The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

Is Chinese food more American than apple pie? When's the last time you had an apple pie? When did you last eat Chinese? In Baghdad's green zone, do troops feel nostalgic for pie or beef with broccoli? Did a Western Massachusetts National Guard platoon get care packages of pies or chow mein sandwiches on wonder bread? Ms Lee, a reporter for The New York Times, spent over three years, and visited 33 countries and 43 North American states and provinces on her quest to understand Chinese food. And along the way, she realized that this was a personal journey to understand herself and aspects of the American Asian experience. Her book opens with a story on how some numbers printed in fortune cookies led to an unprecedented number of Powerball winners in March 2005. Lee embarks on a journey to interview these 110 winners and the owners of the Chinese restaurants that distributed these cookies. Along the way we learn how this Harvard educated daughter of Chinese immigrants grew up on Manhattan Chinese takeout and became obsessed with how American Chinese food evolved. For me, each chapter was more exciting than the preceding ones. Chapter 2, The Menu Wars, is a must read for every NYC apartment dweller; it tells the tale of the first NYC Chinese restaurant to offer delivery and distribute menus under apartment doors and in lobbies. Chapter 3 begins to tell the story of the origin of fortune cookies. Were they Chinese? Japanese? LA? San Francisco? Or.... ? And as in a good mystery, clues get dropped in later chapters. Chapter 4 explores the origin and proliferation of chop suey, but between the lines, is a history of the Chinese Exclusionary laws in America. Chapter 5 is a search of the source of General Tso's (Zuo Zongtang) chicken (aka Admiral Tso at Annapolis), which was harder than finding the source of the Nile. Lee visits the ancestral village of the dish's namesake and meets the descendants of this ruthless military leader. The chapter is garnished with stories on why woks won out over baking in Chinese cuisine, why American like brown over white and avoid rubbery jellyfish-like textures, and what the heck broccoli and baby corn have to do with Chinese dishes. In another chapter, Lee searches for the best Chinese restaurant in the world (NYC? Dubai? Paris? Rome? or...?), and another explores what Confucius really said. Of course, the chapter on why Chinese of the chosen food for the chosen people is a necessary read, but my favorite chapters were the one on the plight of the surviving passengers of the Golden Venture ship that ran aground in NYC, filled with undocumented alien restaurant workers, and the one in which Lee explains how Chinese restaurants are bought and sold in the USA (and where the best town to open a restaurant is) and her travels with one family that escapes NYC and ventures to rural Georgia to run a restaurant. In the non-words of Confucius, "May you read books in interesting times."

"Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie. But ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie? How often do eat Chinese food?" That's what Jennifer 8. Lee (the 8 is a number that connotes prosperity for the Chinese) writes in _The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food_ (Twelve Books), and although "As American as apple pie" may never be replaced by "As American as Chinese food," she has an interesting point. It is a point made in many different ways in each chapter of her funny and enlightening book which is about what would be better called American Chinese food, a type of cuisine that is served all over the United States in more restaurants than McDonald's, Burger King, and KFC combined, and is also something you can find all over the world. I remember, for instance, fifteen years ago being in Amsterdam and going to a Chinese restaurant, and it was almost as if we had stepped into one on Main Street, USA. There were red and gold décor, pictures of dragons and waterfalls, pictures of the specialties above the register, a menu printed in black and red, with egg rolls, chop suey, and all the old favorites, and they all tasted just like home. Lee is a New York Times reporter and an American-born Chinese who got intrigued by a 2005 Powerball lottery drawing when an unexpectedly high number of people got five of six numbers correct; they had picked the lucky numbers on from a fortune cookie. Because these cookies were distributed all over the US, there were winners all over, and Lee set out to visit the winners, their particular Chinese restaurants, and trace back to the factory that made the cookies and the people who wrote the fortunes. Among the "Chinese" foods described here, the cookie is one that didn't originate in America. The cookies originated in Japan, and are not so ancient as Confucius, arising sometime in the nineteenth century. There is a whole chapter here ("The Long March of General Tso") about my favorite Chinese dish, the general's chicken. It will not surprise you, perhaps, that the general did not invent the chicken recipe, but it may be more Chinese than chop suey, which is unknown in China and may have originated as a joke by a Chinese chef in America who was told to concoct something that would "pass as Chinese". General Zuo (a more modern transliteration of "Tso") Zongtang is a historical figure venerated by the Chinese for his gifts as a military leader. He died in 1885, but his name lives on because of his chicken. When Lee goes to the general's ancestral village in rural Hunan, she finds that the village is proud of its famous son as a general, but has no idea about his branching off into victuals. Lee showed a waitress at a restaurant there a picture of General Tso's chicken, getting the reply, "It doesn't look like chicken." "No one here eats this," says an old farmer. When she explains that many Americans know the general's name, one villager is not surprised. "He was

I knew that fortune cookies were not "real" Chinese food, as I knew that chop suey was an invention for American palettes. What I did not know, however, was the incredible back story behind each, as well as many of the other topics covered in this book. While the material on fortune cookies and chop suey was interesting, it was the stories of how Chinese nationals (PRCs) will do whatever it takes to get to the United States and what that can entail that I found fascinating. I also was amazed that the area in China supplying the majority of restaurant workers has shifted over the years, and that the population of the region has shrunk so much that schools have closed. Other interesting features in the book include how Chinese restaurants sprout up and how they are bought and sold in a near underground economy, how fights have broken out over soy sauce, how the little white bucket used for take out came about and why you rarely see it anywhere other than at Chinese restaurants, as well as more mundane topics about the food. The author has an obvious passion for the subject, and covers it well. She writes well, and has a sense of humor about some of the items that is somewhat infectious. A very well written and researched book that I would recommend to anyone interested in food. It will certainly change the way you look at a Chinese restaurant the next time you eat at one!

This is one of those delightful books that tells you all sorts of "behind the scenes" secrets about a part of life that everyone knows about and takes for granted. But unlike a lot of tell-alls (think Fast Food Nation) that make you afraid of a product or industry, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles left me more in love with "Chinese food" than ever before. Lee is a skilled journalist, and so the exposition of her insightful ideas is typically clear and crisp, yet never dry or academic. The pages come alive with clever witticisms (she compares General Tso to Colonel Sanders) and she evokes real people with real stories, like the entrepreneuse who introduced Chinese food delivery to New York, and the delivery man trapped in an elevator for days who couldn't speak enough English to get help via the intercom. But the real fun of this book is learning about how what we think of as Chinese food isn't the food eaten in China; the cuisine served as "Chinese food" around the world is as much a mix of its Asian origins and its adopted home as the children of the hard-working immigrants who serve it up. Fortune cookies turn out to be as American as apple pie -- or probably more so, if you buy her argument: when was the last time you had apple pie, and when was the last time you had Chinese food? The Fortune Cookie Chronicles isn't just about Chinese food. It shows us, through the stories of a ubiquitous cuisine and its subculture, the kinds of forces that make America what it is today, and continue to shape our world. Full disclosure: although I do know the author, this review was unsolicited. I'm writing this for those who haven't had a friend already introduce this wonderful book to them!

I do have to admit that I am in the book as inventing the Fortune Album, but I also do have to admit that I found this to be a fascinating and revealing book about a myriad of topics relating to Chinese cuisine, the fortune cookie, and about Chinese culture in general. My favorite Chapters in the book are as follows: Chapter 8: The Golden Venture: Restaurant Workers to Go - in which Jennifer describes the process of immigrating to the United States for the sole purpose of working in the Chinese restaurant industry. Chapter 12: The Soy Sauce Trade Dispute - How the largest manufacturer of packeted soy sauce does not use soybeans in their product! Chapter 16: Tsujiura Senbei - The real nation that invented the fortune cookie and how the Chinese "stole" it and marketed it to what it is today. But to be honest, I found the whole book to be a true labor of love, from describing how the concept of delivery of Chinese food came about, how the Chinese came to own so many restaurants and laundromats, the Chop Suey revolution, the state of the Fortune Cookie industry, why Jewish people love Chinese food, the discovery of the Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World, and the contrast between Chinese parents and American parents. So go buy the book. It takes about 4 nights before going to bed to finish it, and you will find it very educational and fun. Congratulations, Jennifer, for spending a monumental amount of time, energy, and effort in writing such an excellent book.