Americans craving General Tso's chicken or any other Chinese cuisine have more than 40,000 restaurants to choose from to satisfy their taste bud delights.
According to Jennifer 8. Lee, the producer of "The Search for General Tso" and author of "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food," there are around 50,000 Chinese restaurants in the U.S. that are more than the total number of McDonald's, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Wendy's restaurants combined.
America's love of Chinese food is one of the most unexpected stories of cultural exchange in world history.
"It started to become popular among non-Chinese consumers towards to the end of the 19th century because of the growing need for convenient and inexpensive restaurant food," Yong Chen, professor of history at the University of California, Irvine and author of "Chop Suey, U.S.A: The Rise of Chinese Food in America."
The anti-Chinese sentiment was rampant in America beginning in the latter half of the 19th century, when as many as 300,000 Chinese miners, farmers, railroad and factory workers came to the U.S.. Many non-Chinese workers felt threatened by these laborers, who often worked for lower wages.
Bread and butter of mass consumption
"Similar to how numerous other cuisines came to the U.S., the arrival Chinese food in the New World was a byproduct of immigration, brought first to California by the first large wave of Chinese immigrants during and shortly after the Gold Rush," Chen told CGTN Digital.
Amid mounting pressure, the U.S. passed immigration laws that explicitly barred Chinese laborers from immigrating or becoming U.S. citizens, and made it extremely difficult for even legal residents to re-enter the U.S. after making a visit home to China. But there was an exception to these laws. Some Chinese business owners in the U.S. could get special merchant visas that allowed them to travel to China, and bring back employees. Only a few types of businesses qualified for this status. In 1915, a federal court added restaurants to that list which historian said is how the restaurant boom was born.
"No government – Chinese or American- had any intention to introduce it to U.S. diners," Chen said. "In the first half century after its initial arrival, it was rejected and even despised by Americans,"
