Far East Meets Pacific Northwest: A Celebration of Chinese and Japanese
Culinary Traditions from the First Half of the 20th Century
by Paul Swanson
This article first appeared in the February 2007 Prandial Post, the International Association of
Culinary Professionals’ Food History Committee Newsletter. The article was adapted by Paul
Swanson from the Menu Notes he prepared for the Endangered Treasures benefit during the
2006 IACP Conference in Seattle. Swanson was co-chair of the event.
www.theculinarytrust.com/html/endangered_treasures_seattle.html
Chinese and Japanese immigrants making their way to the Pacific Northwest often earned their
living by farming, tending stores, toiling in the back kitchens, or waiting on restaurant patrons.
To avoid the slings and arrows of blatant discrimination, they formed enclaves and found much
comfort in their own families, church groups, and ancestral traditions.
Chinese and Japanese cuisine seemed very strange and exotic at first to the previous waves of
immigrants who had come in droves to the Pacific Northwest from an opposite direction. In the
minds of these European-based immigrants, the two cuisines often merged, possibly because of
their shared use of soy sauce or shoyu, although these two national cuisines had little else in
common.
The Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1914) was the first Asian cookbook published in the United
States directed toward such a mystified “American” public. Its authors, Otono Watanna (aka
Winnifred Eaton) and her sister, Sara Eaton Bosse, were half Chinese/half Caucasian in ancestry.
Winnifred adopted a “Japanese” persona and wrote best-selling novels set in Japan under her
pseudonym. Japan seemed more captivating than China at the time and, even though she never
actually set foot in Japan, she enthralled a large swath of the American public’s imagination with
her tales of the samurai.
On the side, “Otono” wrote magazine and newspaper articles about Chinese and Japanese
recipes. The Chinese-Japanese Cook Book was published as a result of this secondary activity.
While not a reliable guide for recipes—by all accounts Winnifred was a horrible cook who
overcooked everything—it is a fascinating historical document and an emblem of how people
thought about and approached Japanese and Chinese food near the turn of the 20th century.
A more authentic portrait of what initial generations of Chinese- and Japanese-Americans served
and ate emerges from memoirs and novels written by these immigrants and their offspring. When
their writings are plumbed for food references, they indirectly yield numerous insights into the
assimilation and clash of Asian and American cultures. Food memories are like that, for daily
acts and rituals of eating also become a ready form of cultural expression and identity.
The Culinary Life of a Nisei Daughter
Seattle’s historic Nihonmachi (Japantown) found its epicenter at Sixth and South Main in the
“International District.” In 1930, the Japanese population in Seattle numbered around 8,500.1 At
the turn of the century, Nihonmachi was the world of the Issei, or the first arrivals from Japan.
Japanese-Americans routinely classified themselves by their first (Issei), second (Nisei), or third
(Sensei) degrees of generational separation from the Japanese homeland.
When two Issei met on a sidewalk, one would see much bowing and hear the soft
modulations of the Japanese language. Ritual acknowledgements of obligations incurred
and to be incurred were an almost invariant part of such conversations. 2
Compared to their Issei parents, the second-generation Nisei embraced “American” traditions.
They “spoke English, knew its idioms and slang; they knew the popular songs and danced the
latest dance steps; and their idols were the favorites of all Americans: Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio,
Clark Gable, and Katharine Hepburn.”3 However, the Nisei generation was isolated from Issei
culture as well as white American society because of their limited command of the Japanese
language and scant knowledge of Japanese traditions. However, “most Nisei absorbed more of
Japanese culture than they realized.”4
Nisei Daughter (1953), a memoir by Monica Sone (née Kazuko Monica Itoi), is a walking tour
of the tastes, sights, and sounds of Seattle’s Nihonmachi as it existed at the crossroads of the first
two Japanese-American generations to live on American soil.5
To set the historical family table, Nisei Daughter describes life of the Japanese-American
community around Seattle, beginning with Sone’s father’s arrival and continuing through the
Japanese-American internment camps of World War II. Sone’s memoir is historically recognized
for recounting the joys, struggles, and vast unconstitutional indignities visited upon the JapaneseAmerican community in Seattle and elsewhere. When read from a gastronomic perspective, Nisei
Daughter also tells a fascinating, overlooked story.
Landing in Seattle in 1904 with an aim at law school, Sone’s father instead found himself
cooking “his way back and forth between Alaska and Seattle on ships of all sizes and shapes, but
fortune eluded him.”6 He “had the robust, mass-cooking style which he had learned in the galleys
of Alaska-bound ships and he leaned heavily toward ham and eggs, steaks and potatoes, apple
and pumpkin pies.”7 In 1918, he purchased the Carrollton Hotel at Main Street and Occidental
Avenue and became a Seattle hotelier.
Sone’s mother “had come to America just fresh out of high school and had had little training in
Japanese culinary arts. “Later Mother picked up the technique of authentic Japanese cooking
herself and she even learned to cook superb Chinese dishes.”8 Sone recalls the pungent odor
emanating from a five-gallon crock kept near the kitchen window “filled with cucumbers,
nappa (Chinese cabbage), daikon (large Japanese radishes), immersed in a pickling mixture of
nuka, consisting of rice polishings, salt, rice and raisins. The fermented products were sublimely
refreshing, delicious, raw vegetables, a perfect side dish to a rice and tea mixture at the end of a
meal.”9
Much of the ritual of Japanese culture is revealed through Sone’s mother’s preparation of food
for picnics and other social gatherings. For example, “Mother filled another platter with makizushi, added fresh sprigs of parsley to it and took it over to Mrs. Matsui. I saw both of them
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bowing back and forth, and soon Mother returned with Mrs. Matsui’s luscious botamochi, a
special kind of rice rolled into balls and generously covered with sweetened, crushed red beans
[i.e., adzuki beans].”10
Sone might well have crossed paths in Nihonmachi with the likes of Matajiro Fuse, the
protagonist of Sushi and Sourdough (1989), a coming-of-age novel by Tooru Kanazawa that
recounts a Japanese-American family’s life in Alaska before WWII. Because travel to Alaska
flowed through Seattle during the various gold rushes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
the novel includes descriptions of cuisine and life in Seattle’s International District.
Sushi and Sourdough opens with Matajiro (a close likeness of the author’s father) catching a
train for Seattle from Oakland in 1897. “He carried a box of sushi and—his concession to
American life—instead of sake, a bottle of Rainier beer.” When he arrives in Seattle, he
immediately goes to a familiar Japanese restaurant, and orders a “T-bone steak with trimmings,
twenty-five cents.”11 A common theme in the Japanese and Chinese immigrant experience, many
of Matajiro’s family members and friends worked in restaurants in various capacities.
It isn’t easy to recreate the culinary experiences such as of Monica Sone or Matajiro Fuse from
original documentary sources because of the wholesale destruction of Japanese literature and
artifacts that occurred in 1942. As Japanese-American families were visited by the FBI, they
became adept at dealing with these intrusions. A friend of Monica’s mother admonished her,
“You must destroy everything and anything Japanese which may incriminate your husband. It
doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s printed or made in Japan, destroy it because the FBI always
carries off those items for evidence.”12
With regard to foodstuffs, Monica’s mother did not follow this injunction; she insisted on taking
a gallon can of soy sauce with her to the initial Japanese internment camp in Puyallup,
Washington euphemistically called “Camp Harmony.” In her words, “It’s going with me. I
[don’t] think we’d have shoyu where we’re going.”13
Many Japanese-Americans facing internment left their shoyu and other cooking articles behind.
In 1999, a trove of such stored relics was rediscovered in the basement of Seattle’s historic
Panama Hotel. “Forced from their homes in April 1942, a few dozen families stored their
possessions in this cellar, hoping some day to return for them. But many never did, and their
electric cookers, gallon-sized cans of Kikkoman soy sauce, homemade tempura baskets and
stone drums used for pounding cooked rice into mochi (rice cakes) remained tucked away, out of
sight and all but forgotten.”14
In Search of the Golden Mountain
Early Chinese-American immigrants came mostly from Guangdong (Canton) Province. They
called this new land of America Gum Sahn, “the Golden Mountain.” In The Chinese Kitchen
(1999), Eileen Yin-Fei Lo describes the cuisine these immigrants brought with
them to these Pacific shores:
To a large extent, Cantonese is what people think of when they think of Chinese food. It
is the cooking, albeit altered by circumstances, of those men from southern China who
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migrated to the West to search for gold and to build the transcontinental railroad. But
pure Cantonese cooking is grand indeed, with the belief in the sanctity of freshness and
that the essential nature and taste of food ought not to be changed. Overcooking is a sin in
the Cantonese kitchen, which relies heavily on stir-frying and steaming, though it roasts
and stews as well. This kitchen is ingenious, innovative, inventive, and most
welcoming.15
For many Americans in the first half of the 20th century, Cantonese cuisine remained
otherworldly. Reasons for this collective ignorance are generally unappetizing to recount.16 It
would be decades before Americans as a whole recognized Chinese cuisine as something more
than chop suey, chow mein, and egg foo young. 17
Taste cravings can trump or feed prejudices. One popular cookbook of this era, “compiled and
edited for the American Cook,” advised readers in 1936, “The best recommendation for Chinese
food is that when you have eaten it for awhile you actually crave it. Time will come when you
will even share the Chinese delights in many strange but delectable viands, which may be
repellent for the first time, owing to their mysterious origin.” ”18
Cantonese cuisine helped shape one of the 20th century’s most outstanding palates, that of James
Beard, who credited “chicken jelly” and other dishes prepared by Jue-Let, a Chinese chef in his
mother’s Gladstone Hotel, for developing his early flavor sense. The little pots of chicken jelly
helped Beard (age three) recover from malaria, revealing the strong medicinal current within
Cantonese cuisine.
Beard’s biographer, Evan Jones, connects such early Cantonese culinary experiences with
Beard’s renowned palate. “While most children who begin to learn by rote retain the memory of
sounds and images through repetition, Beard perfected the ability to register subtle flavors
indelibly, perhaps in an Oriental way, and to call back specific tastes after the passage of
decades. He described the talent as ‘akin to perfect pitch.’”19
Facing limited employment opportunities, many Chinese immigrants became cooks, waiters, and
restaurant owners across America. Chinese cookbooks authored by immigrants were more likely
directed to one another as guides for preparing “American” dishes, rather than geared to an
American audience at large. Jones summarizes the experience of Chinese-American
cooks in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere:
In the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese cooks like Billy and Let, and Poy and
Gin at the old Gladstone Hotel [run by Elizabeth Beard] were not sought after for their
skills in the various regional cooking styles of their homeland. Few Americans, even on
the West Coast where the Chinese population provided kitchen workers of high
accomplishment, had learned to cook any Oriental meals more sophisticated than chop
suey and chow mein, or eggs foo yung, sweet and sour pork, fried shrimp, and fried rice.
***
But Mrs. Beard would often allow [Jue-Let] to prepare Chinese dishes for a quick meal,
or as a special treat for Jim or his father—such as Let’s version of green beans fried
separately and served with hog jowl. Let also liked imaginative cooking, and he
4
developed a recipe for a special curry sauce that he said was originally Chinese. Its
smooth texture was achieved by grinding onions, garlic, Chinese parsley, unpeeled tart
apples, and drysmoked ham, and the mixture was seasoned with curry powder, turmeric,
various peppers, stock, and tomato paste. When Beard’s reputation was established, he
concluded that this country’s enthusiasm for Oriental food might have surfaced earlier
had Americans in Let’s time been generally more open-minded about ordering in Chinese
restaurants. 20
Jue-Let’s experience is repeated throughout the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. Louis Chu’s
Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) is the first Chinese-American novel to accurately describe daily life in
an American Chinatown. Protagonist Ben Loy is a waiter and cook at such restaurants as the
China Pagoda and the New Toishan. By the novel’s conclusion, Ben “was rapidly learning to
become a good cook. The change gave him a new self-assurance. His old job of waiting tables
had subjected him to all sorts of pressures from the diners:
The tea is too strong. The chow mein is cold. Not enough shrimps. Where’s my roast
pork? Now that he was working in the kitchen, this constant pressure was greatly
reduced. He was learning a new skill. He expected to become a master of it.”21
Historically, Portland proved to be more hospitable to Chinese-Americans than other West Coast
cities, as related by Marie Rose Wong in Sweet Cakes, Long Journey: The Chinatowns of
Portland (2004). Wong’s father, a chef, deeply inspired her scholarship about history of
Portland’s Chinatowns. Jim Wong’s life reveals further universal truths of the ChineseAmerican immigrant experience:
Our father arrived in the United States as Wong Gin Man, and it was perhaps by
convenience while completing some kind of governmental paperwork or because of his
own fascination with English names he took the name Jim Wong.
In 1930, my father joined Jung [his brother] in Oregon at the Portland immigration
station and the two traveled across the United States, working in numerous odd jobs, but
primarily as cooks for small-town hamburger joints and mom-and-pop restaurants.
In 1939, my father met my mother in the King Ying Low Chinese restaurant in Des
Moines, Iowa. She was a waitress there, and he was playing mahjongg with Uncle and
the other restaurant cooks. They had a brief courtship, and my grandmother was horrified
when her Caucasian daughter announced she was going to marry Jim Wong. In her mind,
our mother would be doomed to life with a “non-Christian, Chinese man who wasn’t a
citizen and couldn’t speak English like normal people.”22
Chinese restaurants of this era (and even still) commonly offered patrons side-by-side
“American” and “Chinese” menus. Behind the dueling menus lurked the sense that what was
being served was not the same as that being prepared for Chinese customers:
Part of the adventure of dining in Chinatown for Occidental diners was the struggle to get
a copy of the menu offered to Chinese patrons, [and] then convincing the server that one
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wanted the dishes cooked authentically. The differences between the two ways of
cooking the same dish could be startling: For Occidentals, a Cantonese classic of
spareribs in black-bean sauce would be a stew-like dish of spareribs inundated with
brown gravy and with little flavor of the black-bean spice. For Chinese diners, the kitchen
would ‘dry-cook’ the meat and present the spareribs coated with a spare glaze of
deliciously savory sauce.23
Wong recalls the dissonance between public and private Chinese dining in her upbringing:
At best, the larger towns had a “Chinese chop suey” restaurant sporting a flashy neon
sign that screamed “serving American and Chinese cuisine,” but the dishes they served
were nothing like the food we ate at home. I never saw chicken feet, smelt, or pig snout
advertised as an evening special. There was no store selling staples like fun won rolls,
oolong tea, dried black beans, or tiger balm for aches and pains. Dad got shipments of
these, and spices and herbs, on a regular basis from a catalog merchant in San Francisco’s
Chinatown.24
The freshness of ingredients and innovation of Cantonese cooking, sadly, is lost on those who
associate Chinese cooking with the supposed use of too much cooking oil. That common
stereotype misses the mark completely. Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, for example, grew up in a household
where her grandmother “would eat no vegetables that were older than two hours out of
the ground . . .”25
Likewise, Marie Wong’s father loved gardening to sustain his family with fresh produce. She
suspected “that Dad loved the earth as much as he loved us, and maybe a little more. Sometimes,
when it rained, he went outside and stood amid his plants, looked up at the sky, threw up his
arms, and sang loudly, a source of considerable embarrassment to our mother, who worried
about what the neighbors would say.”26
Jim Wong’s connection with the earth may seem revolutionary to later generations of Americans
who have now lost a firsthand relationship to farming or food preparation. In Marie’s words,
“How can you explain why your father butchers chickens in the basement when the grocer is less
than a mile away, or why he grows fresh bean sprouts in a twenty-gallon crock? And what could
be the purpose of drying chicken and deer feet on clothes racks near the kitchen heater.” It would
take a genius on the order of Alice Waters to usher American cuisine back to where the likes of
Jim Wong passed every day of his culinary life.
Paul Swanson, an intellectual property lawyer by day, enjoys spending his free time reading
cookbooks (as others might read novels) and hovering over a stove. He is currently researching
kaiseki ryori cuisine and how it may be adapted using local Pacific Northwest ingredients.
1
Many historical facts about this era and place in Seattle history can be found in “Restoring a
Sense of Place in Seattle’s Nihonmachi,” prepared by the Nihonmachi Charrett Planning Team in
2003. It is available on line at www.ci.seattle.wa.us/dclu/CityDesign.
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2
The quoted material is taken from the Professor S. Frank Miyamoto’s introduction to Nisei
Daughter. The memoir was first published in 1953 and then republished in 1979, with the new
introduction by Prof. Miyamoto (then a sociology professor at the University of Washington) and
a new preface by Monica Sone.
3
Nisei Daughter, p. xi.
4
Id.
5
Many of Monica Sone’s experiences also find a resonant chord in Country Voices: The Oral
History of a Japanese American Family Community (1987), by David Mas Masumoto and Sushi
and Sourdough, by Tooru Kanazawa.
6
Nisei Daughter, p.5.
7
Id., p.13.
8
Id.
9
Id., p.12.
10
Nisei Daughter, p. 76.
11
Sushi and Sourdough, pp. 3-4.
12
Id., p.154.
13
Id., p.168.
14
Phuong Le, “Japanese past displayed in the International District hotel,” Seattle PostIntelligencer, July 23, 1999, available online at www.panamahotel.net/article 2.htm)
15
Eileen Yin-Fei Lo, The Chinese Kitchen: Recipes, Techniques, Ingredients, History, and
Memories from America’s Leading Authority on Chinese Cooking (1999), pp. 105-06.
16
“Although Portland was a land of immigrants—the best established and most secure families
could claim at most forty years of residence—the Chinese were not considered ethnic, but
wholly and utterly alien. To white people (who often arranged to be escorted by a policeman) a
visit to Chinatown seemed a descent into a miasma of opium, piercing aromas, bizarre foods,
rare silks, and rich furniture, in which voices were sharp, smoke and vapors drifted through the
air, and candles and lamps guttered and hissed. But in fact Chinatown was neither dangerous nor
impoverished and along the wharves of Front Street, Chinese merchants and traders were a force
to be reckoned with, however distasteful.” James Beard, a Biography, by Robert Clark (1993),
pp. 23-24.
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17
Craig Claiborne collaborated with Virginia Lee to produce The Chinese Cookbook. Its
publication in 1972 coincided with President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the People’s
Republic of China that year. Robert Shoffner, a food and wine editor for the Washingtonian,
opines that “For many Americans, [The Chinese Cookbook] opened the door to a world beyond
chop suey and egg foo young.” R. Shoffner “Looking for Chinatown,” available on-line at:
www.washintonian.com/dining/bestof/chinatown.html.
18
The Chinese Cookbook (1936). An inside page states that the cookbook covers “the entire field
of Chinese cookery in the Chinese order of serving from nuts to soup” and that it is “compiled
and edited for the American Cook by Mr. M. Sing An.”
19
Evan Jones, Epicurean Delight: The Life and Times of James Beard (1990), p. 45. A recipe for
“chicken jelly” is included in Jones’ biography as well at p. 21.
20
Epicurean Delights, p. 45.
21
Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961), p. 245.
22
Sweet Cakes, Long Journey, pp. xii.
23
Shoffner, see fn. 3.
24
Sweet Cakes, Long Journey, p. xiii.
25
The Chinese Kitchen, p. 3.
26
Jim Wong would deliver “his homegrown Chinese vegetables” to other Chinese restaurateurs
“in exchange for meat and fish.” “No money would exchange hands between these Chinese
people. My brother and I carried buckets of bitter melon, winter squash, snow peas, and string
beans through the kitchen service entries that opened onto downtown alleyways while my father
talked and laughed with owners and waitresses. They spoke their language and smiled and
nodded at us. We returned the courtesy. It wasn’t until I moved away from home that I had the
experience of being a patron who entered a Chinese restaurant through the front door.” Sweet
Cakes, Long Journey, pp. xiv-xv.
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