The Fortune Cookie Chronicles

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee.

This book is a social history of American Chinese food and an account of the inner workings of the Chinese restaurant industry, with occasional bits of autobiography. The author points out in the first sentence of Chapter One that there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than there are McDonalds, Burger Kings and KFCs combined (!!!); and the overall argument of the book is that American Chinese food is domesticated exotica and is as American as apple pie.* While Mikey-D's, BK and KFC are top-down corporate franchises, Chinese restaurants are bottom-up, being mostly mom-and-pop joints. Despite this, they share a surprisingly homogenous menu and look derived from a kind of open-source model.

She organizes the book around two purported "mysteries". 1) Why did 110 people win a certain 2005 Powerball lottery (well, well in excess of what statistics would predict)? 2) What is the origin of the fortune cookie? Neither are particularly mysterious: for the former, the winners simply bet the sequence of numbers they got from a particular Chinese cookie fortune; and as for the latter, well, the Japanese actually invented the fortune cookie, case closed. These "mysteries" just serve as a structure on which Lee can hang various episodes and digressions: the American origin of chop suey and General Tso's Chicken (both old tales I've read elsewhere); the close relationship between Jewish Americans and Chinese food; the origin of Chinese delivery (surprisingly, only in the seventies!); the difficulties of working in the Chinese restaurant industry (legal or illegal immigration to America, dangers of being a delivery man, the crippling social isolation of running restaurants in small towns); the generation gap between the self-sacrificing first-generation immigrants and their spoiled Americanized children (getting into Amy Tan territory here); and the travails of writing suitably bland and inoffensive fortunes for the cookies.

I particularly liked the author's visit to General Tso's home village - they have never heard of his chicken, of course, but are pleased to learn about its popularity in the U.S. General Tso is so famous the Americans use his name as a marketing gimmick, they say. Lee doesn't have the heart to tell them that the chicken is the only reason most Americans have ever even heard of the General.

I'll quote some of her description of how Chinese food was rendered palatable in the U.S.:

Mainstream Americans don't like to be reminded that the food on their plate once lived, breathed, swam or walked. This means nothing with eyeballs. No appendages or extremities (no tongues, no feet, no claws, no ears). Secondly, opacity. That means nothing transparent or even semitransparent . . . There is also a limit to the textures Americans will allow in their mouths: nothing rubbery or oddly gelationous (no tripe and again, no jellyfish or sea cucumber) . . . But perhaps most important in American eating is the idea that what goes into the mouth should never come out . . . This means no chicken feet, no fish with bones, no shrimp with shells. Peanuts come shelled, and even watermelon is preferred seedless.

* My head spun when I found out that in South Korea they have actually have a chain of restaurants that sell American Chinese food. Is it authentic? she asks. "It's authentic American-style Chinese food," is the diplomatic answer. Koreans feel they can get a genuine taste of America there.