NEW YORK — So many New Yorkers have memories of a long-gone Chinese restaurant, whether it was Moon Palace or Chun Chow Fu, where they learned to indulge in succulent dishes like battered fried shrimp and egg foo yong that violate today's dietary edicts but were delicious nonetheless.
Now the Museum of Chinese in the Americas here wants this nostalgia to be understood as part of the important history of the Chinese diaspora, and has mounted an exhibit about a Los Angeles landmark to illustrate the point.
"General Lee's Banquet Room," created by Los Angeles artist Cindy Suriyani, tells a story that began more than 140 years ago, when Chinese immigrants were objects of discrimination, relegated to building railroads and working in mines.
Known as Man Jen Low -- the House of 10,000 Treasures -- when it opened in Los Angeles in 1860, General Lee's changed over the years, mirroring the social struggles and strides made by the Chinese population as it rooted in the city.
In the exhibit in New York, ordinary objects such as piles of chopsticks mounted under Plexiglas and dusty salt and pepper shakers artfully arranged on a stained chopping block are used to tell the story not only of the restaurant and the four Lee brothers who ran it, but also of how Chinese immigrants and their new American neighbors learned about each other in such restaurants.
"For many Americans, Chinese restaurants were their first introduction to that culture -- to the food, the people, the customs," said the museum's curator, Cynthia Al-Fen Lee. "And it wasn't a one-way exchange. The owners also got to know their new home through the customers."
Renamed in the 1940s, General Lee's became a popular hangout with an ethnically diverse but devoted clientele that included entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy and Barbara Hutton. The exhibit has old photographs of the Lee family, silk screens that were hung near the bar and framed dining awards from the 1950s, as well as two tattered waiter's uniforms from that era created by then-hot designer Rudy Gernreich.
The restaurant closed in 1987, in part because the college-educated fourth generation of Lees was not interested in the business and in part because tastes had changed: A flood of restaurants that had popped up in suburban Los Angeles in the previous 20 years had acquainted Americans with spicy regional Chinese food not served at General Lee's.
