(no subject)
Sep. 29th, 2013 10:02 amEvery so often ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aberration hands me books and tells me to read them, of which The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food was one.
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles starts with the story of how fortune cookies accidentally generated 110 Powerball lottery winners, and uses that as an in to investigate the history and development of American Chinese food as its own specific and fairly standardized cuisine. (That's probably the part that I was most interested to read about, actually, because I'd never really thought about the history and logistics of that level of standardization before, and why, for example, I can order the same meal in the same packaging from my current local Chinese take-out restaurant as I could from the one around the corner from me in my last apartment as I could in the one around the corner from me where I grew up in a completely different city. There are obviously very specific reasons for this, which also has me now wondering about the logistics underlying the standardization in, for example, corner bodegas, which at least in my neighborhood are also usually owned and staffed by immigrant populations.)
This is very much a pop nonfiction book, and some respects a 101 -- for example, Jennifer 8. Lee assumes her readers will be surprised to be find out that popular American Chinese dishes such as General Tso's chicken and chop suey are not found on the menu in China -- which makes for an enjoyable, relatively breezy read with a lot of interesting factoids dropped in. The research is good, and the author clearly had a lot of fun writing it.
The breeziness of the book overall means that, although the book dips into the more serious subjects at the heart of the Chinese food industry -- Japanese internment, for example, or the frequent assaults on Chinese deliverymen, or the industry in human smuggling of Chinese restaurant workers -- it's never for more than a chapter before we're back to bouncing along with the Quest to Find the Best Chinese Restaurant or the Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989. This can occasionally be disconcerting. Jennifer 8. Lee's attitude -- or at last, the way she presents her attitude for commercial consumption in the book -- is very much a cheerfully uncontroversial "American cultural fusion, yay!" The facts are there, basically, but if you want to make a more critical argument from them, you have to do it yourself.
aberration hands me books and tells me to read them, of which The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food was one. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles starts with the story of how fortune cookies accidentally generated 110 Powerball lottery winners, and uses that as an in to investigate the history and development of American Chinese food as its own specific and fairly standardized cuisine. (That's probably the part that I was most interested to read about, actually, because I'd never really thought about the history and logistics of that level of standardization before, and why, for example, I can order the same meal in the same packaging from my current local Chinese take-out restaurant as I could from the one around the corner from me in my last apartment as I could in the one around the corner from me where I grew up in a completely different city. There are obviously very specific reasons for this, which also has me now wondering about the logistics underlying the standardization in, for example, corner bodegas, which at least in my neighborhood are also usually owned and staffed by immigrant populations.)
This is very much a pop nonfiction book, and some respects a 101 -- for example, Jennifer 8. Lee assumes her readers will be surprised to be find out that popular American Chinese dishes such as General Tso's chicken and chop suey are not found on the menu in China -- which makes for an enjoyable, relatively breezy read with a lot of interesting factoids dropped in. The research is good, and the author clearly had a lot of fun writing it.
The breeziness of the book overall means that, although the book dips into the more serious subjects at the heart of the Chinese food industry -- Japanese internment, for example, or the frequent assaults on Chinese deliverymen, or the industry in human smuggling of Chinese restaurant workers -- it's never for more than a chapter before we're back to bouncing along with the Quest to Find the Best Chinese Restaurant or the Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989. This can occasionally be disconcerting. Jennifer 8. Lee's attitude -- or at last, the way she presents her attitude for commercial consumption in the book -- is very much a cheerfully uncontroversial "American cultural fusion, yay!" The facts are there, basically, but if you want to make a more critical argument from them, you have to do it yourself.
