Is the food at Chinese food Restaurants in America real Chinese food?!

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Taken from one of my recent answers:

"A good portion of Chinese foods served in the US do not taste that authentic. Do not expect to find dishes like egg foo young, lemon chicken, chop suey and crab rangoon in China. Those free crispy noodles with sweet and sour dipping sauce do not exist as well. Finding teriyaki chicken in China is possible but you will only find it in Japanese restaurants. Hunan beef, Szechuan chicken, and ma po tofu are completely different dishes in China; authentic versions of those dishes are not that friendly. Mongolian beef is not as sweet and it got a completely different name. Kung pao chicken is one of the most molested Chinese dishes currently available. This dish got way too many local variations/modifications and there are MANY different versions available in China; depending on the region, the ones commonly found in the US could also be found in China. Authentic Sichuan kung pao chicken is quite different from many local variations. Moo shu pork got local variations too. Some versions served around Beijing and Tianjin area looked completely different but somehow the taste was rather similar to good US versions; crappy US versions tasted way off. LOL Those reddish BBQ pork ribs are available in Cantonese BBQ places. The only difference - they tasted A LOT better. Depending on where you're at in China, the selection for fillings of dumplings and pot stickers could be rather huge. Other than limited selection on fillings, dumplings and pot stickers in the US are not that molested. They are just boring compared to the ones available in China. Egg rolls do exist and they are fairly common. The most commonly found version in the US is among one of the cheapest versions available in China. The ones made with shitake mushrooms and pork (and sometimes shrimp) tasted way better."
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Something new:

Here's a picture of one of the variations of an authentic Chinese dish. Many people are very familiar with this dish's name but I bet most of them have never seen the authentic version befoer. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/epaper/… Those who could recognized this dish immediately are Chinese, or people who are experienced with authentic Chinese foods from Northern regions or people who have visited Northern regions of China before. What is this dish's name? Moo shu pork. :)

Fried rice is pretty common in many parts of China. However, if you search for fried rice images with Chinese characters, you'll find a lot of fried rice looked pretty light in color because they either don't or contained little soy sauce. Ingredients like peas and carrots are not as common too. If you're curious, you could look up Chinese characters yourself by looking up "fried rice" in Wiki then copy and paste. :)

Fried wontons do exist in China. However, fried wontons are not very common in many regions of China. Actually, rare would be a more appropriate term to describe fried wontons in many parts of China.

One of my recent answers

no, never.
China has different soil, temperature and vegetable seeds.

The way they cook is different. The prep is different. There is much more vegetable cooking and far less sweet sticky food in china on the street and in restaurants.
Most of the food I saw, living there a year, was nothing like sweet, sugary sticky orange American chinese food.

that's a very debatable and hard to answer question since china is such a big country, so there are numerous types and varieties of "chinese" cuisine. Usually though, Chinese restaurants here have been highly Americanized to suit American tastes, especially buffets. To get truly authentic cuisine, try Chinatown! (:

if you go to a chinese restaurant in the midst of like american towns, then most likely the food there is americanized. if you go to like chinatown, where there are a bunch of chinese stores around you, than thats real chinese food. its as chinese as it can get. like literally, chicken fingers :)

im chinese

The authenticity of the dish depends on the quality of the restaurant. If you want to try making some delicious, authentic Chinese dishes yourself, check out these recipes at http://www.globalfoodsonline.com/cook/

http://www.globalfoodsonline.com/

They do eat some of it but the food in the restaurants here is more americanized. To get authentic Asian food you have to go travelling or have asian friends and go there for dinner.