In collaboration with the Afro-Asia Group and Junzi 君子 Kitchen, MOFAD is excited to invite you to participate in the Chop Suey Supper Club, an online (Zoom) event, featuring a conversation, mixtape, and cooking demo exploring the crossroads of Black diaspora and Asian diaspora cuisines.
Chinese food is often stereotyped as greasy and inexpensive in the United States, and this hides a deeper interracial history of labor and Asian migration. There is a forgotten history of African diasporic and Asian diasporic people who labored on the same plantations across the Western hemisphere from Cuba to Louisiana to Jamaica to Peru to Mississippi.
A mixture of protein (chicken, beef, shrimp, conch) and vegetables (bean sprouts, cabbage, bok choy, peas) stir-fried with a cornstarch-thickened sauce and sometimes served with rice, chop suey sustained the United States during the Great Depression. It was invented during the Gold Rush by Chinese men who migrated from the Pearl River Delta and cooked with locally available ingredients in California. The dish was subsequently remixed and has faced scrutiny for a century and a half about whether it is “authentically” Chinese or not.
During the 1930s, middle-class white women dined out at Chinese restaurants on “chop suey dates” as the dish became all the fashion across the U.S. Chop suey joints could be found from Harlem to St. Louis to San Francisco. As Dr. Goffe will explore, the mysterious dish is not only found in the United States but also in Jamaica, the Netherlands, and the Philippines; a product of south Chinese labor migration of men, many of whom were indentured laborers.
Author of the essay “Chop Suey Surplus: Chinese Food, Sex, and the Political Economy of Afro-Asia” Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe, a professor of literature and history at Cornell University, will present a mini-lecture on the political economy of how Chinese American food is essential to the American experience through the lens of the (now) obscure Chinese American dish Chop Suey. Also a DJ, or “PhDJ,” Dr. Goffe will debut her “Chop Suey visual mixtape” to show the history of the elusive dish and how tracing it is a useful way to understand Afro-Asian history and racial mixture.
Join us on August 20th at 8pm EST for a virtual conversation, mixtape and cooking demo that will explore the intersections between these Black and Chinese cultures that came together out of necessity and created a cuisine of reinvention across the Americas.
During this demo Dr. Goffe and chef Lucas Sin will be making:
Li Hongzhang Chop Suey
Jamaican Chop Suey
Recipes will be mailed to ticket holders in advance so attendees can cook along at home. This event will celebrate ingenuity, remixing, and Afro-Asian solidarity and coalition in cuisine. Please help us elevate the conversation around these incredible traditions in an evening of celebration.
TAO LEIGH GOFFE
Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University. She is Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an advisory consortium with the mission of designing and imagining African and Asian diasporic entanglements into the future. Her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between food studies, ecology, and the human sensorium. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. She has been interviewed by VICE Munchies on Caribbean colonial food origins in Africa and Asia that converge on the plantation.
LUCAS SIN
Lucas Sin, Eater Young Guns Class of 2019 and Forbes 30 under 30, opened his first restaurant when he was 16, in an abandoned newspaper factory in his hometown of Hong Kong. Despite spending his Yale undergraduate years in the Cognitive Science and English departments, Lucas spent his weekends running restaurants out of his dorm, known as Y Pop-up. He backpacked and cooked his way through Japan, before settling at Kikunoi Honten in Kyoto. He’s also spent time at Modernist Cuisine in Seattle and Michelin-starred kitchens in Hong Kong and New York.
Beyond the bings and noodles at Junzi Kitchen, Lucas also directs the funkier, more indulgent After Hours menu: fried chicken, instant noodles, juicebox cocktails, and the like. His monthly personal project is a no-longer-secret, collaborative tasting menu exploring the narrative of contemporary Chinese cuisine, which we call Chef’s Study. During the COVID-19 crisis, he runs the collaborative delivery pop-up known as Distance Dining.