Library of Congress confirmed for March 17th
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 16, 2008
From Abby Yochelson: Monday, March 17th at 12:00 noon in the Mumford Room, 6th floor of the Madison Building, 101 Independence Avenue, SE. The program is being sponsored by the Humanities & Social Sciences Division, the Asian Division, and the Center for the Book.
I am working on my Keynote presentation right now. It’s very fast-paced and amusing and multimedia with lots of photos. I just learned Keynote this past weekend in a crash course with my friend Hugo (helps to know those Apple campus representatives).
Topics: Appearances, Chinese Food | No Comments »
Nixon Library in Los Angeles area, late March
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 14, 2008
I just got booked at the Nixon Library for a day in late March. Address is 18001 Yorba Linda Blvd in Yorba Linda, Calif. More details to come.
Nixon, of course, played a large role in sparking interest in Chinese food in the United States when he went back to China in 1972. As one restaurateur in Louisiana half-seriously described it: “Lines formed overnight.”
I also like the Nixon Library folks because they do not take themselves too seriously. They embrace the kitsch.
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
General Tso shares an issue with Maxim with a semi naked April Lavigne.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 13, 2008
This is the March issue of Maxim magazine with my piece on the origins of General Tso’s chicken. For some reason I find this all very amusing. My research is sharing pages with “Why Women Secretly Love Porn.” (Why do we secretly love porn?)
One of the cooler things they did was take pictures of General Tso’s chicken and sew them into a montage.
Topics: Chinese Food, General Tso | No Comments »
When Fortune Cookies will be in The New York Times Book Review
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 13, 2008
Scheduled for The New York Times Book Review on March 9th, supposedly. Nervous. Ugh.
Topics: Reviews | No Comments »
No justice, no egg rolls! Labor strife in Israel
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 12, 2008
Rebecca Harrison of Reuters as a fascinating account of how Israeli Asian restaurant workers went on a one-day spring roll strike to protest government policies to replace Asian restaurant workers with Israeli ones.
You’d would think it’s an Onion article, except it’s real.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Maybe cupid likes Chinese food too?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 12, 2008
Pink Valentine fortune cookies, now on sale for $4.97 for 50 instead of $7.95. Bargain! Perhaps you can also put them in Valentine’s takeout glitter boxes (also in pink and red), now slashed to $1.97 for a dozen.
Topics: Fortune Cookies | No Comments »
How Chinese is All-American, excepted in a magazine that is all-American: Readers Digest
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 11, 2008
So, my book is excerpted in Readers Digest’s March issue (who knew? they have a ciruclation of 10 million!). I also have a piece in Maxim on the origins of General Tso’s chicken this month and another essay in Food and Wine on how I grew up not understanding how to use the oven. That is quite a magazine range: Readers Digest, Maxim, Food and Wine.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
So what is ‘authentic’ Chinese food anyway?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 10, 2008
Fred Ferretti, a food writer, has a critical piece in The New York Times op-ed page about the authenticity of Chinese food in America. (Ripping on Chinese food in America seems to be a resonant topic for The New York Times op-ed page/NYT Mag this year, see previous pieces by the Zagats, Nicole Mones and Fucshia Dunlop)
As Ferretti writes, “Virtually all of today’s so-called Chinese cooking in the United States can best be described as undistinguished, served in restaurants generally indistinguishable one from another.”
Topics: Chinese Food, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
So it’s Chinese New Year…Year of the Rat.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 7, 2008
A snippet from an IM conversation early today.
Shawn: happy new year! do you celebrate it with family/friends?
Me: not in the slightest. i’m more likely to go to seder for passover than celebrate chinese new year.
(Hey, the Jewish-Chinese connection in New York goes both directions).
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Booked at the Library of Congress (maybe)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 7, 2008
I might be speaking on at the Library of Congress on March 17, thanks to LOC researcher Abby Yochelson (yay). More details to come.
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
Indian Chinese food, catching on in Singapore?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 7, 2008
Reuter’s Gillian Murdoch seems fascinated by the emergence of Indian Chinese food in Singapore, writing a fairly substantive review of a restaurant there. Singapore, remember, has substantial ethnic Chinese (East Asian) and Indian (South Asian) populations — and the food in the region often reflects that. But Indian Chinese food is not the same as Southeast Asian food. It is its own hybrid. But one that New York City too has long been able to experience in Indian culinary concentrations like in Murray (Curry?) Hill and Jackson Heights. Chinese Mirch is the one that pops most immediately to mind.
Indian Chinese food in India is almost as Indian as Indian food itself. It’s all over the place even in Indian restaurants, where their menus will often have two pages of Chinese specialties like Hakka noodles, Chicken Manchurian, and American chop suey. Full text of her article after the jump.
Topics: Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
A welcome letter to the Baghdad Chinese Restaurant
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 6, 2008
A friend of mine who works in the Baghdad bureau ofThe Los Angeles Times sent me a welcome letter that his translator wrote to the owner of the new Chinese restaurant in Baghdad (which was informed, in part, by reading this blog).
Dear Sir,
I was yesterday following up some stories on the web about your restaurant, and let me relay to you how I was inspired and touched by having you and your fellow colleagues here in my country among all this chaos.
As soon I read the stories about you and your restaurant yesterday night, a big smile drawn on my face and I couldn’t feel but hope which I thought I lost it since 5 years ago. All of you leaving your families behind, and coming here is nothing but spirit lifting and deserves the greatest respect and admiration. In fact I couldn’t sleep yesterday, no matter how I tried, thinking about and admire all of you.
Topics: Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
NPR: Twelve, Betting on a Dozen Books (now with transcript)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 4, 2008
NPR has an 8-minute piece on Twelve’s first year in publishing, focusing on Jonathan Karp’s serial monogamy for twelve books a year.
Little tidbits. Out of every every 10 hardcover books, 7 fail financially, 2 break even, one becomes a hit. It’s a hit driven business. It’s like corporate legalized gambling. Anyway, Twelve has a different approach, which people thought was a gimmick when it first started. According to the piece, six of Twelve’s first nine books have hit the New York Times bestseller list — (including the extended list)
Topics: Book Musings, Twelve | No Comments »
Is Super Bowl Sunday a National Patriotic Holiday
By Jennifer 8. Lee | February 4, 2008
The Giants win. New York City rejoices.
I watched the game at the home of my friend Eric (who is throwing my book party). The crowd was heavily mostly Asian/Chinese-Americanish, but the food was totally Super Bowl American –chili, wings, beer, nachoes, dip. When our parents get together, they don’t eat like this.
In December 2006, I was in Singapore on the hunt for the best Chinese restaurant eating dinner with Shawn Chen, a native Singaporean Chinese guy who observed that Super Bowl was a patriotic American holiday akin to the Fourth of July. In retrospect, seems to be true. Super Bowl Sunday falls behind Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and Halloween in national psyche. But it falls ahead of federal holidays of President’s Day, Veterans Day and Columbus Day in American significance. If you don’t watch Super Bowl, you seem vaguely un-American.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Washington Synagogue, March 17, with Politics and Prose
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 31, 2008
The event, scheduled for March 17, 2008 (a Monday), at a local synagogue is being held in conjunction with Politics and Prose, one of the venerable independent book stores. I’m all about the synagogues.
Topics: Appearances, Book Musings | No Comments »
The Books are Here!
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 31, 2008
I will post photos later. I was running out of the building so only caught a glimpse of the books in the package. The orange cover glows slightly — almost fluorescent.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Story #3 on the Baghdad Chinese restaurant, this time by ABC
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 29, 2008
Yet another story on the Baghdad Chinese restaurant (really, people love Chinese restaurants), this time a Reporter’s Notebook by Hilary Brown of ABC. This restaurant will soon be the most covered restaurant in all of Baghdad
My favorite excerpts:
There’s no menu so I had the bright idea of calling ABC’s Beijing bureau to find out what it could serve me. I passed the phone to Wu, who was wearing a black-leather bomber jacket.
A stream of rapid-fire Mandarin Chinese poured out of him. In spite of years of experience eating in Chinese restaurants around the world, I didn’t recognize a single word, not even chow mein, won ton or sichuan.
ABC’s Beijing producer, Chito Romana, translated. Basically he had chicken and carrots, fried rice, mutton meatballs and dumplings.
Topics: Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
Szechuan and the City
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 29, 2008
That is the cute but corney name for my Q&A in Publishers Weekly this week.
Topics: Media & Interviews | No Comments »
Presenting the future of journalism…
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 27, 2008
I’m not even sure how I ended up at a karaoke bar in Koreatown with (mostly) sophomores on the Harvard Crimson on a Friday night. I start losing track of the years. I think they are the 136th guard.
Topics: Journalism Musings | No Comments »
More on the Baghdad Chinese restaurant: no Sweet and Sour Pork
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 25, 2008
Media just loves the Chinese restaurant in Baghdad story. The Times of Lonndon also takes alook at the Chinese restaurant in Baghdad with a piece that is horribly headlined: “Chinese chefs take a wok on the wild side in world’s most dangerous city.”
Tidbits we learn
- It is probably the only non-Iraqi restaurant — and possibly the only non-Arab business — in the city except for a handful huddled in the fortified, sealed-off Western enclaves.
- The local Baghdadis feel that peace is on its way. And the Chinese restuarants makes them feel almost cosmopolitan.
- The restaurat workeres have left their families behind in China, work all the time, and sleep next door to the restaurant in a single room.
- The new tenants do not serve sweet and sour pork.
Topics: Chinese, Chinese Food, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
Even Hallmark is getting naughty with its fortune cookies
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 25, 2008
Timothy Layman sent this Hallmark Card link to me. For $4.99 you can get it personalized and mailed for you (no need to lick your own stamp!)
Outside: “You will have much success and happiness.”
Inside: “In bed. Happy Valentines Day.”
Topics: Fortune Cookies, Quirky | No Comments »
Read the The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 24, 2008
This is a plug, but a relevant one. Yesterday I went to a reading/presentation by Eric Weiner, the NPR resporter and author of Geography of Bliss, at the Rubin Museum in New York City. The Geography of Bliss is one of my favorite books of the last year. I was lucky to read an advanced copy. It is a new take on the surfeit of happiness books that have been flooding the market. He does a good job of weaving what is known about happiness via research, real life demonstration of said knowledge, funny travelogue and self-reflection.
Topics: Book Musings, Chinese Food, Twelve | No Comments »
Soy sauce packet, writ large
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 24, 2008
This is just a random amusing shot of the cover of my book next to the Chinese takeout that we had for the the media luncheon last week. It’s very large and very orange.
At this point I have talked about Chinese food in Boston, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Ann Arbor and New York.
There was a radio reporter there not for me, but rather because he was working on a story on Twelve. I provided ambient noise.
Topics: Book Musings, Chinese Food | No Comments »
So did you like my book? A strangely satisfying compliment.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 23, 2008
From my friend Tim Layman, about my book: “It’s not that like I was expecting not to like it. But I was surprised how much I did.”
Have had other double-edged compliments like that. From Seth: “I’m not even interested in Chinese food! But I liked your book.”
Or this e-mail from my good friend Adam (who felt guilty he didn’t read the draft chapters until they were a galley). Some context. Adam used to be somewhat dismissive of my book (he likes to say, he was not atheist, he was just agnostic. Whatever. He used to say things like, “Jenny! You’re writing a book on Chinese food!” So this is an email from around Christmas (ignore the typos).
Seriously, the book is an incredibly well-organized, fluid assemblage of information, from the very detailed to the very general, with some very good one-liners. And there is clearly a trustworthy, authoritative author. Your Chineeseness is there, in the background, without making the book an annoying lesson in identity. (Like the food you write about, your voice has been adapted for American tastes.) Without being preachy or teachy, you do a very good job of educating the reader. It’s a fun class, basically, on a wide range of subjects (economics, class, trade, culture). The bottom line, I guess, is that it’s a smart book, and I confess, I wasn’t prepared for that, but I’m very, very happy for you, and proud of you, that it is that. With all the traveling, and jokes we’ve made (and the light material in some chapters), I thought of it as candy, but having learned so much from it (or having been reminded of things that I assumed I knew, but hadn’t focussed on), I see that it’s meatier than meets the eye.
Topics: Book Musings, Reviews | No Comments »
Updated tour sked: Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles
By Jennifer 8. Lee | January 23, 2008
I just got my updated book tour list for March for Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles. I will add them to Appearances page in a bit. We are still trying to nail down DC. Possibly a joint synagogue-bookstore event.
Topics: Appearances, Book Musings | No Comments »