This past weekend, in between interleaving celebrations of P’s sister’s 30th birthday (she had 3 parties), we checked out the wedding banquet hall. We had the three set menus for the banquet to choose from, which turned out to be the ultimate in Chinese “special menus”. We had a hard time figuring out what they said, because they were 1. written in Chinese (one of those times I wished I actually went to Chinese Saturday school), 2. written in Running Script style (which P’s parents had a hard time reading – think super-wild calligraphy), and 3. written in super-flowery language that only Chinese culinary veterans could know (and P’s dad, as an retired Chinese chef, had a hard time explaining some of them).
After polling our friends, our best resource was my best man’s wife, who is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese, and managed to type out everything into Microsoft Word. That was a God-send, as I could then just pump up the fonts and produce a Reader’s Digest large-type version. For kicks I also ran it through Babelfish and Google Translate to get independent rough translations. Some of these translations literally converted the flowery language, resulting in 幸福炒飯 “Two Silvers Fried Rice” (no silver is involved), and the 雙喜伊麵 “North Mushroom Burning of Iraq” (sic) which actually means something like Beijing-style mushroom noodles.
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
At the time we were struggling through these choices, P bought for me Jennifer 8. Lee’s The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, which is a bittersweet look at the world of Chinese food and its place in Chinese-American identity.
She covers definitively the sources of fortune cookies (not from China), the soy sauce packet (more often than not has 0% soybeans), chop suey (fresh leftovers – that’s what for dinner!), and the take-out container (something recycled from the turn of the last century). General Tso – the man, the myth, the legend of General Tso’s Chicken fame: Lee goes to his ancestral town to learn the truth.
She somehow figures out a way to expense both around-the-world trips to find the best Chinese restaurant (perhaps she can hook up with Cheuk Kwan’s Chinese Restaurants series), and a search through the American Midwest to find Powerball lottery winners that used fortune cookies for their numbers. She is able to connect with those who take the idea of takeout and literally run with it, and those that are not as lucky and run into hard times in the middle of Nowhere, U.S.A.
My biased rule of thumb for determining how thorough a book on Chinese or Chinese American history has been researched is to see whether there is any mention of Hakka Chinese. (I am Hakka, so that is why it draws my attention.) She succeeds in making two mentions, and then has coverage of the Taiping Rebellion, which the aforesaid General Tso brutally put down the Hakka-led revolt. That won’t stop me from ordering his namesake dish, a totally American invention which Lee suggests is the inspiration for the Chicken McNugget.
The book makes for an engaging evening read, all the more amplified by the author’s effervescent appearance on the Colbert Report, which happened to be playing in my living room at the time. Great books are those that you feel that you are having an involving conversation; this was a great one to have with Lee and The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. Recommended.