The first time the “takeaway” emoji popped on my cellphone, it struck me as oddly familiar. Although the exact image varies across operating systems, it usually features an oyster pail with an image of a pagoda on it; sometimes you can make out English in a font stylized to resemble Chinese characters.

The oyster pail — a folded, waxed paper food container — was patented by Frederick Weeks Wilcox in 1894, and as its name suggests, was originally intended to hold shucked oyster meat. According to The New York Times, it was an unknown designer at a packaging company in the 1970s who first added the pagoda and what is now known as the “wonton font.” At the time, Chinese restaurants had just begun to discover the utility of the tiny white boxes for transporting stir-fried dishes — often laden with grease and sauce — to the homes of customers who ordered by phone. Soon, the oyster pail had become as much a symbol of Chinese food in the West as kung pao chicken or the fortune cookie.

Curiously enough, this invention — along with Chinese food delivery itself — runs counter to a belief that millions of Chinese had drilled into them growing up: “Eat it while it’s hot.”

Chinese people’s love of hot food dates back millennia. As early as the Neolithic period, advanced pottery-making techniques in the area around the Yellow River Basin allowed people to share freshly cooked food. The oldest chopsticks yet discovered were unearthed further south, in the Yangtze region, at a site dating back 5,000 to 7,000 years. They, too, suggest the popularity of food too hot to handle.

But once hot food is packaged in a takeaway box, it’s easy for condensation to form on the inner walls. This rapidly building heat and humidity has a detrimental effect on the quality of the food within, causing delicate crusts to collapse or decreasing the intensity of seasoning.

To make things worse, Chinese dishes are often laden with sauce or oil. And hot, moist food is the enemy of all packaging, easily spoiling paper-based containers. Most lovers of Chinese food have likely experienced how takeout can turn from a satisfying dining experience to an on-land oil spill in a matter of minutes.

In contrast, Japanese sushi seems much better suited for takeaway dining. Despite this, people tend to prefer visiting fancy Japanese restaurants to eat sushi.

So if it’s not the nature of the food itself that determines whether or not it’s suitable for takeout, then what is? The answer largely rests in price.

The first premise of making takeaway food is that labor is cheap, and China has long been a source of cheap labor. To name just one example, the influx of low-wage immigrants from China helped make New York’s Chinatown a center of the garment industry in the United States. The same is true of Chinese restaurants, where the first immigrants from China struggling to put down roots were willing to accept much lower wages than locals, because even then, they earned several times what they would in their hometown.

Cheap immigrant labor allowed owners of Chinese restaurants to gain a competitive advantage through the sheer number of workers, for example, by employing workers to wash dishes, since they were cheaper and more reliable than machines. And legal immigrants without kitchen skills would be sent out to make deliveries — after all, it’s easy to find friends or relatives who can’t cook but need a job. By the mid-20th century, the extremely low labor costs of delivery began to match up with the growing demand from people who either didn’t want to cook at home or go out to eat.

The second driving force behind food delivery is also related to cost: rent. The number of customers that a restaurant can serve is limited by the size of the venue. Chinese restaurants are very cost-sensitive, and rent is one of the most significant expenses. While the efficiency of a kitchen is restricted by the number of people the restaurant can seat, offering takeaway can break this limitation. By providing delivery, restaurants can cater to the largest number of customers possible at the lowest possible rental cost, which is also how Chinese bosses make their money.

Unfortunately, the rise of Chinese takeaway delivery led to Chinese food increasingly being labeled as “low status.” In the prologue to her new book, “Invitation to a Banquet,” British author Fuschia Dunlop writes: “Chinese food may be popular, but it’s still widely seen abroad as cheap, low-status, and junky. While Western consumers are willing to pay exorbitant sums for sushi or European tasting menus, Chinese restaurateurs still struggle to persuade customers that fine Chinese food is worth its price.”

Some restaurateurs have broken the mold. In 2021, A. Wong in London became the first Chinese restaurant outside Asia to receive two Michelin stars. In the United States, new fast-casual restaurants like Junzi are trying to change people’s perceptions of Chinese food as “greasy and heavy.” However, the stereotype of Chinese food in the West as “cheap and low status” seems to be as hard to escape as the ever-present oyster pail.

But maybe the “cheap” label is not necessarily a bad thing, since it also means something else: ubiquity. Low-priced Chinese food, delivered to your home in oyster pails, is never far away. It allows friends to share food late at night, Chinese students living abroad to get a taste of home, and countless Asian immigrants to have a place to work. Attempts to offer high-quality Chinese food are certainly laudable, but if one day Chinese food was to become a symbol of “high-end” dining like French cuisine, I think it will have lost more than it has gained. 

(Header image: Visuals from VCG and emojis.wiki, reedited by Sixth Tone)