The dish named “chop suey” comes from Toisan, a district south of Canton, in China, where it combined leftover vegetables chopped up and fried up with noodles.
It was brought over to America by Chinese workers.
The American addition was probably the addition of meat: the very poor in China probably would have rarely had meat seating around as a leftover item.
Chop Suey comes from the Cantonese “tsap seui”, which means mixed scraps.