Yiyun Huang and Dan Du analyze Chinese luxuries–tea and Nankeen cloth–in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Huang examines controversies over tea’s medicinal value on the eve of the American Revolution. Relying on European knowledge transferred from China, those in colonial America either embraced the beverage’s curative power over their mental and physical well-being or attacked tea as a baneful weed that harmed American bodies and body politic, thus marking their identities as loyalists or patriots in the political storm. Du traces the changing cultural and market value of the Chinese textile, Nankeen, in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century America. While the Nankeen, with a natural yellowish color, was an imported luxury to make male attire in England, nineteenth-century Americans not only tailored Chinese nankeens into a wider variety of clothing but also manufactured imitation products by dyeing U.S. textiles or growing brown cotton in the South, aiming to achieve cultural and economic independence. However, as white cotton and industrial textiles grew predominant, Nankeens became “colored people’s cotton” in the Gilded Age United States.

Julia Haoran Ni and Yi Sun examine Chinese food and pandas in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ni investigates the cultural and social influences of Lao Gan Ma, the chili sauce made in Guizhou, China, in the American Midwest. Owing to the growth of spicy Chinese food in contemporary U.S. society, the sauce has been a commercial success in America since the early 2000s. Moreover, serving as the gateway for Midwestern American youth to engage with Chinese food, the sauce has influenced American dining habits and fostered intercultural awareness among the younger generation. Sun elaborates the political and cultural significance of Chinese pandas. The Sino-American “panda diplomacy” began in 1941, when the “fuzzy” ambassadors projected a positive image of China while garnering American public’s support for Chinese struggles during WWII. After Richard Nixon’s visit to China, the pandas gifted or loaned to U.S. zoos became the icon of a thawing Cold War, the facilitator of environmental education in America, and the bridge for U.S.-China scientific collaborations. Henceforth, the pandas have been signifying the non-confrontational form of U.S.-China engagement even amidst heightened tensions today.