{"id":375,"date":"2007-12-27T15:04:42","date_gmt":"2007-12-27T20:04:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/2007\/12\/27\/is-there-a-worm-hole-from-the-panda-garden-straight-down-to-beijing\/"},"modified":"2007-12-28T00:13:32","modified_gmt":"2007-12-28T05:13:32","slug":"is-there-a-worm-hole-from-the-panda-garden-straight-down-to-beijing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/27\/is-there-a-worm-hole-from-the-panda-garden-straight-down-to-beijing\/","title":{"rendered":"Is there a worm hole from the Panda Garden straight down to Beijing?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.matthewpearl.com\">Matthew Pearl<\/a> (who also had <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/about\/editor\">Jon Karp <\/a>as an editor) sent me an except of a diary from his great-aunt Ruth (now in her late 90s), about her early impressions of a Chinese restaurants while growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. In this excerpt, Jenny is an aunt and Sylvia is her sister.  Matthew doesn&#8217;t know exactly when this is from, but I would ballpark it in the 1920s, based on how Chinese restaurants spread in New York City, and what little I know about Aunt Ruth.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It was in this house that Sam Sturman came to court Jenny. He was a good-looking man with wavy, blond hair and big blue eyes. He was jolly, liked to joke and tease. He was a &#8220;man about town&#8221; and invited Jenny and my mother, Anna, to dinner in a new kind of restaurant, Chinese. Jenny was afraid to go to such an outlandish place, but my mother was eager and adventurous.<\/p>\n<p>Jenny, Grandma, Sylvia, and I, pleaded with them to not go; but they did go just the same. We all worried they&#8217;d be kidnapped to China, and were much relieved when they returned.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Its interesting to think of Chinese restaurants as strange exotic &#8212; potentially dangerous &#8212;  places.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matthew Pearl (who also had Jon Karp as an editor) sent me an except of a diary from his great-aunt Ruth (now in her late 90s), about her early impressions of a Chinese restaurants while growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. In this excerpt, Jenny is an aunt and Sylvia is her sister. Matthew doesn&#8217;t know [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese-food","category-jews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2pydS-63","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}