"Today, Chinese Americans make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, but roughly one-third of all ethnic restaurants in the U.S. are 'Chinese,' and every supermarket carries a line of 'Chinese' food.
New-fangled Food
It started with the Gold Rush of 1849. As thousands of 'Forty-Niners' streamed into California in search of gold, whole boom-towns - including a tent city named San Francisco - sprang up to supply their needs.
One merchant who set up shop in San Francisco was a Chinese American named Norman Asing. He opened a restaurant called, "The Macao and Woosung" and charged $1 for an all-you-can-eat buffet.
It was the first Chinese restaurant on U.S. territory, and it was a hit with miner and other San Franciscans. Asing's success inspired dozens of other Chinese immigrants to open restaurants, called "chow chows".
Made in Canton
Over the next three decades, hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrated to the United States. By 1882 - when Congress curtailed Chinese immigration - there were more than 300,000 Chinese nationals living on the West Coast.
Most came from the Kwangtung Province, whose capital city was Canton. So most Chinese restaurants carried Cantonese-style food.
In Cantonese cuisine, very little goes to waste: nearly every part of an animal that can be eaten is used in one dish or another
[It] was considered adventurous eating for most white Americans at the turn of the century. Typically, one food critic who ate in San Francisco's Chinatown in the late 1800s wrote that he was served "pale cakes with a waxen look full of [strange] meats... then giblets of you-never-know-what, maybe gizzards... perhaps toes.
Before long, however, ...Chinese cooks learned how to modify their dishes to make them more palatable to a wider American audience. The result: Chinese-American cuisine, food that looked and tasted "Chinese" but was actually invented in the U.S. and was unknown in China.
By the 1920s, Chinese restaurants dotted the American landscape.
Note: Until the 1970s, Chinese-American cuisine was almost exclusively Cantonese. If you're a fan of Szechuan or Hunan cooking, thank Richard Nixon. He opened the People's Republic of China to the West in the '70s...which brought us new Chinese cuisines.
