nwasianweekly.com
Mar. 1, 2008

As American as Mom’s apple pie …
and a fortune cookie

By Pat Tanumihardja
Northwest Asian Weekly

When she was in middle school, Jennifer 8. Lee discovered the shocking truth: Fortune cookies were not Chinese; they were an American invention. It was a revelation she describes as “like learning I was adopted while being told there was no Santa Claus.”

Born to Taiwanese immigrants, Lee grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she ate both her mom’s home cooking and Chinese takeout from the neighborhood restaurant down the street. She never thought to wonder why the two cuisines didn’t quite taste the same. The fortune cookie’s American provenance should have been enough of a precursor to everything she was to learn about Chinese food in America, but as Lee found out, hindsight is always 20/20.

Years later, Lee, who now works as a New York Times metro reporter, came face to face with the fortune cookie again. It was the year 2005, and a story in the AM New York, the commuter daily Lee read on the subway to work, caught her attention. The one-paragraph article announced that the March 30 Powerball lottery had a grand total of 110 winners. Mass-printed paper fortunes from fortune cookies were to blame. Right there and then, Lee decided to trace those fortune cookies back to their source, from the winners, to the restaurants and back to the cookie’s historic origins. She believed that following the Powerball fortune cookie trail would help her solve the mysteries of Chinese food in America. And like any good journalist, Lee turned her newfound fortune cookie obsession into a book deal.

What began as a cross-country chase tracking down the Powerball winners to Chinese restaurants across the U.S. spun off into a larger, more intense saga blending the culinary, social and cultural histories of Chinese food in America.

In this quirky book, Lee sets out to prove that Chinese food is as American as apple pie. “Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie,” she writes. “Ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?” As proof, she proffers this factoid: There are more Chinese restaurants in America — 43,000 of them — than McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s franchises combined.

In her bid to unearth every single nugget of information related to her quest, Lee traverses the U.S., China and beyond. Along the way, she goes off on myriad tangents. As a result, the chapters in her book delineate different aspects tied (albeit loosely) to the fortune cookie, making for a fun and easy book to dip into.

Chapter 7, “Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People; or The Kosher Duck Scandal of 1989,” is a fascinating look at the special relationship between Jews and Chinese food, despite the cuisine’s obvious conflict with the strict kosher dietary restrictions.

In Chapter 14, Lee criss-crosses the globe to 15 locations as far flung as Peru, Mauritius, Jamaica, Australia and Dubai in search of “The Greatest Chinese Restaurant in the World Outside Greater China” (also the chapter’s title). Her selection — a restaurant settled on not-too-distant shores — upholds one very important criterion for Chinese food: It gives more “bang for your buck.”

Other chapters document the less-than-savory aspects of America’s Chinese restaurant business, such as the trafficking of illegal immigrants into indentured kitchen servitude; discuss the international feud between Japanese and American soy sauce-makers; investigate the origins of General Tso’s chicken, a classic Chinese-American concoction named for a Qing Dynasty general; and shed light on the plight of Chinese deliverymen who are prime targets for robbery and murder. (Who knew?)

Thanks to Lee’s witty prose and solid journalistic chops, she manages to weave a lively and energetic text with a personal narrative about her own relationship with Chinese food. Ultimately, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” traces the immigrant experience as a whole, revealing facts and tidbits that reveal how Chinese cuisine has shaped American culture.

“The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food,” by Jennifer 8. Lee. Published by Twelve Publishers, March 3, 2008. $24.99.

Pat Tanumihardja can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com

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