Left to right: Dr. Joyce Pualani Warren, Prosy Delacruz, Daniela Rangel (author) , Dr. Kimberly Carroll and Dr. Phil Hutchinson. Dr. Tomo Hattori, Chair attended but had to go to another event.
By Daniela Rangel
The Asian racial identity as constructed by White America encompasses many conflicting qualities. While the perceived qualities of subservience and mildness made early Chinese immigrants desirable domestic help for wealthy White Americans in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, Asians’ perceived exoticness, sexual deviancy, and degeneracy made them an unwelcome presence in the developing American landscape.
Across Asian American history, the selection of these warring qualities and their bewildering assignment mirrored the economic implications of Asian immigrant workers in America, with one area exemplifying this complexity being the Chinese restaurant. Analyzing the sociohistorical context of Chinese Americans’ overrepresentation in the restaurant industry defines not only the legacy of one Asian ethnic group’s American identity but also the United States’ historical legal and social treatment of Asian Americans.
This paper examines the legal fabrication of Chinese Americans’ social, political, and material statuses, drawing attention to how modern-day Chinese dominance in the American restaurant industry reflects this legacy of discrimination. Today, the Chinese restaurant industry is successful in spite of targeted legal attacks and the remnants of racist rhetoric that operate in the background of Asian American business ventures.
Now ubiquitous in American culture, Chinese restaurants’ de-exoticization in the 1920s (Lee, p. 54) was far from a marker of American acceptance. In fact, the rise in popularity of Chinese food accompanied heightened anti-Chinese sentiment, and the initial boom in Chinese restaurants was a direct result of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred the entry of Chinese laborers.
This act inadvertently produced one of the most successful Asian American economic ventures—a mistake that lawmakers and White labor unions worked tirelessly to rectify. Its introduction of a system of visa preferences qualified certain business owners for “merchant status,” granting them entry and the ability to sponsor relatives’ journeys. The ruling of a 1915 court case granted Chinese restaurant owners these specific privileges, creating the conditions for an unbroken succession of Chinese restaurant investors who qualified for legal merchant status (Lee). Chinese restaurants not only became advantageous for individual entrepreneurs’ economic success but also served as a way to bypass restrictions in U.S. immigration law, diverting new waves of Chinese immigration to the restaurant industry.
Writer Maria Godoy aptly dubs this allowance the “lo mein loophole,” whereby Chinese restauranteurs sourced labor and facilitated the migration of others. Many restaurants were staffed by members of the same family or family friends whose migration had been sponsored by one or all restaurant owners.
Obtaining merchant status was complicated by strict requirements that applicants be major investors in swanky eateries. Entrepreneurs pooled their money and rotated formal ownership duties (excluding menial labor) for periods of a year or eighteen months to qualify (Godoy). Once each owner obtained this status, they could sponsor relatives’ journeys to the U.S., providing restaurant employment upon arrival.
This made Chinese restaurants important community establishments, offering exotic and exciting new foods and providing avenues for Chinese immigrants to start new lives in America or send money to family in China. While restaurant owners’ thrifty legal circumvention wasn’t a nefarious plot for cheap labor, their cyclical employment of low-wage immigrant workers created optimal profit margins, making some Chinese restaurants more profitable than “American” ones.
By “employing Chinese workers and successfully competing with other restaurants,” Chinese restaurants were regarded by White labor unions as “a serious menace to society,” threatening the White race’s economic and moral order (Chin and Ormonde, pp. 683–684). The threat posed by Chinese restaurant workers surpassed economic competition: now, they were racially dangerous individuals whose presence threatened the morality and virtue of White women.
While White labor unions were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to eradicate Chinese restaurants, their efforts “propagated the idea that Chinese immigrants were morally and economically dangerous,” contributing to the passage of the Asian-exclusionary Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924 (Chin and Ormonde, p. 684). Where union efforts failed to eliminate competition from lower-paid Chinese workers, they pivoted to concern for White women, leveraging the 1909 murder of Elsie Sigel, a young White woman, by a New York Chinese restaurant worker as “rationale for suppression,” making the moral contagion posed by the restaurants a matter of national concern (Chin and Ormonde, p. 684).
Using this stand-alone case to manufacture race-based fear in White Americans proved incredibly successful, generating public support for legislation detrimental to Chinese restaurants. Articles of the time display the success of the social campaign waged against them, warning of how Chinese men’s “insidious ways and fawning matters” easily trapped White women, who were portrayed as pure of heart and often had a maternal instinct for the ill-treated Chinese American man (Chin and Ormonde, p. 706). The oversexed identity of Chinese men prompted calls from newspapers and community leaders across the country to “pass laws that would prohibit a white girl from ever crossing a Chinaman’s threshold,” which were actualized in instances like the Pittsburgh City Council’s passing of a 1910 ordinance banning women from working for or patronizing Chinese restaurants and restricting their hours of operation (Chin and Ormonde, pp. 708–709). While this and similar proposed bills in Massachusetts and Montana were ultimately struck down for being unconstitutionally “directed against the Chinese as a race,” and thus invalidated by the precedent set in the 1886 case Yick Wo v. Hopkins, the fervor with which they were supported displayed the ubiquity of America’s anti-Asian sentiment. Existing Sinophobia in American legislation bolstered White labor unions’ arguments that the presence of Chinese immigrants was detrimental to American society—they were, after all, the only nationality to be explicitly banned from entering the country.
Labor unions didn’t prompt the closure of all Chinese restaurants as they’d hoped, but they permanently positioned Asians at odds with Whites. At the intersection of labor movements’ efforts and the government’s history of discrimination was White America, receptive to unfounded claims that “chop suey joints served dog meat, rats, garbage, and human children” (Chin and Ormonde, p. 689), yet returning time and again to partake in their cuisine.
Reports of Chinese restaurants varied greatly. All required the racial othering of Chinese Americans, even in their praise of Chinese-owned establishments; but none drew the divide as effectively and permanently as those accusing Chinese of nefarious intent and malicious, corner-cutting business practices that threatened public health and safety. While some articles spoke to the cleanliness and convenience of Chinese-operated businesses, reporting that “celestials carry off the palm for superior excellence in every particular,” others warned Whites of the risk they encountered patronizing Chinese businesses through fabricated stories of Chinatown’s hidden opium dens and houses of prostitution (Peters, p. 9).
These whiplash-inducing accounts of Chinese Americans’ moral character mirror the unstable grounds upon which the Asian American identity has been predicated. American legislators’ constitutional inability to enact harsher, even more explicitly discriminatory laws that directly threatened Chinese-owned businesses prompted their constituents, proponents of White racial supremacy, to continue the country’s legacy of Asian discrimination themselves. Banding together to construct false narratives and echo the forever-foreigner labels placed on Asian (non)Americans, they created a social reality of Asian inferiority.
Lawmakers’ pushes to find facially neutral methods of undermining Chinese restaurants took form in restricting business and employment licenses to citizens (while Asians were still barred from naturalizing), imposing restrictive zoning measures, and introducing discriminatorily enforced booth ordinances. They found Chinese restaurants “hard to kill off” and “thriving in spite of opposition” (Chin and Ormonde, pp. 727–729). The persistence of the Chinese restaurant industry was equally matched in the efforts to abolish it, and its complex history is a testament to the laborious processes of American racial construction.
The 1920s newspaper declarations of Chinese restaurants’ permanence in the American landscape didn’t cover histories of White, union-backed, anti-Chinese policies operating in direct opposition to Americans’ love of Chinese food. Whites wanted to have their chop suey and eat it too—their taste for Chinese food necessitated Chinese Americans, and White legislators had effectively reduced America’s Chinese population by almost half from 1890 to 1920.
Following the 1943 repeal of anti-Chinese immigration legislation, Chinese restaurants were still home to many newly arrived immigrants, which rings true today, when Chinese restaurants remain targets for immigration enforcement (Chin and Ormonde, pp. 731–732). In the case of Chinese restaurants, repealing discriminatory legislation didn’t end Asian racial antagonism, but allowed for the American public to translate its inherited beliefs to material consequences for Chinese Americans.
Recent avoidance of Chinese restaurants due to such racist misunderstandings as the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome and fear of contracting COVID-19 echo past legal and political Asian American racialization efforts. The recency of these attacks and their devastating consequences on not only Chinese-owned restaurants but all Asian businesses (Yang) illustrate the reverberating effects of America’s historical construction of Asian racial identity. Though Asian racial inferiority isn’t an inherited natural reality, Asian Americans’ inherited social reality continues to relegate them to a spot permanently below that of White Americans, just outside the walls of American identity.
Works cited include Chen and Chang Jae Lee’s *Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America* (Columbia University Press, 2014); Chin and Ormonde’s article, “The War against Chinese Restaurants,” published in *Duke Law Journal* in 2018, pages 681–741; Maria Godoy’s “Lo Mein Loophole: How U.S. Immigration Law Fueled a Chinese Restaurant Boom,” NPR, 2016; Heather R. Lee et al.’s *A Life Cooking for Others: The Work and Migration Experiences of a Chinese Restaurant Worker in New York City, 1920–1946* (NYU Press, 2020); E.J. Peters’ “A Path to Acceptance: Promoting Chinese Restaurants in San Francisco, 1849–1919,” *Southern California Quarterly*, 2015; and Angela Yang’s “Pandemic-Era Stigma Cost Asian Restaurants $7.4B in Lost Revenue,” NBC News, 2023.
***
About the Author: Daniela Rangel is an undergraduate student at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), majoring in Asian American Studies and minoring in Theatre History and Literature. She believes in the necessity of historical and legal literacy as tools for personal and social empowerment.
Editor’s Note: Each year, CSUN hosts an essay competition for Asian American Studies and Education majors, supported by an endowment established by Prosy Abarquez-Delacruz in memory of her mother, Asuncion Castro Abarquez, and her sister, Rosalinda Abarquez Alcantara. Founded in 2016, the endowment provides scholarship grants to deserving students. This essay was carefully reviewed by Dr. Kimberly Teaman Carroll, Dr. Tomo Hattori, Dr. Phil Hutchison, and Dr. Joyce Pualani Warren. Now in its tenth year, the program continues under the sustained collaborative leadership of Dr. Tomo Hattori. Asian Journal has proudly partnered in this initiative for a decade, providing a platform for college students to share their voices with a wider audience.
