Chinese History Is on the Menu in NYC

NEW YORK —  So many New Yorkers have memories of a long-gone Chinese restaurant, whether it was Moon Palace or Chun Chow Fu, where they learned to indulge in succulent dishes like battered fried shrimp and egg foo yong that violate today’s dietary edicts but were delicious nonetheless.

Now the Museum of Chinese in the Americas here wants this nostalgia to be understood as part of the important history of the Chinese diaspora, and has mounted an exhibit about a Los Angeles landmark to illustrate the point.

“General Lee’s Banquet Room,” created by Los Angeles artist Cindy Suriyani, tells a story that began more than 140 years ago, when Chinese immigrants were objects of discrimination, relegated to building railroads and working in mines.

Known as Man Jen Low -- the House of 10,000 Treasures -- when it opened in Los Angeles in 1860, General Lee’s changed over the years, mirroring the social struggles and strides made by the Chinese population as it rooted in the city.

In the exhibit in New York, ordinary objects such as piles of chopsticks mounted under Plexiglas and dusty salt and pepper shakers artfully arranged on a stained chopping block are used to tell the story not only of the restaurant and the four Lee brothers who ran it, but also of how Chinese immigrants and their new American neighbors learned about each other in such restaurants.

“For many Americans, Chinese restaurants were their first introduction to that culture -- to the food, the people, the customs,” said the museum’s curator, Cynthia Al-Fen Lee. “And it wasn’t a one-way exchange. The owners also got to know their new home through the customers.”

Renamed in the 1940s, General Lee’s became a popular hangout with an ethnically diverse but devoted clientele that included entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy and Barbara Hutton. The exhibit has old photographs of the Lee family, silk screens that were hung near the bar and framed dining awards from the 1950s, as well as two tattered waiter’s uniforms from that era created by then-hot designer Rudy Gernreich.

The restaurant closed in 1987, in part because the college-educated fourth generation of Lees was not interested in the business and in part because tastes had changed: A flood of restaurants that had popped up in suburban Los Angeles in the previous 20 years had acquainted Americans with spicy regional Chinese food not served at General Lee’s.

“After TV got started, especially, we lost our supper trade,” David Lee, an octogenarian and reigning Lee family patriarch, says in a video that is part of the exhibit: “It was a slow death, so there was no use to fight.” A long time civic leader and civil rights activist, Lee paused before adding: “Anyone who opens a restaurant should have their ... head examined anyway.”

About 10 years ago, Suriyani was looking for studio space and came upon the closed restaurant -- with its tall, slatted bamboo screened windows on Gin Ling Way in Chinatown’s Central Plaza. Nothing had been altered from the day it closed. The tables were still set and the kitchen in tact: “I felt I had reached out into the past and I had grabbed a handful of something precious.” From what she found, she sculpted the exhibit displays.

The installation kicks off the tiny New York museum’s yearlong study of the role of food, restaurants and dining in the Chinese diaspora, its curator said. This summer, the museum will show examples from artist Harley Spiller’s collection of 10,000 Chinese menus; they will be studied for what their pidgin English, family biographies and exotic food offerings explain about how Chinese immigrants adapted and changed the tastes of Americans.

“The exhibit will not be about the menus per se, but what they say about the immigrants who ran these restaurants all over America,” Cynthia Al-Fen Lee said. The museum, started in 1980, is on the second-floor of an old public school in Manhattan’s sprawling Chinatown.

Before there were Big Macs and fast food alternatives, Chinese restaurants and their ubiquitous takeout menus offered comfort food to generations of American families. (The restaurant owners even offered hamburgers for fussy family members who didn’t want Cantonese cuisine.)

Several older New Yorkers who were working their way through the General Lee’s exhibit recently said they had fond memories of family dinners at similar places in their neighborhoods in Manhattan and Long Island.

But as he surveyed a table set with pink china and soy sauce bottles, 12-year-old Johnny Chan didn’t quite know what to make of the re-created restaurant, except to say that his family is sort of living this history.

“My dad works in a Chinese restaurant, but it’s cleaner than this,” said the middle school student, giggling. He and his classmates had come to the exhibit as part of an oral history project. Chan’s family immigrated to the U.S. about the time he was born. His father works in an Upper East Side restaurant, and his mother works in a textile factory.