In searching the NYPL LEO  (and their research catalogue is CATNYP, adorable no?) I discovered there were 166 holds on 19 copies of the Fortune Cookie Chronicles at the NYPL as of May 1 (none seem to be in stock, oddly, they are all on order…didn’t this book come out two months ago?).

This made me curious about other libraries.

• San Francisco Public Library has 71 holds on 40 copies (what’s with the 3-star rating?)
• Seattle Public Library had 185 holds (156 active, 29 inactive) on 33 copies (wow)
• Los Angeles Public Library had all 10 copies checked out.
• Chicago Public Library had 12 copies, all out or on hold.
• Boston Public Library had 11 of 12 copies out or on hold.
• Brooklyn Public Library had 10 copies out or on hold.
• Queens Public Library’s catalogue is down for computer maintenance, but they should have a bunch.

Yay.

Sometimes people ask how it came to be that I would write a story on Chinese restaurants. The story actually starts two years before the book with a story I did for the New York Times, published in January 2003, on a Fuzhounese immigrant family that travelled from New York City to rural Georgia to run a Chinese restaurant.

This is one of my favorite lines from the article:

She was leaving the only place in the country that had an identity to the Fujianese: New York City. Other parts of the United States are not called Indiana or Virginia or Georgia. Instead they are collectively known as waizhou — Mandarin Chinese for ”out of state.”

For the Fujianese, waizhou is more than a geographic description. It is the white space left over where there is no New York, no Chinatown, no East Broadway. Waizhou is where fathers and sons go away for weeks and months at a time to work 12-hour days in Chinese restaurants. Waizhou is crisscrossed by Greyhound bus routes and dotted with little towns, all of which either already have or could use a Chinese restaurant. Waizhou schools are better. In waizhou, supermarkets sell crab meat prepackaged in boxes.

The family makes up one chapter in my book. Often people tell me it’s their favorite chapter because of its bittersweet ending.

I taped another television segment today, though this one is not intended for an American audience, and strictly speaking, may actually be banned from within our borders. Suffice it to stay, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles may be immortalized as part of U.S. propaganda.

Anyway, we did (yet another) shot of me walking. Television people always seem to take shots of people walking. It is a safe harbor footage they can use for voiceovers and cutaways.

I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked to walk for television. I have walked at ABC, for CNN, for CBS, for this unnamed propaganda piece. I have walked inside buildings, down hallways, on streets. I have walked alone. I have walked with another person. I have walked with the camera fixed on a tripod from far away. I have walked with the camera man right in front of me, walking backwards himself. I have walked north-south, east-west. I have had to walk down the same street twice in different directions.

The walking shots really amuse me, because as a print reporter it comes across as artificial. I would not be walking if they were not asking me to walk. It is not like getting B-roll of people working on my computer, where I am actually e-mailing and they happen to record me doing something I was going to do anyway. And it is not like an interview, where clearly the person is being asked to speak to a camera, but the viewer knows that someone off camera has clearly asked a series of questions regardless of whether that interviewer actually appears.

The walking shot is like pretending to be natural but it’s actually not. Somewhere between reality and fiction.

So Wednesday afternoons, the NYT bestsellers are revealed. Today the list comes out for the the week closing Saturday, April 5, and I think after a happy three-week run, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles will fall off the extended list.

After popping in at #26 during my second week of publication, the last two weeks, I have squeaked in at #34 and #33 without expecting to make it. So I feel like the girl who got the surprise bronze medal (who is generally happier than the person who gets the unexpected silver medal, except for Paul Wylie in 1992, the happiest silver medal).

The burst of April books is likely to push it off, plus I can sense from my Amazon ranking it’s slowing, but not too badly, just enough to tip it over. Fortune Cookie Chronicles is just chugging along…

Today I got my 20th review on Amazon (it’s a really short one though), so now the book has 17 five-star and 3 four-star ratings, which computes to 4.85 (and thus rounds up to 5 stars).

I feel like I’m computing some kind of GPA.

Based on my calendar. Apologies to everyone who is falling by the wayside :(.

The New York Chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association is holding a panel tomorrow, called “So you want to publish a book? A panel for your book publishing fantasies to come true.”

We will cover:
 
·         What do you need to get started?
·         How much research is required?
·         Common mistakes writers make.
·         What comes first, the publisher or the book?
·         How do you find a publisher for a book?
 
And other questions.

Panelists so far:

• Geeta Anand, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer with The Wall Street Journal, Author of ‘The Cure’
• Jennifer 8. Lee, New York Times writer for Metro Section, Author of ‘The Fortune Cookie Chronicles’
• Kevin Kwan, book packager and creative consultant, Author of ‘Luck: The Essential Guide”

Location and exact time still to be announced.

Not sure why, but Amazon just upped the discount on The Fortune Cookie Chronicles from 34% to 40%.

Yes. I obsess about my Amazon ranking, like every new author does. It’s like watching a stock ticker, which updates every hour (if you are in the top 1,000?) and every day otherwise. (My dad obsesses too, once I told him there was something to watch. We are very goal-oriented people), Today, just now, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles broke the 100 barrier into two-digit territory. My friend Pawel was here to see me cheer. I took a screenshot because I have no idea if it is going to last.

Here is my explanation of what it’s like to prepare for The Colbert Report on The Huffington Post:

Don’t try to be funny.

That was the piece of advice that was repeatedly given to me when my friends first heard I was booked on The Colbert Report to talk about my book on Chinese food in America, called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. I had never watched a full episode of The Colbert Report because not only do I not have cable, but I also don’t own a television (which makes me a bit of an oddity, but very productive).

A friend who writes for The Daily Show, Rachel Axler, advised over instant messaging that with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, “The only way to come off looking bad is to try and out-funny them.” Colbert is a tougher interviewer so, “Just be calm & roll with the weirdness.” Or as my friend Dana explained, Colbert comes from an improv tradition and the first rule in improv is never deny. In other words, treat the outrageous things that he says at face value and segue into your points - don’t brush them off. And keep talking. He needs the author to keep talking in order to riff.

Appearing on The Colbert Report as an author can be a double-edged sword, because while it’s high-profile, you are also a punching bag in his bombastic red-blooded American act. A Random House editor said he preferred putting authors on The Daily Show because Jon Stewart, like most interviewers, has a style that is essentially, “So tell me about your book.” Whereas with Colbert it’s a tête-à-tête where he’s trying to be funny while the author is trying to get her point across. Sometimes those goals converge, sometimes they don’t. So in advance, my friends brainstormed on which of my points he might jump on. My friend Alexis (a huge Colbert fan) sent me an e-mail predicting how Colbert might respond to my argument that Chinese food is more American than apple pie given how much we eat apple pie versus Chinese food, and how I should recover from that.

Colbert : “I eat apple pie every morning - with a jack and coke - and a bald eagle egg omlette.”

Jenny: Well, there are exceptions - and you are clearly an exceptional American - for most would say Chinese food.

Other things he might do:

• Introduce the idea that the Chinese are taking over the world, starting with the restaurants. (”If that happens, I’m hedged. I speak Chinese, what about you?” or “That might happen. I suggest that your kids learn to speak Chinese. My mom’s a tutor.”)
• Bring up any comment about the fact that fortune cookies were copied from the Japanese by the Chinese (”We don’t feel so bad about it, they’ve been copying us for centuries”).
• Of course, ask about the middle number as initial. (”The Chinese love the number 8. The Beijing Olympics are starting at 8 p.m. on August 8, 2008. They really wanted this Olympics.”)

Stephen Colbert greets his guests before the show, where he briefly explains his character to people who have not seen it. (In person he is nothing like on television: very thoughtful with an almost professorial air). Guest interviews last about six minutes, which under the lights and in front of a live audience, seems simultaneously like an eternity and an instant.

Something I wasn’t expecting was that Colbert would shift the interview to Mandarin Chinese. (So what did I say? “I started working on this book several years ago and now I’m talking about it on your television show.” It was what popped into mind.) Something we did anticipate correctly, was the apple pie line.

And then it was over. At the moment the lights went out, I slumped in exhaustion down in my chair. Colbert reached over the table, calmly smiled and said, “Don’t worry. You did great.”

Make-up artist (holding a menacing metallic device): Have you ever been airbrushed?

Me (looking at aforementioned device): Um, not to my knowledge.

I thought airbrushing was something they do only after a photo is taken? Apparently not.