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As American as Chinese Food
In Rhode Island, home to five of the Powerball winners, I stopped at a century-old eatery in Woonsocket called Chan's Egg Roll and Jazz. In its latest incarnation, the owner, John Chan, had turned it into a nightclub featuring prominent jazz acts. This part of New England features the fabled chow mein sandwich, a subject of study for Professor Imogene Lim, a Canadian who speaks better Swahili than Chinese.I dragged along my friend Lulu, a girl whose doe eyes and round cheeks make her appear like a thinly disguised anime character. Though born in China and raised mostly in Hong Kong, Lulu speaks flawless English. Her parents, both lawyers, still live in Beijing, but she spent most of her academic career in English-language schools -- mostly in Hong Kong, as well as a brief period in New York City. When she was six years old, she glimpsed her parents' green cards with their photos and "resident alien" stripped along the top. At the time, Star Trek: The Next Generation was popular, so the idea of extraterrestrials was in her head. Are my parents aliens? she thought in shock. Her parents snatched the cards away.
When the chow mein sandwiches were set in front of us, Lulu looked at them with a combination of mock horror and genuine fascination. Trapped between two pieces of white Wonder bread was a crunchy pile of fried Chinese noodles slathered in a brown gravy flecked with bits of celery and onion. It was moist and soft and crunchy. Lulu giggled. We weren't sure how to approach it. The gravy had softened the bread, making it too messy to pick up with our hands. I attempted to attack mine with a knife and fork. Lulu plucked the crispy noodles out of the bread. It wasn't bad; the gravy gave the sandwich a lot of flavor, and the textural mix of crunchy noodles, sodden bread and flavored liquid was intriguing. In some other life, we might even have thought it was good. But that day, we couldn't get our minds around the idea of a starch-on-starch sandwich.
I learned that for many people, though, the chow mein sandwich captured memories of growing up: Mom's home cooking. Hanging out after school. Flirting. First dates. The sandwich evoked both family and friends. Locals even shipped the mix overseas, unleashing the force of the chow mein sandwich on foreign soil. And during the first Gulf War, in '91, residents sent chow mein mixes to local men who were serving abroad.
When I heard these stories, I was reminded of a phone conversation I'd had after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I was in Washington, D.C., and a number of my friends had been swept up in the historic journey: cynical journalists, idealistic nation builders, mercenary contractors.
Many of these people informed me of the two improvised Chinese restaurants that had popped up next to the landing pad of a military hospital in the Baghdad Green Zone, a ten-minute stroll north of Saddam Hussein's palace. The restaurant in the back was slightly more popular because patrons figured it would be less likely to be damaged by an insurgent attack from the street.
These Chinese restaurants in Baghdad had neither Chinese nor Arabic on their menus, only English. And though the Chinese restaurateurs had never been to the States, they certainly knew how to attract large crowds with American-style offerings like sweet-and-sour pork and panfried dumplings.
Among those friends of mine who had been deployed to Iraq was Walter, a foreign service officer who resembles a bookish version of James Dean. We would chat by phone (his cell phone in Baghdad had a 914 area code, as if he were only just north of New York City, in Westchester County). In one of our conversations, I wondered aloud why the Chinese restaurants were so popular with my friends in Iraq when, after all, diners in the Middle East should indulge in the authentic local cuisine of kebabs and hummus.
"It's a taste of home," Walter responded. Even against the whirl of medevac helicopters, Chinese food had become a beacon for American patriots. "What could be more American than beer and take-out Chinese?" he added.
Favored cuisines become refuges in times of crisis. On September 11, 2001, my friend Daniel and his friends, after their high school classes were canceled and they learned that their parents were all safe, headed to a local Chinese restaurant called Chop Stix, in Scarsdale, New York. Together they watched the news and ate stir-fry. Chinese food was comfort food for them. It was something predictable and familiar when they needed an anchor in an explosion of uncertainty.
I reflected on my journeys to numerous Powerball restaurants across the country. American Chinese food is readily available and has a broad appeal to our national palate. It's something that nearly every one of us has grown up with -- both young and old. I marveled that on a single day, Chinese food had united so many different people from different parts of this country: a schoolteacher in Tennessee, a farmer-veterinarian in Wisconsin, a microbiologist in Kansas, a police sergeant from New Mexico, retired septuagenarian snowbirds from Iowa, a bank clerk from South Carolina, a salesman from New Hampshire.
Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie.
But ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?
Tasty Little Tidbits to Chew On
• As far back as 1942, chop suey and chow mein were added to the U.S. Army cookbook.
• In 1961, before the Freedom Riders left for the first fateful bus ride through the Deep South to protest segregation, a number of that company got together for dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Washington.
• In October 1962, emissaries for John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev met secretly at Yenching Palace in a neighborhood of Washington to work out a solution to the Cuban missile crisis. (Chinese restaurants were neutral territory.)
• In the 1980s, Peking Gourmet Inn, near Falls Church, Virginia, had to install a bulletproof glass window near table N17. That's where the Bushes, both father and son, sit to this day at their favorite Chinese restaurant.
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