Fortune cookie fungus
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 11, 2008
Was browsing the Internet doing a search for fortune cookie by Super K (Kari-out) and stumbled upon this blog post on Thoughts from Miller Manor about fungus that looks like fortune cookies.
Yummy?
Topics: Quirky, Fortune Cookies | No Comments »
In Denver’s SPJ’s adorable invite
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 8, 2008
Am in Denver to speak the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalist (a four star chapter at that). I just saw the invite for the talk and dinner. It’s adorable.
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
Fortune Cookie Chronicles on Local Library Signs
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 8, 2008
Did some library events earlier this week, and I love seeing the signs they put up with the name of the book in that piecemeal lettering. I love local libraries. That is how I grew up learning to read.
The signs remind me of traveling through Iowa and Ohio and places like that. (though these were both in New Jersey).
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
Google knows that Jews love Chinese food?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 6, 2008
This is very odd. I looked up “Fortune Cookie Chronicles” on Google and was pleased that I was advanced enough to get my own little subcategories. It listed my most popular pages: Lee, Photos, About, Chinese food and then…a category called “Jews Love Chinese Food.”
.
That startled me, because as you see from the blog, the category page it links to is called “Jews and Chinese Food.”
I actually only use the phrase “Jews love Chinese food” once on the page, low down, in a post. So I have no idea how Google knows that Jews love Chinese food, or why it chose that as the headline. It just does. Perhaps the fact that Jews love Chinese food is a truism, universal in knowledge. Or perhaps the Google engineers have a sense of humor.
Topics: Jews and Chinese Food | No Comments »
Proquest, the American Library Association, and Fortune Cookies
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 6, 2008
I might be going to speak at an American Library Association conference in Denver next January (yes, Denver in January) on my use of the historical newspaper archives offered by ProQuest. I love ProQuest and even thank them in my acknowledgments. Basically their historical archives were perfect for something like my book — searching for early terms that may or may not show up in sporadic locations. So this helped me trace the history of fortune cookies, chop suey, General Tso’s chicken and Chinese restaurants. This is how I found the 1883 NYT article that asked, “Do the Chinese eat rats.”
It also made me really proud to work for the New York Times, because our content has been so good from day one. And the New York Times was as obsessed with Chinese food then as it was now.
American Library Association, Appearances, New York Times, proquest
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
Phoenix. Why is Chow Mein the Chosen Food of the Chosen People
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 6, 2008
I thought this invite, sent out for my Phoenix event this Sunday, was adorable.
Appearances, invitation, Jews, Jews and Chinese food, phoenix
Topics: Appearances, Jews and Chinese Food | No Comments »
A Chinese Restaurant in Venice (with a boat docked out front)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 4, 2008
My friend Kathleen took a photo of this Chinese restaurant in Venice for me (love the boat out front).
Topics: Photo, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
My Asia Society Conversation Now Partially in Podcast Form
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 2, 2008
I’m in a recent Podcast episode from my conversation at the Asia Society.
4/22/08: India Goes Hungry; Secrets of Chinese Takeout
The world food crisis and Asia, with analysis by Asia Society Fellow Mira Kamdar… Food author Jennifer 8. Lee solves a Chinese takeout mystery… and upcoming Asia Society programs in Mumbai and Hong Kong.
To the podcast: http://www.asiasociety.org/podcasts/subscribe.html
To my episode: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/asiasociety/eqec/~3/276217508/weeklyfix20080422.mp3
Topics: Audio, Multimedia | No Comments »
YouTube Celebrates Asian American-ness (and you can win an iPod Nano)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 2, 2008
YouTube and The Asia Society collaborated for a video series on Asian Americanness for Asian American Heritage Month. And I got to be included in it (very flattering). It’s a pretty fneat group — including a senator, Hollywood actors and a Silicon Valley start-up folk. The main video is a montage of interviews from a bunch of Asian Americans, and then we get our own video. And then Asian Americans are invited to submit their own and win an iPod if they get the one that is most watched.
Topics: Video | No Comments »
Boldtype: “The book balances history and cooking lessons with Lee’s humorous mythbusting expeditions”
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 1, 2008
I’m recommended on Boldtype’s list this month (first book!). As their site explains, “Boldtype is a monthly book review focusing on smart, readable works of fiction and nonfiction, from current titles to past gems.”
Available everywhere from shacks that sell it alongside hamburgers to highly rated Zagat favorites, Chinese food is one of the most iconic comfort foods in American culture.”Review
For over a hundred years, Chinese food has transcended religion, race, and picky eaters in American culture. More than a mere cuisine, it has become a cultural phenomenon — it’s a Christmas Eve tradition, a midnight indulgence, and a source of fortunes and good advice. Available everywhere from shacks that sell it alongside hamburgers to the highly rated Zagat favorites, Chinese food is one of our most iconic comfort foods.
In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, Jennifer 8. Lee re-examines this beloved food with a series of questions. How true is American Chinese food to its forebears? Who is General Tso, anyway? How in the world do those fortunes get inside the cookie?
Lee’s cross-cultural culinary journey began in 2005, when she learned that 110 second-place Powerball winners — a lottery record — had used the same set of “lucky numbers” from Chinese fortune cookies served in restaurants all over the US, from Montana to Virginia. So many winners bonded by the same picks was a first in Powerball history. After discovering this unlikely statistical coincidence, Lee travels the country to interview the different people who won big off of identical fortunes. Lee then takes her fascination over to China, to see if beloved American Chinese dishes match up to the originals, and, in turn, develops a sort of origin story.
Over the course of this investigation, Lee tells human-interest tales of cookie and chop-suey copyrights, describing the fights that have continued for generations (in and out of court) over the origin and ownership of these edible classics. The book balances history and cooking lessons with Lee’s humorous mythbusting expeditions; she delves deep into the transnational world of Chinese food while also chronicling the development of food-delivery services and the rise of popular chains like Panda Express and P.F. Chang’s. The Fortune Cookie Chronicles is at once a historical, personal, and culinary tale that ultimately manages to be as savory as its subject.
-Diana Metzger
Topics: Reviews | No Comments »
Philadelphia City Paper: “after you’ve digested all of that cultural insight and fascinating trivia, you’ll still want more.”
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 1, 2008
I’m just trolling and catching up with random reviews that I never got around to adding. Here is one from the Philadelphia City Paper.
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
By Jennifer 8. Lee
Twelve, 320 pp., $24.99
“This book began as a quest to understand Chinese food,” New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee writes in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles. “But three years, six continents, 23 countries, and 42 states later, I realize it was actually a personal journey to understand myself.” Born and raised in New York, Lee tells a story of immigrants through the cuisine they spread throughout their adopted countries.
The chapters read like a loosely connected series of magazine articles, with fortune cookies providing the framework. Lee begins her book by trying to track down 110 Powerball winners who’d found their fortunes through one set of lucky numbers. From there, she hunts for the origins of the Pacman-shaped cookie itself. (Japan, as it turns out.)
But she cracks other mysteries, too, like where those takeout containers come from, why American-made soy sauce doesn’t contain soy and “Why Chow Mein Is the Chosen Food of the Chosen People.” In her quest to discover the world’s greatest Chinese restaurant, Lee makes cases for — among others — a celeb-studded Parisian joint, a Chinese-American chain in Seoul and a pricey dive in San Francisco before settling on a discount fusion foodery hidden in a Vancouver strip mall.
The book’s not perfect. Lee has a habit of repeating herself, and a chapter on one troubled restaurant family drags on without resolution. There’s fat to be trimmed, for sure. But after you’ve digested all of that cultural insight and fascinating trivia, you’ll still want more.
– M.J. Fine
Topics: Reviews | No Comments »
On hold, checked out, due. Fortune Cookies Chronicles in Libraries
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 1, 2008
In searching the NYPL LEO (and their research catalogue is CATNYP, adorable no?) I discovered there were 166 holds on 19 copies of the Fortune Cookie Chronicles at the NYPL as of May 1 (none seem to be in stock, oddly, they are all on order…didn’t this book come out two months ago?).
This made me curious about other libraries.
- San Francisco Public Library has 71 holds on 40 copies (what’s with the 3-star rating?)
- Seattle Public Library had 185 holds (156 active, 29 inactive) on 33 copies (wow)
- Los Angeles Public Library had all 10 copies checked out.
- Chicago Public Library had 12 copies, all out or on hold.
- Boston Public Library had 11 of 12 copies out or on hold.
- Brooklyn Public Library had 10 copies out or on hold.
- Queens Public Library’s catalogue is down for computer maintenance, but they should have a bunch.
Yay.
Topics: Book Musings | No Comments »
Beyond Chinese Cuisine @ The Asia Society on May 6
By Jennifer 8. Lee | May 1, 2008
Another event at the Asia Society next Tuesday, May 6. (James Oseland, Editor in Chief, Saveur Magazine, is really a very skilled moderator)
From Silk Road to Steppe: Exploring Cuisines Beyond the Great Wall
In the West, when we think about food in China, what usually comes to mind are the signature dishes of Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. But beyond the urbanized eastern third of China lie the high open spaces and sacred places of Tibet, the Silk Road oases of Xinjiang, the steppes of Inner Mongolia, and the steeply terraced hills of Yunnan and Guizhou. The peoples who live in these regions are culturally distinct, with their own history and their own unique culinary traditions. The inimitable duo of Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid–who first met as young travelers in Tibet–will discuss the enticing flavors of this other China while presenting riveting photographs chronicling their travels.
Panelists:
Jeffrey Alford & Naomi Duguid, Authors, Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China
Moderator: James Oseland, Editor in Chief, Saveur Magazine
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Registration: 6:00—6:30pm
Discussion: 6:30—8:00pm
Reception and Book Signing: 8:00—9:00pm
Asia Society and Museum: 725 Park Avenue at 70th Street, New York City
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Chinesefoodmap.com, for Chinese people.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 28, 2008
This is awesome (though it’s in Chinese): www.chinesefoodmap.com, a Google maps mashup of Chinese restaurants that Chinese people want to eat at across the country, with ratings.
Topics: Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
@ LATimes Festival of Books
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 27, 2008
Speaking on a panel at the LATimes book fair called Eat This Book with Fred Kaufman and Raj Patel at 1 p.m. Sunday in Moore 100. The moderator is Barry Glassner.
It is gargantuan book fair, basically taking over the entire UCLA campus.
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
Hull House: Where Eleanor Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, W.E.B. Dubois have all tread
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 23, 2008
Last week I got to speak in the Dining Hall of the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago (at the invitation of Lisa Yun Lee). This was a room that W.E.B Dubois, Ida B. Wells, Upton Sinclair, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Carl Sandburg have all spoken in. Very historic. So it was a real honor.
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
Boston Globe: “revelations come fast and frequent”
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 23, 2008
Wow. They are still running reviews of my book(!). The Boston Globe today printed its review by Ralph Ranalli. Interesting that he is astute to point out that Chinese food has “a veritable buffet of cheap metaphors” (I will note many of which have been used by headine writers (egg drop scoop, lo mein street, wok on)
BOOK REVIEW
‘Fortune Cookie Chronicles’ delivers tasty cultural history
By Ralph Ranalli, Globe Staff | April 23, 2008
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food
By Jennifer 8. Lee
Twelve Books, 308 pp., $24.99
For better or for worse, critiquing a book about Chinese food’s place in the modern world presents a reviewer with a veritable buffet of cheap metaphors.
One could say, for example, that the book was a pu pu platter of mixed styles (true, in this case), or that, after finishing, the reader was hungry again for more an hour later (also true). However, unlike in most cases that involve interaction between myself and Chinese food, I’ll try to exercise a bit of self-control.
Thankfully,
Topics: Reviews | No Comments »
Largehearted Boy: A soundtrack for Fortune Cookie Chronicles
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 23, 2008
I was invited by David Gutowski to participate in his Book Notes series on the music&lit blog, Largehearted Boy (note the cute logo someone designed for him!)
And amazingly he has compiled the most comprehensive list ever of my reviews and interviews.
So when he first invited me after hearing about his book, I checked out his blog, and discovered it had been highlighted in a WSJ article as a coveted place for pubishers. The article spoke about how publishers were trying to get people to buy more books (seemingly older and fuddy duddy) by using music (seemingly hip and fresh!)
This is what it said.
One byproduct of the book soundtrack trend has been the transformation of a grassroots music blog into a coveted marketing slot for authors like Mr. Ellis and Mr. Klosterman. The blog, called Largehearted Boy, features a running series called “Book Notes.” About once a week, an author of a recent book posts a list of songs that inspired the work or that readers might want to listen to as they turn the pages. The series was begun last year by David Gutowski, a Web-site developer in Decatur, Ala., who runs the blog. Mr. Gutowski started the series as a way to combine his interests in books and music.
Increasingly, however, Mr. Gutowski says he’s approached by publishers hoping to expose their authors to the discerning young music fans who visit his site.
Farah Miller, director of new media for Knopf and Pantheon, says she has arranged “Book Notes” submissions by about nine authors, including Mr. Ellis.
“There’s always a soundtrack to a movie,” Ms. Miller says. The blog “has made it possible to do the same thing for books.”
Mine is not really a soundtrack for a book (that’s better for fiction, I think). It’s a roundup of songs that are thematically related — some of questionable musical merit. I had to ask my friend Brendan Kredell for his music wisdom.
brendan kredell, david gutowski, largehearted boy, Media & Interviews, music
Topics: Media & Interviews | No Comments »
Food Network: Online interview with the Amateur Gourment
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 22, 2008
Here is an episode of FN Dish, the Food Network’s edgier online cousin, hosted by Adam Roberts of the Amateur Gourmet.
Adam and I went to New York City’s Chinatown and eat my favorite buffet place on Grand Street between Chrystie and Bowery: $4 for five items! He tried pigs heart (his Jewish grandmother rolling over in her grave). This is Chinese buffet for Chinese people, not Chinese buffet for Americans.
Also on the episode, Alton Brown’s biggest fans get to meet him at a book signing
adam roberts, amateur gourmet, amazon ranking, fn dish, food network, Media & Interviews, Video
Topics: Media & Interviews, Video | No Comments »
Tibetan fortune cookies? (well…divination dough balls)
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 22, 2008
Nate Barksdale remembered of his Let’s Go India researchers wrote in his report on Dharamsala back in 1998 — to wit, that one of the Dalai Lama’s lesser-known tools of statecraft involves choosing between balls of dough that had little notes hidden inside. (fortune cookie-ish yes?)
There’s even an explanation from the Tibetan government-in-exile:
Varieties of Divination:
i) Doughball Divination: This method is practised mainly in the monasteries or by individual lamas when an important decisions needs to be made, such as in the search for the reincarnation of very high lamas. A number of possible answers to the enquiry, such as the names of likely candidates for a reincarnation, are written on slips of paper. These are then encased in equal sized balls of dough. Great care is taken to weigh the dough balls to ensure that they are exactly the same size. The doughballs are then placed in a bowl, which is carefully sealed and placed in front of a sacred object, such as the Jowo statue in the main temple in Lhasa, images of Dharma protectors or the funerary monuments of great lamas, requesting their inspiration in deciding the outcome. For a period of three days monks remain in the temple reciting prayers day and night. During that time no one is allowed to touch the bowl. On the fourth day, before all those present the cover of the bowl is removed. A prominent lama rolls the doughballs round in the bowl before the sacred object until one of them falls out. That is the ball containing the answer.
Topics: Fortune Cookies | No Comments »
So what kind of jerky is this.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 21, 2008
This is a picture of some kind of jerky in a Guangzhou market by a photographer named Charlie Grosso (”a Chinese American woman with a male Italian name” or as she put it in her offer to buy me a drink in Los Angeles “I am a Chinese girl much like yourself so this is not a creepy come on”). It’s up to you to figure out what it is.
She has an art project called “Wok the Dog” (and yes, I think those are headless dog carcasses)
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Mao, made out of hundreds of fortune cookies
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 21, 2008
Benjamin Wallace (author of the forthcoming book The Billionaire’s Vinegar) passed me this amazing artwork by Robert Deckey (his artist brother-in-law who apparently doesn’t have a Web site that I can dig out) — a portrait of Mao Zedong made out of hundreds of fortune cookies.
Here is some promotional information from his 2007 collection. (Don’t agree with idea that fortune cookies are “an American invention to inspire poor Chinese immigrants to work harder and have hope,” but whatever)
Robert Deckey
The artist was inspired by the dramatic contrast between a visit to China for the Shanghai Biennale in 2006, and the poverty and constraint he experienced in 1989. Many of the protesters in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Uprising wanted democracy but didn’t know what it was. Today, many contemporary Chinese artists want to make art, but their definition of art is a parody of the commercialization they perceive in society. Many of China’s contemporary artist are making art “for export” with commercial purpose and are missing the true value of the aesthetics of art. The artist is also interested in China’s uneasy relationship with the United States, which is both drawn to the communist republic’s economic might and repelled by
its indifference to human rights and intellectual property laws.
Fortune cookies are an American invention to inspire poor Chinese immigrants to work harder and have hope.
The artist is American and was born in Rhode Island. He began making artwork at 5 when he attended a summer camp run by RISD students for children of professors, where his father taught. Robert has a bachelor of arts from Brown University, a masters from the University of Pennsylvania, and has studied painting at the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League in New York City.
Topics: Fortune Cookies | No Comments »
Madison Square Park (not Garden), Thursday July 17 @ 6:30 p.m.
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 21, 2008
Just confirmed this new talk: I’ll be presenting the The Fortune Cookie Chronicles for 20-25 minutes as part of the Madison Square Reads outdoor program in Madison Square Park (5th Avenue and 23rd Street in Manhattan) on Thursday, July 17, at 6:30 p.m. The program, which will last 60 minutes, features two authors of books about food. Laura Schenone will read on the same evening.A question-and-answer session may be part of the program.Books will available for sale by Borders.
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
What I eat…
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 20, 2008
A profile/interview of me on Midtown Lunch, which is a fun food blog. (Have I posted this before? This was in draft mode and I’m not sure why) In it, I discuss the places I like to eat in midtown, and also explain why Dubai’s food scene is awesome.
Topics: Media & Interviews | No Comments »
This is the Chinese restaurant story about waizhou that started it all
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 20, 2008
Sometimes people ask how it came to be that I would write a story on Chinese restaurants. The story actually starts two years before the book with a story I did for the New York Times, published in January 2003, on a Fuzhounese immigrant family that travelled from New York City to rural Georgia to run a Chinese restaurant.
This is one of my favorite lines from the article:
She was leaving the only place in the country that had an identity to the Fujianese: New York City. Other parts of the United States are not called Indiana or Virginia or Georgia. Instead they are collectively known as waizhou — Mandarin Chinese for ”out of state.”
For the Fujianese, waizhou is more than a geographic description. It is the white space left over where there is no New York, no Chinatown, no East Broadway. Waizhou is where fathers and sons go away for weeks and months at a time to work 12-hour days in Chinese restaurants. Waizhou is crisscrossed by Greyhound bus routes and dotted with little towns, all of which either already have or could use a Chinese restaurant. Waizhou schools are better. In waizhou, supermarkets sell crab meat prepackaged in boxes.
The family makes up one chapter in my book. Often people tell me it’s their favorite chapter because of its bittersweet ending.
Topics: Chinese Restaurants, Book Musings | No Comments »