Greetings, welcome to day three of the new, experimental daily schedule.
No feedback or commentary on it yet, but please keep me posted. This will be the third of five scheduled pieces (so far) that deal with the subject of rumors of Chinese restaurants in the USA and similiar countries secretly serving dogs and cats to their customers.
Recently I commented that studying Asian or Chinese or even Chinese-American history is like going down an endless series of rabbit-holes. “Ooh! Something new and interesting sounding! I’m going to skip lunch and research it.”
Having recently stumbled across two new and very interesting late 19th Century intellectuals this week, one admirable, one not-so-much, and seeing that I could easily spend hours chasing down more information and reading extensively on each of them proves my point. Today, the admirable one. Tomorrow the other one.
As for the origins or age of the idea that Chinese restaurants are serving cats, so far, I have not been able to trace them. I have however had two interesting related reports from two late 19th Century intellectuals, and it would be hard to find two more diametrically oppossite people if one tried.
Wong Ching Foo, a period illustration of the man who created the first Chinese language newspaper “East of the Rockies,” created the term “Chinese-American,” and campaigned for Chinese and Chinese-American civil rights.
WONG CHIN FOO, EMINENT 19TH CENTURY CHINESE AMERICAN
The first involves an important Chinese American man named Wong Chin Foo ( 王淸福 ) who lived from 1847 to 1898. In this case, “Wong” is the family name, and we are looking at a 19th Century anglicization of his non-Mandarin name. The Mandarin pronunciation of the characters would be “Wang Qing Fu,” but neither he or his associates would have ever pronounced it that way.
Wikipedia describes him as “a Chinese American activist, journalist, lecturer, and one of the most prolific Chinese writers in the San Francisco press of the 19th century. Wong, born in Jimo, Shandong Province, China, was among the first Chinese immigrants to be naturalized in 1873. Wong was dedicated to fighting for the equal rights of Chinese-Americans at the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act.”
There are reports that Mr Wong, the first Chinese American newspaper publisher in not just New York City but the entire country east of not just the Rockies, but also the Mississippi in the late 19th Century, became angered over widespread claims that Chinese in the USA ate and served “cats and rats” and offered a $500 reward to anyone who could prove it to be true. I have read that there was a great deal of concern in late 19th Century New York City about Chinese eating rats and cats, not so much dog, so it does sound believable. (In fact, in the piece below Wong actually admits Chinese eat dogs, actually, but that does not mean they secretly serve them in restaurants in the USA.)
Now, putting on my history scholar hat, while I had read this in several places on the internet, not a single one of them has included the time or place of when he offered this reward. So I thought that while it may very well be true and have actually happened, I’d like to see more details and a higher degree of proof before labelling this as real history or believing.
So off I went, seeking proof.
Fortunately, I lucked out quickly, and with a vague memory of the wonderful work done by a Chinese American, former New York Times reporter with the name Jennifer 8 Lee (And, yes, that “8” is not a typo. It is part of her name.) who has done a lot of interesting work on the history of Chinese food in America and mentioned that the New York Times in the late 19th Century took reports of rat eating Chinese seriously enough to look into them, I began with The New York Times archives. (Some time in the future, I will have to write about Jennifer 8 Lee’s very interesting work on Chinese American food and its history.)
And there it was! Yippee!! Proof that this happened from a first hand period source. From The New York Times, August 1, 1883. Note that when the reporter describes “Wong” as “Mongolian,” this was just a standard, accepted term for any Chinese person during this period. He was Chinese, born in Shandong province in 1847. It is quite common to see Chinese referred to as “Mongolians” in 19th Century American writing of the time. “Celestial” is another period term for Chinese as at the time, China was often referred to as “the Celestial Empire.” Obviously, the term “Chinaman” is no longer accepted and many find it offensive, but we are reading 19th Century historical documents.
[ See the following links for the claim:
https://www.mocanyc.org/collections/stories/wong-chin-foo/
https://www.americanheritage.com/mixed-bits-true-history-chop-suey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wong_Chin_Foo ]
https://web.archive.org/web/20150309182146/https://www.bucknell.edu/x81362.xml
A recently rediscovered photo of Wong Chin Foo from the archives of Bucknell University.