This is very odd. I looked up “Fortune Cookie Chronicles” on Google and was pleased that I was advanced enough to get my own little subcategories. It listed my most popular pages: Lee, Photos, About, Chinese food and then…a category called “Jews Love Chinese Food.”

.

That startled me, because as you see from the blog, the category page it links to is called “Jews and Chinese Food.”

I actually only use the phrase “Jews love Chinese food” once on the page, low down, in a post. So I have no idea how Google knows that Jews love Chinese food, or why it chose that as the headline. It just does. Perhaps the fact that Jews love Chinese food is a truism, universal in knowledge. Or perhaps the Google engineers have a sense of humor.

I thought this invite, sent out for my Phoenix event this Sunday, was adorable.

Another event at the Asia Society next Tuesday, May 6. (James Oseland, Editor in Chief, Saveur Magazine, is really a very skilled moderator)
From Silk Road to Steppe: Exploring Cuisines Beyond the Great Wall

In the West, when we think about food in China, what usually comes to mind are the signature dishes of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. But beyond the urbanized eastern third of China lie the high open spaces and sacred places of Tibet, the Silk Road oases of Xinjiang, the steppes of Inner Mongolia, and the steeply terraced hills of Yunnan and Guizhou. The peoples who live in these regions are culturally distinct, with their own history and their own unique culinary traditions. The inimitable duo of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid–who first met as young travelers in Tibet–will discuss the enticing flavors of this other China while presenting riveting photographs chronicling their travels.

Panelists:

Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid, Authors, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China

Moderator: James Oseland, Editor in Chief, Saveur Magazine

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

Registration: 6:00—6:30pm
Discussion: 6:30—8:00pm
Reception and Book Signing: 8:00—9:00pm

Asia Society and Museum: 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, New York City

This is a picture of some kind of jerky in a Guangzhou market by a photographer named Charlie Grosso (”a Chinese American woman with a male Italian name” or as she put it in her offer to buy me a drink in Los Angeles “I am a Chinese girl much like yourself so this is not a creepy come on”). It’s up to you to figure out what it is.

She has an art project called “Wok the Dog” (and yes, I think those are headless dog carcasses)

Nina Simonds did an interview with me for a segment on Spices of Life. She introduced me to a Chinese/Asian-ish restaurant, Myers and Chang (named for the couple who started it) in the South End. It’s very funky. Here are some reviews from Yelp.

I did a presentation at Columbia with my friend Sugi, whose new novel, Love Marriage about the many generations of a Sri Lankan family was published by Random House last week. The logic of the pairing was  somewhat tenuous: we both wrote books, our parents were from the great continent of Asia, and we knew each other from the school paper.

Nonetheless very successful. The South Asian student group got their numbers out in impressive forces. Standing room only (again, it’s about the butt-to-seat ratio).

As I put it. You got fiction and non-fiction, brown and yellow. It was like a literary ethnic combo meal.

Keith Richburg has an article today in The Washington Post about how Asian American groups are trying to lobby to get the name of a Philadelphia eatery changed from Chink’s steak because of its derogatory connotations. It was the nickname of a man because he had slanted eyes. If it had been called “chink” for another reason — like “chink in armor” — it would likely not rise as much ire.

Asian Groups Fight to Change Eatery’s Name

By Keith B. Richburg

Washington Post Staff Writer

The Washington Post. Tuesday, April 15, 2008; A02

PHILADELPHIA — Could a restaurant by any other name make a cheesesteak so good?

Joseph Groh’s popular eatery in a blue-collar neighborhood of northeast Philadelphia has been serving them up pretty much the same way since it opened in 1949. Authenticity is everything here — the original soda fountain, the same ceiling fans, the same sparse menu and the 1950s-vintage wooden booths, now way too snug for today’s expanded waistlines.

Even the sign outside bears the nickname of the restaurant’s original owner, and therein lies a problem.

It’s called Chink’s Steaks.

more »

My friend Geoff Upton sent out a birthday invite for his party, called Stuff Gay People like, a play on Stuff White People Like.

Come help me belatedly celebrate my 31st birthday with a celebration of Stuff Gay People (okay, Gay Men) Like:

8. Dance mixes of pop hits.Gay people love it when DJs remix and speed up a Top 40 hit, preferably by a black female recording artist. (Gay people especially go crazy for remixes of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and, lately, Rihanna. Although she is not black, gay people also cherish Kelly Clarkson.)

7. Low-carb foods.

Gay people as a rule do not eat more carbs than necessary, especially after 6 p.m. (except when drunk). Hence, you will find gay people discarding burger buns and shunning toast at their favorite meal, brunch. At parties, gay people may completely ignore any food presented, even carrot sticks. Gay people will also go to great lengths to avoid drinking carbs, such as the Rum-and-Diet.

6. Tight spaces.

All I’m saying is that my apartment is small.

Julia Moskin has a lovely explanatory piece on MSG in Wednesday’s Times. (Sorry for delay, but book craziness). I do touch on MSG and the concept of umami, the fifth taste, in my book in the soy sauce trade wars chapter.

I use MSG in my cooking sometimes. We call it weijing. China is actually a net importer of MSG, from Japan, if I remember correctly

Amazing how aware Americans are of MSG. Stephen Colbert actually said his interview of me would feature a lot of MSG: “Me Shouting at Guest.” Luckily this turned out not to be true.

The Associated Press has moved a review which ends with telling readers “Go buy this wonderful book” (okay, but only if they want to find the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world). It is a really flattering review and it will be picked up by papers across the country slowly over the next few weeks.

Adventures in the world of Chinese food

By JESSICA BERNSTEIN-WAX, Associated Press Writer

“The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food” (Twelve. 308 pages. $24.99), by Jennifer 8. Lee: If you’ve ever pondered the origins of chop suey, wondered who the heck General Tso is or spent hours analyzing a fortune cookie message, this is the book for you.

Scratch that. Lee’s inquiries into the cultural and historical phenomena behind Chinese food and its amazing spread around the world are so fascinating that anyone who has ever eaten a single egg roll should read her book.

That would be just about everyone, according to Lee, a New York Times metro reporter.

In the United States alone, she writes, some 40,000 Chinese restaurants outnumber all the country’s McDonald’s, Burger Kings and KFCs combined.

“Chinese food has become an American comfort food in part because it is predictable,” Lee writes. “At times it seems that America’s Chinese restaurants operate as a single giant, pulsing entity, a lively example of one of the most fertile research areas for biologists, sociologists, and economists: spontaneously self-organizing networks.”

Chinese food has also made its way to the world’s seven continents and is even available to astronauts as part of NASA’s thermostabilized menu, she writes.

Lee takes readers around the United States and the world as she probes anything and everything related to General Tso’s chicken, the fortune cookie and chop suey.

The book features captivating sections on human smuggling of Chinese restaurant workers, Chinese take-out menu wars on New York’s Upper West Side and virulent disputes in the international soy sauce trade — turns out most of the soy sauce packets Americans get with their take out actually contain no soy.

In the chapter “Why chow mein is the chosen food of the chosen people; or, The Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989,” Lee hightails it to the Chinese city of Kaifeng, home to a dwindling community of Chinese Jews, as part of her quest to figure out why American Jews like Chinese food so much. She also provides a hilarious account of a Maryland kosher restaurant that created an uproar in the surrounding Orthodox Jewish community by allegedly served non-kosher duck to its customers during a shortage in the late 1980s.

Another chapter pulls the curtain back on the secret travails of fortune cookie message writers, detailing their struggles with writer’s block, plagiarism and cutthroat competition.

And then there are the restaurant reviews. Lee traveled from San Francisco to Lima, Peru, to the African island of Mauritius in search of the best Chinese restaurant outside China.

Want to know what it is? Go buy this wonderful book.