Christine Y. Chen writes a lovely review in The Washington Post (so she too is not excited about the round-the-world chapter).
So now The Fortune Cookie Chronicles have been reviewed by all the major papers (+ the AP!) except The Wall Street Journal…which I doubt would review it anyway (and we haven’t heard any rumblings of such).
The Chinese Food Diaspora
By Christine Y. Chen,
a contributing writer at Foreign Policy magazine
Wednesday, April 9, 2008; C04
THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES
Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
By Jennifer 8. Lee
Twelve. 307 pp. $24.99
When the Chinese greet their friends, it’s rarely with a simple “hello” or “how are you?” Instead, their first words are: “Ni chi fan le ma?” or, “Have you eaten yet?” In Chinese culture, food doesn’t exist merely for physical nourishment; it’s fundamental to social interactions and relationships. In other words, food is necessary for the body and for the soul.
It’s a maxim that Jennifer 8. Lee, author of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” knows well. (Her middle “number,” by the way, connotes prosperity to the Chinese.) “The vocabulary words that Chinese-American kids . . . know best,” she writes, “are almost always related to food.” In her engaging first book, Lee, an American born to Chinese immigrant parents, puts that food-related vocabulary to good use by embarking on a three-year journey across six continents, 23 countries and 42 states to discover how and why Chinese cuisine became ubiquitous. After all, as Lee notes, “There are some forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States — more than the number of McDonald’s, Burger Kings, and KFCs combined.”
more »
