NPR
By Maria Godoy
February 22, 2016
Americans
craving kung pao chicken or a good lo mein for dinner have plenty of
options: The U.S. is home to more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants.
One
could think of this proliferation as a promise fulfilled — America as
the great melting pot and land of opportunity for immigrants.
Ironically, the legal forces that
made this Chinese culinary profusion possible, beginning in the early
20th century, were born of altogether different sentiments: racism and
xenophobia.
Anti-Chinese
sentiment was rampant in America in the early 20th century — and had
been since the latter half of the 19th century, when as many as 300,000
Chinese miners,
farmers, railroad and factory workers came to the U.S. Many non-Chinese
workers felt threatened by these laborers, who often worked for lower
wages.
Amid
mounting social tensions, the U.S. passed immigration laws that
explicitly barred Chinese laborers from immigrating or becoming U.S.
citizens, and made it extremely
difficult for even legal residents to re-enter the U.S. after a visit
home to China.
But,
as MIT legal historian Heather Lee tells it, there was an important
exception to these laws: Some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could
get special merchant visas
that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a
few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal
court added restaurants to that list. Voila! A restaurant boom was born.
"The
number of Chinese restaurants in the U.S. doubles from 1910 to 1920,
and doubles again from 1920 to 1930," says Lee, referring to research
done by economist Susan
Carter. In New York City alone, Lee found that the number of Chinese
eateries quadrupled between 1910 and 1920.
Lee
was digging through old immigration records in 2011, as part of her
doctoral dissertation, when she discovered evidence that this legal
change had fueled a rise in
restaurants. She found a flood of applications from Chinese immigrants
after 1915 seeking merchant status to start up restaurant businesses,
along with applications from others brought over to work in these
establishments.
Prior
to the restaurant loophole, Lee says, most Chinese immigrants in
America worked in laundries — they were excluded from better-paying
options. But by 1930, they were
more likely to be toiling in eating establishments. "The scale of it
increases astronomically," she says.
Many
Chinese immigrants to the U.S. were men who had come alone: They were
here to earn money to support families back home, not to settle down
permanently. Once in the
U.S., however, it was all but impossible for them to travel back to
visit loved ones in China. After 1915, the visas that came with working
in a restaurant became bridges to families and friends back in China,
Lee says.
"It
was really important for [these men] to be able to move back and forth,
to get married and retire someday. That was the idea. These special
visas were critically important,"
Lee says.
Even
so, getting a special merchant visa was far from easy, Lee explains.
Only the major investors in a restaurant qualified — and it had to be a
"high grade," fancy eatery.
These investors had to manage their restaurants full time for at least a
year. During that time, they couldn't do any menial work: no cooking,
waiting tables or ringing up the cash register, she says.
Lee
says Chinese immigrants found ingenious ways to get around these
hurdles: They would pool their money to start luxury "chop suey
palaces," then each investor would
take turns running the joint for a year or 18 months. Once they'd
earned merchant status, the investors would use it to bring their
relatives over to work in the restaurant.
Lee
explains how it worked: "Your cousin, your uncle has helped you over
and is giving you a job. He's supposed to show you the ropes. Then you
move up the hierarchy until
you earn the money to be a partner in your own restaurant."
Lee's
research focused on New York City (she's writing a book about the rise
of restaurants there in the 19th and early 20th centuries). But she says
the immigration dynamics
were similar in other urban centers with large Chinese communities,
like Chicago and San Francisco.
In
order to make these schemes work, Chinese restaurateurs also had to
loop in the white vendors they worked with: Lee says Chinese immigrants
had to have two white witnesses
support their visa applications. In practice, she says, this turned
into a quid pro quo situation: A small group of white vendors would
secure the restaurants' business, and in exchange, they'd vouch for the
investors. "I found the same six vendors' names
over and over again" on old immigration documents, she says.
"It's
quite a different story than [the usual explanation] about why Chinese
were opening restaurants during that period," Lee tells me.
That
standard explanation points to a confluence of cultural forces. For one
thing, as historian Yong Chen notes in Chop Suey, USA, Chinese food's
cheapness made it an
affordable luxury and helped democratize the dining out experience.
The
late hours observed by Chinese restaurants were also a draw —
especially to bohemians, whose patronage lent these establishments a
certain cachet. By 1910, "going
out for chop suey made middle-class Americans feel pleasantly naughty,"
write Lisa Stoffer and Michael Lesy in Repast, their history of dining
out during that era.
Cultural
historians also tell of the rise of "slumming parties" — groups of
well-heeled suburbanites and out-of-towners in New York who'd pay for
tours of Chinatown, where
the supposed "depravity" of the place was the main attraction. And some
point to New York Jews who shook off the old country and embraced
Chinese food as a sign of their own modernity.
All
of these factors played a role, Lee says, but they're not the whole
story. "While going to Chinese restaurants did play into an emerging
worldview, what's really under-recognized
is the primary motivation for the Chinese," Lee tells us.
That
motivation was the same then as what still drives many immigrants in
America today: to save, get ahead and send money to family back home.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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