{"id":671,"date":"2008-03-17T23:39:24","date_gmt":"2008-03-18T04:39:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/17\/smith-magazine-qa\/"},"modified":"2008-03-17T23:39:24","modified_gmt":"2008-03-18T04:39:24","slug":"smith-magazine-qa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.fortunecookiechronicles.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/17\/smith-magazine-qa\/","title":{"rendered":"Smith Magazine Q&A"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elaine Chen writes up our Q&A<\/a> for Smith Magazine<\/p>\n

INTERVIEW: Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles<\/strong><\/p>\n

Monday, March 17th, 2008<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Elaine Chen<\/p>\n

New York Times<\/em> reporter Jennifer 8. Lee started tracking down a suspiciously high number of lottery winners, and ended up following a trail that led through hundreds of Chinese restaurants on six different continents. The book that resulted from this epic journey (read an excerpt here<\/a>) ended up being about a lot more than fortune cookies, although you certainly learn some surprising things about them. (They brought luck to 110 Powerball winners, and they actually originated in Japan!) Instead, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles<\/a><\/em> is ultimately about how Chinese food and Chinese immigrants have spread throughout the world, encountering failure and success, then ultimately emerging as something new\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut still at its core Chinese.<\/p>\n


\nThe same could also be said of Jenny herself, who grew up in a Taiwanese immigrant family on the Upper West Side of Manhattan\u00e2\u20ac\u201cnot far from the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Szechuan Alley\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of Chinese restaurants known as Broadway. After graduating from Harvard, she studied at Beijing University and finally became immersed in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153real Chinese food\u00e2\u20ac\u009d as well as the real China. She was surprised to find that when she told her classmates she was American, they would reply, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153No, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re Chinese. You were just born in America.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But as she discovered while writing this book, they were probably right.<\/p>\n

When we spoke with Jenny, she was cooking and eating a late supper of fish balls. We couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have imagined a better time to talk.
\n -Elaine Chen<\/em><\/p>\n

In your book, you spend a lot of time eating in Chinese restaurants, but of course when you were growing up, you probably mostly ate at home. What was your favorite dish that your mother cooked? <\/strong>
\nI really liked beef noodle soup. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a very Taiwanese dish. The funny thing is, I didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even really like my mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s food growing up. So she did learn to cook one dish for me, which was beef with broccoli\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand only now do I know that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no beef with broccoli in China! But when you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 12, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what you like.<\/p>\n

I know first-hand that growing up in America eating Chinese food every night can make you feel different from everyone else. Did you ever ask your mother to cook Western food so you could try to fit in? <\/strong>
\nYou know, I never asked her, but she did. She tried to make spaghetti sauce. It was interesting because now that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m grown up, I realize that the whole thing about spaghetti sauce is simmering it forever and ever and ever, which is not a really Chinese style to cook. So she would end up basically stir-frying tomatoes, and then it didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look anything like what came out of the Ragu jar\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwe were very perplexed.<\/p>\n

And then we went through a hot dog stage; we went through a macaroni stage; we had this dish that we liked, which was basically taking (Campbell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s) Chunky soup and putting it over a bowl of macaroni. . . and (my mother) would even do hamburgers in a strange Chinese way. For a while there were experiments with turkey for Thanksgiving, until we found out that no matter what you do, it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t taste good. So we eat Korean for Thanksgiving now.
\n<\/span>
\nYou spent a lot of time interviewing Chinese restaurant workers who probably came to the U.S. so they could have a child like you\u00e2\u20ac\u201dHarvard-educated and successful. In some ways you must symbolize their American dream; did that impact your interactions with them? <\/strong>
\nWhen I met the Chinese restaurant workers, who are the purest Fujianese, they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what Harvard is. To them I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m the person who speaks English and also happens to speak Chinese, and can maybe help them translate a document, or call the dishwasher installer. They\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re just so removed it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even an issue. They may have understood I was a journalist, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not a prestigious thing in their world. Maybe if I were a doctor, that would have gotten them more excited, but I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m a woman talking to them about Chinese restaurants. How, in any way, could that have any social value?<\/p>\n

When you go to Chinese restaurants, do you usually order in Chinese or English? And do you feel there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s any truth to the American suspicions that Chinese customers get different, better food? <\/strong>
\nI usually order in Chinese; it seems better, and with a lot of the dishes, I feel I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t trust their English names. But one time I went to Flushing with a Latino friend, and we sat down and they gave us these menus\u00e2\u20ac\u201dGeneral Tso\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s chicken, blah blah blah. And I looked at the menu and thought, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153This is very strange, this isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the menu I usually get.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Then I looked over at the other side where the Chinese people were eating, and they had a totally different menu. They had the Chinese menu and I had the white people menu\u00e2\u20ac\u201dI was totally offended. I thought, I speak Chinese, I read Chinese, I want the real menu!<\/p>\n

On the surface your book may be about Chinese restaurants, but on a deeper level, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also about race and class. What role did class issues play in telling your story? <\/strong>
\nThere\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a subtlety with the class issue, it depends how much people pick up on it. My first interaction with illegal immigrants was when I was 18, the summer before I went to Harvard. I was walking down the street near Columbia and then this guy, this delivery boy collapsed on the street. There was this crowd surrounding him and they couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t speak Chinese, and he couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t speak any English. I asked him what happened, and he said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153My stomach hurts.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d This very nice man gave us money and we went to St. Vincent\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Hospital.<\/p>\n

It was very interesting for me because he was 18 and I was 18; we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re both the same age, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re both Chinese-American and we both arrived at that sidewalk at the same moment\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut were coming at it from a completely (different) place. The fact that he was an illegal immigrant, I was the daughter of this fairly highly educated couple, and yet at that moment our lives intersected. That really struck me\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 18 and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to Harvard, and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s traveled around the world to go work at a Chinese restaurant. That moment still resonates with me now, even decades later.<\/p>\n

You ate at Chinese restaurants all around the world. Which country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s restaurants seemed the most strange and unusual compared to the ones you knew growing up in New York? <\/strong>
\nI became agnostic about it. In Scotland, they serve their Chow Mein over French fries, so that gets a little weird. But you know what? If it works for them, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re giving that indigenous population something it wants. The closest would be Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia\u00e2\u20ac\u201dall the countries that are basically spin-offs of China; England is a little weird; they have this dish that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s called crispy shredded beef, which is a lot of crisp and a lot of shred, but not a lot of beef – so that was strange, but not a lot stranger than General Tso\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s chicken. In the end, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all kind of recognizable as Chinese food.<\/p>\n

What has it been like having people read your book and learn about your life? <\/strong>
\nThe shocking thing is that people are reading it and responding. The idea that people you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never met have read it is really strange, and they have opinions on it\u00e2\u20ac\u201dit\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very odd. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s almost like someone showed up in your living room and told you they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like your couch. What business is it of yours? And people also show up and they think they know you\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbut they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t, they know your book. So that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a little weird too.<\/p>\n

Now that you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve finished your first book, what are you planning to write about next? <\/strong>
\nYou know, I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a clue. People keep asking me, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153What are you going to write about next,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d but this was the perfect book for me to write. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know if I could do better, so why try\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhy have a sucky sophomore effort?<\/p>\n

There are some ideas I have floating around, but now that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve done a book, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m more intellectually interested in blogging and how mainstream newspaper and media converge with blogs. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my job now at the Times\u00e2\u20ac\u201dto think about how the form and function can merge for the Metro section of the Times. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really interesting to me because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the complete opposite of a book. With a book, it takes three years before your idea hits the public; with blogs, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s three hours, if that. So that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my focus right now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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