Self-branding remains an indispensable aspect of the restaurant business. From franchises to mom-and-pop dining establishments, considerable sums of money are invested in the calculated streamlining of color schemes, typography, and memorable logos. Disseminated via inexpensive and portable advertisements like matchbooks, promotional flyers, and postcards–enticing freebies–restaurants were more likely to whet their potential patrons’ appetites. Indeed, in an age of growing consumerism, the visual feast was just as important as the act of eating itself. At the very least, savvy restaurateurs in Los Angeles consulted page after page of appealing stock design pamphlets for matchbook art or solicited print shops to design their menus. Some even enlisted the help of local artists to develop a flattering aesthetic program for their establishment (the dedicated periodically chose to refresh their branding).
Tyrus Wong, the visionary artist behind the lush watercolor landscapes of Disney’s Bambi (1942), supported himself during the early years of his career by waiting tables at the Dragon’s Den Restaurant, where he also designed menus and painted murals. Wong was additionally responsible for creating the Phoenix Bakery’s bashful logo, the Celestial Dragon Mural in New Chinatown’s Central Plaza, and the sleek calligraphic font and graphics that adorned the marketing materials of the Grandview Gardens restaurant.
Background Image: Tyrus Wong, Chinese Celestial Dragon Mural, 1941 (Restored by Fu Dingcheng, 1984), 951 N Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90012.
The only remaining vestige of the restaurant on Ginling Way, its Grandview Gardens sign, was designed by fellow artist and Disney animator Milton Quon, who contributed to films such as Fantasia (1940) and Dumbo (1941). Like Wong, the outset of Quon’s career required him to take on various commercial graphic design projects. He too designed menus and restaurant paraphernalia for Chinatown restaurants such as the SooChow Cafe and Man Jen Low (later known as General Lee’s). Noticeably, Quon and Wong’s designs strayed from the mainstream avenues of caricature used to evoke Chineseness and accentuate otherness. I began to inquire whether these designs had a subversive undercurrent– were these Chinese American artists attempting to reenvision a new Chinese iconography amid a rather limited visual lexicon?
Background Image: Milton Quon, New Chinatown Gateway, Los Angeles, 1962. Markers and watercolor on paper, 12.5 in. x 18.75 in. Photo courtesy of Milton and Peggy Quon.
Perhaps. In Protean Prompt: The Matchbook as Commercial, Private, and Cultural Reminder, art historian Anna Jozefacka underscores the ingenious matchbook as a marketing tool. Not only was it inexpensive to manufacture, but its portability lent to its mass circulation among a large number of smokers. Matchbooks designs could be commissioned from specific artists such as Wong or Quon, but the more economic option was to select from catalogs provided by match distributors full of clip art. Due to the nature of commercial graphic design, it was not unusual for designers to refrain from signing their work and maintaining anonymity.
Background Image: Sales Catalog from Matchbook Corporation of America, circa 1940s, private collection.
The challenge of identifying individual designers who worked in the industry complicated my initial conjecture that Chinatown restaurateurs may have deliberately ‘outsourced’ their design projects to non-Chinese designers in hopes that their imagery could better appeal to white American tourists. Signifiers of Chineseness, whether it be the cartoon coolie with slanted eyes, chop suey font, or a pagoda, were already part of an established visual language shaped by the dominant culture.
Therefore, the ubiquity of Chinese caricatures in restaurant marketing materials should not be generalized as a gratuitous show of self-orientalization, but a complex desire for assimilation and self-preservation amid a white society that selectively embraced multiculturalism. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that the visual language that was associated with China and Chineseness was perpetrated by a predominantly white design sphere and reinforced by influential cultural industries in close proximity such as Hollywood.
Background Image: Sales Catalog from Matchbook Corporation of America, circa 1940s, private collection.
Despite being unable to verify the demographics of the graphic design industry in 20th century Los Angeles, the obstacles and archival gaps I encountered led to new discoveries on the community-driven nature of Chinatown restaurants. Quon and Wong, as well as several hundred Chinese American elders from Los Angeles, recounted their experiences living in Old and New Chinatown in an oral history archive (conducted between 1978-1991) created in collaboration between the Chinese Historical Society and University of California, Los Angeles’ Asian Studies Center. Almost two-thirds of the interviewees mentioned their family’s restaurant businesses or the role of the restaurant in Chinatown communities.
Tyrus Wong, in particular, recounted the hardships he endured in his early years as an art student at the Otis College of Art and Design. To pay his tuition, Wong washed dishes at the school cafeteria and waited tables at the Dragon’s Den Restaurant in Old Chinatown, where he would take his lunches free of charge. Wong’s multiple commissions by the See family to design their restaurant logo and menus indicate a closely-knit community where mutual aid was standard. Chinese-owned restaurants typically hired Chinese employees, and this support system benefited new immigrants who could work without any knowledge of English. An oft occurrence in these restaurants was the staffing of recently immigrated extended family. According to Mary Moy, Betty Lee, and Wallace Quon, Soon Doon Quon, their grandfather (the proprietor of the Tuey Far Low restaurant) “sponsored the whole village to come and work at Tuey Far Low.”
Tyrus Wong’s dynamic, calligraphic flourishes and sensitive renderings of everyday objects in the Grandview Garden and Dragon’s Den Restaurants’ promotional material are idiosyncratic stylistic traits that recur throughout the entirety of his oeuvre. It appears that the See family did not just support Wong financially, but provided him an outlet to nurture his promising career in art. Wong’s star rose when he began to design Christmas greeting cards for Hallmark in 1953– his uncompromising attitude towards his art made fans of his inventive marriage of Chinese and Western painting traditions. Regardless of his intentions, Wong’s unique contributions to the visual landscape of Chinese restaurants can be apprehended as a form of resistance against mainstream distillations of Chinese culture.
Background image: Tyrus Wong, Starbright, 1970. Printed in the January 1970 issue of Reader’s Digest
A visit in early August to the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California’s archives fortuitously introduced me to another, lesser-known Chinese American artist named Wylog Fong (1894-1974). A contemporary of Quon and Wong, Fong also supported himself by supplying restaurants with appealing graphics. Board member Linda Bentz shared Fong’s promotional flyer for the Old Chinatown restaurant Jerry’s Joynt with me, a vibrant pastel depiction of an elderly Chinese man and a young Chinese woman in colorful, Qing Dynasty-inspired garb.
However, another dimension of his artistic oeuvre revealed itself to me upon stumbling across a number of Fong's recently auctioned works online (International Auction Gallery of Anaheim). Using oil paints and pastels, Fong painted a range of expressive, Chinese caricatures on bamboo weavings, such as an old crone with a cigarette dangling from her lip, a doughy-faced Peking opera actress, and a prostitute with an opium pipe.
On one bamboo weaving, I instantaneously recognized the villainous, yellow-faced Fu Manchu character I had seen on one of Eugene Moy’s matchboxes. The leering character represented Maxey’s Singapore Spa, which, contrary to its name, was a Chinese restaurant during the 1950s. Once located at 119 South Fairfax in Hollywood, the restaurant was owned by the Maxeys, a caucasian couple. Maxey’s Singapore Spa menu not only boasted authentic Chinese food prepared by a Chinese chef, but also a lavish interior decorated with Chinese carvings and other Oriental curios that Mr. Maxey acquired during his travels abroad.
With great thanks to graphic designer Alex Jay and his blog on Chinese American visual culture, Chinese American Eyes, I was exposed to another matchbook cover (or matchbook interior, ostensibly designed by Fong, that was critical in formulating my own postulations about his artistic career. This edition depicts two stereotypical ‘Chinaman’ characters feasting at a dining table, one cartoonishly rotund and the other rake-thin. Their appearance is not an anomaly, as they appear together in a 1939 mixed-media work signed and dated by Fong. In view of this, I now suspect that Jerry's Joynt's logo, a fat Chinese butcher holding a sparerib in one hand and a cleaver in the other, was another one of Fong’s caricatures.
The nature of Fong’s patronage by the Maxeys (and plausibly the owners of Jerry’s Joynt) still proves to be indeterminate– it would be somewhat premature to assume that Fong was willed into drawing the offensive caricature by the volition of the Maxeys, as caricature may have already been a significant, defining part of his repertoire. Yet, the scarce information that can be used to piece together Fong’s biography and artistic career is only capable of speculating the genesis of these caricatures. Fong’s sentimental, folksy pastel drawings and oil paintings appear to dominate his oeuvre between the early 1920s and 1930s, whereas his caricatures seem to emerge from the late 1930s and onwards. From a business perspective, could it be possible that these exaggerated caricatures were created to appeal more directly to white patrons? Did Wylog Fong belong to the camp of Chinese Americans who were pleased to witness the growing visibility of Chinese culture in mainstream American media despite its predilection for stereotypes? I cannot answer this question confidently, however, his design work, alongside Wong's and Quon's, attest to the intricate dynamics of identity formation that took place in the arena of the Chinese restaurant.
As the popularity of Chinese food surged, the growing phenomenon of non-Chinese owning Chinese restaurants during the late 1930s and beyond (the Maxeys and Korean-American actor Phil Ahn are apt examples) raises new questions about the literal and figurative ownership of Chineseness during a period where the symbols for ‘Chinese’ and ‘Oriental’ were becoming interchangeable. What did it take to inscribe meaning upon the ever-evolving term that is ‘Chinese’? How did Chinese restaurants (now owned by both Chinese and non-Chinese) have a stake in the past and future definitions of Chineseness? These questions will be explored in the final installment of The New American Cultural Diet and Consuming Chinatown.
Left: George Brich, Phil Ahn with his version of chop suey, 1962, Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection, Los Angeles Public Library
Bibliography
Fang, Karen. “Commercial Design and Midcentury Asian American Art: The Greeting Cards of Tyrus Wong.” Panorama 7, no. 1 (2021). https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.11548.
Jay, Alex. “Chinese American Eyes,” chimericaneyes.blogspot.com, 2013, http://chimericaneyes.blogspot.com/.
Jozefacka, Anna. “Protean Prompt: The Matchbook as Commercial, Private, and Cultural Reminder.” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 27 (2015): 196–213. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24739838.
Lee, David Fon. Man Jen Low to General Lee’s Restaurant: David Fon Lee. Interview by Susie Ling. Gum Saan Journal, August 2013.
Moy, Mary, Betty Lee, and Wallace Quon. “Quon Family, Quon Brothers Grand Star Inc, Now Grand Star Jazz Club.” Gum Saan Journal 40, no. 1 (2018): 5–15.
Wong, Tyrus. Interview No. 96: Tyrus Wong. Interview by Beverly Chan. Chinese Historical Society of Southern California Southern California Chinese American Oral History Project, 1978-1991, May 7, 1980.
Yang, Hongyan. “Toy’s Chinese Restaurants: Exploring the Political Dimension of Race through the Built Environment.” In American Chinese Restaurants : Society, Culture and Consumption, edited by Jenny Bahn and Haiming Liu, 285–98. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2019.