toastykitten (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
toastykitten) wrote2008-03-30 08:58 am
toastykitten) wrote2008-03-30 08:58 am
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fortune cookie chronicles
We went to go see Jennifer 8. Lee at Vroman's in Pasadena talk about her new book, the Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which traces the lineage of various Chinese American food items such as fortune cookies and chop suey and General Tso's chicken. It was fascinating and very humorous discussion that brought up all sorts of huge, relevant issues - food, masculinity, racism, immigration, and of course, "what it means to be American". I think what she said was "if our standard of what it means to be American is 'as American as apple pie', then how often do Americans eat apple pie, and how often do they eat Chinese food?"
Her presentation was pretty organized, and we saw a bunch of different images and videos, from Chinese people in China trying fortune cookies for the first time, to the video of a sad little five year old girl in China explaining that she was born in America and was being raised in her village in China while her parents were working in America, and America was "at the airport, far away".
Her presentation was pretty organized, and we saw a bunch of different images and videos, from Chinese people in China trying fortune cookies for the first time, to the video of a sad little five year old girl in China explaining that she was born in America and was being raised in her village in China while her parents were working in America, and America was "at the airport, far away".
Some things I learned:
Anyway, I paid full price for her book and got it signed by Lee. (If I had thought about this earlier I would have gotten the book off Amazon or somewhere cheaper. My cheap ass was going "25 friggin' dollars for a book!") She gave everyone a little fortune and personalized it for us. Oh, and she had one of those Chinese stamps with her name on it, which I thought was pretty cool. At the end there was a Q and A session which went on for a bit. Notice to old white people: just because she wrote a book about Chinese American food does not mean she is an authentic Chinese restaurant GPS. You can use the Internet for that.
I finished the book last night and I thought it was pretty cool. It's written in a very breezy, conversational tone, and she jumps from topic to topic - from Jews obsessed with Chinese food to illegal immigration to the limitations of living in American freedom to her quest for the origin of fortune cookies, which holds the book together. It's an interesting look at my history and I actually learned something about my family's area that I didn't know before:
"One single county, Taishan (or Toisan) in Guangdong Province, suffered onslaughts of near-biblical proportions. In a sixty-year period, from 1850 to 1910, it endured fourteen great floods, seven typhoons, four earthquakes, two sever droughts, four epidemics, and five serious famines, plus a twelve-year ethnic war between locals and Hakka transplants. At least 80 percent of the Chinese immigrants to the United States before the 1950s would hail from around this region."
Ethnic war in our county with the Hakka? That was completely news to me. There's a Wikipedia entry about it.
There's also an amusing part where she compares Chinese restaurants to the open source world. I laughed out loud because if I had been doing the same project, it's probably exactly the type of connection I would make.
So the book, in the end, is really about the Chinese diaspora and where we ended up and our continuing influence on the world through the Chinese restaurant business. It was a bit like reading the personal history of my family, and learning about more recent immigration trends, which, if anything, seems to have gotten harder for the Chinese as time has passed. All my jokes about the Chinese taking over the world through immigration? Kind of came true.
- Lee found an actual Chinese guy who worked in the kitchen at P.F. Chang. Asked about his thoughts about the restaurant, he replied that it just looked like a funeral parlor to him because of all the terra cotta soldiers.
- Fujian is the source of new immigrants these days, and they're all heading out to New York to work in various restaurants. The so-called "Chinatown buses" have been discovered by the Lonely Planet crowd, and Lee mentioned that most of the buses from New York to D.C. or Boston are now mostly carrying non-Chinese people, because the buses are pretty cheap. I do know that in Philadelphia it only costs $20 to take it up to New York. Watching the videos of the villages was pretty depressing though - it reminded me of our village, and our village was just as empty of people, as most of the young people have migrated, either to Guangzhou, or finding a way, illegally and legally to Hong Kong and America and Canada. Also, this totally explains why I couldn't understand anybody in Philadelphia or New York.
- A lot of immigrants who have American-born children have to send them back to their villages to have their grandparents take care of them because they don't have the time or the means to take care of them properly in America. This part was completely surprising to me and I felt really, really badly for the kids and their parents.
- There are villages in China where they teach the kids "Chinese restaurant English" to prepare them for their lives in America as illegal immigrants.
- Lee says that S.F. and L.A. beat N.Y.C. for Chinese food, but Vancouver may beat us all.
- Fortune cookies are actually Japanese in origin, and they may been made more popular by the Chinese during the Japanese internment.
Anyway, I paid full price for her book and got it signed by Lee. (If I had thought about this earlier I would have gotten the book off Amazon or somewhere cheaper. My cheap ass was going "25 friggin' dollars for a book!") She gave everyone a little fortune and personalized it for us. Oh, and she had one of those Chinese stamps with her name on it, which I thought was pretty cool. At the end there was a Q and A session which went on for a bit. Notice to old white people: just because she wrote a book about Chinese American food does not mean she is an authentic Chinese restaurant GPS. You can use the Internet for that.
I finished the book last night and I thought it was pretty cool. It's written in a very breezy, conversational tone, and she jumps from topic to topic - from Jews obsessed with Chinese food to illegal immigration to the limitations of living in American freedom to her quest for the origin of fortune cookies, which holds the book together. It's an interesting look at my history and I actually learned something about my family's area that I didn't know before:
"One single county, Taishan (or Toisan) in Guangdong Province, suffered onslaughts of near-biblical proportions. In a sixty-year period, from 1850 to 1910, it endured fourteen great floods, seven typhoons, four earthquakes, two sever droughts, four epidemics, and five serious famines, plus a twelve-year ethnic war between locals and Hakka transplants. At least 80 percent of the Chinese immigrants to the United States before the 1950s would hail from around this region."
Ethnic war in our county with the Hakka? That was completely news to me. There's a Wikipedia entry about it.
There's also an amusing part where she compares Chinese restaurants to the open source world. I laughed out loud because if I had been doing the same project, it's probably exactly the type of connection I would make.
So the book, in the end, is really about the Chinese diaspora and where we ended up and our continuing influence on the world through the Chinese restaurant business. It was a bit like reading the personal history of my family, and learning about more recent immigration trends, which, if anything, seems to have gotten harder for the Chinese as time has passed. All my jokes about the Chinese taking over the world through immigration? Kind of came true.
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