At the time, Fall River was a textile mill town mostly staffed by factory workers who had immigrated from Poland, Ireland and French Canada, and so Chinese restaurants tried to adapt. "And then there were tea shops in the back of laundries, and after a certain amount of time, you started getting restaurants."īut of course, the success of any restaurant was dependent on its ability to sell food. Laundries did not require a lot of language expertise," Lim says. "Many Chinese ended up opening up laundries. They came to cities on the East Coast like Fall River, looking for business opportunities. Many were coming from the West Coast after having worked on the country's Transcontinental Railroad, but they were being pushed out by hostility surrounding the federal Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of all Chinese laborers. "Well let's put it this way, I consider myself the expert on the chow mein sandwich, and when I was studying it, my friends dubbed me 'the chow mein sandwich chick,' " she says.Ĭhinese immigrants first started arriving in Fall River in the late 1800s. Lim studied the sandwich for her dissertation at Brown University. "Fall River booming with factories, the textile industry, and mostly a lot of workers, that's why the chow mein sandwich sold," she says.Īccording to anthropology professor Imogene Lim, the sandwich originated from earlier waves of Chinese immigration to Fall River. Immigration Law Fueled A Chinese Restaurant Boom The main reason for the sandwich's rise to popularity in the early 1900s was spurred by Fall River's factory worker population.
It's a piece of history that points to the city's patterns of immigration. They will whisper to the server, 'Do you have those burger sandwiches?' I say 'You mean the chow mein sandwich? Yes, we do,'" says Regina Mark, co-owner of Fall River's Mee Sum restaurant, a place that's been making chow mein sandwiches for more than 50 years.īut the sandwich is more than just a local oddity. "We have people come from New York or Chicago, and it's so funny. The dish has been a specialty of Chinese restaurants in the area for decades. The chow mein sandwich is in some ways exactly how you would imagine it: a portion of fried chow mein noodles with brown gravy poured over it, served on a no-frills hamburger bun. Imagine a sandwich that isn't so much a sandwich as it is a noodle dish, and you'd have what locals in Fall River, Mass., call the chow mein sandwich, a hybrid Chinese-American dish with roots in the city's factory worker past. Regina Mark, co-owner of Mee Sum Restaurant in Fall River, Mass., holds a chow mein sandwich, which the restaurant has served for more than 50 years.
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