As most Americans know: Chinese restaurants almost never close on Christmas. Early Chinese immigrants were not Christian, and losing an entire day of sales for a holiday they didn’t understand did not make economic sense, especially when Chinese restaurants occupied a tenuous position in America. It’s hard to imagine now, when there are over 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States (McDonald’s, for scale, has just over 14,000 restaurants), but before Americans were crowding into Chinese restaurants for Christmas dinner, they were more interested in crowding these restaurants out.

In “Eating History: 30 Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine,” Andrew F. Smith explains that Chinese restaurants proliferated during the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, catering to Chinese miners and railroad workers. After the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was passed as a result of worries that Chinese immigrants were stealing jobs from white men, labor unions set their targets on Chinese restaurants. Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, published a pamphlet in 1902 subtitled “Meat vs. Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism.”

Labor unions even organized boycotts against Chinese restaurants, according to research by Gabriel J. Chin and John Ormonde. These boycotts rarely succeeded in their aim of driving the restaurants out of business. As one union organizer lamented, “A lot of union men seem to have, I am sorry to say, a fancy for chop suey.”

The unions next attempted to get a law passed barring white women from Chinese restaurants, exploiting public fears that the Chinese were a kind of “moral contagion.” White women were flocking to these so-called dens of iniquity in part because they were a way to escape rigid racial and gender expectations. Chinese restaurants may have allowed white women to smoke opium, but they also employed them in a time when only around 15 percent of women had jobs outside the home.

Jewish people and African-Americans also patronized those early Chinese restaurants in noticeable numbers. As one newspaper from 1892 put it so delicately, “Whites, blacks and Mongolians mingled without sign of prejudice.”