Inevitably, Lee’s investigative trail leads back to the mass arrival of Chinese immigrants in California during the Gold Rush, when they became known as Celestials because they seemed so otherworldly. Their eating habits were especially distressing — using chopsticks instead of forks, they consumed strange sea creatures and animals considered vermin, not game. “The embers of culinary xenophobia smoldered,” Lee writes, citing a pamphlet published by the labor leader Samuel Gompers titled “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat Versus Rice, American Manhood Versus Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive?” The Chinese Exclusion Act, restricting immigration and preventing Chinese from becoming citizens, effectively barred an entire ethnic group from jobs in agriculture, mining and manufacturing. The result? The Chinese opened laundries and restaurants. “Cleaning and cooking were both women’s work,” Lee explains. “They were not threatening to white laborers.”
Nor did the food in the restaurants the Chinese opened threaten American taste. It was, and mostly remains, “streamlined, palatable and digestible” — American food that looks foreign, with the Chinese who cook and serve it, according to Lee, “just the middlemen.”