YES, VIRGINIA, THERE WAS A GENERAL TSO, and he appears to have been fond of his chicken. We’re not sure whether it was anything like the sweet, crispy dish beloved by East Coast diners. But the man is real, if not his bird.

Tso was a Chinese general who made a name for himself quashing mid-19th-century rebellions. Last year, an American reporter went to Tso’s rural birthplace in Hunan province and spoke with his descendants. While they confirmed the existence of their ancestor’s legendary recipe, they neither knew how to make it nor had they learned of its New World notoriety.

The lesson here is that Chinese food as Americans know it is both authentic and a load of hooey. We do some sleuthing as to the history and meaning of popular Chinese dishes.

“Almost every early Chinese immigrant came from the Pearl River Delta Region,” says Yong Chen, associate history professor at the University of California, Irvine. Chen refers to a southern, seaward part of China, which favors lightly-flavored seafood, vegetables, and rice. The newcomers who opened restaurants hawked what Chen calls “inexpensive” and “convenient” cuisine. Few had culinary backgrounds, but they could open corner joints with very little capital.

In the American tradition, marketing trumped cleaver skills. The restauranteurs who persisted were the ones who adapted their menus to Western palates. What’s more, says Chen, they gave their dishes colorful names.

This gave rise to “Chop Suey,” which means “different pieces”. Commonly used back home to refer to a frugal meal of giblets and entrails, the American incarnation is said to have evolved from a mandate given in 1896 by a visiting Chinese diplomat. When the diplomat directed his chefs to make a Chinese-style stir-fry using American ingredients, the result was one of the all-time casualties of fusion food: a mixture of bean sprouts, water chestnuts, celery, mushrooms, and meat, seasoned with soy sauce and dumped over rice.

“This is a vivid example of the making and remaking of history,” says Chen, likening Chop Suey, which swept the nation, to Thanksgiving. Of course, nobody then tried to mass market turkey from a can, as did La Choy with Chop Suey. The Detroit-based manufacturer met with astonishing success.

Some dishes don’t make any attempt to hide their hyphenated backgrounds. Egg Foo Young, for example, is essentially a Chinese omelet.

Still other dishes are named after the feeling they conjure when eaten, such as a divine seafood soup called Fu Tiao Chang, which translates to “Buddha jumps over the wall.”

Still others conjure their own lore. You are more likely to find “Crossing the bridge noodles,” a layered noodle dish, in the non-take-out portion of a sit-down Chinese restaurant. The dish refers to the daily journey made by the dedicated wife of a secluded scholar. As legend has it, the wife once fainted, says Jacqueline Newman, editor of Flavor and Fortune magazine. When she came to, the layer of oil floating above the noodles preserved their heat.

Then are the dishes named after picturesque likenesses, such as “ants climbing up a tree”; a dish to be found in Szechuanese menus. The “tree” are long strands of cellophane noodles, speckled with “ants,” or marinated ground pork.

If your local Shanghainese restaurant gets them right, lion’s head meatballs are pork meatballs as large as a human fist, presented on a bed of sauteed greens. The greens form “lion’s manes” billowing around the “heads.”

Other dishes are simply transliterated into exotic-sounding concoctions that managed to become popular in spite of a general incomprehensibility. “Moo Goo” refers to mushrooms, and “gai” is chicken. “Chow mein” are simply fried noodles, and the “mu shu” of “mu shu pork” are the brownish “wood ear” fungus featured in the dish, which comes with pancakes.

The fortune cookie, a total Americanism, was a San Francisco restauranteur’s attempt to inspire the homeless with the biblical messages tucked inside. He later invented a machine that made the cookies by the thousands.

Perhaps Chinese food was born to be tongue-in-cheek. During the war against Japanese aggression, the Chinese invented dishes that mimicked fighting, says Chen. Some replicated the crackle of gunfire.