One evening several friends went out to a local Chinese restaurant for a celebratory meal. Then they found out that someone, maybe a competitor, maybe just a person who nursed a real or imagined grudge against Chinese, had initiated a rumor that the police had found three skinned cats, labeled rabbits, in the restaurant's refrigerator.Īncient slur or not, wherever this rumor goes it affects how the locals feel about the Chinese in their midst, and it often impacts a restaurant's fragile bottom line: The once-prosperous proprietors became miserably unhappy, for they could not understand what had happened to all their patrons. But without the slightest warning business suddenly took a drastic drop. Everyone agreed that the food and service were good. It was the most successful eating place around, patronized by businessmen and citizens morning, noon, and night. In a town of thirteen thousand inhabitants, which was gradually blossoming into cityhood, there was a restaurant operated by three Chinese. How ripe small towns actually are for rumors was amply demonstrated a few years ago.

How old is old? The rumor about Fluffy's or Fido's being slipped into Chinese food by unscrupulous restaurateurs has been traced by British researchers to the earliest years of the British Empire in England and to the 1850s in the United States:

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