If not for the coronavirus pandemic, Feng-Feng Yeh might never have learned about a lesser-known chapter of Chinese American history in her hometown of Tucson, Arizona.
Yeh was an executive chef in New York City when the shutdown took away her job and career plans. She pulled up stakes and moved back home, turning instead to her passion for public art.
Chinese immigrants settling in Arizona were doing so in the shadow of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the U.S. government's first race-based immigration policy. Both Chinese and Mexican immigrants faced racism despite being instrumental to the workforce. Starting in 1900, Chinese-owned grocery stores prospered and became an economic force in Tucson. By the 1940s, there were 130 families running a little over 100 grocery stores in the city. The number of stores dwindled in the ‘70s and ’80s due to an influx of supermarket chains, convenience stores, and a younger generation of Chinese Americans uninterested in the family business.
Lew, 74 and a longtime board member of the center, remembers watching his father or the Hispanic butcher he employed making chorizo. They used the end pieces of “big rolls of bologna” or salami, boiled ham or other cold cuts. The 500-plus pounds of meat and plant-based chorizo given to restaurants for the festival was made at a local butchery. Yeh devised the vegan recipe. She invited Jackie Tran, a Tucson food writer and owner of Tran’s Fats food truck, to work on the pork one.
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