Glenn Gary Gamboa's History of Chinese Food and Take Out in America
Six Thousand years of Chinese Food History, Absorption, Innovation and Export
The History of Chinese Food
Let us examine the history of Chinese food and it is celestials to find out how it influenced the rest of Asia and the Western world. The cuisine of the first European explorers who reached the new world in 1492 had very little variety or change 24/7/365, they had no regional or national constructs and, since most of the world was illiterate, the only cookbooks in existence were those from antiquity written in Greek or Latin. However, in the middle kingdom Chinese food history and recipes were written, first on bamboo, then silk and finally paper, for over 2000 years reflecting some six millennia of the chameleon like culinary absorption from other cultures. Wood block printed broad sheets, as the one distributed in 1594 describing the sweet potato’s virtues, planting, harvesting and cooking, had been in use for centuries to promote various historic Chinese foods among the masses and the farmers. For 3500 years scholars, poets, moralists, rulers, politicians and philosophers had been writing treatises detailing the texture, aromas, flavors, colors and pleasures of both royal and plebeian Chinese food history and cuisine. One surviving document written 1000 years before the current era, 3000 ago, details and defines the duties of the royal dietitian at a time when the inhabitants of Europe were still digging for roots and harvesting wild greens. The custodians of Chinese food history and cuisine were always willing to embrace new cultivars or foodstuffs that their far-flung enterprises might contact. Stalwart new world examples include the chili pepper, peanut, sweet potato and maize that all arrived around the same time but adopted over centuries. You might also find it surprising to note that over 20% of China’s population consumes the sweet potato as its major carbohydrate and the tomato is the most popular vegetable in the urban centers of the country. Upon arrival, most of these new world immigrants were usually relegated as marginal crops to the poor but eventually became major Chinese food archetypes both through necessity and government promotion.
Let us begin our historical investigation of Chinese food with a brief topological survey of that vast country. The North and South have radically different climates that determined both the types and availability of indigenous protein sources and crops grown in antiquity as well as now. The North is comprised of grasslands, mountains and deserts that suffer from sporadic rainfall, cold winters, hot summers and frequent droughts. If you have the Yuan’s your regular menu will feature noodles with pork or mutton supplemented with unleavened breads, beer, peaches, apples and melons. If you are just one of the masses, your meals will be gruels or congees of millet, barley, wheat, corn and sorghum with a sprinkling of preserved vegetables or maybe a little soy sauce. The south in contrast has a temperate climate with seasonal rains that produce plenty of rice along with fresh water and sea fish, poultry and pork. The region’s long list of Chinese food products include taro root, eggplant, soy derivatives, various leafy greens and tomatoes and in addition prolific amounts of longans, litchis, mangoes, bananas, and coconuts annually. Migrations due to famine, drought, disease or barbarian threat has always existed in China and in the last 30 years, an estimated 400 million have moved to urban areas from the country along with their culture and cuisine. Famine has long been one of China’s major problems and in the last 150 years, it has claimed over 60 million people. Only in the last few years has the country been relatively famine free even though this does not preclude a diet of just rice, sweet potatoes, or congee for much of the population.
The first domesticated protein sources in Chinese food were the Chow dog and the pig both nurtured around 6000 BCE. Pork, as it was in antiquity, is at the top of the Chinese food pyramid for those who can afford it and it comprises 70% of all the animal protein consumed annually. On a classic Chinese food menu, unless otherwise noted, all the featured items are made with pork. The written character or rune for pork and meat are the same and the symbol for house or family is a pig under a roof. The penchant for pig is easy to understand; the fertile porker can produce litters of twelve, it’s can be raised in the smallest of spaces on a limited diet of scraps and waste and leaves almost no footprint at its demise. Lard is the dietary fat of choice, with duck running second, for the majority of the populace although the more affluent rely on Western oils like corn, soy or hydrogenated vegetable oil. Per capita pork consumption for 2006 was about 4 ounces a day for those who can afford it but these figures are somewhat skewed since the vast majority eat little meat of any kind. Chinese food anthropologists propose that this preference for pork may have slowed the Muslim spread in China’s early history.
Many of us think of the wok as the primary crucible of Chinese food but in reality that station belongs to the simple three-legged invention known as the ting or clay pot to us barbarians from the West. This Chinese food vessel, known around 6000 BCE, about the same time the Egyptians, Persians and Turks were domesticating sheep, goats and grains. This favored pot was, and still is, used to cook a vegetable, meat or grain stew called a keng. The ting is a stellar example of the esteem bestowed on Chinese food, cooks and tools by the culture throughout the ages. The ting was the state symbol for the Shang dynasty because its appointed prime minister was a professional cook named I Liu. I Liu waxed philosophically, around 1300 BCE, when he said that a good stew was like good government and a good emperor like a good cook. He provides us with a culinary bon mot that went: The transformation of the cauldron (ting) is so utterly marvelous and of such delicacy the mouth cannot put into words and the mind cannot comprehend them … this man liked to eat!
Around 970 CE porcelain was discovered during the Tang dynasty when they added clay known as kaolin to their pottery and 600 years later, this material and the serving pieces made from it became known as “china” in Europe. So to recap when the celestials where eating Chinese food with chopsticks using ceramic plates, bowls, spoons and cups European nobility ate off of stale piece of thick bread, known as trenchers, with their hands using crude communal ladles, cups and knives. In fact, one food myth tells us that Catherine de Medici brought the fork to the French court of Henri II about the same time that Cardinal Richelieu had knives blunted so diners would have a harder time stabbing each other at the dinner table. In addition, the British Navy did not accept the use of forks on board until 1897 because they thought the new appliance unmanly. The Chinese had used ceramic spoons to eat congee and Keng for millennia, they invented fast fellows/nimble lads aka chopsticks in the 4th century BCE and even established table etiquette centuries before Europe had any dining conventions. One of the earliest definitive guides to Chinese food ceremonies, written sometime around the first century CE, was called the Li Chi and provided this easy to remember primer on the serving and eating of fish.
If the fish is dried, turn its head towards the guest.
If the fish is fresh, turn its tail towards the guest.
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If it is summertime, turn the belly of the fish to the left.
If it is winter turn in to the right.
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This is done because winter is in the reign of Yin and not Yang.
Yin corresponds to the below and since the belly is lower it is Yin.
Moreover, during the winter, the belly should be the best-nourished part, the fattest and the most succulent.
The belly is placed on the right hand side and since you eat with your right hand, you should begin by eating the best part of the fish.
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If it is summertime, the rules are reversed since the summer is the reign of Yang.
Even though most of us think or rice and Chinese food in the same breath the grain did not arrive until about 11,000 BCE and then only in a wild state until slash and burn methods appeared about 5000 BCE. Rice paddy technology appeared about 700 BCE and it meant lifelong intergenerational bondage to the flooded rice fields and the loss on any other supplementary inputs you might have gleaned as a hunter/gatherer. Flooded rice paddy agriculture brought large groups of people together making them much more susceptible to famine and pestilence than the migrating ancestors. The diet of most rice dependent cultures tends to be a very bland one particularly for the poorer segments and most of these people spent their lives short of food, fuel, cooking oil, utensils and even water. Chinese rice paddy agriculture requires every inch of arable land for cultivation and that means that any appreciable quantity of animal protein is a once or twice a year occasion and it’s far more likely to take the form of pickled ant eggs or a few dices of dog ham than a cutlet of pork, poultry or mutton. Beef has historically been a rarity in Chinese food even for the affluent in the city, although the march of Western cuisine is changing that, while for the peasants the only source might be a beast that died in the harness.
Around 800 BCE warring factions solidified and a centralized, governmental system was adopted that helped guide the empire from Bronze Age technology to that of iron. Iron Age technology increased agricultural and industrial outputs and the resultant monetary and physical surpluses underwrote war and conquest. The adoption of the Mongolian mounted archer method and the new armorterium of iron weapons made China’s armies formidable. Confucianism and Taoism became social forces and Indian Buddhism, along with its vegetarian menu, arrived a few centuries later. This triad of religions soon coalesces to form the philosophies of The Three Doctrines that shaped Chinese food, philosophy and politics for the next two millennia.
The short-lived Chin (Qin) dynasty 221-206 BCE strengthened governmental control, established standardized weights and measurements, codified the Chinese writing system and tried to wipe out Confucianism by burning its books. Earlier pieces of the Great Wall were linked during this period by a huge conscripted labor force that survived on a sauerkraut like, wine soaked cabbage, that eventually reached Europe via the Tartars, and the brick of the famous wall were bonded with mortar made of rice. The next dynasty, the Han 206 BCE to 220 CE, conquered Korea and Vietnam and in a census conducted in 220 CE concluded that thirty percent of the worlds estimated 200 million inhabitants were Chinese. The next six hundred years saw the invention and wide scale adoption of the noodle, which probably occurred concordantly in a number of far-flung and different cultures, the development of gunpowder, the national adoption of tea as the beverage of choice and the growth of Buddhism and it’s proscribed vegetarian diet. During the Tang dynasty, about 1000 CE, overland and sea trade increased using Arab and Persian ships that docked in Canton, the only Chinese port open to barbarians, that bringing another cross-pollination of national cuisines. By 1150 China, technologically spurred fleet of ocean-going traders grew ginger on board to prevent scurvy on their journeys and may have spread the technology of brewing around the world.
By 13th century, the Mongols Temujin-Genghis and his grandson Khublai Khan had succeeded in dominating China and insuring a safe overland trade route through the Gobi desert. These bandit free conduits linked Asia to Europe and India to Manchuria allowing the west to be inoculated with new inventions, consumer items, philosophies and eventually, in 1346, The Black Death. The overthrow of the Ming Dynasty, by a peasant army under the leadership of the Buddhist monk Hung Wu, heralded another period of rapid commercial and industrial growth triggering population increases that severely taxed the agricultural technology and capacities of the period. By the time the Jesuits opened the first Christian missions in 1601 China was desperate and willing to accept any new foreign cultivar that might help stem the hunger experienced by the majority of its citizens. The last dynasty, known as the Qing or Manchu from 1644 to 1911, adapted and fused many foreign cultivars to Chinese food that have come to be erroneously thought of as the essence of Chinese cuisine.
Many students of Chinese food maintain that there are four definitive schools of style while others admit to five but I think you should also add the pork free Muslim and Buddhist inspired vegetarian to the roster. Anyway, few of us are ever likely to experience the real thing unless we travel in each respective geographical region and eat off the local menu and not that of the Westernized hotels. But it any case we still should discuss the different regions of Chinese food, to help us understand what we’ve grown accustomed to in the US, and even though they are somewhat undefined on the geographical map they are neighbors on the culinary one.
The southeastern Kwangtung/Canton school of Chinese food became the food of the nobility when the capital moved there in the 17th century and it was the first regional food to reach the West. Currently there are more Cantonese Chinese restaurants in the US then there are McDonalds … maybe there is still some hope for us. This school of Chinese food prides itself on using the subtle nuances and natural combinations of ingredients with few seasonings an added emphasis on the quality and freshness of the items presented. Wok skills are highly evolved here and we Westerners do not know the regions exotic animal dishes like monkey, snake, cat, dog, rat, turtle and numerous creepy crawly insects. A great deal of chicken stock is used in the preparation of such signature dishes as lacquered or caramelized roasts meats, fried rice, steamed dishes, sharks fin and birds nest soups and of course the benchmark dim sum of the region.
The Northeast and Peking, now Beijing, and Yellow River-Shantung are geographically separate areas that were historically such close trading partners that the two cuisines of the areas morphed into one style. Peking was the gourmet capital of Chinese food until the imperial court moved to Canton in the 17th century. The cuisine of the royal court set out lavish and mammoth feasts where its namesake Peking duck, clay pots of mutton, velvet chicken and spring rolls were the standards. The rich favor poultry while the poor were fortunate to get an occasional egg, seafood is as rare as the many pickled items are common in this nasty freezing climate. The Chinese food of this area is often dubbed Mandarin but the term actually only means a government official or bureaucrat and name is only used to give the restaurant using it a little cachet for the American market. A wonderful example of the respect and frugality of Chinese cuisine is in the way duck is served at banquets. The first course is the crispy skin with scallion pancakes and black bean sauce, then followed by a stir-fry or platter of sliced duck meat and then consummated by a soup made from the duck bones. The cuisine of this area shows influence of an the European presence of the 19th and 20th centuries and you will find things like French pastries and Russian hors d’oeuvres.
The Western or Szechuan school makes great use of aromatics such as the new world chili pepper, fermented bean pastes, sesame oil and seeds. Animal fats serve as a dietary component especially in many dishes of the poor. The Iberians’ introduction of chili peppers during the latter part of the Han 1650 CE makes us ponder why this culinary darling only appears in the food of this region and not the others. Sichuan pepper, although it’s not really pepper or chili related, is a standard seasoning that produces a numbing effect on the tongue and palate setting them both up for enjoying the heat of the constructs that follow. Other regional flavorings are cassia bark, cumin, cinnamon, star anise, ground coriander and dried tangerine peel.
Hunan cuisine come from the lower plains of the Yangtze basin and is known for the use of fresh water fish, especially carp, tender young vegetables with ginger, Shaoxing wine and many sweet and sour preparations.
The East Coast or Fukien school of Chinese food is famous for its clear soups, suckling pigs, cooking wines and egg rolls. Soup is highly revered here and sometimes served more than once, instead of last as the hierarchy with the rest of China, during a meal dependant on the occasion. The interplay between sweet and sour is highly valued and shellfish along with pork and poultry are the animal proteins of choice. The area is not only known for its soups but its “soupy” constructs like meatballs, dumplings and buns whose liquid centers explode in your mouth when you bite into them.
Buddhist vegetarianism, which interestingly features lots of ersatz-mock shaped animal constructs made of tofu, is interwoven through the other Chinese food regional schools. Finally Chinese Moslem’s, like the Hui and Uyghur, who eat no pork are rapidly adopting canned and vacuum prepared convenience foods that are prepared using “modern methods” meaning they are not contaminated by the human hands or infidels. Once again, you will probably never really experience this Chinese food unless you travel there because it is unlikely that you will ever find it anywhere else.
This harmony and balancing principle is a central theme inherent in all the schools of Chinese food. Each Chinese food discipline will embody a definitive number of prime flavors or combinations that are distinctive to it and the balancing and counter balancing of these essences are the ancient cornerstones of each regional school. The concepts of yin and yang, or opposites, represents food as being either hot or cold not in terms of temperature but instead based on the attributes of the ingredients much as the Greeks and medieval Europeans applied to health and humors. All practitioners of Chinese food agree that meat, spices, alcohol and fat are “hot” foods while bland foods like tofu, fruit and vegetables are “cold”. This hierarchy of this mix and match Chinese food quilt may seem odd to Westerners but with a little study, you will be able to experience and enjoy the cuisine to the fullest. In addition, it is important that you try the construct in as many different venues as possible to acquire the knowledge that will allow you to detect the different nuances of what might become your favorite construct.
Early Chinese food writers had a penchant for fives and cooking meant creating memorable and healthy constructs through the careful pentagonal manipulation of one these different tastes to achieve balance. Of course, as new cultivars and products entered the Chinese culinary universe the categories underwent change but the following list of five is illustrative.
5 Flavors Salty, bitter, sour, hot, sweet and now MSG
5 Grains Wheat, rice, millet, beans, corn
5 Tree Fruits Peaches, plums, apricots, chestnuts and dates
5 Vegetables Mallows, coarse greens, scallions, onions and leeks
5 Animals Pig, fowl, sheep, horse and beef
5 Elements Wood, metal, fire, water, earth
In Beijing, those who can afford them prefer rice and boiled, steamed or fried noodles. By 1900, 200,000 Chinese a day were eating sweet potatoes 27/7/365 with little more than a little salted turnip, bean curd or pickled beans. Historically millet and maize, China’s third largest carbohydrate crop, were the historic staples of the North and Central regions. In the South rice is so preferred over wheat and other flour products that celebratory cakes of a glutinous variety is served in the guise of cakes. During famine, an estimated 43 million died from 1958 to 1961, and periods of scarcity taro and potatoes both sweet and regular often became the only available carbohydrate. These carbohydrate foundation foods, served unsalted, known as zhushi, ca or fan.
This starches act as a foil to other more prestigious amendments as salted vegetables or insects and interestingly enough they are usually absent at celebratory occasions. When they do appear on the menu they do so in a furtive role and not usually eaten since they are an everyday maintenance food and a banquet or celebratory party is just the opposite. Anything that embellishes the starch foundation fan, ca or zhushi is also called cai or fushi meaning secondary food. It can be as simple as soy sauce, sesame oil, pickled or salted vegetables or as sophisticated as hummingbird’s tongues or monkey brains depending on which of the 56 different Chinese ethnic groups you identify with.
This eating for pleasure often found expression in the hundreds of different regional and sub regional gastronomic indulgences that have historically enriched Chinese cuisine. These little snacks, often eaten throughout the day, came to represent defined geographical areas just as fine silk, porcelain or jade might. Most of these local Chinese food specialties were sent to the Emperor as tribute, which helped, spread their fame and cache throughout the middle kingdom. These regional bites had their own names and so did the newly introduced items from the West and they were invariable tacked with the Chinese word for barbarian as a prefix yielding names like barbarian grain-rice-fish and so on. The Chinese love to eat as social interaction and you’ll rarely hear “oh no tanks I just had breakfast, lunch, dinner or a tea break” replied to the question you want something to eat which in Mandarin would be … have you eaten fan yet? This fan being whatever foundation food you’ve grown up with such as rice, yams, sweet potato or one of the many other unsalted foundation carbohydrates of your youth. Cantonese Chinese food was long-held to be the best amongst the celestials and the first and most well known to Westerners since its introduction during the California gold rush in 1849. This preference for Cantonese changed when Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, both from the Southwest provinces, took over China’s leadership. Along with the two new leaders came the spicy cuisine of Hunan and Sichuan spun into a catchphrase of the communist movement stating, “If you don’t eat la you’re not a revolutionary”. Soon this regional Chinese food began its journey into the world of the global eater and helped pave the way for Asia’s other exciting cuisines by educating the Western palate.
This often elusive and sought after Cantonese culinary quality of harmony called Ts’ui is a time-based essence that quantifies the texture and taste of something freshly cooked to the point of perfection. The construct exhibits both the perfect resistance to the tooth and provides a pageantry of succulence that takes years for the diner to study and define. Flavor principles are culturally specific repetitive taste combinations that give a cuisine its recognizable distinctness and it citizens their nationality be they Asian or Western. The enjoyment of Chinese cuisine requires that the diner, as well as the chef, be aware of the juxtaposition and interplay between soft and firm, hot and cold, granular and smooth, bland and spicy, and sweet and sour and this skill set must be developed and refined over a life time. Often the uninitiated find some dishes, in particular Cantonese, bland and lacking taste because they are not educated or experienced in the principles of the cuisine and the depth of the 8000 codified recipes. As contradictory as it sounds the goal of increased complexity in preparations is to produce a construct with a more refined and simplistic flavor. In addition, the resultant flavor principles cross all lines between rich and poor, feast or famine, pork or pigeon and chicken or carp; as I’ve said before it’s not what you put in but when and how you put it in. Chinese food technology has been shaped by both the severe fuel shortages caused by the intensive use of rice paddy technology meaning the land was cleared for fields leaving very little fuel for cooking. This lack of fuel placed the emphasis on preparing and planning the constituent ingredients not on the actual cooking protocol. Once you begin to cook very few changes or adjustments are possible and therefore the sequential timeline and preparation of ingredients is tantamount.
Nevertheless, no matter what school of Chinese food you are discussing there are certain markers and memes that are common to all ingredients, procedures or pieces of equipment. Chinese food is rooted in scarcity and economy. For instance; you use the waters of preparation repeatedly in the meal, first as a source for steaming, then blanching and finally as the base for soup, served at the end of the meal instead of the beginning as we do in the West. Once a dish leaves the Chinese kitchen it needs little or no additional manipulation before the diner can enjoy it. Even in the case of a whole, duck, chicken or fish the protein is either cut in the kitchen or manipulated in a manner that makes it accessible with just chop sticks, and perhaps a ceramic spoon, at the table.
Cutting and seasoning are the consummate skills of the Chinese chef. The dearth of fuel means all composite ingredients in Chinese food need to be cut into uniform bite size pieces so they’ll cook uniformly and can be eaten without any further manipulation accept a deft hand with your chop sticks. The culinary trinity of ginger, which probably arrived from India about 600 CE, soy sauce and green onions or leeks attends every school of Chinese food. Condiments and seasonings like black rice vinegar, rice wine, fermented bean pastes, sesame oil, chili oil, garlic, red pepper pastes, various pickled and salted vegetables, and oyster sauce are the school supplies and the wok, cleaver, steamer, clay pot, spatula, skimmer and cutting board the laboratory equipment. Roasting in not represented in the home-cooking repertoire and is usually only done in commercial or restaurant environments. The stir-frying or chow method of cooking is unlike western procedures where a pinch of this or that is used to adjust or refine the intended flavor profile. The proper preparation of Chinese food requires that all the needed components be instantaneously available and predetermined due to the staging and high heat from the cooking source. Your home range puts out about 9000 BTU’s per burner while a commercial Szechuan range put out 120,000 BTU’s. So each ingredient is precooked to the point needed for the respective restaurant by steaming, baking, smoking or frying then finally combined and added in crescendo to construct the finished product.
Salt as a table condiment is not used in Chinese cuisine that is why you’ll find no shaker on the table of your favorite restaurant. Even though China traded with the West in salt, the cuisine rarely used it at the table instead opting for a variety of fermented, pickled or salted preparations. MSG is also an integral part of the Chinese food larder and many a Chinese chef is plagued by the Western attitude towards it even though it is in about 50% of everything we buy at the grocery store. A naturally occurring compound is a human trace element. It was chemically isolated in 1908 in Japan from seaweed called Kombu, and to date it has not caused any two-headed babies-sumo wrestlers or celebrities and frankly, you are probably ingesting many other food additives that don’t have a hundred year history. Soy sauce is a natural form of MSG that used to be a artisan product that is manufactured in billions of little plastic packets for global consumption. Of course, for foodie pricy artisanal varieties are available that uses whole steamed beans and not the waste from soy oil production or other products used in over 70% of the American processed food diet. Beans or waste products are first steamed, yeast is added and the product ferments and ages in the manner of modern and old world vintners then strained, pasteurized and sold.
The Chinese came to Gold Mountain, as San Francisco and California were euphemistically titled, they came mostly from the impoverished Toishan district of the Kwangtung province we call Canton. This area was separated from the rest of China by mountains and the only way out for the poor was West via the China Sea. Upon docking these mostly, male immigrants went to work in the gold fields of California where they were taxed $3 a month labor tax. Many, finding no gold, became merchants, vegetables farmers, cooks and laundry men supplying their compatriots and the international community of forty-niners with goods and services in the fields and small boomtowns of the period. Later the Rocky Mountain mineral strikes and construction of the Central Pacific railroad lured them and their cuisine east. When the rail line was completed, many of the 10,000 celestials, known derogatorily as Crocker’s pets, moved back to the Sacramento Valley of California and San Francisco. The first Chinatown had a population of 3000 in 1850 with an allied agricultural and commercial structure to support the growing community. Soon a sizable number of occidentals began frequenting the wondrously named restaurants of San Francisco’s Chinatown like Tsing Tsing Lee’s “The Balcony of Golden Joy and Delight”, with over 400 seats where a dollar could get you all you can eat presaging the huge Asian buffets of today. The population reached 22,000 by 1880, the enclave would become America’s largest Chinese community until first New York, and then Los Angles overtook it in the late nineteen hundreds. Today it continues to grow and be influenced by other Southeast Asian cultures especially the Vietnamese and Hmong.
Chow Mein and Chop Suey were the trendy dishes of the 20’s and so many chop suey/chow mien parlors opened that by the end of WW II these dishes were as popular and as well know as meat loaf in the US. In 1947 an American icon, the Chung King combo pack hit supermarket shelves and the Formica kitchen tables of many an urban kitchen. The seminal Chinese cookbook for Americans, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese – with a forward by Pearl S, Buck no less – was published the same year. The author Buwei Yang Chao coined the American terms “red cooking” for simmering meat in a soy flavored base yielding a master sauce, “clear or white simmering” for cooking in a clear broth and the well-known common term “stir frying” or ch’ao meaning to cook in hot fat with constant turning. By the 50’s more than half the Chinese in America lived on the West coast of California in the first and third largest Chinatowns outside of the mainland. Going out for Chinese soon became as popular as the Sunday drive with an adventurous, unknown and mysterious cachet. As people from other areas of China migrated so did the many styles of Chinese food that are now commonplace in any coastal US city.
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