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.

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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. 

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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.” 

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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.