In her 2003 article "I'll take chop suey": Restaurants as agents of culinary and cultural change, Samantha Barbas finds that Chinese American food is shaped not only by a question of authenticity, but also orientalism. Barbas believes that American Chinese food was a fad not based only on preference of American palates, but on white nationalism, noting descriptions of Chinese restaurants of the 1800s as “strangely barbaric” and calling them “the Bohemians' exotic fantasies”. The view of Chinese American food as gritty and exotic led to the need for foods that suspended belief, satisfying American palates while still being foreign enough to be marveled at. Curated by American perceptions of Chinese Americans as weaker or subservient post-Gold Rush, Barbas believes that “By distancing foods of Chinese origin from people of Chinese origin, and by reaffirming Chinese Americans' subordinate status through the repeated invocation of racial stereotypes, white Americans were able to adopt Chinese American dishes into their diet in spite of their hostilities toward Asian immigrants.”
Through looking at Barbas’ analysis of Chinese American, we can see that Westernized dishes that other writers criticize for their inauthenticity, like egg foo young, become layered beyond discussions of what is authentic or not, and into the realm of Chinese American sacrifice.