Sorry... I do not really now how the pinyang spelling of 'gwai lo' goes. But, in a similar note when we speak of Mexican or Latin food in America we lovingly refer to it as Gringo Mexican. There does exist a certain nostalgia with these cuisines.
I understand your loathing for this representation of your food culture in America. For a long time, I felt the same. However, as I get older I feel a sort of reverence for some of these creations. The dish itself, chop suey, represents an American twist on Chinese flavors. I also look towards dishes such as crab rangoon (which I believe does not exist at all in China) as a cultural phenomenon. What if we took these same dishes and ideas and elevated them. What was their original appeal? How can they be taken to a higher level?
My wife is Taiwanese, so I truly understand the argument. For me it's very similar to my experiences of eating (let's just say for example) Italian food in Taiwan. It's so different from anything I've had in the west. I just find it a curious thing how each culture expresses the cuisine of other cultures. The same situation does not exist in America with other Asian cultures such as Japanese or Thai (although they are still bastardized) and even less so with Vietnamese (which came much later to their benefit). As for Chinese food, it's been here so long that it's muddied down into an unrecognizable image of it's former self. We can love it or hate it. I just find it extremely interesting... all this ABC food.

I wonder if Hopper stopped to eat here and if so. what did he order? Whatever it was, I'm going to guess it was as bland as "The Great Wall" is near my apartment.

Jennifer 8. Lee covers precisely this topic in her book "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles". I'm about 40 pages from the end, so your post was well timed Diana. It's a nice mix of pop-sociology and history that is well sourced (judging by the length of the footnotes at the end).

is that the earlier cultures that immigrated here have transformed the most for various reasons:
- availability of ingredients
- modified to suit broader tastes
- generational shifts in tastes

If, for instance you look at Korean food, which I'd guess is "newer" in America than Chinese cuisine (I've not researched this), the dishes are much closer to what one would find in Korea. Ask a typical mid-American to name 3 Chinese dishes, and a Chinese person will most likely never have heard of them.

A parting question: Where did the orange/yellow glowing rice used in most fast food Chinese restaurants come from?

I think that the tradition of Chinese food in America being greasy, cheap, poor quality, etc., also stems from the fact that the first Chinese in America were mainly men, since women were barred from the country by various state and federal laws. In addition, most of the men who came were presumably were unskilled in the kitchen and had to learn on the fly with strange new ingredients. If my own bachelor "cooking" is any indication, fried rice is usually easy and tastes decent enough!

Who knows what would have happened if women had been allowed to enter the US at the same time as the men. I'm not trying to pigeonhole women into the role of homemakers, but it's probably accurate back 200-300 years ago.

My great aunts who were in the service told us stories about how they would go from Brooklyn into Manhattan some nights with their Chinese colleagues from the hospital and have CHOP SUEY. That was their extent of Chinese food back in the day.

Good eyes on the tea pot and the outside sign!

I think it's more the mainstreaming of "Chinese food". At first it was the cool thing to do. The few Chinese restaurants back in the day were hella busy. Then others decided to jump on the bandwagon. As more and more places showed up on the scene, each one trying to undercut each other with price, the quality of the food dropped accordingly. Ironically these days, a nice place does not guarantee good food and a dingy, fluorescent lit place isn't always crap. There's so many places now it's strictly word of mouth about quality Chinese food.

Sadly, many of my Chinese friends (I'm ABC BTW) equate cheap with "good" and to them, if it's not "cheap" then it's a rip off and to be avoided.

Your post reminded me of a book I read called the Rice Room, by Ben Fong-Torres. Gotta read! He is a Chinese-American and talks about his life growing up in the back of a Chinese rest. in CA. He's also a former writer and editor for the Rolling Stone. He's the BOMB - he ought to be the social icon for all Chinese-Americans; instead of the typical doctor-pediatrician that all Chinese parents want for their first-born son, he went his own way and became very successful.

An interesting take on why Chinese food isn't hip ...
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122065742934705655.html

Hi Diana, I'm an avid reader of the blog and love the recipes you've introduced me to, but I can't help but wonder if you've misread this image a little. In the 1920s (and through the '50s and early '60s) people dressed up anytime they went out, whether it was to a baseball game, or a restaurant, so I'm not so sure the Hopper painting represents glamor in Chinese dining.

Having said that, I find the best Chinese restaurants here in the states (I'm thinking of the Grand Sichuan outpost on Canal St., Spicy & Tasty in Flushing, or Lucky Eight in Bay Ridge) have fairly lackluster interiors, but the food is so astonishingly good, that the design (or lack thereof) doesn't matter.

A real Chinese banquet has got to be totally decadent. This is a culture with a history of more than 4000 years with dynasties galore. Food was taken seriously and heads would roll (literally) if the food wasn't perfect.

I haven't been to a 'real banquet' in this sense but I have been to one were more than 20 courses were served and it was an experience which was simply delightful in the beginning but as the evening progressed it was a mixture of delight and suffering. You only got to eat a mouthful or so of any course but small amounts can pile-up and toward the end you were stuffed. Problem was, the food was so good and each course was new and different and wonderful, and you just had to taste it. So you were delighted with the taste but felt like you were going to die from over eating. To me, this is what Chinese cuisine is all about. It's something that is so good that you just keep eating it even when you know it's in your best interest to stop. :P

from Edward Hopper "Chop Suey" to A Real Chinese Banquet is.... .... ......
Having been part of the Chinese Diaspora in SouthernAfrica, and now Canada (NAmerica)
A banquet consisted of 9 dishes, the Hors d'œuvre platter, seafood, pork, duck, chicken, deep fired crispy, soup and desert/fruit
now in NAmerica, it is usually 10/12 dishes.
20 or more is truly decadent, often in Hong Kong harping back to the Manchurian Imperial Court menu of ( WILD ) exotic dishes, that are nowadays absolutely NO NO in light of endangered species plight.

I like this post, and it was kind of timely for me because I've been having so much fun reading the old Chinese menus in the Los Angeles Public Library's online collection. It really was a different time and aesthetic--big cocktail menus, lots of flourishes. The famous Copacabana club in NYC had a special "Chinese kitchen"...so you could start your meal with chopped clams and French onion soup, and then move on to a chop suey: http://dbase1.lapl.org/images/menus/fullsize/b/13856-cover.jpg

You're right, there's nothing really comparable to that now.

Re: P.F. Chang, I can't remember if I mentioned to you that I watched this American-Chinese movie called "Ping Pong Playa," in which the main character refers to a chain restaurant known as "B.S. Chang." Enough said!

When one nation 'discovers' the food of another, they change and adapt it to their own tastes. The same is true of Indian food in Britain; curry is one of the most popular dishes in Britain, due ti the long history of involvement in India, but it's not the same meal as is eaten in India. However, in recent years there has been more interest in real Indian food, with qulaity restaurants making a feature of authentic regional food.
The same is true of Chinese food, there are terrible takeways serving food that has little in common with the cuisine it cam from, but as the standard of restaurant food in general has improved, so there are also very good Chinese restaurants.

I know exactly what you mean about those kinds of restaurants. Here in DC, Tony Cheng's in Chinatown is one of the last few examples of white table cloth, professional service, elaborate cocktail menu places with (unfortunately) Americanized Chinese food. My New York grandparents who dined out a lot were used to these restaurants.

In the last few years, I have been to a few Indian-style Chinese restaurants (one in Chicago and one in Queens). The food was basically Chinese food as interpreted from an Indian point of view. And it tasted incredibly good! I'm not sure if the dishes were completely unique - as chop suey is unique to American Chinese restaurants. But the spicing was definitely an Indian spin on Chinese food. And it made me think of American-style Chinese food in a whole new way - as a cuisine all its own.

In that context both American-style Chinese food and Chinese-Chinese food can be given their due...