series on the music&lit blog, Largehearted Boy (note the cute logo someone designed for him!)
And amazingly he has compiled the most comprehensive list ever of my reviews and interviews.
So when he first invited me after hearing about his book, I checked out his blog, and discovered it had been highlighted in a WSJ article as a coveted place for pubishers. The article spoke about how publishers were trying to get people to buy more books (seemingly older and fuddy duddy) by using music (seemingly hip and fresh!)
This is what it said.
One byproduct of the book soundtrack trend has been the transformation of a grassroots music blog into a coveted marketing slot for authors like Mr. Ellis and Mr. Klosterman. The blog, called Largehearted Boy, features a running series called “Book Notes.” About once a week, an author of a recent book posts a list of songs that inspired the work or that readers might want to listen to as they turn the pages. The series was begun last year by David Gutowski, a Web-site developer in Decatur, Ala., who runs the blog. Mr. Gutowski started the series as a way to combine his interests in books and music.
Increasingly, however, Mr. Gutowski says he’s approached by publishers hoping to expose their authors to the discerning young music fans who visit his site.
Farah Miller, director of new media for Knopf and Pantheon, says she has arranged “Book Notes” submissions by about nine authors, including Mr. Ellis.
“There’s always a soundtrack to a movie,” Ms. Miller says. The blog “has made it possible to do the same thing for books.”
Mine is not really a soundtrack for a book (that’s better for fiction, I think). It’s a roundup of songs that are thematically related — some of questionable musical merit. I had to ask my friend Brendan Kredell for his music wisdom.
Here is an episode of FN Dish, the Food Network’s edgier online cousin, hosted by Adam Roberts of the Amateur Gourmet.
Adam and I went to New York City’s Chinatown and eat my favorite buffet place on Grand Street between Chrystie and Bowery: $4 for five items! He tried pigs heart (his Jewish grandmother rolling over in her grave). This is Chinese buffet for Chinese people, not Chinese buffet for Americans.
Also on the episode, Alton Brown’s biggest fans get to meet him at a book signing
A profile/interview of me on Midtown Lunch, which is a fun food blog. (Have I posted this before? This was in draft mode and I’m not sure why) In it, I discuss the places I like to eat in midtown, and also explain why Dubai’s food scene is awesome.
Jessica Henderson does a Q&A with me for The Harvard Crimson arts section. I remember she recorded the whole thing on her laptop with her freeware, and was very impressed. Every so often we’d have to startle the computer to make sure it didn’t go to sleep.
I did a lovely interview on Brian Lehrer (scroll down for mp3…no permalink?) on Wednesday, right before the Asia Society talk with the Fuchsia Dunlop of Chinese cookery fine.
We did the interview after the Asian American Writers Workshop reading in mid-March. It was us two Chinese-ish girls and three South Asian girls at a Vietnamese restaurant in Koreatown. Very pan-A.
Elisa Mala wrote a nice two-page profile in Audrey Magazine [pdf] in which she interviewed my parents and numerous friends (Nolan, Sugi, Alexis) at the book party. It has a lot of detail about my family actually, and my siblings. And it mentions my hobby of collecting usual toothpaste flavors from around the world. (Coca cola toothpaste in Thailand!)
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.
A few people had passed me this little item by Andrea Thompson that ran on the New Yorker’s web site on chop suey a few weeks ago, where my book is mentioned and quoted. Exciting.
Born in the U.S.A.
In this week’s Tables for Two, Ligaya Mishan reviews Chop Suey, whose tongue-in-cheek name has little to do with the actual menu: it’s not Chinese, and the eponymous dish isn’t served here. But perhaps the restaurant, with its amalgam of Korean, French, and American influences, is aptly named after all. “Chop suey,” according to Jennifer 8. Lee in her new book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” means “odds and ends,” and most likely came about as a way to offer Americans familiar ingredients dressed up as novelty. more »
on Chinese food in America by my former colleague Lola Ogunnaike. Produced by the lovely Ethel Bass. We actually filmed at an Empire Szechuan, a descendent of the original restaurant that sparked the delivery revolution. I asked Lola what was different from print and television, and one of the things is how much logistics are involved. For a two-minute segment it took two guys with three cameras three hours to get all the footage.
My favorite story of the afternoon: one of the cameramen lives in Queens. A few years ago during the fall, his friendly next door neighbors (who were Chinese) gave him and his wife a winter melon, a popular Chinese vegetable. The camera man and his wife didn’t know what to do with it, so they hollowed it out, carved a face in it — a jack o-melon.
Because that is what Americans do with gourds: make pie or a Halloween decoration.
Today I am doing an insane tour by phone set up via Newman Communications, a PR firm that specializes in (among other things) literary radio and satellite television tours. They essentially hook you up with radio programs (mostly live, some pre-taped) coast to coast on a very tight schedule. It has to be done over a landline, and I don’t have a landline, so I had to crash at my friend’s place to use the phone. Same place where I watched the Super Tuesday returns as I do not have a television either.
Here is the schedule for today.
4/7 7:40 am WMJI-FM/Cleveland OH 10 min live w/Lanigan & Malone, 50,000 watt FM 4/7 8:30 am KCBS-AM/San Francisco CA 10 min live w/Morning Show, 50,000 watt AM 4/7 9:10 am Cable Radio Network - CRN National National 10 min live w/ Jack Roberts 4/7 9:20 am WKZL-FM Greensboro NC 10 minute live w/ Murphy in the Morning 4/7 10:00 am WMHX-FM/Harrisburg PA 20 min live w/Diane Grey, top-rated FM 4/7 10:30 am 30 min taped with WGTD-FM Milwaukee WI w/ Greg Berg for Morning Show 4/7 11:05 am *KCMN-AM/Colorado Springs CO 10 min live w/Tron Simpson, top-rated AM 4/7 11:40 am KZOK-FM/Seattle WA 10 min live w/Bob Rivers, 50,000 watt FM 4/7 12:20 pm Lifestyle Radio Network – national 20 min live w/Frankie Boyer, nationally syndicated 4/7 5:30 pm WINA-AM/Charlottesville VA 30 min live w/Coy Barefoot, top-rated AM 4/7 10:00 PM *WLW-AM/Cincinnati OH 30 min live w/Scott Sloan, 50,000 watt AM
Jeff Yang, the founder of A. Magazine and a columist for Sfgate.com, has a piece interweaving The Fortune Cookie Chronicles and raising his sons.
We had an hour-long interview before I ran out for a TV shoot on Saturday where he told me he liked my book. I was like, if there is one person on this planet that should like my book, that would be Jeff Yang. If Jeff Yang did not like my book, I would have failed. Full text after the jump
New dad Jeff Yang, thinking about food, identity, and culture, talks with Jennifer 8. Lee, author of the just-published “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles”
Prologue: Made with love
Our second son, Skyler Jordan Yang, was born two weeks ago — a candy-pink bundle of softness and occasional wetness whose early appearance has both thrilled and upended our household.
Skyler is a highly efficient engine for converting breast milk into cuteness and poop. He snaps his lips like a piranha at anything vaguely spherical, and I’ve woken Heather up in the living room from gentle dozes in the early morning hours several times, with him still latched on and Hoovering like mad. (By contrast, No. 1 son Hudson wouldn’t take the boob, and even now is such a picky eater that he seems more like some exotic breed of orchid than a rambunctious little 4-year-old boy — he thrives on water, light, air and the occasional Go-Gurt stick.)
The process has been grueling for Heather, but she says she wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s a special, instant bond she feels with this one, based on that most basic of parent-child transactions: the giving of food. It took longer to get that closeness with Hudson, because he wouldn’t eat, and kind of still doesn’t. And for Heather, who came to the United States from Taiwan at age 7 and spent her formative years working in her parents’ Chinese restaurant (the late, lamented House of Ying), food is the foundation of all things, the building block of family and society, the universal medium for communicating emotion, teaching lessons, preserving history.
I’ve mused before about the critical role that food plays in Asian cultures. But the coming of Skyler has put that truth back in focus for me once more: The relatively conventional context of his birth (in contrast, Hudson was over six weeks early and spent the first 10 days or so of his life in the bittersweet clinical environs of the neonatal ICU) means that he and my wife are getting the full, traditional Chinese postpartum treatment, a ritual called zuo yue zi, or “doing the month.”
Part of the process is about staying at home: No travel, no visitors, no going outside for a brisk walk. You’re also not allowed to bathe, and you’re officially not allowed to read or watch television, though the last provoked such rebellion that my mother-in-law finally backed down under Heather’s suggestion that the remote could only be pried from her cold, dead hands.
But the biggest part of zuo ye is eating and drinking the right things, culturally approved things — a dietary plan that predates Atkins by a few millennia and is designed to help the maternal body recover and most importantly, generate maximum amounts of precious life essence for the little one. The smells and tastes of these foods range from bland to foul, and they linger Chernobyl-like in our kitchen. In the interests of solidarity early on, I tried eating a bowl of the soup Heather has been sentenced to eat three times a day, brewed from some combination of fresh chicken, rice wine and herbal tonics, and had to suppress my gag reflex. “What is this made with?” I choked to my mother-in-law in my broken Mandarin.
She looked at me with flat eyes, and said in an equally flat voice, “It’s made with love.”
Belly, head and heart
One of the things that Skyler’s early arrival derailed was the column I’d hoped to write about a new book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” by reporter, blogger, friend and all-around menschette (womensch?) Jennifer 8. Lee. The book hit the bricks on March 3, a week after Skyler did, so I find myself now writing about it after the media’s madding crowd has already chimed in — mostly with effusively glowing reviews. Deserved ones: I consumed the book in a single, rapt late-night stint, with bread loaf-sized Skyler lounging in a Boppy on my lap, breaking only to address the calls of nature (his and mine).
The book’s subtitle is “Adventures in the World of Chinese Food,” but I don’t think it does the work justice. It may look like a book about food from the outside, but crack open its sweet cookie shell, and you’ll find a more profound and provocative set of insights within.
Or, to use a more apt culinary metaphor: If, to the Chinese, food is culture, food is family, food is history, well, this book is about all of those things, tumbled together, brightened and bound with spice and sauce — a hearty stir-fry indeed, juxtaposing the epic and intimate, the mundane, the absurd and the sublime, in a recipe made with love.
The surface conceit of “Fortune Cookie Chronicles” is lightweight: At one level, it’s the story about the takeover of takeout, the peculiarly bastardized U.S. variant of Chinese cuisine that has captivated the American appetite since the 19th century with innovations like chop suey, General Tso’s Chicken, and yes, fortune cookies — all dishes assembled in America from flexibly adapted Chinese parts. “Most people who eat Chinese takeout don’t realize how fundamentally American it is,” laughs Lee. “It’s like, well, you think it’s Chinese, but it’s not — it’s an ‘indigenous foreign’ food that only exists here. Like burritos and spaghetti with meatballs.”
But the deeper you dig into the book’s richly varied ingredients — clusters of lottery winners who bet the “lucky numbers” printed on fortune cookie slips; bayou chefs who serve up Szechuan-style gator; menu-slinging deliverymen and Taiwanese mafiosi; philosophers and ambassadors, hustlers and strivers, ancient warlords and modern-day entrepreneurs — the more you taste the agenda behind Lee’s tale: By tracing the outlines of the unique phenomenon of “American Chinese” cuisine, Lee is telling the tale of Chinese in America, in a way that would be toothsome even to those who flee the History Channel. It’s social studies in a batter-crisp coating, if you will. And the lessons to be learned are both sweet and sour.
“The book really began in 2003, when I wrote a story about this immigrant couple, John and Jenny,” says Lee. Like many of their friends and neighbors from Fuzhou — a province that has been the source of so much outward migration that some of its villages have become virtually depleted of working-age residents — John and Jenny sought to come to the United States, and pursued that goal in stages: First Jenny, then John, then their children, one by one, came to New York, becoming a family again by accretion. And then, after toiling as a waiter in Manhattan Chinatown for years, John decided to invest the family’s savings in a restaurant of their own, in the tiny town of Hiawassee, Ga.
“I followed them from New York to Georgia, and I realized, sitting there in that little seven-seat restaurant, that this was something interesting: They knew nothing about running a Chinese takeout restaurant. They had a binder of recipes that they never would eat themselves, and they had one another, and that was it,” she says. “And as I researched, I found out that there are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonald’s, Burger Kings and Wendy’s put together. And at that point I said, ‘Wow, I’m onto a bigger idea.’”
Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of immigrant Jennies and Johns have journeyed across the ocean and fanned out into the American wilderness known as waizhou, “outside territory” — deep suburbs in the Midwest and South, rural townships in the plains and mountains, inner-city jungles in decaying metropolises and industrial centers.
To get there, they’ve suffered and sacrificed. Suffice it to say that Jenny and John’s story is not a happy one, and the chapters in which Lee explores the underground pipeline that funnels undocumented Chinese restaurant workers to the United States are heart-stopping, particularly the one that narrates the death-defying journey of one survivor of the Golden Venture disaster, the shipwreck that spilled hundreds of Chinese immigrants onto the shores of New York’s Rockaway Beach.
But in the process of planting these beachheads in places that may have never seen an Asian even on TV, these intrepid colonists have spread the gospel of a China that is foreign enough to be attractive, but familiar enough to be appetizing; a taste of China that has been designed for mittelamerika’s quick-serve culinary preferences. Sweet and greasy and chunky and alien to anyone who’s grown up with the authentic cuisine, takeout Chinese is nevertheless an entry point for understanding — a gateway drug for people to at least engage with a culture and a people that loom large in the history that will be written of the century to come.
“Just about everyone who’s reviewed this book has stuck to the superficial, top-level aspects of the book — like ‘Oh my God, there’s no beef with broccoli in China!’ — but the chapters I felt were my best work were the ones that dealt with the experiences of the people making the food,” says Lee. “And the other things in the book were like a wrapper that let me tell those stories. Like the history of the fortune cookie, for instance: I realized that if I told the story of fortune cookies backwards through history, I’d ultimately hit every aspect of the Chinese American experience.”
And not just Chinese American: One of the things that emerged out of Lee’s investigation of the fortune cookie’s origins is that not only are they not Chinese, they’re not even American: The fortune cookie evolved from a traditional Japanese confection called tsujiura senbei, sweet, fortune-laden crackers originally sold outside of Shinto shrines. Brought to the United States by Japanese immigrants before World War I, they nevertheless became indelibly identified with the Chinese community. The Japanese American bakers had to abandon their equipment when they were forced into internment during World War II — equipment that was then picked up by Chinese entrepreneurs and used to fuel the demands of a growing, organic network of American Chinese restaurants that by the 1950s were already in wide proliferation. But the universal embrace of the fortune cookie could never have been possible without the innovation of an immigrant whose roots came from neither Japan nor China. The inventor of the fully automated baking, folding and fortune stuffing machine is a Korean immigrant named Yong Sik Lee.
In fact, one of the wonders of “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” is the way it reveals the vibrant, pan-ethnic and international roots of American Chinese cuisine — how its tastes and conventions have been shaped and retooled by a borderless network of individuals and communities. America’s broken translation of Chinese cuisine has been embraced by Brazilians and Indians, British and French and Germans; it’s eaten in the United Arab Emirates and on the island of Mauritius. Indeed, China’s culinary stepchild has by most measures far outstripped its parent in popularity.
“You have people all over the world who long for authentic Chinese food, and they really mean authentic Chinese American food, not things with the head and feet still on,” says Lee. “And I think this shows how authenticity is a function of time and place: Who’s to say this isn’t an authentic Chinese cuisine?”
After all, the definition of Chinese has always been one that has stretched to cover a surpassingly large terrain — in fact, Chineseness is big enough to encompass the world. “If you compare the notion of Japaneseness to Chineseness, in Japan, to be Japanese you need to have three things: blood, culture, and nationality. If you leave Japan and give up your citizenship, you get kicked off the team,” says Lee. “But Chinese have a much more elastic definition of identity. You have this notion of huaren — this idea that you are Chinese no matter how far you go, no matter how many generations away you’ve descended.”
It’s that adaptability of identity that has made the Chinese diaspora so globally influential, preserving that sense of network among huaren regardless of culture, latitude or, for that matter, attitude.
“I’d like to think that this book forces people to think twice about what it means to be American,” says Lee. “And, for that matter, about what it means to be Chinese. The interplay of authenticity and change, and how it’s impacted not just Chinese Americans, but all of the immigrants of the post-1965 generation — the children of the ‘Open Door’ Act.”
Epilogue: Children of the open door
After speaking to Lee, I had to pick up Hudson from his Chinese language school — which we decided to enroll him in despite my own painful childhood memories of Saturday tedium. Through the efforts of Heather and her mother, Hudson has been bilingual since he first began to speak, and we want to preserve that double-tongue as long as we’re able. Most of the boys and girls streaming from the school in the heart of Brooklyn’s Chinatown were Chinese — but many had more diverse roots: Adoptive parents; multiracial and multiethnic families; there was even a healthy number of black, white and Latino children whose parents have decided that the ability to speak and read Chinese is an advantage for anyone seeking global citizenship.
And as I picked up dim sum from an authentic Chinese restaurant nearby, the kind with roasted meat in the window and Chinese-only entrees on the walls, I noticed many of Hudson’s classmates within. Not eating duck feet or tripe, perhaps, but maybe someday in the future they’d explore beyond dumplings and expand their horizons — make them, like the idea of America and China, big enough to encompass the world.
All of a sudden, the recipe for cultural understanding seemed similar to a saying my mother-in-law had shared with me about the responsibilities of a parent: Feed the belly. Feed the mind. And don’t forget to feed the heart.
Jeff Yang forecasts new Asian and Asian American consumer trends for the market research company Iconoculture (www.iconoculture.com). He is the author of “Once Upon a Time in China: A Guide to the Cinemas of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China” (Atria Books) and co-author of “I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action” (Ballantine) and “Eastern Standard Time” (Mariner/Houghton Mifflin). He lives in New York City. Go to www.ouatic.com/mojomail/mojo.pl to join Jeff Yang’s biweekly mailing list offering updates on this column and alerts about other breaking Asian and Asian American pop culture news.
Nina Lalli does a Q&A with me for Salon, which was picked up on the front page of Yahoo!
How the fortune cookie crumbles
Is Chinese food as American as apple pie? Jennifer 8. Lee discusses the strange evolution of everyone’s favorite ethnic food.
By Nina Lalli
Mar. 11, 2008 | As a teenager, New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee was crushed to learn that fortune cookies weren’t Chinese. She likens that moment to “learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus.” She became obsessed with answering the specific question of where the cookies did originate and the bigger question of how Chinese food became, as she says, more American than apple pie.
The quest led her to her first book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” which took her around the world and all over the United States to dig up some of the missing links between the food her Taiwanese mother cooks at home and the boneless, saccharine dishes she preferred (to the dismay of both her parents) as a kid growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She searches rural Hunan for the origins of America’s most beloved Chinese dish, General Tso’s chicken, only to find the people of the general’s hometown have no idea what she is talking about. She visits a Chinese village that resembles a ghost town because its men are working in America’s Chinese restaurants. She takes us through the scary global network of human trafficking, introduces us to the woman who single-handedly spearheaded the Chinese food delivery business in Manhattan, and shows us the Jewish-owned factory that makes those free soy sauce packages — which, by the way, contain no soy.
Her adventures are illuminating, and the big picture of how American taste has altered Chinese food, and vice versa, sheds complex light on both cultures. The evolution — or devolution — of Chinese food in America has similarities with other major ethnic foods, especially Italian and Mexican: As Americans adapt to new flavors, we simultaneously impose our own lustiness onto every cuisine we touch. The portions get bigger, the meat-to-vegetable ratio is reversed. Everything must be breaded, fried, sauced beyond recognition.
Somehow, Lee avoids making judgment calls or impassioned political stands. Although her fascination is personal, hers is an attitude of amused observation, obsessive reporting, anthropological curiosity. In fact, the most striking thing about the book, especially in light of recent trends in food writing, is her unwillingness to sneer at fast food or inauthenticity.
Reading your book, I found myself oddly craving General Tso’s chicken. The other night, I treated myself to a very special meal a few blocks away from my apartment. I knew it was going to be crunchy and gooey-sweet. But what really struck me was that with the first bite, I was hit so hard with another association — Chicken McNuggets. The taste was practically identical.
Oh, yeah. Totally. It took McDonald’s a decade to develop McNuggets, which appeared in 1980, but General Tso’s chicken swept the country by the mid-’80s, without the organized experimenting and marketing.
It was funny that your Chinese friend called General Tso’s chicken the “ultimate Chinese-American dish.” Later in the book, you say that it’s as American as it is foreign. Is it Chinese at all?
My Chinese friends who have come here for grad school are like, “What is this?” I call it indigenous foreign food. It’s indigenous because it was created here, but it’s inspired by something foreign, the same way burritos are Mexican. American Chinese food is its own thing. It has been exported to all these other countries, but not from China — from America.
As a kid, you loved beef with broccoli. After all your travels and research, do you actually enjoy what you call American Chinese food?
I certainly prefer “Chinese Chinese food.” These things have a lot to do with our associations. For me, the time between college and 9/11 — this pocket of, like, two years — was an amazing time for me. I traveled all over China, and that’s when I really started to love the food. When I go out for Chinese, it has to be a place where I can get dishes you won’t find on an American takeout menu, like certain lamb dishes and kinds of buns, and some tofu dishes. As a kid, I definitely preferred beef with broccoli. I was like, Why can’t Mom cook like this? Now I realize how naive I was.
You write that “authenticity is a concept that food snobs propagate.” But I wonder, if you sit down for American Chinese food with a bunch of Americans who have never had anything else, don’t you want to shake them and show them the real thing?
Oh, yeah. All the time. I try to order things that people might not have had before, but that will be pleasing to them. I’ll order a lot of single-vegetable dishes. That whole vegetable medley thing — the baby corn and the mushrooms and carrots — that’s not Chinese. I will introduce people to a vegetable dish with a twist, like eggplant with garlic. Or even a simpler, green vegetable, like the one that translates to “empty heart vegetable,” or snow pea shoots.
One dish that doesn’t go over very well is Ma Po tofu. The name means “pock-marked lady.” It’s too spicy. People expect tofu to be bland — you know, it’s white. The book “The United States of Arugula” talks about how people’s tastes have definitely opened up in the last 15 years. It’s true, but it’s still baby steps.
There are two very different ways you frame Chinese food — and food in general — in your book. On the one hand, you talk about cooking as an always changing, evolving “language,” but you also write that cooking and eating are the easiest ways for immigrants to preserve their cultural heritage. How do you reconcile these ideas?
Hmm, I don’t know. I guess dumplings are a perfect example. They’re essential to our heritage. We buy the skins, but then, it can be hard to find ground pork in American supermarkets, so maybe we start stuffing them with turkey.
You know, I’m sure my grandkids will be able to make dumplings, but I don’t know how their Chinese is going to be. And maybe their dumplings will be really different. Maybe in 30 or 40 years, we’ll have decided that meat is bad for global warming and everyone will be a vegetarian. But there will still be the essence of that heritage. It is like language. In English, we have all these different influences, and the way we talk changes, but we can still see the etymology of the words.
The way you talk about the evolution of Chinese food in America made me think a lot about Italian-American food. My family is Italian, and my parents, both third generation, made this big effort toward a more “authentic” identity. They spent time in Italy, my mom learned the language, and I grew up eating “real” Italian food. I always looked down on Italian-American food. More recently, after spending time with some really great Italian-American home cooks, I came around to respecting that cuisine as its own thing. I wonder whether your experiences have had a similar effect on you?
Authenticity is a function of time and place, so, to Americans, this is an authentic cuisine — to the point where, when the Americans invaded Iraq, they actually brought Chinese-American cuisine with them. There were two restaurants in the Green Zone that served American Chinese food, and they were so popular because, for the Americans, it was a taste of home.
Last year, I spent some time exploring a stretch of Eldridge Street in Chinatown where there are a bunch of Fujianese restaurants. One guy who was nice enough to translate a menu for me explained that most of the restaurant workers in New York come from the Fujian province, like your grandfather. If there are so many immigrants from this one area, why aren’t we seeing more of that cuisine?
Well, one, it’s very seafood-driven. Americans, not so into seafood. Salmon, yes, but not octopus, squid, etc. Also, Fujianese food is, like, OK. You know, they have a lot of fish balls, they have some weird noodle things going on, and if you go there, they have fantastic fresh seafood. They do amazing things with crab, but when it comes down to it, it’s not a sophisticated cuisine. The people coming over from the Fujianese city of Fuzhou are hicks. It’s not like some of the Cantonese food that comes over, for example.
In your chapter on soy sauce, you write: “America has simplified — or corrupted, depending on your perspective — and mass-processed many refined foods from around the world,” and you go on to list beer, chocolate and cheese as examples. So what is your perspective? Has America just simplified these foods, or corrupted them?
Oh, it’s both. It’s corrupted in sort of a good way.
In one chapter you describe your attempts to find the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world. Why do you think so many people you spoke to expected it to be a hole-in-the-wall place or a dive?
There are certain kinds of food where authenticity seems to imply dive-ness. For example, if I told you the best barbecue is this four-star restaurant on Wall Street, with white tablecloths and fine crystal, you’d be like, Huh? There’s something about those kinds of food that [makes us] associate their authenticity with the idea that they’re not upscale.
I’m certainly guilty of this attitude. I’m skeptical of high-end food in general, but especially when it comes to ethnic cuisines. Your friend in L.A. broke down Chinese restaurants into categories: Chinese for Chinese people, Chinese for other people and postmodern Chinese food. Would you generally assume that Chinese restaurants for Chinese people are going to be the best?
It depends on the type of person. Some people are naturally curious about the world and some are not.
Emily Schwab writes a lovely piece today in The Boston Globe about me and my quest for identity through Chinese food. I met with Emily last November during my pre-pub tour at Changsho in Cambridge and we had a lovely time. So this is one of the longest pieces in development on this book.
So The World Journal (the largest Chinese language newspaper in the country) ran a piece on me earlier in the week. (My mom did send them a press release, though. Yay moms)
The New York Times Book Review runs its review of my book this Sunday by Jan and Michael Stern. It’s already online now and it actually closed 10 days ago, on a Wednesday. (The Book Review, like the Magazine, has a incredible close-to-distribution lag, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me but may involve giving the industry a heads-up as to what is coming. Book publishers and retailers always get the review like a week in advance).
I actually had a sense that the review might be good news when I got a e-mail from the section’s Web producer inviting me to join in the podcast with the subject line “book review podcast.”
My first thought was, “Wait, our book review?” I had to look at the domain name of his email to make sure.
I wrote back “Hopefully the fact you are interviewing me means that the book didn’t get panned. Either that or you guys have a soft spot for podcasting people who are in the same building.”
When I went up, it was incredibly sweet. As people walked by, they congratulated me.
Note the headline: Wok On. Add list of Chinese-food related puns used for my book.
March 9, 2008
Wok On
By JANE and MICHAEL STERN
THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.
By Jennifer 8. Lee. 307 pp. Twelve. $24.99.
Chinese restaurants are more American than apple pie, says Jennifer 8. Lee in “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food.” There are twice as many of these restaurants as there are McDonald’s franchises, and the food they serve is every bit as predictable. “What Chinese restaurant menu doesn’t offer beef with broccoli, sesame chicken, roast pork lo mein, fried wontons, egg rolls and egg drop soup?” asks the author, an “American-born Chinese” who cheerfully admits to an obsession with Chinese restaurants.
Intrigued by the Powerball drawing of March 30, 2005, which produced an inordinate quantity of winning lottery tickets because the lucky numbers had turned up in fortune cookies all around the country, Lee rides her obsession on a three-year, 42-state, 23-country journey during which she discovers that fortune cookies, like so much about America’s Chinese restaurants, aren’t really Chinese. They originated in 19th-century Japan and were sold in Japanese confectionery shops in San Francisco until World War II, when Japanese-Americans were interned, at which point Chinese entrepreneurs took over the business. Lee tracks down Donald Lau, who spent a decade writing fortunes for the biggest cookie manufacturer until he suffered writer’s block and had to retire in 1995.
Lee is a city-beat reporter for The New York Times. Her inclination as a journalist is to trace a story all the way to its genesis, but not without taking some fascinating detours. On the way to finding the origin of fortune cookies, she pinpoints the beginning of door-to-door delivery in New York and its attendant scourge of free menus. And she gives us the possible origin of chop suey (a joke played by a Chinese chef in San Francisco whose boss wanted him to concoct something that “would pass as Chinese.”) Lee travels to Hunan to see if the actual General Tso had anything to do with the chicken dish that bears his name, only to discover it most likely began as General Ching’s chicken, named after General Tso’s mentor. She also reveals that the white cardboard Fold-Pak cartons for takeout food, originally used to hold shucked oysters, are unknown in China, where Chinese takeout food is virtually nonexistent. But there’s a demand for them elsewhere — because European and African television viewers want the product they see on “Seinfeld” and “Friends.”
Lee presents an intriguing idea in a chapter called “Open-Source Chinese Restaurants,” contending that “if McDonald’s is the Windows of the dining world (where one company controls the standards), then Chinese restaurants are akin to the Linux operating system, where a decentralized network of programmers contributes to the underlying source code.” She contrasts the decade of “failed experimentation” before the success of Chicken McNuggets to the breathtaking speed with which chop suey, fortune cookies and General Tso’s chicken took hold in Chinese restaurants everywhere thanks to a “self-organizing” system in which good ideas spread like urban legends.
It’s fun to read about the Jewish passion for “safe treyf” (Yiddish for nonkosher food) and to accompany Lee on an exhaustive hunt for “The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World” outside China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. But amusing as such diversions are, Lee’s book is more serious than its jolly subtitle suggests, exposing some very ugly sides of the business. She journeys to the province of Fujian, which is “the single largest exporter of Chinese restaurant workers in the world today,” and documents the ordeal of a teenager named Michael from the fishing village of Houyu, which has sent more than three-quarters of its population to the United States and where a school teaches restaurant English to the young. Michael spends a harrowing two years trying to get to America, winding up on the notorious Golden Venture, the ship that ran aground off Rockaway Beach in 1993 and raised public awareness of human smuggling. She writes about the vulnerability of Chinese deliverymen, for whom homicide is a leading cause of on-the-job death. And she tells the tragic story of an immigrant couple who try to make a go of a small Chinese restaurant in northern Georgia but are left broke and broken by the experience.
Inevitably, Lee’s investigative trail leads back to the mass arrival of Chinese immigrants in California during the Gold Rush, when they became known as Celestials because they seemed so otherworldly. Their eating habits were especially distressing — using chopsticks instead of forks, they consumed strange sea creatures and animals considered vermin, not game. “The embers of culinary xenophobia smoldered,” Lee writes, citing a pamphlet published by the labor leader Samuel Gompers titled “Some Reasons for Chinese Exclusion: Meat Versus Rice, American Manhood Versus Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive?” The Chinese Exclusion Act, restricting immigration and preventing Chinese from becoming citizens, effectively barred an entire ethnic group from jobs in agriculture, mining and manufacturing. The result? The Chinese opened laundries and restaurants. “Cleaning and cooking were both women’s work,” Lee explains. “They were not threatening to white laborers.”
Nor did the food in the restaurants the Chinese opened threaten American taste. It was, and mostly remains, “streamlined, palatable and digestible” — American food that looks foreign, with the Chinese who cook and serve it, according to Lee, “just the middlemen.” Jane and Michael Stern are the authors of “Roadfood.”
Here is the mp3 of an interview I did on the origin of the fortune cookie on Wisconsin Public Radio a week ago, along with Eric Hagiwara, for their Friday food program. (I know. Delay. Book craziness. Why else am I catching up on blogging on a Saturday morning at 6 a.m.?!).
They liked me well enough that they might have me back to talk about dumplings.
Boston.com, in advance of an online chat I will do today at 4 p.m., put up a nice slideshow called 8 Things You Didn’t Know About Chinese Food. (see my pictures of the chow mein sandwich and the Chinese hot dog!)
Newsweek has a pretty lengthy feature in their books section this week by Jennie Yabroff (who asked really engaged questions about immigrations and bigger thoughts, where I really had to think, like didn’t have stock answers for).
For the interview, we went to Tang Pavilion, near the MoMA in Midtown East, which is known for its Shanghainese and Suchow food (But you can still get your General Tso’s chicken). We ordered a whole fish (eyeballs), jellyfish (jiggly), cold noodles (brr), and something green (always gotta have the vegetable dish).
It’s a pricier but nicer place. To celebrate my handing in of the manuscript, my sister’s bday and my brother’s passing of an actuarial exam, my family invited a whole bunch of people to go back in June.
