The Human Stew

How do we begin to weave these tapestries together?

You can put anything into a hodgepodge.

Hash, stew, marmalade, submarines.

Now, who came up with the idea of chop suey?

Ghosts, orangutans, hospitals..

So, why why and where did chop suey come from?

And then one thing they have things like risotto chop suey.

You heard wrong. Chop suey's American, chow mein is Chinese.

I like to say chop suey's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another, because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means tsap sui, which, if you translate back, means odds and ends.

I like to think of it as a mesh of civilizations, in which the strands of different cultures are intertwined.

Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12 point plans.

A Chinese guy named Lem Sen shows up in Chinatown, New York City, and says, I want you guys all to stop making chop suey, because I am the original creator and sole proprietor of the dish known as chop suey.

The testimonies are a blend of anecdote, information, history, culture, knowledge, opinion and experience.

Awfully good beans. You oughta have some. You'll be eating chop suey soon.

So it took about 30 years before the Americans realized that, whoa, chop suey is actually not known in China.

I'm trying to show you too much, because I want you to really get a broth of ideas and images.

So, in a way, because the Chinese were attacked, chop suey was created as a defense mechanism.

I was feeling a little sick at my stomach... what with that sweet champagne and that tripe I'd been reading... that silly hodgepodge of melodramatic plots.

Strange mashups were tried as caloric and nutritional fulfillment took precedent over taste or even common kitchen sense.

And as this article points out, The average native of any city in China knows nothing of chop suey.

And according to New York Times, in 1904, there was an outbreak of Chinese restaurants all over town, and the city has gone 'chop suey' mad.

There are two clips I want to show you, the first one is a kind of hodgepodge, its just three little moments, four little moments with three of the people who are here tonight.

But the granddaddy of all the Chinese American dishes we probably ought to talk about is chop suey, which was introduced around the turn of the 20th century.

Now I've come and found him, and I want my recipe back and I want everyone to stop making chop suey, or pay me for the right to do the same.

Mr. Coe's last book, Chop Suey, was about Chinese cuisine in America, while Ms. Ziegelman told the story of life in a Lower East Side tenement through food in her book 97 Orchard.

So, these people are going around China asking for chop suey, which is sort of like a Japanese guy coming here and saying, I understand you have a very popular dish in your country called leftovers, and it is particularly right?

NEW YORK My very first serious job was as a fact checker for Forbes magazine (now mostly a laissez faire collection of blogs). I consider fact checkers to be the altar boys of journalism.

You know, back then it was a way to show that you were sophisticated and cosmopolitan if you were a guy and you wanted to impress a girl, you could take her out on a chop suey date.

But, you know, it's very easy to overlook the smaller characters oops for example, like Lem Sen, who introduced chop suey, Chef Peng, who introduced General Tso Chicken, and all the Japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies.

And if you think about it, a lot of the foods that you think of or we think of or Americans think of as Chinese food are barely recognizable to Chinese, for example beef with broccoli, egg rolls, General Tso's Chicken, fortune cookies, chop suey, the take out boxes.

Hatoyama s talk about a new age, which sounds strange from a Western perspective, is in harmony with the Japanese way this is a country where thousands of cult leaders offer myriad paths to Happiness, in particular a glib mishmash of New Age and Zen Buddhism.

It is complex. Space is complex.

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