Tso Much Information
On Sunday night in Hollywood, a crowd of foodies and cinephiles gathered at the tiny, 99-seat Arena Cinema for a screening of the documentary The Search for General Tso, followed by a Q&A with L.A.-based food writers Zach Brooks and Evan Kleiman and producer Jennifer 8. Lee, whose book, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, helped shape the course of the film.
Directed by Ian Cheney (King Corn, The City Dark), The Search for General Tso is much more than an origin story of the sweet and spicy fried chicken dish—also known as General Gau’s, General Tao’s, General Tsao’s and even Admiral Tso’s (at the U.S. Naval Academy). The film is an eye-opening and often humorous examination of the immigrant experience in America.
Here are 11 things Paste learned about the General, the chicken dish and Chinese American culture.
1. The General was a real person.
Before conquering Chinese American restaurants, the real General Tso hailed from China’s Hunan Province. He was a ruthless military leader of the Qing Dynasty, who helped put down the Taiping peasant rebellion in the mid-19th century. He probably never had the chicken that bears his name—in fact, most of mainland China probably hasn’t either. Some of the film’s funniest scenes feature filmmakers showing pictures of General Tso’s chicken to Chinese people on the streets, and they have no clue what the dish is.
2. The California Gold Rush and new immigrants
The aforementioned Taiping Rebellion led to abject poverty in southern China, and when word spread of the California Gold Rush in 1849, Chinese men began immigrating in large numbers across the Pacific. Many of the newcomers were Cantonese, hailing from the Guangdong Province.
3. Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first significant federal law that limited immigration to the United States. It placed a 10-year moratorium on Chinese workers entering the country, particularly California. It also placed strict limitations on the type of work that could be undertaken by Chinese laborers already in the U.S., helping the immigrants establish a market share of laundries and restaurants. (These were seen as feminine, nonthreatening jobs.)
4. The chop suey craze
Chinese restaurateurs found that they could adapt simple Chinese dishes to American tastes to bridge cross-cultural palate divides. Chop suey, a mix of various meats and veggies covered in a flavorless sauce, became a national phenomenon in the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Large signs that advertised “chop suey” popped up from San Francisco to New York, promoting a dish that basically translates into “odds and ends.”