AMERICAN NOTES: Chinoiserie

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One of the more visible repercussions of Richard Nixon's China trip has been a sudden American appetite for things Chinese. In New York City's Chinatown, according to one food wholesaler's estimate, restaurant business has increased 25% since the President went to Peking. Part of the rise may have been due to the recent Chinese New Year, but the televised spectacle of the Nixons sitting down to eight-course Mandarin dinners obviously set many salivary glands to work.

Across the nation, there was a great fumbling and clicking of chopsticks—an item that restaurants often ran out of, as Americans accustomed to forks and chop suey suddenly demanded authenticity. Instead of the familiar Cantonese cuisine, spicier Mandarin dishes enjoyed a vogue. Some adventurous diners even demanded preserved eggs and shark's-fin soup.

Other businesses exploited the faddish fascination. Delta Airlines took out newspaper ads written in Chinese. Books about China sold briskly. The Harvard Co-op in Cambridge was offering do-it-yourself acupuncture kits with diagrams of the body's critical points—but without the needles.

It was an intriguing display of popular psychological accommodation to a new turn in foreign policy. There was, of course, no evidence that the Chinese were overcome by a corresponding yen for hamburgers.