Drive across the United States and you’ll be hard pressed not to run into a Chinese restaurant. With nearly 41,000 of them spread across the land, nestled in strip malls or occupying prime real estate along crowded boulevards, they’re more commonplace than McDonalds franchises—and decidedly more American than apple pie, as Jennifer 8. Lee explains in her seminal book about Chinese food in America, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. In fact, according to Lee, there are more Chinese restaurants in the country than McDonalds, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined. 

In places like New York, American-Chinese restaurants have deeply embedded themselves within the city's cultural fabric thanks to their garishly lit picture menus, trapezoidal takeout contains, and reputation for hawking fare like pork-fried rice with fries and chop suey. They hold a special place for Jews during Christmas time, and have become immortalized in hip-hop circles for providing greasy sustenance.  

But there’s a clear difference between a Chinese restaurant in China and an Chinese-American restaurant. Bring people straight from China into the latter, and most likely they will be terribly confused by all the zodiac placemats, fortune cookies, and dishes smothered by an extremely generous amount of corn starch. Even amongst Americans, there is still plenty of confusion. “Hey do you want some cream cheese wontons?” my Minnesotan roommate asks me. This is years ago. I am in New York City and she is ordering take-out Chinese.

“What? I’ve never heard of that in my entire life,” I say.

“But you’re Chinese!” she exclaims, equally confused.

Little did she know that dairy products are seldom used in Chinese food, and that most of the take-out dishes she grew up eating can't even be found in the mainland. For many like her, the Chinese-American restaurant was the first glimpse of Chinese culture—albeit one that promised a skewed representation of the rituals back home. 

To understand the idiosyncrasies at play, here are 8 truths about American-Chinese restaurants that need to be addressed. 

You won't find cream cheese wontons China, nor other American staples like chop suey or beef with broccoli. “People in China don’t eat as much fried rice [either],” Lee adds. The bulk of these dishes were created by accident. Chop suey, for example, was invented in 19th century by San Francisco chefs who threw a bunch of ingredients into a pan and unintentionally started a craze. Regarding cream cheese wontons—dairy itself isn’t terribly popular in the East, considering most East Asians are lactose-intolerant. There is yak cheese in China, but usually appears in places like Tibet. Inner Mongolia also has a wonderful milk tea drink made with pu’erh and raw milk, but by and large dairy isn’t consumed en masse.

Many of these dishes were created using available ingredients at the time because chefs didn’t have much else at their disposal. The substitutions occurred mostly in the greens department: broccoli was swapped for kailan; carrots, peas, and white button mushrooms were put in place of mustard greens or shiitakes. Other adaptations were geared towards appealing to an American palate. “Generally [food at American Chinese restaurants] is more sweet,” Lee says, “Sweet, fried, and chicken.”

Speaking of poultry, Lee notes that Americans lean toward white meat, whereas Chinese are more partial to dark. Bones don’t make a frequent appearance on the American-Chinese menus, but in China it’s a rare meal without a mouthful of them. “Americans don’t like bones,” Lee says. “Generally American-Chinese restaurants don’t do lamb, and they tend not to like jelly textures.” Sichuan, for one, has a rabbit dish that is literally more bones than meat. The difference is that Chinese people put a premium on texture. That’s why chicken feet—with all its cartilage and nearly no meat—is such a beloved dish. 

The sweet cookies packed in take-out bags or presented at the end of meals? “They’re Japanese,” Lee says of the cookies that have become a signature staple of American-Chinese eateries. Their origin story actually dates back to 19th century in Kyoto. Lee tracked down an amateur historian who told her that fortune cookies were based on a Japanese confection called tsujiura senbei, which were popularized by the confectionary companies in the West during World War II. By the late 1950s, 250 million fortune cookies were being consumed annually, nationwide. 

Because of immigration patterns, Chinese restaurateurs in America traditionally represented a limited pool of people from areas like Fujian, Hong Kong, and Guangdong. This was the demographic that introduced recipes for kung pao chicken, moo shu pork, and orange chicken—based off of Sichuan, Beijing, and Hunan dishes, respectively. This has been changing over the last decade, especially with an influx of immigration from mainland China.

You'll see different types of Chinese food trends in countries across the board. “In Thailand, there’s a heavy Chaozhou population. India is Hakka.”

By and large, there are a lot of underrepresented Chinese regional flavors that the vast majority of Americans aren’t exposed to. For example, the province of Anhui has a dish called hairy tofu that takes on the texture of blue cheese. They also have stinky fish, in where the carcass of the fish is left out to rot for weeks. These dishes are non-existent in the West. 

Just like the hamburger and its manifold interpretations in small pockets of America, regionality among American-Chinese restaurants exists too. The Chinese restaurants of Springfield, Missouri have a unique chicken stir-fry topped with cashews that you can’t get anywhere else in the country. Louisiana boasts Szechuan alligator and soy-vinegar crawfish. Cream-cheese wontons began in the mid-West, Philly cheesesteak rolls showed up in Philadelphia, and the chow mein sandwich is now a staple in New England. A dish like dan dan noodles is cooked completely differently in New York than in Los Angeles: In New York, the noodles have a heavier bean paste ratio and are slightly sweet. In Los Angeles, there is much more chili oil used. 

Even outside of the United States, there are other unusual local interpretations of Chinese dishes that reflect its ability to be remixed endlessly. “In India there’s a dish called Chicken Manchurian, and in Italy there’s fried gelato served in Chinese restaurants,” Lee says. 

There’s an unofficial network that connects American-Chinese restaurants across the nation. Kari-Out, according to Lee, makes most of the soy sauce packets in the United States. Fold Pak is responsible for two-thirds of takeout containers. To quote Lee from her book: “If McDonald’s is the Windows of the dining world (where one company controls the standards), then Chinese restaurants are akin to the Linux operating system, where a decentralized network of programmers contributes to the underlying source code.” She says the open source is spread via industry publications likes Chinese Restaurant News or via word of mouth by restaurant workers who move from state to state. 

Chinese people don’t receive separate menus at American-Chinese restaurants; the only real "secret" is to speak the Chinese language. Here's how it really works: When I’m at a very Americanized Chinese restaurant, I simply ask the waiter in Mandarin for an authentic dish. Most of the time, that dish is actually on the menu—it’s just not the one pushed forward in the lunch special or combo meal. Once, I even found water-boiled fish topped with red Sichuan peppercorns (a real Sichuan specialty) hidden in an American-Chinese restaurant menu in Los Angeles. 

Yes, there’s an uncanny amount of restaurants with the word Golden, Garden, Lucky, and Happy in them. This isn’t incidental. In China, restaurant names aren’t chosen for their quirkiness, but rather for their auspiciousness. This practice has carried over even in America. For example, "garden" in Mandarin, is yuan, which is a homophone for money. 

The most interesting thing to me about Chinese restaurants in America is that while the food may undergo a dramatic transformation for the sake of the masses, the superstitions are left untouched. The crystal ball, the fat happy Buddha, that bowl overflowing with gold ingots—even the cat with the moving paws (which is Japanese in origin, not Chinese)? Those pieces aren’t just decorations. They’re fengshui tactics to bring in more money, superstitions that have been transferred down through family lines over centuries. So while Chinese people may compromise their food, they definitely won’t adjust their rituals involving superstitions.