I now live in California. Every year I ski in Dodge Ridge, near Sonora, California, formerly a Gold Rush town. I usually eat at 2 Chinese restaurants in Sonora: Great Wall, and Wok & Sushi. Guess where the owners are from? Great Wall’s owners are from Fuzhou, and Wok & Sushi’s owners are from Fuqing. The Wok & Sushi owners were so excited to learn of my Fuqing ancestry when we chat, even though my knowledge of the language only consists of counting to 10 and simple kiddie words like: go eat, good bye, drink water ….

Glad you got the chance to experience ‘authentic’ Kansas City Chinese food. Crab Rangoon is definitely a big hit in KC. In China, cheese and cheese products are still relatively new on the culinary scene. So while it’s definitely more popular than it was 10 years ago, it is not commonplace yet. In Fuzhou, to buy cheese you had to go to Metro, a German megamall which has outlets in most larger Chinese cities. Another prohibitive factor is that cheese (especially good cheese) is still extremely expensive in China. I’m not a big cheese eater, and since it was so expensive, I basically just did without it while I was there. As a funny side note, I am pretty sure there is no Chinese word for “crab rangoon.” Whenever I overhear Chinese conversations in Chinese restaurants, they just use the English word “crab rangoon” rather than translating it into Chinese.

@ Ben: “…there are quite possibly more Changle natives living in the US than there are in Changle itself.”

Hmm, very interesting. The same could have been claim for my old hometown of Kaiping, Guangdong (开平, 广东省) over a decades ago. More natives living in the U.S. or overseas than the people in Kaiping itself!

It’s pretty obvious to most China watchers in the U.S. that the recent waves of Chinese immigrants are from Fuzhou. Being poor in wealth but entrepeneurial in spirit at the start, they would naturally be building on their business acumen & risk-taking “ventures” and in time some may achieve their materialistic dreams. The same could be applied to the various people within China itself – namely, the Sichuanese (四川人) and the Hunanese (湖南人).

Over the past decade, both these pools of immigrants to the coastal cities created the abundance migrant labour to fuel the Motherland’s huge infrastructure and manufacturing boom. Only more recently has the latter (i.e. Hunanese) being more astute and adventureous had succeeded in taking over that title of “Jews of China” (中国的犹太人).

As a side note, the old immigrants of Cantonese, Fujianese and Hakka (广东人, 福建人 和 客家人) were often referred as the “Jews of the East/Orient” – not Jews of China. All in all, a great discussion!

You are correct about Henan (Kaifeng to be exact) being home to an ancient community of Jews. From what I have gathered it started dwindling in the 1800’s and today there is barely anything left. I visited there a few years ago and was able to see the building which housed the old synagogue, as well as meet some old Chinese Jewish women. There isn’t much left, but it’s quite interesting for Jewish history buffs. My pics of my trip are here if anybody is interested.