ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the intimately intertwined relationship between Chinatown, one of America’s most important ethnic communities, and Chinese food, which eventually became the nation’s most popular cuisine. Chinatown has played an indispensable role in the development of Chinese food. Chinese food, in turn, has always functioned as a marker of cultural identity for Chinatown and, for much of its history, constituted an important part of its economy. I will first address popular misassumptions about the reasons for the enormous popularity of Chinese food in the realm of public consumption. The rest of the chapter uses food as a vehicle to chart what I call the four major stages of Chinatown’s evolvement: formative, classic, suburban, and postmodern. In the first stage, Chinatown was the entrepot and incubator of Chinese food, serving an almost exclusively Chinese clientele. In the second, Chinatown became a tourist attraction, and restaurants existed as a central part of its tourism industry. In the third and fourth phases of Chinatown’s history, the emergence of new Chinese communities in the suburbs and postmodern high-tech hubs marks the decentering of the Chinese population. It is food places that render these otherwise invisible communities visible.
