Chinese food for Chinese vs. Chinese food for Americans
By Jennifer 8. Lee | August 5, 2007
Nicole Mones writes about the duality of Chinese food for Chinese people and Chinese food for Americans in The New York Times Magazine. What’s the difference? According to Mones, “American taste†means Chinese-style dishes prepared with a limited range of pre-mixed sauces, usually no more than 5 to 7 per restaurant (These sauces — sweet and sour, sesame, Hunan, Sichuan — are descended from flavors introduced first by Cantonese immigrants pre-1960s and great Chinese chefs post-1960s).
Unlike the Zagats who lamented that the static Chinese food was in large part due to difficulties with immigration visas for Chinese chefs, Mones argues that “the problem isn’t one that a few books or even better immigration policy can fix. Real Chinese cooking doesn’t need to be imported, because it has been here for decades. Since the start of the current wave of Chinese immigration in the 1980s, gifted Chinese chefs have jammed into enclaves like the San Gabriel Valley in California and Flushing, N.Y., competing with one another, complaining about how hard it is to get Americans to give their cuisine a chance. The real problem is the American diner or, more precisely, the relationship between diner and chef. Chefs don’t know how to step outside of all-Chinese communities and market their cuisine to the mainstream. And most American diners want to stick to the Chinese food they already know.”
I think the reasons why Chinese-style Chinese cooking has not made further inroads is more subtle. One reason is that a lot of what Chinese find fascinating (odd textures and extremely fresh seafood that comes in bodily glory) is not so intriguing to an American palate.  Secondly a lot of people don’t know *how* to order in a Chinese restaurant, and unless they are hardcore foodies or go with an experienced Chinese friend, they would not know what “bamboo pith” and “sea cucumber” are.
One of the more interesting places to see an analysis of American Chinese food is on the menu of Grand Sichuan Chinese restaurants in New York City which tries to introduce Chinese Chinese food to Americans with an extensive explanatory menu.
Nicole has recently published another novel, The Last Chinese Chef, which weaves a widow’s exploration into her dead husband’s secrets with an informative history about Chinese cuisine. (The woman is a food writer and she becomes friends with an up and coming Hapa Chinese chef named Sam Ling, descended from a imperial chef)
I found the sections on food fascinating. With a politcal and literary history that stretches back over four millennia, Chinese cooking is full of subtle allusions and puns that cater to the diner’s intellectual as well as gustatory sophistication. A good banquet has a narrative arc. For example, the last dish in one of the chef’s banquets mixes a lamb broth with a whole fish, which would seem bizarre, except that it is a pun told through food. The character for Chinese for “fresh” is xian (鲜), which is made up of the character for “fish”, yu (éš) and “lamb,” yang (羊),
Topics: China, Chinese | No Comments »
And when they came with their torches and nooses, the Chinese fled to restaurants
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 31, 2007
Jean Pfaezer’s new book: Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans
Imagine the unease about outsourcing now, except that these were “insourcing” Chinese people to the west. So the laborers came face to face with the people who were threatening their livelihoods. It wasn’t pretty. The results: The Chinese Massacre of 1871 in Los Angeles, the Denver Riot of 1880, the Tacoma Riot of 1885, The Rock Springs, Wyoming Massacre of 1885.
But the most lurid tale was the Snake River Massacre of 1887. The water in Hell’s Canyon in Oregon ran red with blood as more than 30 Chinese gold miners were killed and mutilated by a group of white men who had conspired to steal their gold and force the Chinese out. Three killers were brought to trial. Not one was convicted and the killers kept their souvenirs. A Chinese skull fashioned into a sugar bowl graced the kitchen table of one ranch home for many years.
Topics: Chinese | No Comments »
I’ll need that by Feb. -30-
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 30, 2007
The New York Times ran a correction, which undoubtedly will go down into the canon of great corrections.
An article on Thursday about the arraignment of three men in the shooting of two New York police officers, one of whom died, misstated the schedule set by a judge for a trial in the case. The trial is expected to begin by February, not by “Feb. 30.†The error occurred when an editor saw the symbol “— 30 —†typed at the bottom of the reporter’s article and combined it with the last word, “February.†It is actually a notation that journalists have used through the years to denote the end of an article. Although many no longer use it or even know what it means, some journalists continue to debate its origin. A popular theory is that it was a sign-off code developed by telegraph operators. Another tale is that reporters began signing their articles with “30†to demand a living wage of $30 per week. Most dictionaries still include the symbol in the definition of thirty, noting that it means “conclusion†or “end of a news story.â€
 The best collection of New York Times corrections is in the book. Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times: A Collection of the Newspaper’s Most Interesting, Embarrassing and Off-Beat Corrections.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
I’m catching up on two years of sleep…
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 30, 2007
Working on the endnotes, bibliography and acknowledgments now. (It never, ever ends). AAJA convention in Miami at the end of this week. Will be back blogging full force in a few days.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Wow. The cardboard in porkbun story was a media hoax to get ratings?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 26, 2007
So a few weeks ago there was a huge ruckus about a Chinese television report that showed a vendor mixing cardboard into his bun filling in Beijing. It ran around the world — picked up by CNN and Fox News — because it seemed so resonant with the dominant narrative at the time (food scandal in China). I was surprised how many people had heard of it and brought it up in random conversation. Here is an updated version: saying it was a hoax to get ratings. True? False?
Beijing police have detained a television reporter for allegedly fabricating an investigative story about steamed buns stuffed with cardboard at a time when China’s food safety is under intense international scrutiny.
A city-wide inspection of steamed bun vendors found no “cardboard buns,” the China Daily said.
A report directed by Beijing TV and played on state-run national broadcaster China Central Television last Thursday said an unlicensed snack vendor in eastern Beijing was selling steamed dumplings stuffed with cardboard soaked in caustic soda and seasoned with pork flavoring.
Beijing authorities said investigations had found that an employee surnamed Zi had fabricated the report to garner “higher audience ratings”, the China Daily said on Thursday.
“Zi had provided all the cardboard and asked the vendor to soak it. It’s all cheating,” the paper quoted a government notice as saying.
A city-wide inspection of steamed bun vendors in the wake of the report had found no such cases, the paper said.
Beijing TV had apologized for failing to check the report’s authenticity and said it would make efforts to improve staff ethics, the paper added.
China is reeling from a series of tainted food and drug scandals that have sparked criticism at home and abroad.
The deaths of patients in Panama from mislabeled drug ingredients from China, deadly toxins in pet food exported to the United States and food laced with hazardous antibiotics and chemicals have raised fears about the safety of China’s surging exports.
On Wednesday, Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to improve food safety in a meeting with a visiting Japanese House of Representatives Speaker Yohei Kono, Kyodo news agency reported.
Topics: China, Chinese, Chinese Food | No Comments »
Done.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 26, 2007
i’m hungry.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Wakiya’s Menu
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 25, 2007
Here is a look at Wakiya’s menu, courtesy of Menupages. The restaurant Web site claims (when are they going to update that thing?) “It will offer a new style of Chinese cooking inspired by the traditional food of Shanghai and Northern China. Currently not available in America, this new genre of Chinese cuisine is rich in imagination and dynamically presented through the eyes of chef, Yuji Wakiya. In fact, the food is so delicately and beautifully presented it’s as if it is painted on the plate!” Glancing through the dishes, sadly, it doesn’t look too much like his Japanese version.
Here we go (more after the jump)
Hot Dishes
Lobster with sweet taoban or black bean sauce $34
Spicy Crispy Soft Shell Crab   $18
Crispy Yuba Shrimp            $16
Creamy Lemon Shrimp $22
Sea Bass in hot chouten olive oil $28
Tong Tsu Sea Bass $26
Pan Seared Whitefish with golden sand $25
Spicy Fish Lettuce Wrap $25
Sauteed Shrimp with seasonal vegetables $23
Wakiya Seafood Toast $16
Grilled Washu Steak with black pepper sauce $36
Seared Beef & Vegetable Rolls $28
Beef with seasonal vegetables (oyster or black bean sauce)Â $25
Peking Duck 4 pcs      $24
Roasted Crispy Chicken $13
Sansho Pepper Crusted Chicken $16
Fried Chicken with chinese ponzu $16
Chicken Wings $12
Wakiya Cha Siu $18
Tong Tsu Pork $18
Double Sauteed Pork and Cabbage            $18
Smoked Lamb with black pepper sauce $24
Spicy Dynamite Tofu            $18
Vegetarian Peking Duck $24
Tofu & Chicken Toast $12
Ma Po Tofu            $21
Wok Sauteed Vegetables with glass noodles           $14
Dried Scallops with seasonal vegetables           $15
Mixed Vegetables with dried shrimp $15
Sauteed Chinese Bacon and Broccoli  $15
Sauteed Julienne Potatoes with XO sauce           $14
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
More Culinary Xenophobia? Pat Oliphant’s Chinese Restaurant Cartoon
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 25, 2007
Click to enlarge. Lots of debate in the Asian American circles over this Pat Oliphant cartoon commenting on the recent food issues in China.
If you can’t tell well enough. It depicts a well-to-do white couple in an alleyway behind the “Inn of the Lucky Happiness Chinese Restaurant” picking through scraps from dumpsters and trash cans for their dinner. The white woman, holding a chicken head, says, “When you suggested eating Chinese this evening, I should have known…” Then, next to Oliphant’s penguin, a tiny Chinese man with a Fu Manchu mustache spurts out, “Confucius say, ‘What FDA Don’t Know Won’t Hurt Them.'”
Topics: China, Chinese Food | No Comments »
A How-To Menu Guide for all the Laowai!
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 24, 2007
Ben Ross in China has compiled three years of culinary exploration into a very handy guide to ordering Chinese dishes in China, complete with pictures, phoenetics, and descriptions at howtoorderchinesefood.com. It’s also useful for people who want to order “off the menu” or more authentically at an American Chinese restaurants. It’s not the most aesthetically pleasing site (but the Internet has never been impressed with flashy design, think Craigslist, Google), but it covers an impressive range of topics and cuisines. For example, it has a shorthand list for all the one-character shorthands for various provinces (sort of how like CA means California, and MO means Missouri, but only less inuitive). And it even has Northeastern dishes, which rarely find their way to America.
Topics: China, Chinese Food | No Comments »
Don’t Talk to Me Until Friday
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 24, 2007
Final final manuscript due Thursday. Meanwhile, I eliminated a chapter, consolidating it into another. And am rewriting two chapters after I decided the prose was mediocre. (And I read Harry Potter 7, which makes you appreciate how elegantly everything is constructed)
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Forget singing. Try reading aloud to yourself in the bathroom.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 19, 2007
So my editor, my agent and my friends have all recommended that I read the manuscript to myself out loud as I do the final fine-tooth line-editing. When you read it out loud, it is like music. If something is off, you can tell immediately. Each paragraph, sentence, word has to justify its existence in this world. Each sentence has to flow from the one immediately preceding it.
One friend does this all the time apparently. She just got her manuscript back from the copyeditor and was hurrying off to read it to herself again. Before she rushed off, near the end of our IM conversation, she typed in:
I recommend the bathroom
good acoustics.
Topics: Book Musings, Chinese Food | No Comments »
Done! (4th time) Now for the factchecks…
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 19, 2007
Woke up this morning to the UPS delivery guy at the door with the last hand-edited chapter of my book (both my Jon Karp and Nate Gray, his assistant). Entered those edits just now. Which means, I just have the changes that are coming in from fact checking. Yay. Then to the production side next week.
I’ve also installed Google Analytics for the blog, which offers interesting geographical detail about who is visiting from where and when and how long they are staying and what they are reading. It’s mostly for companies who are trying to make money, but I found it fascinating to see that level of detail even about my baby book blog.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Imagine if America only had 100 restaurants today. That was China’s culinary scene in in 1976
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 19, 2007
Oliver August‘s new book was released yesterday — Inside the Red Mansion: On the Trail of China’s Most Wanted Man (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). It is the product of seven years of working, hunting for Lai Changxing, a country-boy turned billionaire fugitive and a fascinating tale of how China is wrestling with its new freewheeling wealth.
Oliver, who is a former Beijing bureau chief of The Times of London and a Chinese-food aficionado, spends a lot of time dwelling on cultural importance of food in the culture.
“Food is — and always has been — not only a key to identify but a signpost to power. Many Chinese remember their first dining out experience like Americans do the Kennedy assassination. Where were you when…?
And he has some great food-related slang. Like guotie (é‹è²¼), or potsticker, is someone who doesn’t want to leave a job with a state-owned company, or chao youyu (ç‚’é·éš), to have one’s squid cooked, is to get fired from one’s job.
But the most amazing statistic of all in the book. In 1976, at the time of Mao Zedong’s death — there was 1 restaurant for every 3 million people in China. (the equivalent of 100 total restaurants in America, or just under 3 for New York City) It serves as a reminder that restaurants/culinary scene is very much the product of having a middle class/leisure class. (The rich had their own cooks at home). After all, it was the French middle class that helped to propel the birth of modern restaurants after the French revolution which is why so many of the words we use in restaurants are French in origin — menu, maitre d’, entrée, hor d’oeuvres. (Nicholas M. Keifer argues that restaurants existed in Hangzhou China (pdf) in 12th century Song Dynasty)
Point being, since communism is a real damper on middle class, Communist countries aren’t known for their vibrant dining scene. So many years the most exciting developments in Chinese cooking were happening in Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Chinese are catching up as of late though
Topics: Book Musings, China, Chinese, Chinese Food | No Comments »
US and North Korean nuclear envoys meet on neutral ground: Chinese restaurant
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 18, 2007
The AFP writes about how the US and North Korean nuclear envoys met in Beijing and went off to a Chinese restaurant. Given that they are in China, perhaps this is not so surprising (but then again, they did chose to meet in China — neutral territory?). But this brings to mind another “dining diplomacy” incident where a Chinese restaurant did play a major role: the Cuban Missile Crisis. Emissaries representing President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev met at Yenching Restaurant in Cleveland Park Washington to negotiate during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Legend has it that they hammered out the final details, and avoided a war, in the second-to-last booth on the left. But sadly, the Washington institution recently closed.
- At Yenching Palace, Five Decades of History to Go (The Washington Post)
- US NKorean nuclear envoys engage in ‘dining diplomacy’ (AFP)
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
So why are Chinese restaurants all over the world? (Because the Chinese are all over the world)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 18, 2007
Professor Peter Kwong, who studies Chinese immigration and labor issues, has an amazingly detailed piece about the Chinese diaspora on the Yale Global web site.
About 180 million people around the world have moved countries since the end of the Cold War, about one-tenth of them are Chinese. The Chinese have spread to 150 countries. He basically discusses the tension between citizens of countries (who want to keep their nation borders intact) and employers (who want cheaper labor). The result is a lot of illegal immigration driven underground. Some interesting factoids with my expanded thoughts.
- In Romania, Chinese immigrants eliminated labor shortages created after some 2 million Romanians emigrated to Spain and Italy after the fall of communism. Chinese women employed in Romanian textile factories are paid US $260 per month – four times more than what they would earn in China, but a sum for which Romanians are no longer willing to work.
- In late 2006 local residents in Tonga – furious that the Chinese businesses recruited Chinese from China instead of employing from the local population – looted and burned more than 30 Chinese-run shops.
- Chinese entrepreneurs own a quarter of the textile businesses in Prato, Italy, (Der Speigel has a fantastic article on the Chinese in Prato.) where an army of low-wage workers recruited in China works long nights, sweatshop-style, to produce low-cost “Made in Italy†fashions for export to Eastern Europe. (Sidepoint: The Chinese restaurants in Italy are totally mediocre, as is true for most ethnic food in Italy. The local attitude is “Italian food is perfect, why would you want to eat anything else?” Plus until the 1980s, Italy exported labor, so no inflow of good ethnic food) The Prato phenom is weird. The Chinese men have adopted names like Luigi and Marco, and there is even a neighborhood called San Pechino (“St. Beijing”).
- Russia’s Far East region has about 100,000 permanent Chinese residents (about 33,000 according to a 2002 census), whose inflow has coincided with the dwindling of Russian population in the region. Many of the Chinese are there on business and legitimate visas, but there is perceived a “Chinese-ification” of the area. A belief has taken hold among many Russians (flamed by Putin) that this is a sign of a creeping Chinese annexation of Russian territory. Adding to the fears is the fact that China controlled most of that region until the 1850s. President Vladimir Putin plays on this fear when he warns that, if the government does not introduce immigration restrictions, people in Russia’s Far East could soon all speak Chinese – even as his experts agree that Russia needs Chinese labor and resources to develop this region. If you have been there, you would see why the Euro-half of Russia would not want to go there, but it seems like a natural extention of China’s north actually.
Chinese Migration Goes Global (Yale Global)
Topics: China, Chinese | No Comments »
Ouch! Scathing review of NYC Wakiya @ Gramercy Park Hotel on Chowhound
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 17, 2007
So it’s friends and family week at Wakiya. And the reviews are trickling in. One anonymous one at Chowhound is particularly scathing — saying they found it “HIGHLY disappointing, overpriced & disorganized” (caps in the original). Their check for 3 came to something like $280 (Ouch!). This blogger is kinder, saying it was one of the best meals she’d ever had (though and hers was free.) Either way, the descriptions of the menu looks nothing like what we had in Japan.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Done! (for the third time)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 17, 2007
Okay. I am done entering all the line edits and cuts (a lot of cuts) and major rewriting. Only one chapter was really in bad shape (out of 20ish, not so bad). I have completely gutted that chapter (2/3 of it is gone).
Now all that is left to polish it — while not procrastinating on AIM and Googlechat. Next: wait for edits back from The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World (outside Greater China) chapter. Enter the factchecks. (I have a great factchecker named Jennifer!)
Almost there. This is like a 3-year pregnancy + a 2-month labor process. And then the thing goes into neonatal or something, because you can’t hold it in your hands for another 7 months!
Topics: Book Musings, Musings | No Comments »
Dispatches from Wakiya (the Tokyo, not NYC, version) — one of the Best Chinese Restaurants in the World
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 16, 2007
As New York ramps up for the launch of the Yuji Wakiya’s eponymous restaurant in the Gramercy Park Hotel, it might be interesting to look at the original Wakiya in Tokyo.
That restaurant is discretely tucked away in an alley in Akasaka, an upscale neighborhood known for its ryotei, discrete high-end restaurants favorbed by Japanese powerbrokers for private negotiations.
It’s really hard to find (lots of twists and turns). I had the chance to eat there last December with my friend Tomoko in my hunt for The World’s Greatest Chinese Restaurant (outside Greater China). The restaurant combines Japanese delicacy + Chinese flavors + French presentation. Japan, as I have mentioned before, is one of the few countries in the world where the top Chinese chefs are not necessarily themselves ethnically Chinese. But the food is therefore Japanese-Chinese food. One of the traits of which is small portions.
The first-floor dining room is oddly European-influenced, but in an incongruous way — more like “how foreigners would picture European-ness.” For example there was a painting there inspired by Van Gogh’s Sunflowers (very Impressionistic), but it was hung up in this gigantic, thick, gold ornate frame (very Baroque). It just struck me as strange-looking, almost as though it clashed. I couldn’t figure out why, except to think that maybe in the west we don’t hang impressionistic paintings in baroque frames? It reminds me of a Chinese chef who went to P.F. Changs and pointed out that the restaurants iconic terracotta warriors were symbols of death as they were the post-life standing army of Emperor Qin (the first emperor of “China,” so think of him roughly as psychologically analogous to George Washington, only he had a nasty bookburning campaign).
Wakiya is upscale, and we were surrounded by the Japanese version of “ladies who lunch.” But it manages to not be stuffy or too posh. Tomoko and her friend Juro went back this week and sent back these lovely photo dispatches, which look very different actually, from what we might expect from the New York version of Wakiya. (Superficially, for example, it looks like the presentation is different, the daintiness, as exhibited from the appetizer plate below, seems to have been lost.) The Japanese really like their food dainty and cute and it’s interesting when that is cast over Chinese cuisine.
Lunch can take more than two hours. When comparing it with the other Chinese food he’s had in Japan, Juro said that after awhile, he forgot he was eating Chinese. “It was simply just good food. It transcended categories.”
More photos and thoughts after the jump.
Topics: Best Chinese Restaurants Around the World, Chinese Food, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
Chinatowns, urban redevelopment and Hooters!
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 15, 2007
Carol Huang writes about the Chinatown landsqueeze across the country in The Christian Science Monitor (yes, I’m a bit late, but I was finishing my last chapter so I missed this piece and stay with me, I’m getting the Hooters point). The piece basically points out that Chinatowns have stopped being gateways for new immigrants and that lots of people have competing views of what should be done with the valuable real estate. She focuses on Boston — which is also kind of a Little Saigon.
Here are my observations/thoughts as I have seen a lot of Chinatowns at this point (six continents!)
Chinatowns tend to have some of the most valuable, conveniently located downtown real estate (notably, often next to the financial district) of the pre-World War II growth cities in the United States. Why? Because Chinese people are often among the earliest settlers in any given city so they tend to be at the “heart” of it. American Chinatowns have been beacons since waves of anti-Chinese violence in the late 19th century drove Chinese workers out of California and into self-protective pockets across the country. So you will find centrally located Chinatowns in San Francisco and New York (the “original” Chinatowns in both), Boston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Chicago. We now know many of these Chinatowns as the place where we catch the Chinatown Bus.
Where is it not true? The cities that grew after Americans discovered their love of cars and highways — Atlanta (the first city I had ever been in which didn’t have a Chinatown), Houston, Dallas, and sort of Los Angeles (while Chinese were early settlers, the downtown area is not really valuable). There, the Chinese markets tend to be in stripmalls in the ‘burbs.
Second point, this phenomenon of urban ethnic ghettos fading has been observed as a;; immigrants bypass urban centers and head straight to the burbs. The glaring exception? New York City, where 40 percent of the population was born in another country, throw in another 20 percent of the population as their children. Chinatown still is a gateway for the Fujianese immigrants from China and Flushing still is a gateway for Taiwan and northern Chinese immigrants. In 2006, I wrote a piece for The New York Times that was essentially, an ode to New York City Chinatowns. Plus New York also has the Russians in parts of Brooklyn, the West Africans in parts of the Bronx, Domincans in Washington Heights, and the South Asians which sprawl out of Jackson Heights, Queens.
Lastly, there are some interesting things that happen when the government tries to “redevelop” a Chinatown while trying to “respect” its cultural heritage. The most amusing place is in Washington DC, where there was some rule that said that all the stores (chains such as Starbucks, Subway, etc.) had to have their names translated into Chinese on their signs. The most amusing one? Hooters — 貓é é·¹é¤é¤¨. In English: “Owl Restaurant.”
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
WP: Culinary xenophobia? A Taste of Racism in the Chinese Food Scare?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 15, 2007
Jeff Yang discusses the China food scare in today’s Washington Post Outlook section — in a piece titled “A Taste of Racism in the Chinese Food Scare.” Culinary xenophobia is a fascinating topic, and long tied into the Chinese presence in America from its earliest days. (see my General Tso’s Kitty post from before).
Jeff Yang notes that “food libel” has long been a part of a larger fear of China and the Chinese. Actually, in general culinary xenophobia, has been a way to establish a difference between “us-ness” and “them-ness.” (note how both Filipinos and Koreans have been labled “dog-eaters”). It’s a very concrete way to establish that we are not only different on the surface (looks and language), but that somehow inside we are different.
So I’d like to point out this rare and popular advertising trading card from sometime between the 1870-1890s (I have yet to see an exact date for this well-known card) for a pest control product called Rough on Rats. The card, once part of a series is now the most sought after collectors item of the bunch. It shows a Chinaman eating rats with the slogan “They Must Go” (referring subtlely to both the rats and the Chinaman during the anti-Chinese laborer backlash from the whites). You can see it live at the Chinatown Historical Society of America in San Francisco as part of the Daniel K.E. Ching Collection (which has thousands of representations of Chinese Americans in 19th and early 20th century American popular culture). James Chan has an academic conference paper discussing the images of Chinese used in advertising called “Racism and Advertising in the Latter Half of the Nineteenth Century.”
Back to the WP piece — Yang notes that a Utah-based health food company, Health International, became the first to take this “China equals menace” meme to market, instituting a new label and ad campaign promoting its products as “China-Free.” But he notes that the problems have stemmed from China’s embrace of capitalist ethics, unrestrained by the government oversight.
The bigger thought being that businessmen, unrestrained by government or public opinion, will do things that they can get away with. China has industrialized helterskelter in decades what it took much of the world to do over more than a century.
My note: it was just over a century ago that Upton Sinclair published his groundbreaking, muckracking The Jungle in 1906 (still an inspiration to journalists today). He described how dead rats were shoveled into sausage-grinding machines; how bribed inspectors looked the other way when diseased cows were slaughtered for beef, and how filth and guts were swept off the floor and packaged as “potted ham.” Within months an outraged public and nauseated President Theodore Roosevelt demanded sweeping reforms in the meat industry and Congress passed a law establishing the Food and Drug Administration.
Topics: China, Chinese, Chinese Food | No Comments »
I’m done! (for the second time)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 15, 2007
Just handed in a draft of the last missing chapter to the editor. So I’m sorta done! I would feel like celebrating, but now I have to enter the results from the factchecking and the edits for chapters 12 onwards. It never ends…
This does not compare in anyway to my friend Sugi, who has finished her book, Love Marriage, a total of eight times since college she discovered. (Her book comes out in the spring too. It’s like we’re birthing literary twins — one fiction, one non-fiction).
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Fortune Cookie Fiction: Does someone secretly listen to our dinner conversations and write custom fortunes?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 14, 2007
A number of people have sent me links to fortune cookie-related art (short story, drawings, even a short film!). The cultural fascination with fortune cookies, particularly with fortune cookie scribes, is
So I will start rolling them out over time. Here is a story from Carl Lang (who Facebook messaged me) about a guy whose job was to secretly listen to dinner table conversations so he could write customized fortunes.
Here is an abbreviated excerpt. (Full text after the jump)
I worked at a high class Chinese restaurant that my uncle owned. My job wasn’t waiting tables, cooking food, or cleaning dishes, but something far more mischievous. My job was to secretly listen to peoples’ conversations through microphones hidden under the table and write specified fortune cookies for the end of their meals. The waiter served each one on its own plate to the receiver. The idea was that the patrons would then have an enjoyable personal experience at the restaurant and keep coming back. It worked well, the couples who received personalized messages seemed to come back regularly, even though the cardiovascular nightmare of the fried rice we served was no more appealing than at any other unsanitary Asian establishment. We did nothing special with the food, but patrons kept coming back, it was because of the fortune cookies.
The key in writing the fortunes was to make them eerily personalized yet still neutral enough to have been received randomly. People were always excited to open their fortune cookies regardless of how their dinners were. They would read their message and be filled with joy. Some of them would even open it up, read the message and then not even eat the cookie. Though to their credit, if the people that did eat them knew how many years it had been since we’d last made a new batch of cookie batter, they would not have eaten them either. Did you know that there are no fortune cookies in China? They were invented in the states, so was General Tso’s chicken.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Daniel Brook’s The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 12, 2007
This recently released book by Daniel Brook (who shares my agent Larry Weissman) is a provocative look at how a winner-takes-all society sucks the best and the brighest away from public interest fields that can better society. Rick Perlstein gives a thoughtful analysis of the book.
Daniel will be doing a reading on Monday Jan 23, 7 p.m. at The Half King pub at 505 West 23rd Street, just past 10th Avenue.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
So, when is a font racist?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 11, 2007
So today, I got a burst of traffic from a link from AngryAsianMan, a popular and well-regarded blog on Asian American issues. From that traffic, I got the following feedback comment on the chingchongy font that “THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES” is written in along the top of the blog, which I found intriguing.
Angry Asian Man has criticized others for using the pseudo”Chinesey” letters like your Fortune
Cookie Chronicles heading. How about the actual Chinese characters with the English translation in parentheses underneath?
So here is the question. When is the use of the font racist? I haven’t seen the Angry Asian Man criticism of the usage, and may go on later to dig it out it. But meanwhile I have a good guess as to the type of the font he might be criticizing, and I think we are talking about two different contexts. The font would be disturbing if I were using it earnestly to represent China or “Chineseness” — but the fact is, that my book is actually about Chinese-Americaness (and the American perception of Chineseness) . So in a way the font is very appropriate since it represents the exotification of the “Orient.” We are appropriating it, not in a serious way, but in a way of self-aware mockery. Also different perhaps is the fact that I am Chinese, and read and write Chinese. I would make the argument that the “n” word can be racist in certain contexts, but that it has also been appropriated to be used in cases where it’s not racist.
Topics: Book Musings, Musings, Quirky | No Comments »
Cocooning myself to meditate on The Greatest Chinese restaurant in the world (outside Greater China)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | July 10, 2007
I’m back, shaking off jetlag, from with one last chapter to write: The hunt for the greatest Chinese restaurant in the world outside Greater China (which is subtly different from “best Chinese restaurant in the world outside Greater China,” because one can be the greatest restaurant without being the best. (The chapter explains) This crazy search took me to a bunch of different countries/cities: London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, Seoul, San Francisco, Singapore, Los Angeles, Lima, Melbourne, Sydney, Vancouver, Toronto, Bangkok, Mauritius, Dubai, Auckland, Mumbai, Kingston (Jamaica). It was actually in Tokyo that I went to Yuji Wayika’s Wakiya, and London that I went to Alan Yau’s Hakkasan (both of who were tapped to open a Chinese restaurant for the Gramercy Park Hotel). So I’m cocooning myself until this chapter is done.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »