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 Â 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.
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
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: Book Musings, Chinese Restaurants | No Comments »
Fortune cookie presents, some of them actually made in China
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 19, 2008
Many people have sent me fortune-cookie themed presents and cards to congratulate me on the book. Here are some of them pictured here. (I especially like the jewelish-encrusted one). Some of them were even engraved. All came with a special fortune inside
What amused me. Fortune cookies made not be made in China. But fortune cookie
mementos are —
Topics: Fortune Cookies | No Comments »
Spices of Life, Nina and Myers and Chang
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 19, 2008
Nina Simonds did an interview with me for a segment on Spices of Life. She introduced me to a Chinese/Asian-ish restaurant, Myers and Chang (named for the couple who started it) in the South End. It’s very funky. Here are some reviews from Yelp.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Harvard Crimson: Q&A on The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 19, 2008
Jessica Henderson does a Q&A with me for The Harvard Crimson arts section. I remember she recorded the whole thing on her laptop with her freeware, and was very impressed. Every so often we’d have to startle the computer to make sure it didn’t go to sleep.
Topics: Media & Interviews | No Comments »
WNYC Brian Lehrer Show
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 18, 2008
I did a lovely interview on Brian Lehrer (scroll down for mp3…no permalink?) on Wednesday, right before the Asia Society talk with the Fuchsia Dunlop of Chinese cookery fine.
Topics: Audio, Media & Interviews | No Comments »
A literary ethnic combo deal at Columbia
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 17, 2008
I did a presentation at Columbia with my friend Sugi, whose new novel, Love Marriage about the many generations of a Sri Lankan family was published by Random House last week. The logic of the pairing was somewhat tenuous: we both wrote books, our parents were from the great continent of Asia, and we knew each other from the school paper.
Nonetheless very successful. The South Asian student group got their numbers out in impressive forces. Standing room only (again, it’s about the butt-to-seat ratio).
As I put it. You got fiction and non-fiction, brown and yellow. It was like a literary ethnic combo meal.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Squat Magazine Q&A, at a Vietnamese restaurant in New York’s Koreantown
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 15, 2008
An interview with Shereen Low for Squat Magazine, which is an online publication focusing on Chinese-themes largely read in the UK.
We did the interview after the Asian American Writers Workshop reading in mid-March. It was us two Chinese-ish girls and three South Asian girls at a Vietnamese restaurant in Koreatown. Very pan-A.
Topics: Media & Interviews | No Comments »
Audrey Magazine Profile: I collect toothpaste from around the world
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 15, 2008
Elisa Mala wrote a nice two-page profile in Audrey Magazine [pdf] in which she interviewed my parents and numerous friends (Nolan, Sugi, Alexis) at the book party. It has a lot of detail about my family actually, and my siblings. And it mentions my hobby of collecting usual toothpaste flavors from around the world. (Coca cola toothpaste in Thailand!)
Topics: Media & Interviews | No Comments »
Dim sum tasting event at the Asia Society for blog readers
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 15, 2008
I’m speaking at the Asia Society tomorrow with Fuchsia Dunlop, a great Chinese cuisine chef, on Chinese food.:6:30 p.m., April 16, at the Asia Society at 70th and Park. So afterwards there is a dim sum tasting catered by the trendy Chinatown Brasserie.
Since I am a speaker I have complimentary tickets (normally $15 for members and $30 for non-members), which I will have a few extra even after I invite friends and family. So I’m throwing open some invites to blog readers. (Thanks for being loyal). Admittedly, I have been a slacker in getting invites out to friends because of other book stuff. (I have four talks this week, two in Chicago)
So if you want to go, email me jenny8lee at fortunecookiechronicles.com. It’s first come first served.
Here is the event info: http://www.asiasociety.org
Topics: Appearances | No Comments »
Is Chink’s Steak an un-PC name?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 15, 2008
Keith Richburg has an article today in The Washington Post about how Asian American groups are trying to lobby to get the name of a Philadelphia eatery changed from Chink’s steak because of its derogatory connotations. It was the nickname of a man because he had slanted eyes. If it had been called “chink” for another reason — like “chink in armor” — it would likely not rise as much ire.
Asian Groups Fight to Change Eatery’s Name
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post. Tuesday, April 15, 2008; A02
PHILADELPHIA — Could a restaurant by any other name make a cheesesteak so good?
Joseph Groh’s popular eatery in a blue-collar neighborhood of northeast Philadelphia has been serving them up pretty much the same way since it opened in 1949. Authenticity is everything here — the original soda fountain, the same ceiling fans, the same sparse menu and the 1950s-vintage wooden booths, now way too snug for today’s expanded waistlines.
Even the sign outside bears the nickname of the restaurant’s original owner, and therein lies a problem.
It’s called Chink’s Steaks.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Why does television always want to film people walking?
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 12, 2008
I taped another television segment today, though this one is not intended for an American audience, and strictly speaking, may actually be banned from within our borders. Suffice it to stay, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles may be immortalized as part of U.S. propaganda.
Anyway, we did (yet another) shot of me walking. Television people always seem to take shots of people walking. It is a safe harbor footage they can use for voiceovers and cutaways.
I cannot tell you how many times I have been asked to walk for television. I have walked at ABC, for CNN, for CBS, for this unnamed propaganda piece. I have walked inside buildings, down hallways, on streets. I have walked alone. I have walked with another person. I have walked with the camera fixed on a tripod from far away. I have walked with the camera man right in front of me, walking backwards himself. I have walked north-south, east-west. I have had to walk down the same street twice in different directions.
The walking shots really amuse me, because as a print reporter it comes across as artificial. I would not be walking if they were not asking me to walk. It is not like getting B-roll of people working on my computer, where I am actually e-mailing and they happen to record me doing something I was going to do anyway. And it is not like an interview, where clearly the person is being asked to speak to a camera, but the viewer knows that someone off camera has clearly asked a series of questions regardless of whether that interviewer actually appears.
The walking shot is like pretending to be natural but it’s actually not. Somewhere between reality and fiction.
Topics: Book Musings, Media & Interviews, Quirky | No Comments »
Stuff Gay People Like
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 12, 2008
My friend Geoff Upton sent out a birthday invite for his party, called Stuff Gay People like, a play on Stuff White People Like.
Come help me belatedly celebrate my 31st birthday with a celebration of Stuff Gay People (okay, Gay Men) Like:
8. Dance mixes of pop hits.Gay people love it when DJs remix and speed up a Top 40 hit, preferably by a black female recording artist. (Gay people especially go crazy for remixes of Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston and, lately, Rihanna. Although she is not black, gay people also cherish Kelly Clarkson.)
7. Low-carb foods.
Gay people as a rule do not eat more carbs than necessary, especially after 6 p.m. (except when drunk). Hence, you will find gay people discarding burger buns and shunning toast at their favorite meal, brunch. At parties, gay people may completely ignore any food presented, even carrot sticks. Gay people will also go to great lengths to avoid drinking carbs, such as the Rum-and-Diet.
6. Tight spaces.
All I’m saying is that my apartment is small.
Topics: Chinese Food | No Comments »
Fortune Cookie Chronicles quoted on Chop Suey in the New Yorker Online
By Jennifer 8. Lee | April 12, 2008
A few people had passed me this little item by Andrea Thompson that ran on the New Yorker’s web site on chop suey a few weeks ago, where my book is mentioned and quoted. Exciting.
Born in the U.S.A.
In this week’s Tables for Two, Ligaya Mishan reviews Chop Suey, whose tongue-in-cheek name has little to do with the actual menu: it’s not Chinese, and the eponymous dish isn’t served here. But perhaps the restaurant, with its amalgam of Korean, French, and American influences, is aptly named after all. “Chop suey,†according to Jennifer 8. Lee in her new book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,†means “odds and ends,†and most likely came about as a way to offer Americans familiar ingredients dressed up as novelty.
more »
Topics: Chop Suey, Media & Interviews | No Comments »