Interesting, though I've never actually seen "chop suey" outside the USA and have heard from several sources that it is not a dish that originated in China. So what is the name of the dish that provided the inspiration for "chop suey"?
chop suey, or even chop sui, incidentally is not and cannot be a Mandarin Chinese word. The phonemes are all wrong in "chop" - Mandarin syllables cannot end with "p" - and there are no likely words from the Chinese "sui" that fit the bill except possibly for the one that can mean "fragments" and another that can mean "essence" but usually means "marrow or spinal matter". Other options are "age", "follow", shatter", "tunnel" and "although".
There is no "sue", "suey" or "suei" in Mandarin phonetics, though "uei" was the old way of writing "ui" which is why I reverted straight to "sui" when I thought of the options above. I also thought about "cui" (pr. like "tsui") but also found nothing that fits with the possible exception of "crisp" (like a fresh vegetable).
I suppose that it could be a common name in some no-longer-spoken version of Chinese, but it seems unlikely.
If that is the case, how did 'char siew" come about?
chow fun in Cantonese is obviously related to 'chao fan' (fried rice) in Mandarin.
#20. "Char siew" appears to be a name for thin strips of slightly sweetish spice flavoured strips(usually red/orange colour) barbecued or roasted pork without the any skin compared to the usual Chinese style whole roast pig which is then chopped up into huge chunks and hung on hooks for customers to order smaller individual portions.It is more a Cantonese,Hokkien,Teochew Southen Chinese dialect term mostly used by the Chinese community that have migrated to other S E Asian countries.
You are absolutely correct to say that there is no equivalent Mandarin word for "chop swei" or "chop suey" as used in the States.
Incidentally "chow" is Cantonese for fried food as in "chow fun/fan(rice)".However,"chow hor fan",a delicious hawker food dish, is fried broard rice noodles with prawns,pork,offal,(sometimes beef)garlic,spring onions plants,slices of ginger,pepper,salt in a gravy of seseme oil slightly thickened with corn/tapoica starch.
The story I always heard about chop suey involved the Chinese workers who built the railroads in the west (of the U.S.)
Supposedly, because only men were allowed in from China, they had to do their own cooking & washing. Because of prejudice, they were prohibited from doing certain railroad jobs, & thus advancing. The story goes that these bachelor workers threw together food from what was available & attempted to make familiar food without actually knowing how to cook. Since the non-Chinese rail workers also lacked women to do their cooking, it was a logical step for some of the Chinese to fill this market niche. This is also the reason that people of Chinese descent in the U.S. were associated with the laundry business, from those early workers who became laundry entrepreneurs in the railroad camps.
I believe "chop" is some mutation or mis-heard version of a word meaning "fast" or "quick", as in "chop-chop", meaning "hurry up". I don't know if it originated in the U.S. or is some arrogant outgrowth of colonialism. If "suey" resembles in any way a word for food in any Chinese dialect, maybe the original "chop suey" was something that resulted from the linguistic/cultural clash/hash in the railroad camps, & the Chinese food purveyors just shrugged & went with the flow.
There are other slang words in English that resulted from mangling other languages. For instance, the cowboy word "hoosegow" for jail is an obvious version of "juzgado", Spanish for "judged".
Roast pork, char siew,liver sausages seem to be served mainly for lunch,sometimes in breakfast tim sum but not so often for dinner.Wonder why?
#21 - I know "chow" is fried things - in Mandarin it's 'chao' and pronounced basically the same way. I do not know if the tone is the same, but as the words are obviously of the same origin, I would think so. I think it's quite honestly merely a difference of spelling - pinyin vs. whatever is used to Romanize the Cantonese language. So it's one of the words that survived the linguistic split.
Since I don't speak any other Chinese dialect, I can't argue with the idea that it comes from somewhere else. I know a little Taiwanese but not enough to begin to wonder whether it's a similar word here - I imagine it would be, as Taiwanese and Hokkien/Hoklo are very, very close. Taiwanese is in many ways closer to Cantonese than it is to Mandarin. I guess the easy answer would be to go to the market one day and just ask how one says the word for that kind of meat in Taiwanese.
(I should have said, as I don't speak any other Chinese language, since once you get rid of all the political implications of calling them different languages and look at it from a purely linguistic point of view, they aren't dialects anymore, barring a possible exception with Taiwanese/Hokkien).
#24.25."Chap chai" in Hokkien and Teochew dialects and "sup choy" in Cantonese seems vaguely and by a long stretch of imagination to sound phoneticially similar to "chop suey" the term used in the States and also refers to the mixed meat/veg dish proffered as such.In Southern Chinese dialects "chap" and "sup"stands for the numeral 10(Mandarin "seh") or it can also be taken to mean a "mixed" veg/meat/seafood dish. Vegetables are called "chai" or "choy" but can also refer to dishes with many different ingridents.All this talk is making me hungary and yearn for some "char siew" with "chow hor fan" and I am going down to the street hawkers store to see if some is still available!Cheers!
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<hr>#10. (cm)"Char siew" is the Cantonese/Hokkien dialect for "chop suei"."Chow fun" is fried rice in Cantonese.<hr></blockquote>
Char siew is the Cantonese for a dish of bbq/roast pork with rice.
"seh" isn't Mandarin either. :) You mean "shi" with a rising tone. Vegetables in Mandarin are "cai" (tsai is closer to the true pronunciation) but it doesn't sound enough like "suey"...though as I said I don't speak any other Chinese languages so really I just don't know.
That said, #27's answer is simpler and more sensible so I'm gonna go with that. Which still doesn't tell me what it's called in Mandarin, but I can find out easily enough by going to the market and asking for the name of the dish in both Taiwanese and Chinese.
It isn't served here with rice, though, except at some Hakka restaurants. Generally it's a side dish - they slice a giant piece of pink meat thinly and top with a savory plum sauce, green onion and shredded ginger. You eat it on the side of whatever you're having as your main course (I usually get it along with digua ye - sweet potato leaves - or dou pi - a dish of tofu that is thin and flat like skin - and a bowl of dry noodles).
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