Cooking in a New Home: How Chinese Restaurants Reflect Immigration History and Negotiations of a New Cultural Context

Looking at the development of Chinese restaurants in the United States, this thesis demonstrates how culinary traditions are continuously invented and reinvented, placing Chinese cuisine within larger narratives of community creation, cultural expression, and identity. Defining food through a biocultural approach, I examine how diets reflect the intersection of biological need with the cultural, political, social, and economic context in which people find themselves and how food reflects larger negotiations of identity. By demonstrating how development of Chinese restaurants in the United States is shaped by changes in immigration policy, societal attitudes, and Chinese immigrant demographics. I show how changes in those factors affect the process of assimilation for Chinese immigrants, creating what I define as an inward and outward dynamic within Chinese restaurants. These designations reflect how Chinese restaurants serve both a cultural ingroup of Chinese people, who rely on those restaurants as cultural touchstones and places of identity formation, and a cultural outgroup of non-Chinese Americans whose tastes the restaurants seek to accommodate. By analyzing menus, flavors, service, and décor, I chart the shifting balance of this inward and outward dynamic to show how Chinese people in America have preserved their traditional culture, created ethnic capital, and fostered acceptance.