Why did sailing ships so often employ Chinese cooks?

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Discrimination against the Chinese was clearly a key factor, excluding them from higher paid and more desirable jobs aboard ship. Here is a quote from the article "‘I Espied a Chinaman’: Chinese Sailors and the Fracturing of the Nineteenth Century Pacific Maritime Labour Force" by John T. Grider, published in the journal Slavery & Abolition (2010).

White sailors did not mind when Chinese worked in domestic jobs, such as cooks, stewards, cabin boys, mess boys, storekeepers, bakers, porters, pantrymen, and waiters. In domestic roles Chinese did not pose a threat to white concepts of labour-based masculinity, but when Chinese worked in the rigging or in the engine room of steamships, resentment grew. Anger towards Chinese sailors increased substantially when the Pacific Mail Steamship Company replaced white and black sailors with their Chinese counterparts in 1867 in order to save money on wages and food stores.

During the early nineteenth century, very few Chinese men shipped out aboard foreign vessels as seamen. Most Chinese men who did ship out did so as cooks and stewards, and they eventually became a common feature on Pacific vessels by midcentury.

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