In the Kitchen

The Chef-in-Residence Program at MoAD, the Asian Art Museum and Afro-Asia Group present:

Sugarwork, Afro-Asian Art and Foodways

In this virtual At the Table event, delve into the bittersweet history of sugar to unearth stories of Afro-Asian cultural exchange in the Caribbean. Through conversation and cooking, artist Andrea Chung and scholar Tao Leigh Goffe explore the crossroads of Black and Asian diaspora arts and cuisines, focusing on foodways that evolved out of colonial plantations — from Cuba to Louisiana, Jamaica to Mauritius. Follow along as our guests demonstrate sugar artwork techniques and recipes for sweet plantains and tostones, while celebrating ingenuity and Afro-Asian solidarity. Recipes will be sent to registered participants with email confirmation.

Andrea Chung is an artist based in San Diego, California. Her work focuses primarily on island nations in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean Sea within the context of colonial and postcolonial regimes.

Tao Leigh Goffe is assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization.

The Chef-in-Residence Program at MoAD is made possible by generous support from Kaiser Permanente.

In collaboration with the Afro-Asia Group and Junzi 君子 Kitchen, MOFAD is excited to present 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, presents 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 debuts 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 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.