Lots products would be considered in America as "classic" Chinese food actually isn't. The traditional Chinese chefs base their food on contrasting textures and also contrasting taste. This goes a whole lot farther compared to "classic" thick, sticky, gooey sweet-and-sour sauce that usually drape over exactly what is fried, especially chicken. Traditionally, you can use five basic flavors that really must be represented in Chinese cuisine to generate the taste complete: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and pungent. It's definitely more complex and not a flavor that the typical Western palate is used to.
But as with any adaptation, the origins come from the mother country but are actually tweaked a lttle bit in order to make them tastier to the natives and also to produce use in the indigenous ingredients from the new country. This adaptation for the local tastes make both food as well as the immigrants more palatable on the natives.
That's why food like chop suey (adapted from a traditional braised vegetable dish but using Western cabbage, carrots, onions, and broccoli), General Cho's Chicken (that is non-existent in China in which the real-life general is merely known for his war tactics), along with the very famous fortune cookie (containing its origins in Japan, not China, and was first served in Los Angeles in 1916) have learned to be generally known as comfort food and classics.
Fried rice in China isn't brown, it's white. Apart from the proven fact that it's got little components of vegetables and meat within it, it by no means looks like the fried rice you get in those cardboard boxes. To this day, brown fried rice means that it's burned; a common mistake when mostly men were immigrating to the New World and were instructed to work at jobs which didn't threaten the local men, which has been washing clothes and cooking food.
Much of Chinese-American food was concocted by these thrifty Chinese cooks who had to produce use in the leftover food. The most famous more likely to be a story about miners barging into a chow-chow, the old term for any Chinese restaurant and demanding to be fed following your restaurant was closed. Not wanting a riot as well as to lose money) the cook just mixed together every one of the leftovers he'd, seasoned them with soy sauce, and served it. He named the dish "tsap seui," which actually means "mixed or chopped pieces."
Chow Mein, literally "fried noodles" are stir-fried crunchy or soft noodles usually topped with Chop Suey. Sesame Chicken, Egg Foo Yung, and barbecued spareribs were also American Chinese concoctions. But, it doesn't really matter in the event the food is authentically Chinese or not ?what most of these diners worry about is that it's delicious.