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Many Chinese Americans also opened restaurants. Most early Chinese restaurants were run as family businesses; generally the husband worked as the cook and dishwasher in the kitchen while the wife worked as waitress, barmaid, and cashier in the front, which gave her greater contact with the white and Chinese community. At times the recipes were simplified or changed for white patrons. Yet Chinese restaurants and cooks imported vast quantities of herbs, dried fish and fruits, dried mushrooms, sweets, and rice from China, creating a lasting, albeit modified cuisine in the United States. Chinese food was an immediate, popular and influential cultural presence in the American West. Both in large cities and rural towns across the West, Chinese restaurants started as a service for immigrant men, but eventually drew more non-Chinese customers. Chinese restaurants also served as an important center of Chinese economic, political, and social life.
Small Chinese grocery stores were also important enterprises before the 1940s. Families often lived in the rear of the store. "They all lived in the rear of their grocery store, which also exported dried shrimp and seaweed to China. Great-Grandma…took care of the children, made special cakes to sell on feast days, and helped with her husband’s work.” After the May Fourth Movement in China (1919) popularized women’s rights, Chinese women in the United States began to work outside the home in larger numbers. Yet they faced hostility and workplace discrimination, and often found only low-paying jobs sewing in sweat shops and processing food in canneries. 41
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