We eat it. We love it.

AT A SMALL CHINESE TAKEOUT PLACE IN FORT MYERS, A tired but sweet looking woman named Su Pan hoists an order of General Tso’s chicken on to the counter and counts the change.

Like many Chinese restaurants Florida Weekly explored last week in Lee, Charlotte and Collier counties, Ms. Pan says Gen. Tso’s chicken is the most popular dish they serve.

The dish doesn’t represent the sophistication of China’s vast culinary landscape, which unfortunately is absent on most menus in the United States. But what it does represent is the innovation of Chinese immigrants, whose first takeout restaurants, called “chow chows,” sprung up in California in the 1860s. While working on the Central Pacific Railroad, some opened eateries. They prepared meals with the ingredients they could find and afford — lacking easy access to fresh seafood, herbs and other ingredients used in their homeland — and tried to maintain a semblance of authenticity while catering to the tastes of white railroad workers.

EVAN WILLIAMS/ FLORIDA WEEKLY Above: Fu Pan, Dayton Pan, Wen Fang Zhen, Zi Biin Pan, Li Zhen Fang, Hanson Tang, Yan Tang, Su Pan. Inset: a portrait of General Tso, by Piassetsky. Since then, the popularity of Chinese- American food has proved as enduring as any bold American culinary invention, including Coca-Cola, hamburgers and apple pie. Dishes on Chinese restaurant menus, like Gen. Tso’s, chop suey, chow mien, Happy Family or sweet and sour pork, may be Chinese in theory but they are actually as American as Ms. Pan’s family: three generations connected to China by varying degrees, who all take their part in seven-day workweeks at the restaurant.

Her mother and father, two brothers and husband all work there. Her 5-year-old son, Hanson, does his homework there after school. Her 4-year-old daughter, Summer, is staying with her grandparents in a semi-rural village in China where Ms. Pan, 31, grew up. Next year, when she’ll be old enough to start school, Summer will rejoin her parents and brother.

COURTESY PHOTO Yanyan Chen, Leo Lu, Yufu Lu and Wanwei Lu at China WOk in Port Charlotte. They are one of many families who came to America all at once or little by little, including the Huang family in Naples, owners of Szechuan Chinese Restaurant; or the Lu family in Port Charlotte, who run China Wok. Many, like Ms. Pan, came first to New York City’s Chinatown, and later followed relatives or loved ones to places like Southwest Florida. They have faced a variety of challenges, such as language and reconciling Chinese and American cultures.

“On the one hand, he was able to come here and be a lot more prosperous,” said Jessica Huang about her father, Michael Huang, owner of Szechuan Chinese Restaurant. “He could send money home to his mother, and also provide for our family. On the other hand, he misses home. His culture is still very much Chinese.”

KURT WILLIAMS/ FLORIDA WEEKLY Fu Pan, Dayton Pan,Wen Fang Zhen, Li Zhen Fang, Hanson Tang, Zi Bin Pan, Yan Tang and Su Pan at China Kitchen in Fort Myers. (See excerpts from Jessica Huang’s essay about her father on page 9).

Ms. Pan’s restaurant in Fort Myers, Chinese Kitchen, is in the humblest of locations, a tiny suite in a strip mall on Metro Parkway and Winkler Avenue. It’s the kind of out-of-the-way place where so many Chinese takeout joints are located. The food business is a means to support the children of immigrants, who are discovering a different American experience than their parents had known, hopefully one with even greater promise.

“It’s really the second generation to benefit from the hard work of the first generation,” said Cynthia Lee, the curator for Museum of Chinese in America in New York City.

She organized a 2005 exhibit at MOCA called “Have You Eaten Yet?” about Chinese immigrants and their families who created this cuisine for which Southwest Floridians seem to have an unabated hunger.

The show expressed “the phenomenon of Chinese restaurants,” Ms. Lee said. “How they were able to adapt to different cultural environments; what great entrepreneurs the first ones were and continued to be; how the restaurateurs tried to introduce something that seemed so exotic to mainstream American palates and how they tried to strike a balance.”

The dreams of many generations

Michael Huang, originally from Taiwan, came here to pursue “The American Dream,” he says. He and Sandy Huang grew up in China and have owned Szechuan Chinese Restaurant in Naples, with a full dining room and bar, for 20 years. Their children, 22-year-old Jessica and 24-yearold Elton (“Like the singer,” his sister explained) grew up in Naples. He played on the high school football team and is pursuing a career as an X-ray technician. She is a luminous literary talent, interested in poetry and dark Russian novels. They bear scant traces of their parents’ accents.

Elton grew up working at his parent’s restaurant after school.

“I would always come here right after football practice,” he said. “I started bussing tables first, then worked the cashier and did deliveries. I kind of did everything.”

The Huang family is rich with cultural diversity, a quality shared by other Chinese restaurant owners as well. At Jeff’s Gourmet Chinese Takeout & Delivery in South Fort Myers, many people are surprised to find a white woman from Superior, Wis., owner Barbara Lau, taking their order. Her husband, Jeff, home last week with a back injury, was born and raised in Hong Kong.

“A lot of times I say, ‘I’m his wife. I’m the owner,’ and they just look at me like ‘really,’” said Ms. Lau, 55. “They’re surprised. But Jeff has a following.” In the funny-grumpy way some couples talk about each other, she added, “He has a personality people love. I don’t get it, but they do.”

She met Mr. Lau when they worked together at a Chinese restaurant in Duluth, Minn. They followed her husband’s sisters to Fort Myers 13 years ago and have four children, including three boys. One girl, 19-year-old Melissa, also works at the restaurant. The family celebrates holidays Mr. Lau grew up with, like the Chinese New Year.

“A couple weeks ago was Moon Day,” Ms. Lau said. “It’s once a year on a different day. It came about as harvest day, because the moon is low and bright over there, and over here.”

Ms. Lau has no problem communicating in English, because it’s her native language. Others rely on their children or relatives who work at the restaurant to cross the language barrier. China’s national language, Mandarin, is an agreed upon set of speech patterns originating in Beijing. But many grew up speaking local variations of Chinese, exclusive to their village or province. Fujianese and Cantonese are examples of other variations of Chinese language.

People like 25-year-old Leo Lu, for example, grew up speaking some variation of Chinese at home, and English at school. He translated for his father, Yufu Lu, who speaks his native language, Fujianese, exclusively. They run China Wok in Port Charlotte.

Yufu Lu started out working at restaurants in New York City’s Chinatown in the 1980s. During that decade, the Chinese-American style of cuisine, originating with mid-19th century railroad workers, boomed there. It gave rise to Chinese takeouts, buffets and sit-down restaurants all over the country. Following relatives who moved to Orlando, Mr. Lu moved to Southwest Florida in the 1990s and opened China Wok in 2001.

“We found out this place is better,” Mr. Wu said. “This place is quieter (than New York City).”

A popular place to eat

With three times as many Chinese restaurants as McDonalds nationwide, according to Chinese Restaurant News, they are ubiquitous enough to be taken for granted.

Critics regularly dismiss the food as unauthentic and unhealthy. According to the founders of Zagat restaurant survey in a 2007 New York Times editorial, the state of Chinese Cuisine in America is “abysmal.”

Yet the America we know wouldn’t be the same without Chinese-American fast food. What would people working late at the office do without the comforting thought of fried rice, crispy duck or sweet and sour pork beckoning from a menu hidden in their desk drawer? And the pleasures of Chinese takeout, packaged in oyster pails and Styrofoam boxes with clever, complimentary little cookies is a comfort in the worst of times. Even during the week after the twin towers fell in Manhattan, for example, those who labored over hot woks were part of the fabric holding people in that city together. Chinese-American takeout was the subject of this paragraph in Jay McInerney’s latest novel, “The Good Life”

“To Luke, it seemed nothing short of miraculous that you could still pick up the phone and conjure up moo shu pork, shrimp toast, and fried dumplings, that men from Shaolin and Shanghai were fanning out on mountain bikes through the streets and avenues above Canal, bearing the sacraments of a New York Sunday night in plastic bags slung over their handlebars. This much of the metropolitan idea, at least, was intact. Smoking a cigarette under the awning of his building as the doormen politely ignored him, he counted five of them racing their bicycles across Seventy-seventh Street, ministering to the shaken populace at the end of this apocalyptic week.” 

largest collection of menus

>> Harvey Spiller, a Brooklyn-born “meat and potatoes” eater, became a connoisseur of Chinese food after moving to Manhattan in 1981. He also started collecting menus from Chinese restaurants. The collection, which he estimates at near 10,000 menus, from more than 100 nations, ranging in age from the 19th Century to today, earned him a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records for “largest menu collection.” Much of it appeared in MOCA’s 2005 exhibit, “Have you eaten yet?”

He has also written articles for Chinese Restaurant News and collects many other items, like watches. Some of his stories about Chinese restaurant owners are available in a book called “Gastropolis: Food and New York City,” published by Columbia University Press in 2009. (For more information on Mr. Spiller, check out his Web site, www.inspectorcollector.com.)

Although for many years he loved Gen. Tso’s chicken, his tastes now run toward Dim Sum. It’s difficult to find in Southwest Florida. Of dishes like Gen. Tso’s, he says, “I still eat it. I’m almost over it. Gen. Tso’s is crispy, greasy, fried, delicious. I went on a (Gen. Tso’s) kick for years.”

Asking Mr. Spiller which menu is his favorite was like asking him to choose between his children.

“In a collection with many gorgeous and beautifully designed and luxurious suede and leather and wood menus, I love them all,” he said. “So if you’re going to ask me my favorite, I’d say the one from Ho Hum. It’s a plain black and white, 4 inches by 11 inches, and it’s the most boring menu in my collection. When you have a collection of a lot of things, sometimes the simplest ones sing the loudest.”

His collection all began in the summer of 1981, at his new apartment in Manhattan, with “a strange noise at the door.”

“I thought I was being robbed,” Mr. Spiller said. “So I poked around the corner and I saw something under the doorjamb and there was a menu. It was interesting because it had typographical mistakes that were amusing. It was interesting because it had foods I didn’t know. It was interesting because it was free.”

That was the year, Mr. Spiller discovered, that a woman who owned a Chinese restaurant in his neighborhood began distributing menus to drum up business.

“Her staff was sitting around,” he said. “I don’t know what they were doing, picking their nails, chewing sunflower seeds. So she got them on their bikes, had them slip a menu under every door. It became, for a while, the most successful Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side. So without knowing it, I stumbled into a phenomenon.”