![Fortune Cookie Chronicles](/web/20110905185820im_/http://www.therealpotato.com/images/book.gif)
For Americans, Chinese food is ubiquitous. We debate about authenticity and taste in Chinatown and in our favorite corner takeout joints. I may prefer the subtle charms of hand-drawn noodles or the joyous free-for-all that is dim sum to a folded white box of General Tso’s Chicken– but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have General Tso’s for lunch yesterday. We see Chinese restaurants everywhere, without giving them a second thought– the almost-identical menus, the red and gold signs, the isolated Chinese families who are sometimes the only immigrants in town.
Jennifer 8. Lee, a Chinese-American New Yorker and beat reporter for the New York Times, tackles the question of Chinese food in America in all its glory in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. It’s an exuberant book, enthusiastic and well-researched, and Lee’s passion for her material is evident on every page.
The scope of Lee’s research is astonishing. She visits Chinese restaurants all over the world in search of the best one (sorry, no spoilers here). She travels to China to visit General Tso’s home village, where the inhabitants are surprised to hear that his fame in the West revolves around a chicken dish they’ve never tasted. She visits San Francisco and Japan in her efforts to track down the origins of the fortune cookie. And she delves deep into the world of “snakeheads,” the smugglers who charge would-be immigrants their life’s savings for dangerous passage into the US and Europe, and compassionately relates the story of Michael, a Fujianese man who survived a shipwreck on his journey to New York.
What she finds is astonishing. This isn’t food porn (though there are plenty of tasty descriptions), nor is it fluff (though it is a quick and enjoyable read). It’s more like the Freakonomics of Chinese food. Lee applies her crisp writing and sense of humor to the intersections of social justice, the immigrant experience, business, gastronomy, and my favorite topic, political economy.
For example:
Why are American Chinese restaurants’ menus all so similar, even though they’re not centralized? McDonald’s strives for the kind of uniformity that the China Gardens and Golden Pandas of small towns across American seem to have achieved effortlessly. Lee argues that Chinese restauranteurs have, in effect, been early adopters of crowdsourcing techniques.
Why are Chinese dishes in America so different from Chinese dishes in China? (And why do people in China find them so unpalatable?) Lee traces the history of Chinese cooking in America, from 19th-century mining camps to chop suey palaces, and shows the evolution of the cuisine as it gained popularity and adapted to American tastes.
Why are the delivery people from Chinese restaurants so routinely mugged, beaten and murdered? What does this say about the position of Chinese immigrants in the US?
Why is Chinese food so popular among American Jews? Lee explores a
kashrut scandal that took place in a Washington, DC-area kosher Chinese duck restaurant and the effect it had on the community.
And the question that ties all of these questions together: What does it mean to be an American child of Chinese parents? It’s the fortune cookie that brings this question to the fore for Lee:
Fortune cookies weren’t Chinese.
It was like learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus. How could that be? I had always believed in the crispy, curved, vanilla-flavored wafers with the slips inside.
It was through reading The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan when I was in middle school that I first became aware of the mass deception. In one tale, two Chinese women find jobs in a San Francisco fortune cookie factory, where one is utterly perplexed when she learns that the cookies and their cryptic messages are considered Chinese.
I asked my mom if she had known all along that fortune cookies weren’t Chinese. She shrugged. She said when she first got to the United States from Taiwan, she’d assumed they were from Hong Kong or mainland China. China is a large and fractured place. She had never been to mainland China. Neither had I.
Lee’s quest to understand the origins of the fortune cookie becomes a quest to understand her own origins, and she handles it with intelligence, compassion and grace. It’s a story relevant to every American (hyphenated or otherwise), every immigrant, everyone who’s ever sought a new life. Whatever nonsense the Republicans and Democrats are spouting about barrier walls and guest-worker programs, it’s stories like the ones Lee brings to life that are the true lifeblood of this immigrant country.