ABSTRACT
My first Chinese food, in my childhood in Nebraska, was chop suey out of a can. My first serious eating of Chinese dishes was done in Berkeley and San Francisco in the glorious 1960s. At that time, the vast majority of Chinese restaurants in the United States clung to chop suey (Cantonese tsap seui, “miscellaneous leftovers”), chow mein (chao min, “fried noodles), egg foo young (fuyung tan, “narcissus egg”), won ton soup (won ton, “original chaos from which the universe emerged”—a great description of the soup), and the other old favorites of a now-vanishing world. It was a more or less Americanized version of the food of the rural districts south of Guangzhou city. The people who ate in these “chop suey houses” were most often stalwart working men and women, Chinese or Anglo.
