• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1402 0

It was an instant hit with his American patrons, and other Chinese restaurants quickly added the new concoction to their own offerings. David Jung, who opened a noodle company in Los Angeles in 1916, is credited with creating the fortune cookie. (Contrary to popular myth, the fortune cookie is not an ancient Chinese dessert, nor is it customary to insert messages in Chinese pastries. While it is true that during the Yuan Dynasty, rebels baked secret messages into Moon Festival cakes, outlining plans for an attack—the uprising overthrew the Mongolians and established the Ming Dynasty—the concept of slipping words of wisdom into fried cookies is completely American.) Chop suey, a fried hodgepodge of vegetables and meat, enjoyed an enormous following among Caucasians and became an icon of mainstream culture by the early twentieth century, when Sinclair Lewis mentioned it in his novel Main Street (1920). It varied greatly by region, as chefs tailored their food to suit local tastes. On the East Coast, some Chinese restaurants even offered chop suey sandwiches.

Some émigrés drew on their knowledge of traditional Chinese medicine to establish herbalist businesses. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, California suffered from a severe lack of adequately trained Western doctors, prompting patients to try alternative medicine. After Western doctors pronounced them incurable, in desperation many Caucasians turned to Chinese healers. One herbalist, Tan Fuyuan, noted that “as a rule Caucasians have been unwilling to consult us until they had tried every other form of medical treatment within their reach. Therefore, it may be said that all of the cures which we have made have been cases given up by other doctors.”

The ability of some Chinese herbalists to diagnose and cure their patients created a huge demand for their services. Though these herb doctors served people within their own community, most of their clientele were non-Chinese.18 By the late nineteenth century, every Chinatown in the West had at least one herbalist business, some as many as three or four. In 1913, the International Chinese Business Directory of the World listed the names of twenty-eight Chinese herb doctors in Los Angeles (the real number may have been considerably higher), even though only two thousand Chinese lived in the city at that time.

Like other Chinese enterprises, Chinese herbal shops were typically family-run businesses. Historian Liu Haiming has portrayed the daily routine of Chang Yitang, who arrived in the United States in 1900. The family lived upstairs in Chang’s house in Los Angeles, while the ground floor served as the doctor’s office, pill factory, pharmacy, and teahouse. In his office, Chang would take the patient’s pulse, then dole out advice and medicine. In the kitchen, his wife, Nellie, would steep herbs into tea, which his nephew, Yee Pai, would serve with crackers to patients in the waiting room. The family also made herbal pills from scratch, an exhausting job that required the efforts of several people. Using their feet or knees, they would grind the medicine into a fine powder beneath a heavy iron device they called a “rocking boat,” as it resembled a boat with handles on the side. The powder was sifted through a sieve, mixed with honey, steamed, shaped into tiny balls, dried in the oven, and packed into bottles, to be sold later through the Chang family’s thriving mail-order business.

Some herbalists owed their success more to marketing than medical knowledge. Tom Leung, who operated a booming herbal business in Los Angeles in the 1910s and 1920s, was particularly gifted at publicity. Though he claimed to be descended from a famous line of physicians in China and trained at the Imperial Medical College of Peking, his daughter, Louise Leung Larson, believes he invented those credentials. Leung advertised frequently in the Los Angeles newspapers, mailed Christmas cards to his patients, and gave away calendars and rulers with “T. Leung Herb Co.” printed on them. Along with a prosperous local practice, he conducted a