Reviews
This is a looong page with lots of scrolling through the excerpts. You can also just click on the category Reviews, to see all the related blog posts, which may be cleaner looking than here (and more complete). Apologies if this is a bit out of date, as the reviews are coming in faster than I can add them right now.
The New York Times
By Jane and Michael Stern
Lee is a city-beat reporter for The New York Times. Her inclination as a journalist is to trace a story all the way to its genesis, but not without taking some fascinating detours. On the way to finding the origin of fortune cookies, she pinpoints the beginning of door-to-door delivery in New York and its attendant scourge of free menus. And she gives us the possible origin of chop suey (a joke played by a Chinese chef in San Francisco whose boss wanted him to concoct something that “would pass as Chinese.”) Lee travels to Hunan to see if the actual General Tso had anything to do with the chicken dish that bears his name, only to discover it most likely began as General Ching’s chicken, named after General Tso’s mentor. She also reveals that the white cardboard Fold-Pak cartons for takeout food, originally used to hold shucked oysters, are unknown in China, where Chinese takeout food is virtually nonexistent. But there’s a demand for them elsewhere — because European and African television viewers want the product they see on “Seinfeld” and “Friends.” [see blog post for full review]
Los Angeles Times
By Seth Faison
As Jennifer 8. Lee observes in “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” her engaging, funny voyage into understanding Chinese food, what is served in Chinese restaurants is actually quite American. That is not an insult or a put-down but a culinary and cultural fact. It is a common illusion that when we go out to eat Thai or Mexican or Italian, we sample fare neatly transplanted from another culture. Instead, as Lee shows, we usually get an amalgam: an idea that sprouted in one place, flavored by improvisation or fluke.
… Unlocking the biggest mystery — where fortune cookies came from — required even greater persistence and ingenuity. Lee is equal to the task, and then some. With her cultural background as a Chinese American, her craft as a reporter for the New York Times, her evident love of food and her quirky sense of wonder, Lee is our trusted guide. And although I don’t want to spoil the surprise, let me just say that she finds the origin of fortune cookies in about the last place you would suspect.
[see blog post for full review]
Chicago Tribune
By Bich Minh Nguyen
In her absorbing new book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food,” New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee (”8″ connotes prosperity in Chinese) drives home the point that food culture is culture, and our dining habits reflect our identities, backgrounds and sociopolitical environments. …
Chinese workers pay a tremendous toll — financial, physical, emotional and often tragic — as seen in Lee’s poignant profile of a family that tries to run a restaurant in a rural town in Georgia and ends up breaking down under the strain of miscommunication and outsiderness. In bringing the stories of these workers to the page, Lee truly addresses what it means, politically and socially, when we order from or sit down to eat in our local Chinese restaurants. This kind of contextualizing and deepening of understanding is what the best food writing and literary journalism can do. … “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” is also an information-packed page-turner that will have you eager to share fascinating tidbits out loud. [See blog post for full review.]
Associated Press
By Jessica Bernstein-Wax
“The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food” Lee’s inquiries into the cultural and historical phenomena behind Chinese food and its amazing spread around the world are so fascinating that anyone who has ever eaten a single egg roll should read her book. … And then there are the restaurant reviews. Lee traveled from San Francisco to Lima, Peru, to the African island of Mauritius in search of the best Chinese restaurant outside China. Want to know what it is? Go buy this wonderful book. [See blog post for full review]
The San Francisco Chronicle
By Kevin Smokler
Her research is thoughtful and often hilarious (a section on why Americans will not eat anything clear, gelatinous, rubbery or black should be the new masthead for your favorite food blog) but avoids the get-my-money’s-worth slathering all too common in micro-examination of the everyday. Prose is thrown out in confident tendrils like balls of string down a staircase. And, in moves of confident poignancy, she gives the virtual slave trade in labor for Chinese restaurants a quiet dignity that respects the subject but doesn’t douse the narrative’s joyous flame. [see blog post for full review]
The Hartford Courant
By Steve Weinberg
For folks addicted to reading and to Chinese restaurants, it is difficult to imagine a more satisfying book than “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” by Jennifer 8. (yes, the numeral 8; hold on for an explanation) Lee. [See blog post for full review]
Publishers Weekly
* The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food Jennifer 8. Lee. Hachette/Twelve, $24.99 (308p) ISBN 978-0-446-58007-6
Readers will take an unexpected and entertaining journey—through culinary, social and cultural history—in this delightful first book on the origins of the customary after-Chinese-dinner treat by New York Times reporter Lee. When a large number of Powerball winners in a 2005 drawing revealed that mass-printed paper fortunes were to blame, the author (whose middle initial is Chinese for “prosperity”) went in search of the backstory. She tracked the winners down to Chinese restaurants all over America, and the paper slips the fortunes are written on back to a Brooklyn company. This travellike narrative serves as the spine of her cultural history—not a book on Chinese cuisine, but the Chinese food of take-out-and-delivery—and permits her to frequently but safely wander off into various tangents related to the cookie. There are satisfying minihistories on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food and a biography of the real General Tso, but Lee also pries open factoids and tidbits of American culture that eventually touch on large social and cultural subjects such as identity, immigration and nutrition. Copious research backs her many lively anecdotes, and being American-born Chinese yet willing to scrutinize herself as much as her objectives, she wins the reader over. Like the numbers on those lottery fortunes, the book’s a winner. (Mar.)
Lee, Jennifer 8.
THE FORTUNE COOKIE CHRONICLES: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
A quest. With eggrolls. Debut author Lee, a New York Times metro reporter, has been fascinated by the culturally mixed nature of Chinese restaurants ever since she discovered from reading The Joy Luck Club in middle school that fortune cookies are not Chinese. “It was like learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus,” writes this ABC (American-born Chinese), who never thought to wonder why the food in those white takeout cartons tasted nothing like Mom’s home cooking. But she didn’t become really obsessed until March 30, 2005, when a surprisingly large batch of lottery-ticket buyers across the country scored some big money in a Powerball drawing with numbers they got from fortune cookies. Lee drew up a list of the restaurants that had served the Powerball winners and used that as a jumping-off point for a trip that covered 42 states and included stops at eateries ranging from no-frills chow mein joints to upscale dim sum parlors. As she explored this vast sector of the food-service world — there are more Chinese restaurants in the United States than McDonalds, Burger Kings and KFCs combined — she learned about the science of soy sauce, the manufacture of takeout containers and the connection between Jewish culture and Chinese food. Lee’s charming book combines the attitude and tone of two successful food industry-themed titles from 2007. Like Trevor Corson (The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket), she embeds her subjects history in an entertaining personal narrative, eschewing cookie-cutter interviews and dry lists of facts and figures. Like Phoebe Damrosch (Service Included: Four-Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter), she has a breezy, likable literary demeanor that makes the first-person material engaging. Thanks to Lee’s journalistic chops, the text moves along energetically even in its more expository sections. Tasty morsels delivered quickly and reliably.
From The American Library Association’s Booklist
Issue: February 1, 2008 The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food. Lee, Jennifer 8 (Author)
Lee traverses the U.S., China, and beyond in her quest to discover what has made Chinese food ubiquitous in America. She investigates the murky origins of chop suey, which for decades peculiarly defined Chinese cooking for many Americans despite the fact that the dish appears nowhere in its putative homeland. In recent years a classic called General Tso’s Chicken has found its way onto virtually every Chinese American menu, and Lee meticulously chases this concoction back to its provincial roots. In an amusing chapter, Lee chronicles the unique bond between Chinese food and American Jewry despite Chinese cooking’s obvious conflict with kosher dietary proscriptions, both groups uniting in opposition to the dominant majoritarian culture. Documenting the less-savory aspects of America’s Chinese restaurant business, Lee lays bare the trafficking of illegal immigrants into kitchen servitude. She also hops from one world capital to another in a quest for the best Chinese restaurant. Extensive bibliography. — Mark Knoblauch From Book Page (sorry about the jpg) Also
Book Forum A thoughtful and substantial review in Book Forum written by Melanie Rehak, of which I pull out an excerpt here.
Her efforts to learn more are rewarded with new and interesting variations on her theme of Chinese-food-as-emblem-of-melting-pot-America; she also throws in the occasional fact that reads as though it’s ripe for a game of Trivial Pursuit: Chinese Food Edition. For example, we learn that in the premechanized days of fortune-cookie folding, a gifted folder could do about a thousand cookies per hour, and also the (oddly romantic) information that the Cuban Missile Crisis was partially resolved at a place called Yenching Palace in Washington, DC. Perhaps my favorite of these nuggets is Lee’s discovery that the Peking Gourmet Inn in suburban Virginia has a bulletproof window in front of one table because that’s where both Bush 41 and Bush 43 like to go for their fix. Can’t you just see them hunched over a steaming plate of lo mein, not talking about global warming and definitely not passing the hot sauce?
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is full of such tidbits, as well as a lot of chirpy theories and postulations mixed in with a great deal of fascinating and well-reported material on everything from the true origins of the fortune cookie (not China, but I won’t spoil it for you) to the invention of chop suey, the plight of the illegal immigrants who are the engines of the nearly forty thousand Chinese restaurants in the United States, the ways that open-source-code writing is like a loose network of Chinese restaurants, and many, many other topics related somehow to the main event. The book’s subtitle is Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, and it more than lives up to that billing. Lee is nothing if not an intrepid traveler, whether she’s seeking out the Lost Jews of Kaifeng or circling the globe in search of the best Chinese restaurant outside of China on a challenge from her editor (spoiler: It’s just outside Vancouver).
This email from my editor, Jon Karp, after his first read, which made me breathe easier.
Dear Jenny, I am so impressed by the liveliness and wit of your writing, the depth of your reporting, and the sweep of your storytelling. Your work is outstanding. Readers are going to marvel at your ability to investigate this subject in so many interesting ways. It will be a wonderful book. Nate and I have both (separately) been line editing the manuscript assiduously. You’ll receive two versions of the first 200 pages via messenger today; the rest by the end of the week. Because you were so great about nailing down the structural issues at the outset, I’m pretty sure the story is developing and unfolding well. I’ll know for sure when I’m done editing. At the moment, the only major question Nate and I have is whether readers will understand the specific nature of your fortune cookie quest. It’s not clear whether it’s the powerball mystery or the origins. I’m not sure it matters. It’s all so entertaining and interesting.
What you most need to do is cut and chisel. We’ve told you exactly where to do it. There are a lot of extraneous descriptions here: of what people are wearing, how they look, where you’re traveling, how you get there. A lot of the conversational digressions can go. All of this is common to first drafts, especially by first-time authors, so none of it surprises me. What pleases me is how clever your observations are and how amusing you are throughout the manuscript. Once you’ve tightened up and polished the prose, this should read like a winner. So that’s my great exhortation to you: Tighten and polish! When I’m done editing and you’ve had a chance to review the entire manuscript, we can talk in greater detail. Until then, I hope you will enjoy the sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph attention that Nate and I have lavished upon you. All my best, J.
and I got this blurb recently from Mary Roach!
“Jennifer 8 Lee has cracked the world of Chinese restaurants like a fortune cookie. Her book is an addictive dim-sum of fact, fun, quirkiness, and pathos. It’s Anthony Bourdain meets Calvin Trillin. Lee is the kind of reporter I can only dream of being: committed, compassionate, resourceful, and savvy. I devoured this book in two nights (in bed), and suggest you do the same.
Mary Roach, author of STIFF and SPOOK. And random e-mail from copy editor to the book editors. I did manage to get it back one day sooner than the extended deadline but couldn’t pull it up any further–it did actually need quite a bit of work. On the plus side, it’s really marvelous. I was so focused on the work I was doing moment by moment that I never pulled back enough to mention to the author how good a book it is–fabulous and wide-ranging research, interesting parallels drawn and conclusions reached. She also manages to take what at first seem like disparate chapters and weave them together, both factually and thematically. It’s all really quite fascinating. So if it’s possible, please pass my compliments along to her.
Book Musings, Chinese food, editing, Jon Karp, manuscript, reviews