington, Idaho, British Columbians, Montana. Here you see an illustration from San Francisco magazine, The Wasp, which describes the Chinese, as you see at the bottom there, many handed but soulless. So they seemed to have their hands involved in many things, but they're not all to the benefit of those white residents of California. I didn't do that. So you see Chinese somehow contributing to everything from drug addiction and poverty and depriving widows of living and so on. That's not a pleasant picture. Accusations that the Chinese could and would work for less pay than white men became a major labor issue on the west coast in the 1880s. When murder, riots, and forced exposure to the Chinese rocked San Francisco and Tacoma in many smaller cities. California and Oregon witnessed a variety of state and local taxes and restrictive measures on landowning and voting. Josephine County was noted for an especially onerous tax on Chinese gold miners. But the big thing was, the restrictive measure was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a congressional action, which was in fact this nation's first significant restriction on immigration to the United States, and it was based entirely on race and class. While Chinese merchants as well as diplomats and teachers and students could travel and bring family members to the United States and could legally reside here, laborers led a much more restricted life. They could not bring their families. Full citizenship became an impossibility. Before that it was a possibility. And some did become citizens. Here you see a British satire magazine, Puck, illustrating the problem. This is in the 1880s. The cap says, Oregon. And the guy with the guns in both hands says, Hobson's Choice, you can go or you can stay. If you go, well, jump off the cliff. If you stay, it will kill you. That kind of attitude was not universal, but it was prevalent. Keep in mind that California and San Francisco, Gold Mountain, was the nexus of Chinese immigration to the U.S. The 1850 U.S. census found fewer than a thousand Chinese in the United States. Nearly all of them in California. Now the census in this period maybe probably does under count, but at least gives us a basis. By the 1860 census, there were 35,000 Chinese, virtually all of them on the West Coast. By 1880, the figure is 105,000 in the U.S., 75,000 of those in California, and 9,500 in Oregon. Although California's Chinese population was but a fraction of California's, this state still held more Chinese than any other U.S. state except California. Portland hosted the nation's second-largest Chinatown. Did we lose things? Looks like we did. Portland hosted the nation's second-largest Chinatown, and about 10% of the city's population by the end of the century was Chinese. Other Chinese were scattered throughout the state, particularly along the lines of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads, and in Fish Canaries, in Astoria, and in mining areas such as Baker, Jackson, and Grant counties. Now we hope to find another picture. Well, when it comes back, we'll show you a picture of Portland's Chinatown in 1886 as it appeared in West Shore Magazine. West Shore was a Portland illustrated weekly or monthly at various times, and in 1886, which was as the Chinese must go, the fever called the Chinese must go, was fading a bit, and they did an entire article on the Chinese in Portland and Oregon. It's called West Shore. So we'll see that when the time arrives. The exclusion law dampened the number of Chinese in the U.S., as you might expect, and the population declines after 1900. In that year, there were 47,000, well, 45,000 plus Chinese in California and more than 10,000 in Oregon. That's the height of the Chinese population in that period. By 1920, Oregon's Chinese population falls to a bit over 3,000. And by 1930, 1940, 1950, it hovers around 2,000. That's a very small number, but it's still a visible and significant presence in the state. In a way, we'll see how Chopsui, Chinese restaurants, played a big role in establishing and maintaining that visibility. As you can tell by the fact that I thought every town had a Chinese restaurant. Well, I don't need any illustrations for a little while, so I'll continue. In this presentation, we'll look at several phases of Chinese cooks and cooking in Oregon. First, we're going to look at Chinese cooking for other Chinese. Then, at Chinese cooking American foods. And this typically would mean in homes or hotels or cafes, that type of thing. Then we'll look at the Chopsui craze of the early 20th century and the mid-20th century. Then we'll look at the new wave of Chinese restaurants from the 1970s. And finally, at the legacy of Chinese and Chinese food in Oregon. Chinese cooking for other Chinese. As sojourners in a strange land, the Chinese had to make many adaptations. Most of the men who came over were not cooks. Women were usually the cooks in Chinese families, but these men had to eat. And in necessity, they developed some skills at cooking. Chinese railroad workers were segregated by race, and some of them had to cook. They were with a gang of Chinese railroad workers. Somebody in that gang better cook. From the 1850s into the 1890s, when the Chinese population in Oregon hit its peak, Chinese cooks were chiefly cooking for other Chinese. And they were having to make do with what they had here, which included different vegetables, different kinds of meats. And the fact that some ingredients, such as rice and soy sauce, were imported. They were not available locally, nor were there any other easy substitutes for them. We popped back to the West Shore illustration from 1886 of Portland, and here you see some of the kinds of trades that are applied by Chinese in Portland, dealing with laundries and janitorial work and fixing shoes and barbering and sawing wood and so on. And in the center there you have an image of a typical Italian-made storefront in Portland's Chinatown. It's not owned by the Chinese, but it is leased or rented. And they have added some touches that are characteristic of Chinatowns from the 19th century worldwide, including the round windows and the balconies, which become noticeable elements. Notice that all of the occupations pictured are essentially occupations that can be done by individuals or small groups of people. They don't require big investments, and they are all servile. They're all things that the Chinese do for the white man. And those are the kinds of things that are most open to them. The other openings are things like cannery work where there's a big operation and you are simply one cog of it. But the operations of the cannery are segregated by race. Chinese do certain tasks in that and Caucasians and others do others. Here we see a photograph of a group of Chinese track maintenance workers. This is on the Corvallis in Eastern Railroad, and this is probably on their line going east from Albany into the Cascade Mountains. And again, this is the kind of group for which there may be one of the men who is better at cooking and takes on that responsibility. This is a photograph of Second Avenue in downtown Portland about 1890. You see on the right is that building that was pictured in the 1886 West Shore illustration. And if you look in the lower right corner, blow it up a little bit here, you see Hang Fung Law Restaurant. Now that gives you a couple of clues right there that this is a restaurant that is in Chinatown and probably serves a Chinese clientele. But the name there is in English. Here probably are also Caucasians who also eat there. Let me give you a brief description of a Chinese restaurant. This is from that West Shore magazine article in which it describes going into a Chinese restaurant. From there we invaded a restaurant and were piloted through the establishment from the kitchen to the apartments where customers who desired can take an after-dinner siesta and smoke a pipe of tobacco or opium. The chairs and tables were of solid ebony and of peculiar pattern and the interior decorations were thoroughly oriental in every particular, as is clearly shown in the artist's sketch. The genial host invited us to partake of a cup of tea, which was the smallest in quantity and the most delicious in taste that ever passed the writer's lips. Here a true Chinaman takes his tea clear and laughs with lofty scorn at the American habit of killing the flavor with sugar and cream. In addition to Chinese operating restaurants and being involved in food, there were other ways that that occurred as well. This shows Chin Rim, who was a Portland grocery who delivered his groceries. As you see here on a wagon, often they were also done by carrying baskets of vegetables and so on. One of Portland's two or three, depending on how you count it, Chinatowns was located in an area called Goose Hollow and that was a semi-rural enclave of Chinese who did market gardening and people like Chin Rim would then take these vegetables around and sell them in the streets and to, of course, Chinese merchants. Now one thing to mention is that at this period opium is not yet an illegal substance. It's frowned upon by many, but it also brings up the fact that Chinese establishments such as restaurants were often in the minds of many Americans associated with various sinful activities, drugs, prostitution, gambling and so on. And so there is this sort of shady side of things that is part of both the push-away factor but also part of the intriguing, exotic I want to know more about it aspect of a group of Chinese in town. So here you see a photograph of opium smoking, which did occur. And then there we have one of those respectable Chinese merchants. This is Seed Back, who was a merchant and labor contractor in Portland. I'll give you a little bit from 1902. There was a newspaper article called How the Seeds Feasted. Chinese family gives banquet to all its many cousins. And here you see some of the family relationships that are growing up. There was a sound of revelry last night in the Chinese restaurant in the corner of Second and Pine. The occasion was a reunion to the members of the Seed family. The family is represented in Portland by about 90 men and boys to say nothing of the women and girls who did not attend the reunion. Eight tables were spread in the spacious banquet hall of the restaurant laid with 12 to 14 covers each and so on about this. The pioneer member of the family here is Seed Back, who's been a resident of Portland for 34 years and comes as near being Americanized as it is possible for a native of China to be. The other members of the Seed family have been in this country from 20 to 30 years and all are workers and self-supporting, not a loafer among them, as Seed Back proudly stated. Nearly all of them are cannery boys who will soon be going off to work in canneries all the way from the Columbia to Alaska. And the reunion was to give them a chance to be all together before scattering. So there's a description then of what was eaten at the banquet. And it says, in Chinese names, the family name comes first as Smith John. So in their banquet, the dessert is partaken of first. And sake, fruit, pastry, nuts were served first. Then came green turtle, shark's fins, preserved eel, bird's nest pudding, and of course plenty of pork, of which Chinese are very fond. And in addition, many delicacies of which outsiders know nothing. So that is how the merchant class was eating. At least at a banquet. So let's look a bit about Chinese cooking, not for other Chinese, but cooking for immigrants from Japan and, pardon me, from Germany and Italy and Scandinavia and New York State and other places. We'll call that American. Let's do it. Chinese cooks in America had to deal with the foods at hand, which were often unfamiliar to them. What Caucasian cooks did with the food at hand was also unfamiliar, preparations. And many Chinese came to adapt, not only to American foods, but also to American food preparation. And as a result, many Chinese were able to make a living cooking in family kitchens in white-owned and run cafes and hotels. But keep in mind the prejudice often blocked the road to success. Oregon newspapers in advertising in the 19th century provide many examples of this. And here are just a scattered few from the 1870s and 1880s in which it is emphasized that Chinese cooks are not to be found in this establishment. Now, besides the kind of connotation of perhaps something sinful going on in a place that had Chinese, there was also sometimes the suspicion that they were cooking things like rats or cats or something else that really shouldn't be eaten by decent people. And that was part of what was behind this no Chinese cooks. Another thing to keep in mind is that another phrase that you see is white help only employed in ads for restaurants and cafes and so on. That is not directed at African-Americans. There were far fewer of those in Oregon. Those kinds of statements were directed almost entirely at Chinese. White cooking employed, or white help only employed means no Chinese. Here's another example of a different kind of prejudice. This is published in the Corvallus Gazette which borrowed it from the Portland Oregonian which probably borrowed it from another newspaper from We Don't Know Where. And the story says turned end for end. Many fancy stories have been told first and last about Chinese cooks. And people who have had dealings with this class are genuinely firm believers in the old saying that the Lord sends vitals but the devil sends cooks. A case in point occurred in this city, we don't know which one, a day or two since. A lady engaged a cook who had been represented to her as an artist in his line. Her husband who was tired of ill-cooked food on hearing of the new acquisition determined to have something a little extra in the grub line. So he carried home that evening a lot of brains and some oxtails. He delivered them to John, John being a common generic term for a Chinese man, telling him to fry the brains for breakfast and make some soup for dinner of the oxtails. Next morning he came down to breakfast his mouth in watering in anticipation. But what was his disgust when on removing the cover from the dish set before him he saw the oxtails fried brown. The Chinese cooks must go is now that man's motto. It is however not so very singular that one of a nation who have no alphabet for their language, who wear their shirts outside their pantaloons and whose compass points to the south should expect to find the brains at the wrong end of an ox. So said the Oregonian in 1883 in the height of the anti-Chinese fever. So we also find that the Chinese are certainly not very bright and so on. So throughout the 1880s and 90s jibes and slurs like this are very common in newspapers and periodicals and so on. It's not an easy life. Some years ago I began collecting Oregon restaurant menus and one of my earliest acquisitions was a menu from the State Cafe of Huntington, Oregon. Any of you ever been to Huntington? Yeah, it's way over there on the Snake River between Baker and Ontario. It's still there, it's off of I-5. It was a railroad division point and repair facility in the early 20th century. It had a population of about 1,500. It's less than a third of that now. So here's this menu I picked up. This is Main Street in Huntington probably about 1915 or 20. There were several clues inside the menu that told me that it was from World War I era and the State Cafe was probably what I would call a hash house. A kind of place that would serve workers. Fuel food. It was probably open 24 hours a day or close to it and had put on no fancy airs. It was a fuel stock. The variety of offerings is amazing. This is the menu and you see the categories. Game and poultry and season. Steaks and chops. Those are just the sauces. Fish. Cold dishes. Sandwiches. Salads. Relishes. Takes and pies. Potatoes and vegetables. Look at all the vegetables. Drink served. Puget sound. Oysters. Clams. And etc. There are 18 different preparations for oysters on this menu. Oysters are not an exotic food at this time and this place. They are protein and they are cheap. The expensive stuff is chicken. Pricey stuff. Well, I asked the Huntington Historical Society if they had any information about the State Cafe and to my surprise, I learned that the proprietor was a Chinese man named Sam Ki and this kind of gave me a new platform to stand on to research this and when I looked at the menu again I thought I saw down there at the bottom of steaks and chops noodles, noodles and coffee, noodles and catsup, chicken noodles. That's the only clue that says maybe a Chinese man is involved in this operation and you may not think that noodles and coffee are so great but maybe if you're an engine man about to go out on duty and you want some wake-up stuff and something warm and full of carbs, that's the thing. So this menu is not designed to serve a Chinese population but a bunch of white workers who want to fuel up but there is a touch of something Chinesey to be there. Research showed me that Sam Ki was somebody. He's described the first reference I found to him in online newspapers was in 1907 when he was described as a count keeper in Walulah, Washington a railroad town. In 1910 he shows up operating a restaurant in the railroad town of Umatilla, Oregon. It burns down in 1911 but he quickly rebuilds it. In 1912 he shows up running a chop suey and noodle house in the railroad town of Klamath Falls. In the 1920s he got in trouble for opium and gambling in Portland visiting. In 1924 when he was still operating the state cafe in Huntington he got arrested for selling opium which now was illegal. The range and breadth of Sam Ki's menu is an indication of his ability to give his mostly Caucasian public what they wanted. The noodles are incidental and the state cafe with its American name and its white working class clientele is not catering to people like Teenage Me looking for something exotic and different. So being a personal cook is another way that Chinese men found an occupation and you see here a well-to-do family somewhere in Oregon mom and dad and daughter and the Chinese cook this is the personal servant of F.E. Judd of Pendleton, Oregon he was the treasurer of the Pendleton Woolen Mills in this period about 1915 and was also the officer of the Pendleton Bank and we also know that his servant did his cooking and here is a curious picture this is Edmund N. Edes in his servant Q.E. shown about 1900 couldn't find out very much Mr. Edes he looks like he is so distinguished that certainly somebody would have written something about him in the paper but not much but we do know that he owned what was described as a candy kitchen candy kitchen and oyster parlor in Salem now you thought noodles and coffee was an odd combination what do you think oysters and candy and you may know of James Beard Oregon's noted culinary writer and who wrote a wonderful autobiography called Delights and Prejudices in which he makes frequent mention of the Chinese cooks in his mother's household in particular one called Lett he also brings Lett up a number of times in his major American cookery cookbook James Beard grew up in Oregon in Portland and his mother Elizabeth operated a boarding house and hotel and she was frustrated by the parade of what she described as a short staying fancy French-ified cooks because they got airs they thought they were really hot stuff and so they cooked for her for a while and then went off to San Francisco and be better appreciated so Beard describes her as hiring several Chinese training them to cook the way she wanted things to be cooked and and then kept them she hung on to those folks one of them becomes an excellent pastry cook Lett becomes kind of the backbone of things and he figures very strongly in there not only for mastering the techniques that Elizabeth wanted him to use and the foods that she wanted but also that she learned things from him about cooking I think one of the more amazing things about Beard in this is that when did this his autobiography is kind of vague about dates and things but he does say that when he was about 10 years old Lett returned to China so some of these sojourners do go back but if Beard was only 10 years old he had an amazing memory for the foods that he ate that he could describe them and the ways that Lett and his mother prepared them when he was only 10 years old Chinese men also found work as cooks in a variety of situations that involved cooking for a group of men usually something like ranch cook railroad survey team cook logging camps hired Chinese cooks in the woods mining camps, same thing large lumber mills sometimes had a crew of Chinese cooks and aboard coastal lumber schooners and river steam boats I'm surprised to find a number of Chinese cooks who show up as cook aboard a river steamer that runs between Portland and Astoria or on a lumber schooner like Coos Bay and Brookings and so on in San Francisco here we have a picture of ranch cook Kwat Hoi Henry Wilkins ranch was near the town of Clem any of you ever been to Clem do you know where Clem is well Clem isn't anymore Clem's gone it was near Iona and there's not much of Iona left either but south of Arlington on the Columbia River up on the Columbia Plateau in what's now wheat country here's a piece from Cottage Grove newspaper in 1901 the newspaper is called the Bohemia Nugget which can remind you that Cottage Grove was once at the edge of a gold mining country called the Bohemia Mines up in the Cascades this 1901 article says Sam the Chinese cook at the hell on a mine arrived in town Tuesday evening having been at the mine for one year and 15 days without a vacation he went to Portland Thursday for a month's visit and we say good for him this is a probably a railroad survey crew somewhere in Oregon second from the right you see the Chinese cook with his apron and his stylish hat and another survey crew this on the a group for the Pacific Railway and Navigation Company which in the early 1900s built the railroad from Hillsborough over the coast range to Tillamook and their Chinese cook and their cat we don't know this fellow's name I don't yet but he was a cook at the Oregon State Blind School in Salem about 1890 and you can see he is still in the dress of his home country distinctive shoes he has a cue down his left side there and a distinctive cap about 1915 this is the Chinese cook at the major downtown hotel in Albany the Albany Hotel and here's a interesting item this is actually a blow up of a business card from the Lumberman's Cafe Vern Singleton proprietor Vern came to Bend in the early 1920s when Bend was booming from the two huge new Lumberman's there, Brooks Scanlon and Shedlin-Hixon Company and Mr. Singleton ran a cafe that says we never close prior Chinese dishes so he probably had a Chinese cook I cannot resist reading you the other side of the card which says I have been balled out, balled up held up and held down bulldozed, blackjacked, walked on cheated, squeezed and mooched stuck for war tax, excess profits tax per capita tax, state tax dog tax and sin tax liberty bonds, baby bonds and bonds of matrimony red cross, green cross and double cross asked to help the society of John the Baptist the G.A.R. women's relief corps, men's relief and stomach relief I have worked like hell I have been drunk and have gotten others drunk lost all I had and part of my furniture and because I won't spend or lend all of the little I earn and go beg, borrow or steal I have been cussed and disgust boycotted and talked to and talked about lied to and lied about, held up and hung up, robbed and damn near ruined and the only reason I am alive is because I eat at the Lumberman's cafe and maybe the Chinese food that did it so the state cafe is an example also of these kinds of situations like the the blind school and the Albany hotel and the Lumberman's cafe of a Chinese working for a Caucasian establishment to feed them what they want here is something a little different this is a picture of Jim Louis in 1935 the year before that the Oregon journalist and folklorist and would be historian Stuart Holbrook did an article in the morning Oregonian he was writing about things faintly undergroundish like saloons and ladies of the night and so on but goes off in another thing here no mention of the profession that is of saloon keeper in Portland would be complete without the name of the late Frank Huber Mr. Huber ran the bureau a high class place very quiet and orderly and his customers were mostly from the business professional and general commercial circles of the town he later moved his place into the new railway exchange building where the original bar and fixtures are part of Huber's restaurant operated by Louis Jim for many years known to thousands of portlanders and visitors Louis Jim came to the city from Canton China when he was a boy of 11 he went to work in the peerless cafe on Older Street in 1891 in 1891 he went to work for Mr. Huber at the bureau and he remained in his employee until Mr. Huber's death in 1916 then Louis Jim has continued the place as a successful restaurant he cut off his queue in 1912 400 million Chinaman couldn't be wrong he said and that was a period of time when those queues were cut by many Chinese well Louis Jim bought the Huber's Cafe Huber's Cafe is still in business and is still in the same building no longer known as the railway exchange building but is this mostly 1910 Edwardian interior with mahogany booths and stained glass atrium glass over the tiled floor and a beautiful back bar and palm trees and the whole works it's in Portland downtown between I think 3rd and 4th on Stark Streets it is still in the ownership of the Louis family and in fact the other thing to note is that behind Mr. Louis is a turkey well Mr. Huber had made a specialty of serving free bar food in his bureau cafe roast turkey Jim Louis continued that and turkey and coleslaw has been the mainstay of the dinner items at Huber's Cafe ever since still is although you can now get fish and beef steak and many other things as well and it's also become something of a rendezvous for trendy young techies and others back in the 70s Jim's grandson who was then trying to beef up the operation started making Spanish coffee drinks which is Kahlua and coffee flaming and he made quite a performance out of it of pouring it from above and the flames fall into the cup and this hot coffee drink doesn't seem to go with either Chinese or with turkey but on its own as a bar item it was hot stuff and it still is for a number of years Huber sold more Kahlua than any other bar in the US I don't know if it's still number one but it's still up there men, they don't serve Chinese food it's quite you can get beef and other things but it's definitely an American menu and it's an updated American menu but the staff is in part Chinese and family so let's jump into the chop suey craze because chop suey is what the title is about after all I wish I could get rid of that stupid anyway this is a menu from a once well known Portland restaurant Hung Far Low depending on your age you may or may not snicker at that name there was also a better known Chinese restaurant in San Francisco called Hang Far Low and the meaning is nothing to be snickered at but it's about apricot blossoms and tower or building and pink pink the color, yes so erase all those other thoughts from your mind but Hung Far Low was a Portland institution from 1928 when it opened in New Chinatown into the 1990s when it moved to 82nd Avenue in Portland and then quietly died last year chop suey appears early in the 20th century here you see quite a lot of chop suey varieties this was from an 8 page menu and it's almost all Asian dishes or so called a little bit of American stuff at the end it uses of course chop suey uses ingredients that are easily available in the U.S. to those who come to orders and crave it however are mostly Caucasians not Chinese those attracted to the exotic and to the lure of gambling opium etc here's another one of these borrowed articles this one from again the cottage grove bohemian nugget which picked it up from some other newspaper and the main thrust of the article was about someone's attempt and I saw this the story in a number of other newspapers some fellow tried to copyright the recipe for chop suey and the name chop suey he did not succeed at this but it created quite a hullabaloo in the press and it led to other things here there's a San Francisco Chinaman in town who claims to have copyright on this it must be explained first of all that chop suey is not a Chinese dish this is no news even to amateur orientalists but probably it is to the average American citizen it is a San Francisco invention or rather adaptation it is an Irish stew translated into Chinese for purely occidental degustation with its usual black ignorance of oriental ways the American public accepted it at once as the Chinese national dish upon which the son of heaven and his imperial household are supposed to die in every day even American officials were surprised when Prince Poulin who was visiting the U.S. about this time inquired in Chinatown the other day what is chop suey oriental or occidental it is a good dish it constitutes a ration in which a nice balance has been received reached between the animal and the vegetable between protein and mere bulk what's in it of course I didn't bring that part here it can be a mixture of things but we'll tell you it's a protein usually pork sometimes chicken those commonly celery, onions bean sprouts which maybe in these early years canned because they weren't easily procurable else wise and sometimes in the sort of water chestnuts maybe put in it and so on it's stir fried and then usually served with a sauce, a clear sauce over rice and there are of course many variations but those are kind of the essentials and the fact that it is malleable is of course one of its chief virtues so here we have a picture of the Clarno Hotel probably about 1920 this is just a small cheap hotel on the east side of Portland on the ground floor though there is a little shop and it says in the window in Chopsui and it looks like there is a curtain in that center window there those are noodles hanging up to dry I tried to blow it up and it just all kind of fell apart and I couldn't get them to do me a better scan but that things are moving into out of Chinatown into other areas here's an ad from 1905 to 1909 July 1st an ad for the Lai Heng Chang Chinese restaurant now open and ready for business our specialties noodles Lai Heng Chang Chopsui rice pork and chicken cooked and served to the most fastidious we serve tea with all orders at reasonable rates entrance to the fairgrounds 1905 Lewis and Clark World's Fair and Oriental Trade Exposition in Portland there is no Chinese food on the campus so to speak of the fair but right outside you could get Chopsui and Chowmein Chowmein incidentally is pretty much like Chopsui the major difference rather than being served over rice it's usually served over noodles which may be fried or may be not fried in 1905 also later on the Daily Journal ran an ad for a restaurant and it says the headline is we cater to white folks our bill of fare consists of anything the palate may crave but our Chopsui and noodles are the delicious dishes that captivate the heart give us one Pryl and you will never desert this restaurant Yut and Kin Lum Chinese restaurant Chopsui and noodles teas and cake things weren't always hunky-dory at Chopsui joints this is a story that plays out in the two newspapers a little differently the Oregon Journal was a little bit more friendly toward the Chinese than the Oregonian was notice here that the Oregonian has a story called about drawing the color line attitude of society leaders clearly defined at fashionable Chopsui dinner party the same story is written in the Oregon Journal is white man finds celestial released the basic story was that a couple of gentlemen accompanied by some young ladies went to a Chinese restaurant and one of the ladies reported to her one of her hosts that there was a Chinese gentleman over there who was what was he doing he was winking at her and making motions with his hand so the host Mr. Palmer got up and threatened this gentleman and the Chinese gentleman stood up and was popped in the nose so what happens is that you know Mr. Palmer gets arrested by the patrolman but he brings charges against the Chinese man too and Mr. T. Lee is discharged and Mr. Palmer is fined $40 a fairly substantial sum on those days sometimes it worked out that way, other times it didn't the proliferation of Chinese restaurants catering to a white population occurs as the number of Chinese in Oregon is declining and then stabilizing in 1900 there were more than 10,000 Chinese in the census 10 years later it's about 7,000 in 1920 about 3,000 next three sentences it's about 2,000 Portland has a Chinatown it's anchored primarily by a few restaurants and some curio stores beginning in the 1910s Oregon's small town Chinese restaurants there were an increasing number of them and they were increasingly family operated rather than being run by an attendant single male like Sam Key gradually the Chinese population although it remains stable the proportion of women and children did increase as exclusion law was eased up a bit in the 1910s restaurant workers for example were classified as laborers and they could not bring family members but then in the teens restaurant owners were admitted to the merchant class and so they could bring wives and children so you see a gradual changing in the composition of the population gradually more wives and children are present and they help in restaurant work that's one of the characteristics of a family owned restaurant especially Chinese owned is that the kids also work so everybody works so small towns are fertile ground for new restaurants even if they've not had a Chinese population in the past it turned out also to be a way of becoming integrated into a community running a restaurant where many many different people came between 1900 and 1915 I kind of scanned where I found Chinese restaurants in Oregon it's a long list Portland, St. John's which was then a separate city Kepner, Albany, Salem Astoria, Pendleton Cottage Grove Le Grand Huntington, Baker City River, Marshfield Oregon City, Roseburg Medford, Monmouth Umatilla, Hermeson Vale, Klamath Falls Grants Pass this is the club cafe in Burns, Oregon the Yi family came to Burns in the early 1920s when Burns became home to a huge new lumber mill Ben had a few years earlier and so there was a huge working population there and they opened the club cafe the club has remained those pictures on the wall there at the right are still to be found in Burns same establishment different building I'll show you a little more this is Klamath Falls and you notice right in the center there big neon sign Chop Suey this is 1920s this is Salem 1938 Chop Suey right on Commercial Street main part of town so they're kind of all over the place I mean we have the Golden Pheasant in Portland the West Lake Inn sounding not at all like a Chinese restaurant in Portland the Taiyoga Coffee Shop doesn't sound Chinese at all but that's what it is it's a Chinese cafe the Taiyoga Hotel in Coos Bay the building still stands named for a place in Pennsylvania and Coffee Shop doesn't sound like noodles and Chop Suey either and here a menu from the white restaurant in the Dallas, Oregon with a distinguished looking lawyerly type on the cover and inside it's Chinese on the left right so things change this is a photo from what was called Old Chinatown in Portland taken in 1954 just before this building was demolished this is an example of one of these the Chinese restaurant is upstairs here's noodles, Chop Suey going in and you go upstairs to the restaurant and that's a kind of restaurant that served both Chinese and American clientele but there's a new wave coming along Leonard Lee gets his picture in the paper because he's a visiting demonstration cook on Cantonese cuisine and came to Portland in 1937 while some Portland restaurants served primarily a Chinese clientele elsewhere they were dependent upon Caucasians who were seeking novelty and entertained it along with dinner and Chinese restaurants began to appear in other parts of Portland such as the Pagoda in the Hollywood District and the Canton Grill on 82nd Avenue these are two early menus from the Canton Grill which opened in 1944 and they didn't have any pictures of a Chinese person for the printer didn't have them so he puts a French-ified chef on the cover and two years later we have Canton Grill now we have some Asian influenced artwork in the font but we have a sophisticated couple dancing as entertainment, liquor and dancing are added to the repertoire of the Chop Suey restaurant here's a picture of the Pagoda on the left you see the architecture that was designed to give you a sense of the exotic Orient lit up with neon this building was recently turned to pieces and turned into a key bank but much to the disgust of the residents of the Hollywood neighborhood who thought this was something of an icon and here, pardon? in Portland, yes and at the bottom you see a photo from the 50s ladies and hats and gentlemen in suits on a night out in the exotic Chinese restaurant the Chinese host is dressed in a business suit and here's a typical couple in the 1950s at the Pagoda in Portland with an Asian Asian influenced mural in the background and a T on the table the repeal of the Chinese exclusion law the final parts were repealed in 1943 when China was after all one of our allies in World War II didn't do too well to be exclusionary at a time like this also that of course to post-war World War II influx of Asian war brides and that led again to a creation of new families of Asian heritage and many of those began to look for enterprises that they could indulge in including restaurants in small cities this is a group of Chinese war brides being fettered at the Golden Dragon Restaurant upstairs at 3rd and Oak Streets 1946 I think it is by the Chinese business association and that bit of post-war business this is 1946 49 pardon me when Wong's cafe in Klamath Falls opened Wong's is still in business on the main street of Klamath Falls looks like this still in Chinese family ownership although it is a different family from the originals which were the Wong's and subsequently by the Leong's and places like Kim's in Medford Kim's was actually created by members of three different families and was a landmark along I-5 and the Pacific Highway in Southern Oregon for decades and here's a menu from another kind of typical Oriental garden, dine and dance Chinese American Cantonese style in McMinnville the heart of a quiet Baptist Yamhill County but you could still go kick up your heels and dance and drink liquor and eat exotic Chinese food in the 1950s in McMinnville by the 1950s when I became aware of the existence of Chinese restaurants and seaside and Astoria and Portland the pattern of the early 1900s of lone Chinese men operating mostly on their own or as cooks and white-owned establishments serving American food as well as noodles was changing to one of family-owned operated restaurants both that same dual menu Chinese and American and there's a bit of moving out and about too this is Eddie Louie of the Louie Family of Hubers he set off on his own and opened the new cafe restaurant in the 1950s on 82nd Avenue in Portland 82nd Avenue is now being promoted as the Jade District of Portland it's a hideous street but visually but it is lined with not only Chinese restaurants from the Chapsui era but also the restaurants and enterprises markets from many other Asian immigrant groups Korean and Hmong and Vietnamese and so on and that has given rise to a whole new district on the Oregon coast San Pan grew up in Deepo Bay that building is still there it's not a Chinese restaurant anymore but it was and it served of course the Cantonese Chinese family dinners with the usual egg-flour soup and jumbo deep-fried shrimp chow mein fried rice but you see some gourmet suggestions coming to appear this is from the 1960s and you get things that maybe look a little bit Trader Vic South Pacific Asian I'm not sure what another 82nd Avenue 1960 Chinese restaurant in Portland and in old and new Portland Portland's new Chinatown this was Ricochet Charlie's Chinese American food across the street to the left was Fong Chong's which was a Chinese market both owned by the same family Fong Chong was one of the first places to introduce what we now call dim sum where carts of freshly made dumplings and noodle dishes and so on were paraded around and you picked and said I'll have two of these and one of those and so on so this is not the same thing but it's a Chinese grocery shop suey joints Ricochet Charlie's obviously is playing off a lot of Chinese stereotypes there notice also the Chinese phone booth the corner there and in the background is an ad for Forbidden City Chinese and American food way out of 94th and Sandy Boulevard Suburban cocktails and banquets that ad is on this building notice the balconies that's the 1911 building built for the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association which was a educational and service group which still exists and still is in that building the lifting of the remnants of the Chinese exclusion law the American military actions in Korea and Vietnam and the opening of China during the Nixon administration all contributed to a new wave of Asian immigrants to the U.S. especially to the West Coast among the repercussions was exposure to Chinese foods that reflected other parts of China beyond Canton Guangzhou even though those restaurants may carry on the fabulous Hung Far Lo sign as I earlier mentioned another one of these second story establishments who climbed the stairs to Hung Far Lo Hung Far Lo was also noted for its very dark cocktail lounge where you could trip and fall before you got to the bar for its sign which was this incredible bit of neon work and when Hung Far Lo deserted downtown old Chinatown for the 82nd Avenue the sign went into decline but it was saved and recently was rehabilitated and put back right where it was although Hung Far Lo is not there anymore the sign is it's now become its own icon of new new old Chinatown I guess newer places had more adventurous menus and even names like Bill's Gold Coin who's Bill I don't know Bill's also stirred up its menu with riffs from Trader Vicks and other South Sea Tiki Bar things that were popular but its roots are still Cantonese and it tells you here about ordering Chinese you should order that kind of family style order things and share them and their Chinese dishes however go a little bit beyond Chapsui and Chow Main the first signs of a major change occurred in San Francisco where a small restaurant called Hunan opened in 1974 the photo shows Henry Chung and he's holding a picture of his wife Diana Chung perhaps the prime instigator of the Hunan restaurant and Hunan takes its name of course from another Chinese province and another one Sichuan starts showing up in restaurant names and what also shows up are different styles of cooking one major feature being peppers hot when Hunan first opened there was an article about it in the New Yorker magazine that became something of a sensation and newspapers picked it up as well and I had to go eat some just before I moved to Jacksonville it was so hot I nearly fell off my stool it was blisteringly hot but it was also wonderful and it was certainly different it was more exotic than the exotic stuff from Cannes, Hengkawi and Seaside well, like so many such things Henry Chung and the Chung family still operate Hunan and a couple of spin-offs from it and more than 40 members of his family are involved in that operation in San Francisco the first Hunan and Sichuan influenced restaurants in Portland about the same time in the 70s and chop suey and noodles and Cantonese cuisine began to be joined by other restaurants serving dishes from Sichuan, Hunan, other Chinese regions and things heated up and the heat spread but still there's this continuity of many Chinese restaurants being tied to family around operations here is the Golden Wall is a place I remember eating in when I lived in Portland area actually this is when I lived in Jacksonville and we go to Portland and visit the Golden Wall in Beaverton and at first you look on the left there and it's egg roll fried rice deep fried shrimp that's Cantonese from the way back machine but then you open the page inside and there are these starred items and all these are hot dishes and you see more familiar today terms like Kung Pao chicken eggplant, Sichuan sauce hot braised chili pork this is different this is not chop suey chow mein although you can still get that and from 2016 Sichuan restaurant Ben another family owned family style Chinese restaurant something a little different from Cantonese Jenny Lee wrote a book called the fortune cookie chronicles adventures in the world of Chinese food see a copy of it there it was an account of her journey across 42 states and 23 countries exploring the secrets of Chinese food a reviewer wrote about her book and said the main point of the book is that the foods we think of as Chinese chop suey general so's chicken it's a new one fortune cookies aren't like the author himself those foods look Chinese but they're actually American chop suey was invented here general so's was invented here the white takeout boxes were invented here we have one here even fortune cookies the most iconic of all Chinese foods originally came from Japan before being popularized here in the U.S. and as Jenny Lee reports most of them are made in New Jersey the ones on the table there are made in New York state and I picked them up in a climb of falls as Jenny put it our benchmark for American is apple pie but ask yourself how often do you eat apple pie how often do you eat Chinese food there are several elements to the legacy of Chinese cooks in Oregon one is that there are still Cantonese Chinese restaurants run by families with a long history that club cafe in Burns Oregon is now known still run by descendants of the Yi family it's now known as the Highlander still Chinese and American though those pictures on the wall are still on the wall the decor has not changed the sweet and sour soup and I had some just last year was just like always Burns you may remember is named for that Scott Barred Bobby Burns and so that's why you have a Scotsman on the cover of the menu for the Chinese restaurant in Burns Oregon even vanished restaurants like Kim's and Medford Barlow and Portland reminders of the long run of those institutions that they held in their communities many of the newer Chinese restaurants with hoted up menus from the north and the west have been established through pooling family monies and labor much the same way that that was done in the late 19th and early 20th century the influx of many other Asian immigrants in Oregon in the past four decades long, Lao Tai, Malaysian Nepalese, Indian it's really incredible to see a Bhutanese restaurant in Portland has made Chinese food, Cantonese to seem less exotic to the larger Caucasian public but has not erased it now Cantonese chop suey is just one of many exotic Asian influence dishes we can all eat Nepagoda is gone the republic is still around and still serves a menu that looks almost the same as it did in 1930 Chinese sojourners and immigrants were a notable component of Oregon's population from the 1850s into the 1920s they were visible and they faced discrimination in working and living here initially there were very few Chinese women and thus very few Chinese families many of the families remained in China and came to make a living in Oregon cooking became one avenue to acceptance first for single Chinese men who worked as cooks in hotels and cafes and homes and then as proprietors or workers in restaurants to both American tastes and Chinese tastes in time the Chinese American cafe often a family run institution as families became more possible in Oregon became an institution but also in many small towns throughout the state in my Oregon coast childhood I thought just as every town had a post office and a supermarket and a sawmill and a Chinese restaurant even today with more than half a century behind us nearly every Oregon town can still point to a Chinese restaurant I mean coming down here there's another one there's another one Elmira Oregon has a Chinese restaurant selling chop suey nearly every Oregon town can point to a restaurant run by an Asian family a family is not shunned or feared or bullied or marginalized but rather is very much part of the town's civic fabric the Yees and Burns the Cans and Seaside the families of of Kims and Medford are part of a complex society in which there has been room for change and adaptation in all to please go and go and eat your sashimi and your Peruvian quinoa and your Indian Nan and your Syrian falafel and your sashimi because it's all good and you can have some Cantonese chop suey too it's still and once again tasty and exotic and it's still and once again at least as American as apple pie so thank you very much