TSO WHAT?
I always love a good food documentary. Last night I watched The Search for General Tso. Though a little bland, the doc had some funny bits and interesting ones too. Most interesting was the reverence paid to General Tso. One of the central questions of the film was “Who was General Tso?” and the documentary’s main take-away was that Zuo Zongtang was a brilliant commander who never lost a battle and is still today, 130 years after his death, loved by the people of his home province of Hunan.
Left out of the film was that General Tso was responsible for some of the bloodiest conflicts in history, such as the Taiping Rebellion, which resulted in an unknown number of deaths (by some counts something like twenty-five or even up to fifty million people.) That he was also a notorious xenophobe and a genocidal maniac — crushing peasant uprisings, entire minority populations, and purging all Russian and Ottoman influence from Western China — was somehow neglected too. Why is that omission a curious one? Well, a key feature of the documentary was the hardship faced by Chinese restaurant owners in America during the Chinese Exclusion Act era and then again during the height of the Cold War. Because it was a food show there was serious discussion of America's inherent racism and how that resulted in restaurants being unfairly forced to amend their menus to appeal to the American palate, how the popularity of chop suey, that took the country by storm in the 1950s and made Chinese cooks and restaurant owners piles of money, waned with the rise of Maoism in China.
I found the erasure of who and what Tso the man really was and the replacement of that with stories of the struggle of Chinese immigrants and business owners a shocking and dishonest portrayal. Eliminating the dark side to this character and framing his life entirely in the light, avoiding all complexity and realism, is, to me, remarkable. Yes, the Chinese Exclusion Act was absolutely terrible but only in contrast to modern Western policy. How does this decade-long exclusion of Chinese immigrants contrast to the situation in China during Tso’s time?
Well, unless you're a history scholar, the situation was probably far worse than you imagine. For example, just five years before the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law in the US, General Tso himself, beloved, was responsible for the killing of four million Muslims in Western China. They were put to death for daring to complain about their mistreatment, demanding the most basic human rights, and then eventually fighting back. Who would doubt that, if General Tso was in charge of US immigration policy at the time of the Act he wouldn’t have just closed the border or imposed burdensome taxes but more likely just rounded up and killed everyone considered problematic? That would seem about right to me. And I think it’s also a safe to bet that even the families of those resisting would have been hunted down, castrated, forced into slavery, and "reeducated." Why? Because extermination and brutality was kinda his jam and he did exactly this to his opponents during the Dungan Revolt. According to some sources, the main site of the rebellion, the province of Gansu, saw its "population reduced" from 15 million to just one million. General Tso himself reported on the date of the Muslim rebels:
With the exception of the two thousand or more Moslems who fled together with Pai Yen-hu, there are no more than sixty thousand of the original seven to eight hundred thousand Sehnsi Moselems who have survived to be rehabilitated in [G]ansu.
So, “who was General Tso?” The film essentially ignored who he was and what he did throughout his life while delving fairly deeply into the plight of Chinese-Americans. Huh? I am not arguing at all that we should ignore the Chinese Exclusion Act or the suffering of immigrant populations. No, in fact, I would happily watch more documentaries on these themes and could easily argue for everyone learning more in school. However, to refer to that and other such policies as examples of egregious discrimination while simultaneously glorifying General Tso, and thereby his deeds, with a documentary about a dish that already immortalizes the man, well, that’s about as ridiculous as it gets and just too much to swallow.
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