Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 641.5951 LEE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
If you think McDonald's is the most ubiquitous restaurant experience in America, consider that there are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonalds, Burger Kings, and Wendys combined. New York Times reporter and Chinese-American (or American-born Chinese). In her search, Jennifer 8 Lee traces the history of Chinese-American experience through the lens of the food. In a compelling blend of sociology and history, Jenny Lee exposes the indentured servitude Chinese restaurants expect from illegal immigrant chefs, investigates the relationship between Jews and Chinese food, and weaves a personal narrative about her own relationship with Chinese food. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles speaks to the immigrant experience as a whole, and the way it has shaped our country.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Readers will take an unexpected and entertaining journey-through culinary, social and cultural history-in this delightful first book on the origins of the customary after-Chinese-dinner treat by New York Times reporter Lee. When a large number of Powerball winners in a 2005 drawing revealed that mass-printed paper fortunes were to blame, the author (whose middle initial is Chinese for "prosperity") went in search of the backstory. She tracked the winners down to Chinese restaurants all over America, and the paper slips the fortunes are written on back to a Brooklyn company. This travellike narrative serves as the spine of her cultural history-not a book on Chinese cuisine, but the Chinese food of take-out-and-delivery-and permits her to frequently but safely wander off into various tangents related to the cookie. There are satisfying minihistories on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food and a biography of the real General Tso, but Lee also pries open factoids and tidbits of American culture that eventually touch on large social and cultural subjects such as identity, immigration and nutrition. Copious research backs her many lively anecdotes, and being American-born Chinese yet willing to scrutinize herself as much as her objectives, she wins the reader over. Like the numbers on those lottery fortunes, the book's a winner. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Lee traverses the U.S., China, and beyond in her quest to discover what has made Chinese food ubiquitous in America. She investigates the murky origins of chop suey, which for decades peculiarly defined Chinese cooking for many Americans despite the fact that the dish appears nowhere in its putative homeland. In recent years a classic called General Tso's Chicken has found its way onto virtually every Chinese American menu, and Lee meticulously chases this concoction back to its provincial roots. In an amusing chapter, Lee chronicles the unique bond between Chinese food and American Jewry despite Chinese cooking's obvious conflict with kosher dietary proscriptions, both groups uniting in opposition to the dominant majoritarian culture. Documenting the less-savory aspects of America's Chinese restaurant business, Lee lays bare the trafficking of illegal immigrants into kitchen servitude. She also hops from one world capital to another in a quest for the best Chinese restaurant. Extensive bibliography.--Knoblauch, Mark Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Jennifer 8. Lee's obsession with Chinese food takes her on a three-year, 23-country odyssey. 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."
School Library Journal Review
Adult/High School-Lee takes readers on a delightful journey through the origins and mysteries of the popular, yet often overlooked, world of the American Chinese food industry. Crossing dozens of states and multiple countries, the author sought answers to the mysteries surrounding the shocking origins of the fortune cookie, the inventor of popular dishes such as chop suey and General Tso's chicken, and more. What she uncovers are the fascinating connections and historical details that give faces and names to the restaurants and products that have become part of a universal American experience. While searching for the "greatest Chinese restaurant," readers are taken on a culinary tour as Lee discovers the characteristics that define an exceptional and unique Chinese dining experience. Readers will learn about the cultural contributions and sacrifices made by the Chinese immigrants who comprise the labor force and infrastructure that supports Chinese restaurants all over the world. This title will appeal to teens who are interested in history, Chinese culture, and, of course, cuisine. Recommend it to sophisticated readers who revel in the details and history that help explain our current global culture, including fans of Thomas L. Friedman's The World Is Flat (Farrar, 2006) and Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's Freakonomics (Morrow, 2006).-Lynn Rashid, Marriots Ridge High School, Marriotsville, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A quest. With eggrolls. Debut author Lee, a New York Times metro reporter, has been fascinated by the culturally mixed nature of Chinese restaurants ever since she discovered from reading The Joy Luck Club in middle school that fortune cookies are not Chinese. "It was like learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus," writes this ABC (American-born Chinese), who never thought to wonder why the food in those white takeout cartons tasted nothing like Mom's home cooking. But she didn't become really obsessed until March 30, 2005, when a surprisingly large batch of lottery-ticket buyers across the country scored some big money in a Powerball drawing with numbers they got from fortune cookies. Lee drew up a list of the restaurants that had served the Powerball winners and used that as a jumping-off point for a trip that covered 42 states and included stops at eateries ranging from no-frills chow mein joints to upscale dim sum parlors. As she explored this vast sector of the food-service world--there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonald's, Burger Kings and KFCs combined--she learned about the science of soy sauce, the manufacture of takeout containers and the connection between Jewish culture and Chinese food. Lee's charming book combines the attitude and tone of two successful food industry-themed titles from 2007. Like Trevor Corson (The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket), she embeds her subject's history in an entertaining personal narrative, eschewing cookie-cutter interviews and dry lists of facts and figures. Like Phoebe Damrosch (Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter), she has a breezy, likable literary demeanor that makes the first-person material engaging. Thanks to Lee's journalistic chops, the text moves along energetically even in its more expository sections. Tasty morsels delivered quickly and reliably. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Curious about a Powerball drawing in which several people nationwide won a lottery after getting identical lucky numbers in their fortune cookies, New York Times reporter Lee traveled worldwide to investigate the secrets of Chinese restaurants. In this fascinating book, she even finds General Tso's birthplace and provides the history of chop suey. (LJ 2/15/08) (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue: March 30, 2005 | p. 1 |
| Chapter 1 American-Born Chinese | p. 9 |
| Chapter 2 The Menu Wars | p. 27 |
| Chapter 3 A Cookie Wrapped in a Mystery Inside an Enigma | p. 38 |
| Chapter 4 The Biggest Culinary Joke Played by One Culture on Another | p. 49 |
| Chapter 5 The Long March of General Tso | p. 66 |
| Chapter 6 The Bean Sprout People Are in the Same Boat We Are | p. 84 |
| Chapter 7 Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People-or, The Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989 | p. 89 |
| Chapter 8 The Golden Venture: Restaurant Workers to Go | p. 107 |
| Chapter 9 Take-out Takeaways | p. 139 |
| Chapter 10 The Oldest Surviving Fortune Cookies in the World? | p. 143 |
| Chapter 11 The Mystery of the Missing Chinese Deliveryman | p. 151 |
| Chapter 12 The Soy Sauce Trade Dispute | p. 165 |
| Chapter 13 Waizhou, U.S.A. | p. 179 |
| Chapter 14 The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World | p. 209 |
| Chapter 15 American Stir-fry | p. 250 |
| Chapter 16 Tsujiura Senbei | p. 260 |
| Chapter 17 Open-Source Chinese Restaurants | p. 266 |
| Chapter 18 So What Did Confucius Really Say? | p. 273 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 292 |
| Notes | p. 296 |
| Bibliography | p. 303 |
