(1985)
GODS ON THE MENU
Elijah Siegler goes on a road trip across America in search of the gods of Chinese restaurants and meet figures like Paco Wong Jr., a fourth-generation descendant of Chinese migrants to Mexico, whose El Paso restaurant doubles as a gallery of Buddhas and celestial dragons. "El Paso has no Chinese temples," he writes, and the "El Paso Art Museum specializes in European and US Southwestern art, but not Asian art. So to come face to face with Chinese religious art, the best place in this transborder metropolis of 2.7 million might be at Paco Wong’s."
Walter Wong was born in 1955 in the People’s Republic of China, Guangdong province, near the city of Shenzhen, which at the time was a small town near the border with British Hong Kong. Today its total population is close to 20 million. His mother was a devout Buddhist, and Wong remembers being taught Buddhist lessons and being around temples and statues, even living under communism. But by the late 1960s, the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” was in full swing. Buddhism was still practiced, Wong told me, but “under the table.”
In February 1972, impoverished and hungry, Wong swam to Hong Kong with a classmate and his mother, who could not swim but floated on a wooden door. Wong later learned that their midnight swim occurred at the exact time that Richard Nixon was en route to China for the historic first meeting with Mao Zedong.
Walter Wong’s mother fell off the door and almost drowned, and Wong had to dive deep to bring her back to the surface; then he swam her back home, promising to fetch her later by speedboat.
Hong Kong, a British colony, was a different world. Wong saw air conditioners and apples for the first time. It also had some freedom of religion, but that did not concern Walter. Education did. He studied engineering, and in 1976, he began working as an engineer on oil tankers and container ships leaving from the busy port of Hong Kong. Over the next few years, he visited ports all over Europe and the Middle East as a merchant seaman.
Wong was planning to live out his years in Hong Kong. But by the early 1980s, negotiations between the UK and the PRC to hand over Hong Kong had him scared. So in 1981, he traveled for the first time to Charleston, South Carolina, and there he stayed. His cousin ran a restaurant, so Wong got into the business. At one time he owned 13 restaurants, all over the Charleston area, but now has only one, preferring the less stressful job of being a commercial real estate landlord. Wong brought his mother over to Charleston, and after she passed, he buried her in a local cemetery, where his children and grandchildren visit twice a year to honor their ancestors.
Walter Wong
posing with the gifted art pieces, a jade boat and a gold Laughing Buddha holding a fan, at his restaurant, C&W Super Buffet
photo by the author
The restaurant he still runs, which I visited one cold Saturday morning in January, he took over in October 1985, changing the name from New China to C&W Super Buffet, after Cindy, his wife, and Walter. At the grand opening, the China Association of Charleston, of which he was honorary president, gifted him two art pieces: a jade boat, symbolic of successful sea voyages, and a gold Laughing Buddha holding a fan; both are popular decorations for overseas Chinese.
They are still at C&W, behind the cash register. People sometimes ask questions about them, but the cashiers, who are mostly younger and raised either in the Christian US South and/or in Communist China, don’t have the answers. Outside the restaurant, a large American flag stands guard.
C&W Super Buffet
outside view
photo by the author
I have been researching and teaching about Chinese religion in the US for more than twenty-five years. In my classes, students learn about the “Three Religions of China”—Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism—but I make sure they understand that the most widespread and important religion in China has always been nameless: scholars have called it popular or folk. It does not emphasize sincere belief, nor congregational belonging, nor sacred texts, all of which are hallmarks of Protestantism, but not of most other forms of religion.
If you are interested in the subject of Chinese popular religion, your local Chinese restaurant is a good place to start. There are more than 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, compared with a few hundred Chinese temples. For this story, I visited 40 or 50 Chinese restaurants, in a dozen or more cities, across five states. Many of these restaurants feature statues or other artwork depicting Chinese deities.
My research has led me to believe that the preservation of Chinese religious culture in America takes place less in temples, museums, or classrooms, and mainly in restaurants. Take the case of Panda Palace, seven minutes from my house. A married couple, who, like most Chinese restaurant workers and owners throughout the South and Midwest, are from Fujian province in southeast China, took over the modest mini-mall takeout joint about ten years ago.
Bas Relief of the Laughing Buddha
Panda Palace, West Ashley, South Carolina
photo by the author
I was impressed by the large wooden carved bas-relief of the Laughing Buddha mounted next to the menu board. The owner told me her brother-in-law got it in Atlanta. This unusual piece was next to a more common laughing Buddha, made of plastic, near the cash register. When I asked the owner why laughing Buddhas were featured so prominently in the restaurant, she told me “for good luck.”
“For luck,” along with “for decoration,” are answers you will hear far more often than “we are Buddhists” or “we believe in the teachings of the Buddha.” The latter would after all be very Protestant answers. Answering “luck” or “decoration” may well be how busy or suspicious restaurant owners deflect that intrusive question. But those answers also teach us about how Chinese popular religion works here in America.
The material presence of the gods—in statues or paintings or even printed cards—is indeed decoration, but it is more than that: an image of a popular god is in some sense alive. Or it can be if it is enlivened; in Chinese the word is “kaiguang,” literally “opened its light,” or made active. In the Chinese cultural sphere, the kitchen god can watch us in our home; and Tudi gong, the earth god, can watch us on the street. In Chinese restaurants, the gods may not be “opened” and active, but, as we will see, some do watch out for the owners, workers, and customers.
Luck is an ancient and deeply embedded part of Chinese popular religion, which later became melded with the Buddhist concept of karma. The best Chinese translation for “a lucky break” is yuanfen, which literally means “fateful coincidence.”
Luck is particularly important to Chinese emigrants embarking on long, perilous sea journeys. Beginning in 1848, thousands sailed from southern China to San Francisco to mine for gold or lay down tracks for the railroad. Who watched over them? Who granted them a lucky break? For many, it was the goddess Tian Hou, which literally translates as Empress of Heaven, a semi-historical figure, known in Taiwan as Mazu. One of the earliest Chinese temples in America, founded in 1877, enshrines her and is named after her. During this period, Chinese temples multiplied, not only in San Francisco but in small mining and railroad towns in northern California, Oregon, and into Montana.
The luck of the Chinese in nineteenth-century America, however, would quickly turn. In 1882, in response to nativist pressure, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, suspending all Chinese immigration. It was the first law to prohibit the arrival of a specific ethnic group. In the twentieth century, hundreds of Chinatown temples throughout the American West were abandoned, one by one.
At the same time, the number of Chinese restaurants was growing: from dozens in the nineteenth century, to hundreds in the early twentieth century, to thousands by mid-century. These restaurants were by then designed to appeal to non-Chinese.
Here is Andrew Coe describing typical mid-century American Chinese restaurant in his 2009 history: “The classic Chinese restaurant aesthetic had not changed in decades: booths along the wall, tables in the center, lanterns hanging from the ceiling, a few cheap Chinese prints on the walls, a counter for the cash register, and the display of cigars and cigarettes by the entrance.” These eateries surely served some of the function of now closed temples: community centers and preservers of Chinese religious culture.
Changes in US immigration law in the mid-1960s meant that hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants, along with millions of immigrants from elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, arrived here. Some of them also opened restaurants, which often kept the mid-century model. These post-1965 Chinese immigrants mostly came by air, a safer and shorter passage. But long sea voyages—like ocean-going Walter Wong—were not unknown.
Bu Dai: Biography of an Icon
You can see similar models of the Laughing Buddha at Chinese restaurants all over the country. What is unique about the one behind the register at C&W Super Buffet is that on his fan is the four-character saying: zhī zú cháng lè 知足常乐. This common Chinese proverb, usually translated as “contentment brings happiness,” is derived not from Buddhism but from Daoism. In the Daodejing, Daoism’s sacred text, the word “zhī zú” appears several times, often rendered as “knowing what is enough.”
Who exactly is this laughing Buddha? I had always understood that it was a representation of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future, a redeemer or messiah figure in Mahayana Buddhism. But I was confused because in traditional Buddhist iconography, Maitrya was usually depicted as a slender, serious figure. It was Helen B. Chapin (1892–1950), a pioneering scholar of East Asian studies, who traveled much of eastern China by bicycle in the 1920s, who first offered “an explanation of the transformation of the tall, well-formed Maitreya of Indian, of Japanese, and of early Chinese Buddhist art, into the Laughing Buddha” in a 1933 essay in the Journal of the American Oriental Society.
In it, she translated an eleventh-century hagiography of a Chinese Chan (Zen) monk, who had lived about a hundred years earlier. He was nicknamed Bu Dai, which means “cloth sack,” perhaps because, as Chapin translates, “he was so fat that he looked like a bag.” He is also sometimes depicted carrying a bag. (What’s in Bu Dai’s bag? The universe, one Chinese art historian informed me.) The monk was known for his jokey and erratic behavior, not unexpected of Chan masters, and for proclaiming, just before he passed away, that he was an incarnation of Maitreya. His hagiography became iconography, and as Chapin wrote, Bu Dai “with his protruding stomach and jolly smile has greeted the visitor to almost every Buddhist temple in China from Ming times up to the present day.”
In America, Chinese temples were rarely strictly Buddhist, so Bu Dai was never the central deity. But in restaurants, it was a different story. We have photographic evidence as early as 1880 of Bu Dai in a Chinese restaurant on Jackson Street in San Francisco, still the center of its old Chinatown.
Interior, Chinese Restaurant, S.F.
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art
Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection
The New York Public Library.
NYPL Digital Collections
(accessed 9 June 2026)
And in postcards depicting Chinese restaurants from Boston to Miami, you can find the laughing Buddha.
Vintage Postcards
Left: China House Restaurant (1940s)
Boston, Massachusetts
Right: Shangri-la Chinese Restaurant (1940s)
Miami, Florida
Peter Romaskiewicz Collection
Today Bu Dai is by far the most common religious symbol at Chinese restaurants across the country.
Bu Dais
Left: An Lac Restaurant, Mekong Plaza
Mesa, Arizona
Right: Paco Wong’s Chinese Restaurant
El Paso, Texas
photos by William Greaves
Bu Dai
Panda Palace
West Ashley, South Carolina
photo by the author
Many variations of Bu Dai can be ordered from the religious supply stores that can be found in Asian malls and shopping districts in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and other cities with a high concentration of Asian-owned businesses. I happened upon one at the Mekong Plaza in Mesa, Arizona, run by a Vietnamese man.
Bu Dais on Shelf
An Lac Restaurant
Mekong Plaza
Mesa, Arizona
photo by William Greaves
This is not the image of the Buddha more commonly shown in textbooks and museums: Shakyamuni, or the historical Buddha. Restaurant representations of him are rare and seem to be most common in Asian restaurants operated by non-Asians. For example, A-Tan Bistro in Seguin, Texas, or more famously, Tao Nightclub in Las Vegas.
If Bu Dai is placed near cash registers for luck and wealth, there are other popular Chinese deities who explicitly invite luck and wealth into a business venture. This is Cai Shen, the god of wealth, who can be depicted singularly, often put up especially for the Lunar New Year or as part of a set of five.
Wealth Gods
Szechuan Cuisine
San Francisco, California
photo by the author
Cai Shen
TanTan Restaurant
Houston, Texas
photo by the author
Related to Cai Shen are the popular trinity known as the Three Stars (San Xing). The first represents luck; the second prosperity or career advancement; and the third longevity. I found this trio only in Vietnamese restaurants, reflecting the fact that some Vietnamese Americans are ethnically Chinese, and also the deep impact that Chinese culture has had on Vietnam because of centuries of Chinese hegemony.
Three Stars (San Xing)
Mein Restaurant
Houston, Texas
photo by the author
Guan Gong, The Cantonese Protector
According to mid-century descriptions, most American Chinese restaurants featured altars for worship of Guanyin (the bodhisattva of compassion), Tudi (the earth God), or Guan Gong (Lord Guan). I found very few altars to the first two deities, but numerous for Guan Gong, who must be the second-most-commonly depicted deity, after Bu Dai. Guan Gong is associated with righteousness, loyalty, protection, and wealth. This fierce, red-faced god is the apotheosis of general Guan Yu (d. 219 CE), whose martial exploits were immortalized in the famous sixteenth century novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In America, he is especially popular among Cantonese immigrants, going back to the first generation. The second temple in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Kong Chow from 1853, is dedicated to Lord Guan, as is the “Joss House” in the Gold Rush town of Weaverville from 1853. G.B. Densmore, in an 1880 book about San Francisco's Chinatown, noted that “in nearly every house or store they have a picture of this god.”
Smoking Divan
in Chinese Restaurant
San Francisco, California
courtesy of The Society of California Pioneers
photo by Carleton E. Watkins
The same is true in 2026. Walking the many historic Chinatowns in the Bay Area, with their longstanding Cantonese communities, I found Guan Gong far more common than Bu Dai.
Guan Gong
Hon's Wun Tun House
San Francisco, California
photo by the author
Indeed, at one restaurant on the main strip of the Chinatown in San Francisco’s Sunset District, I found the five wealth gods, but no Guan Gong. I asked the owners why, and they said they are from Sichuan province, not Cantonese.
Szechuan Cuisine Street Sign
San Francisco, California
photo by the author
Unlike other religious figures, Guan Gong was usually placed in an active altar, often with incense and offering of fruit. This altar is placed at the back of the restaurant, not for the public. If Bu Dai is for luck and decoration and to attract customers, then Guan Gong will protect the restaurant and reward honorable behavior. This public/private dichotomy was most evident at a Chinese buffet in Lumberton, North Carolina. I visited on a busy Sunday, surrounded by well-dressed Hispanic families. An older white couple, the man with a large wooden cross around his neck, praised the food to me. Ling, the woman at the cash register, which was decorated with Jesuses, claimed she wasn’t the owner. She said Bu Dai, placed next to fake Labubus for sale, was there for luck.
The Sacred on Display
Jesuses (left); Bu Dai and Labubus (right) at Hong Kong Buffet
Lumberton, North Carolina
photos by the author
In the back, past the long steam table, out of view of most diners, there was a small shrine for employees. On this shrine there was no image, and the Chinese characters alluded only to this being a family shrine. It might be representing either Guan Gong or Tu Di Gong, the earth god.
Later, driving through the small town of Globe, Arizona, I stopped at a Cantonese-owned restaurant.
Jumbo Chinese Restaurant
Globe, Arizona
photo by the author
I was struck by the Bu Dai next to the register holding an electrified blue globe, but the young woman asked me not to take a photo of their Guan Gong shrine on the back wall, as it was private.
Bu Dai at Jumbo Chinese Restaurant
Globe, Arizona
video by William Greaves
Paco Wong: Crossing Borders
One Chinese restaurant on my journey stood out for the veritable pantheon of Chinese deities in its lobby, including a particularly exaggerated Bu Dai, Shakyamuni, Guan Yin, Guan Gong, and a life-size, custom-created sculpture of the divinized First Emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang Di.
Guan Gong
Paco Wong’s Chinese Restaurant
El Paso, Texas
photo by William Greaves
Paco Wong’s, on Mesa Street in northwest El Paso, Texas, was also the only restaurant I visited that served chicken skins in tortillas—quite delicious—and fried jalapeños known as Chiles Atropellado.
The restaurant’s owner, Paco Wong Jr., was kind enough to talk with me. He told me that his grandfather had immigrated from Canton to Chihuahua in Northern Mexico in the 1880s, and then married a Mexican woman, a devout Catholic, whom he apparently taught to cook Chinese food. A little background is necessary:
Because of the aforementioned anti-Chinese US immigration laws of the nineteenth century, Chinese immigration to Mexico spiked in the 1890s. Paco Wong’s father, Francisco (known as Paco) Wong, was born in Juarez in 1927. Paco Sr. did not have an easy life as a mestizo in a time of rising anti-Chinese prejudice. His father died when he was ten, and he was sent to a hacienda as an indentured servant. But he made a life for himself in Juarez, marrying a Mexican woman, and together they raised five children. The oldest, Francisco, aka Paco Jr., was born in 1957. Paco Sr. learned how to cook Chinese food from his mother, and in 1960 he opened The Shangri-La in downtown Juarez—then as now, a swanky joint for special occasions.
The El Paso/Juarez area is known for its cross-border culture, including its Chinese population. So it was not unusual for Paco Wong Jr., born in El Paso, to be educated in Mexico, and employed as a doorman, busser, and dishwasher in his father’s restaurant. Later, he started his own businesses back in El Paso. In 2006, Paco Jr. opened Paco Wong’s on the west side of El Paso, named after both himself and his father, continuing the legacy of Shangri-la. Both the wait staff and the clientele were mostly well-dressed Chicanos. The food is a mix of Chinese American classics with unique Chinese-Mexican specialties. The eatery also became a venue for Paco Wong’s interest in Chinese art.
Shakyamuni Bas Relief
On the wall of Paco Wong’s Chinese Restaurant
El Paso, Texas
photo by William Greaves
The lobby’s walls are adorned with framed newspaper articles in English and Spanish about his family’s cross-border restaurant empire; pride of place goes to a large portrait of his dad.
Newspaper Articles
in English and Spanish on the walls of Paco Wong’s Chinese Restaurant
El Paso, Texas
photos by William Greaves
But it is the art depicting religious figures that make this restaurant so one-of-a-kind. The first thing you see is a life-size diorama of the famed terracotta warriors of Xian, including the divinized First Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, who commissioned the original some two thousand years ago. These figures were made by an architect from the Mexican city of Morelia, carved out of Cantera stone, a volcanic rock quarried in Mexico.
Terracotta Warriors of Xian
Paco Wong’s Chinese Restaurant
El Paso, Texas
photo by William Greaves
Besides the warriors, which he commissioned for the restaurant, Wong gets most of his other religious art on auction, or from his trips to the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York.
These images, not just at Paco Wong’s, but all over the country, preserve and transmit Chinese religion to both customers and to the families that own the restaurants. Paco’s daughters, like so many other teenage girls, find religious meaning in Taylor Swift, and Paco took them to Toronto to see Tay-Tay in concert. Meanwhile, back in South Carolina, Walter Wong’s son, Walter Wong Jr., went to First Baptist school in downtown Charleston and is married to a Catholic woman. So for Walter Wong’s family in North Charleston, as much as for his customers coming in to eat French fries, chicken wings, and Americanized Chinese food, the silent smiling Bu Dai is the closest they will come to the Buddha and his teaching.
Likewise, El Paso has no Chinese temples. The El Paso Art Museum specializes in European and US Southwestern art, but not Asian art. So to come face to face with Chinese religious art, the best place in this transborder metropolis of 2.7 million might be at Paco Wong’s, and that is thanks to the passion and vision of a one-quarter-Chinese, Catholic-raised restauranteur. He goes to work every day amid celestial dragons, protector gods, divine emperors, Buddhas, and immortals.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
For historic images of Buddhas in America, the best online source is the “Buddhas in the West Material Archive” by Peter Romanskiewicz. In particular, his Section 6, “Additional Shrines,” mentions restaurants. There is not much else out there. Histories of Chinese food in America do not take account of religiosity. Histories of Chinese American religion, of which there is still no comprehensive example, make little mention of the thousands of Bu Dais and Guan Gongs. My best advice is to go to your local Chinese restaurants and ask the workers about any images you find there.
Elijah Siegler
teaches classes on religions of China and Japan, American religious history, Asian religions in America, new religious movements, Asian Religions in America, and many others. He is the editor of Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order (Baylor University Press, 2016), the author of New Religious Movements (Pearson, 2006), and co-author of the award-winning Dream Trippers: Global Daoism and Predicament of Modern Spirituality (University of Chicago Press, 2017). He is also the co-creator and co-organizer of Spirited Brunch 101, The Food Section, and the co-developer and co-producer of Happyland, a new musical about Jewish life in nineteenth century Charleston. He has served on the board of the Charleston Interreligious Council for many years.
