(no subject)

[skygiants]

Every so often 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.

Comments

[jothra]

That's funny, I was just talking about this book at work the other day!

I read it a few years ago, and it was exactly the right tone for me, because I was at that 101 level of knowledge, and the lightness kept me interested enough to continue and want to find out more.

So agreed, not a Serious Meaningful Scholarly Undertaking, but definitely worth a read.

[skygiants]

It's a really easy book to talk about! I've found myself bringing it up in way more conversations than I expected to (usually over food, unsurprisingly.)

[telophase]

I read this a few years ago, and finally understood why I couldn't ever find non-Americanized Chinese food in any of the places I lived.

(I take that back. A short-lived restaurant in my mom's city had pages on their menu titled Chinese Food and Traditional Food. Mom and I, when I was visiting, immediately ordered off the Traditional Food side, and two different people came out from back to confirm our order with "this is traditional Chinese food, are you sure you want it?" I don't remember what we ate, but it was good. Might have had beef tendon in it. The restaurant only lasted a couple of years, alas.)

[skygiants]

I mean, I always knew I was spoiled living in New York . . . but reading this book I understand even more just how spoiled. (And, to be fair, I have no idea how much my favorite Chinatown vegetarian kosher dim sum place resembles Chinese food one would find in China either, but despite its pleasing variations from Standard Americanized Chinese, my guess is still 'not much.')

[telophase]

I expect the restaurant I've eaten at that most resembles China Chinese food is the one in San Francisco that oyceter took me and rachelmanija to back in...2006? or so. Yipes, that was a while back.

There's a dim sum place in Dallas that we've been to with a Chinese friend that passes muster with him, but it's over an hour's drive for us, alas. (Certainly not vegetarian, and I'd be quite surprised if it was kosher, given Texas!)

[oyceter]

I remember reading this a few years back! And apparently I was grumpier about it than I remember being...

[skygiants]

Heh! I think I noticed some of the same stuff you were grumpy about, although this month I am happy enough to be lightly entertained in my nonfiction.

[ambyr]

I have finished reading Lady Eve's Last Con, and the first thing I had to do was check if you were aware of the Great Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989. I am extremely unsurprised to find evidence that you were :-).

[skygiants]

IT'S JUST SO INHERENTLY FUNNY