Asian American Empowerment - Are Chop Suey and Deep-Fried Everything Really Chinese Food?

Artist Indigo Som says takeout menus can tell us something about Asian culture in America.

By Annie Nakao
©2003 San Francisco Chronicle
October 11, 2003

In an airy upstairs studio of her Berkeley house, artist Indigo Som has meticulously laid out index cards all over her desk. Each reads like a signpost in what Som calls the complex and vast landscape of Chinese restaurants in the United States:

"Chow mein noodles: Weird crunchy fried things."
"Red sauce. Pity."
"Customers who always order the same thing."

"I like structure and organization," said Som, peering at her notes.

Spoken just like a bookkeeper, which is her day job. The rest of the time, Som, 37, is happily consumed by an ambitiously offbeat project: collecting takeout menus from every Chinese restaurant in the country. Since Som kicked off her project a year ago on her Web site, www.indigosom.com, menus from all over the country have been stuffing her Berkeley postal box.

"It's kind of profound that we've had this influence on American eating habits," Som said. "I mean, you're driving around in the middle of nowhere and there's a Chinese restaurant. You go, wait -- what's that doing there? But they're everywhere. They're the most pervasively visible manifestation of Chinese American presence in this country. Every person in this country has eaten Chinese food. Everyone in this country has been to a Chinese restaurant. So we do have this visibility. It's a warped and twisted visibility. But that's what I'm interested in."

Som, who renamed herself for a color at age 20, said she's a visual artist and writer who works with "obscure, mundane details of life." Like her hand- crafted book of weird first names that Chinese American guys of a certain generation have -- Wellington, Hoover, Stanford, Winston -- you've heard them. She did one on girls' names, too -- Tiffany, Pearl, Maxine, Ruby and Jade.

"I work with things that everyone knows, but doesn't realize they know," she said.

Raised in Marin by her architect parents, Som grew up in a very white world.

In a work called "Pastel Diaspora," she deconstructed her old gingham prep school uniform as "a personal symbol of my adolescent trials as a nerdy Chinese girl among sophisticated white debutantes."

"The restaurants that are out there, away from here, are kind of a metaphor for my own experience of growing up in Marin," she said. "So there's a whole emotional side of it for me."

Som had the menu idea years ago but had to wait for the Internet to catch up.

"I didn't really know how to find the restaurants," she said. "Should I find a soy sauce distributor who would give me his list? So it sat on the back burner for a long time."

Then, between projects last year, she resurrected the idea. "I thought, hey, this is 2002, so I ran to my computer. Within three minutes, I had a list of Chinese restaurants in Kansas. I was screaming, 'I can do this project now!' "

So far, Som has received a couple of hundred menus in the mail. "A drop in the bucket," she says.

But the project's morphed into something else.

"One man I don't even know sent me a big pile of menus from Maryland. He was so into it. You get inside people's minds and you're already changing the way they think about something. That accomplishes my goal, too. They think, 'Let me go get a takeout menu for that weird artist.' "

Just what Som plans to do with all these menus is still fermenting. Right now, she has this fuzzy idea of stacking them up in a gallery to reflect the "physical presence of Chinese restaurants in American culture."

If you can't wait for that, a small collection of her photographs of Chinese restaurants in Wyoming, Minnesota and Wisconsin is being shown at Mills College Art Museum through Sunday. Taken with a plastic $20 Holga camera, the images are spare and oddly haunting.

"Some of the restaurants are so weird that the best thing you can do is take a picture," she said.

Indeed. Take David Fong's in Bloomington, Minn., with its fake red pagodalike roof. Or the Wonderful House, in Rock Springs, Wyo., whose mammoth sign, mounted on huge steel poles, rises up like a phoenix under a fleecy blue sky.

A year ago, Som and her partner, artist Donna Keiko Ozawa, decided to hit the road to explore this unmined vein of Americana and found themselves in the wilds of Wyoming. One night, in Riverton, they even stumbled on a cowboy poetry festival.

"Everybody had cowboy hats," said Som. "We were the only people of color in the room."

Although two female Asian American artists might blend right into the Bay Area landscape, on the road, they were "traveling entertainment," Som said. "People were really thrilled to talk to us because we were weird, doing a weird project that no one ever heard of before."

In the space of two weeks, the pair visited 34 Chinese restaurants in four Western states -- Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Nevada -- and came away with a wealth of heretofore unknown facts. For example, who knew there had been an explosion of Chinese eateries -- 12 -- in Casper, Wyo.?

Back home in their studio, Som and Ozawa recounted their experiences. They're a comfy pair. Som is slender, with bookish black-framed glasses and longish dark hair. Ozawa, 40, has wispy dark hair sprinkled with gray and a spangle of light freckles on her face.

"Tell her about your Chinese restaurant ESP," Ozawa says to Som.

"It's more like Chinese restaurant radar," Som corrects.

So far, she said, the radar has kept her out of "scary" Chinese restaurants.

Like the kind that offers chop suey or has no Chinese patrons. Of course, that had to go completely out the window on the road trips, although a few of the restaurants surprised them.

"Some of the places in Wyoming were pretty good . . . or at least, not bad, " Som allowed.

Many were much worse, though she did find a perfect lemon berry cheesecake in Rock Springs.

"Mostly you had these buffets filled with deep-fried everything, with heavy, sludgy sauces," Som said. "Totally different from what I grew up eating. I think of steamed fish with black bean sauce. That's comfort food. But there you have what people think is Chinese food. It's a vicious cycle because restaurants adapt to local tastes. They see people really like that, so that's what they serve. Then people think that's what Chinese food is. So there are all these layers of weird perceptions and misperceptions that are fascinating."

Som had to alter some of her own perceptions along the way. Her initial goal to document Chinese restaurants "in the middle of nowhere" had a problematic vagueness. So she decided to confine her search to places where Chinese Americans or Asian Americans were a very low percentage of the population. But a look at the 2000 census told her this pretty much included the whole country. Only six states had a Chinese population higher than 1 percent.

So she decided on a countrywide search but kept a "hot list" of states with the fewest Chinese and Asians: Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi,

Montana, North and South Dakota, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Wisconsin wasn't on this list, but she happened to be there last spring. In Richland Center, a pit stop of 5,000, she found that that five of the town's seven Chinese residents worked at China Inn, the sole Chinese eatery.

"A lot of these workers tend to be immigrants from Fujian, China, who'd come through New York," Som said. "They told us they really liked it here because it's so safe. That was so interesting for me because I had a fear of driving out to the middle of the country. Would the Klan get me? But I don't think anything about going to New York."

Som also found herself projecting her own values on the immigrants.

"My God, they're out here, slinging this fried stuff," she said. "But you talk to them and find that a lot of them came from really impoverished backgrounds, and they're really happy they have a job. They even like the weather. One man said he liked the really cold weather because he grew up in hot and humid Fujian. He was as happy as a clam."

There were other cultural border crossings.

The cowboy poetry event, for example, happened to fall on the day of the Chinese Moon Festival, and Som had brought some mooncakes along on the trip to celebrate. When a woman came up to chat after the poetry reading, Som unaccountably began telling her all about the Moon Festival.

"There I was in Riverton, Wyo., having a conversation with this woman about mooncakes," she said. The woman responded by going on and on about the exchange student she once hosted.

By and large, Ozawa reflected, people weren't well informed about Asian Americans.

"They don't have much intercultural dialogue," she said. Yet their meeting created a "space of understanding. In a way, it was easier to talk to us. People were earnest -- it was kind of refreshing. Here in the Bay Area, people feel the necessity to be PC, but they don't necessarily carry those ethics over in their lives."

The irony of Som's explorations into the Chinese diaspora, of course, is that while Chinese restaurants are an inherent part of the country's landscape,

Asian Americans continue to be perceived as perennial foreigners in the United States -- a stereotype that Som feels will "never die."

Picking up a menu with the familiar "chop suey" in wedgy pseudo-Asian lettering, she says, "I've resigned myself to seeing this font until I die."

Googling for Crab Rangoon and other mysteries of the West

Indigo Som keeps getting more Chinese takeout menus, but it's never enough. She's got the Bay Area covered, but anyplace else is fair game for menu scouters who want to jump in. She'll even reimburse you if postage becomes too much (P.O. Box 5053, Berkeley, CA 94705).

Meanwhile, she blogs away on her Web site, www.indigosom.com.

7-30-03: "Crazy s-- can also happen if you search for "chinese restaurant" on ebay. Don't try this at home! Among other things, you can actually buy a Chinese restaurant in Ft. Worth, Texas, opening bid $18,000."

8-15-03: "I have to give credit where it's due; it was Donna's idea to google "chinese take-out" resulting in this insane goldmine of stuff. Did you know that February 21st is Chinese Takeout Day?! Who decides these things??!"

9-8-03: "I am nearly delirious! I recently started tracking traffic to my blog, & just now saw that someone out there found me because they googled recipe tuna salad 'chow mein noodles'! It's almost too delicious! That's not all: searching for 'chinese takeout carton' leads to my blog too, as does 'shrimp walnuts china' . . . not to mention 'crab rangoon definition!' Hee hee . . . I love the web!"

Speaking of Crab Rangoon, Som found it on many menus she saw in Wyoming and even in Wisconsin.

"I never heard of these things until I started working on the project," Som said. "I googled it and came up with these scary recipes. They all involve cream cheese -- you know, that quintessential Chinese ingredient -- and fake crab meat and some onions. They serve it with a scary red sauce. It's everywhere. People out there love it. It's, like, mandatory.

"I think it's an evil alien plot."Annie Nakao

Indigo Som's "Chinese Restaurant Pictures" show runs through Sunday at Mills College Art Museum, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. Admission is free. Call (510) 430-2164 for more information.