"The Fortune Cookie Chronicles" - Jennifer 8. Lee

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

For non-American readers the revelations in “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” will probably come as less of a shock, since, for most Europeans (the uber-sophisticaded world travellers excluded) the first image of Chinese food (and more recently sushi) probably came from watching a random American TV show or movie.

As I followed Jennifer 8. Lee’s delicious chronicles I wasn’t particularly astounded to find out that, in China, fortune cookies (which by the way, are very uncommon in Europe) are not known, and that the most popular Chinese food dishes in America, such as General Tso’s Chicken, Beef and Broccoli and Chow Mein, were creations of Chinese chefs specifically engineered to suit the American palate, favorite ingredients and presentation.

I was surprised however, to find out that fried ice-cream – one of the most popular Chinese desserts in Portugal – was only found by the author in Italy. In fact, as Lee explains, traditional Chinese gastronomy is not known for its sweets. But the Chinese, brilliant at meeting the culinary expectations of different cultures, must have soon found out that, especially in southern Europe, dessert is almost mandatory!

Growing up, I always heard that food in China had almost no similarities with what I ate in Chinese restaurants (something I only started doing quite late, since my family wasn’t big on restaurants or ethnic food – unless you count my mom’s homemade lasagna or pizza), but it’s still fascinating to follow Lee’s explorations in search of the roots of the “Chinese” in Chinese-American food.

But “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” also offers interesting sociological stories courtesy of Chinese food, such as the age-old relationship between American Jews and Chinese restaurants, the emergence of the first home-delivery systems, and the sad plight of contemporary Chinese immigrants. Impossible not be shocked at the amount most Chinese pay (upwards 50.000 thousand dollars) in order to endure months, sometimes years, of grueling travel so they can be afforded the privilege of ringing our western doorbells and hand us our sweet-and-sour pork.

So, where did the fortune cookie originate? Well, you can find out that fun fact by popping over to Wikipedia right now. But Lee’s book gives the reader a lot more to ponder: even in small western capitals such as Lisbon, eating the ethnic food du jour (nowadays, mostly sushi, to the point that Chinese restaurants seem to have disappeared or recast as nippon counterparts) is the mark of a certain urbanite hipsterism - it signals sophistication and a sense of adventure. Like our cheap t-shirts, however, there is always a hidden cost, and finally what we end up eating is not as original as we might like to think – “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” will provide any reader with food for thought.

"Serve the People" - Jen Lin-Liu

I just didn’t hit it off with this book. While I was reading “Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China”, especially as I reached the middle of the book, I kept asking myself why.

It certainly revolves around themes close to my heart: food and travel; It was on my wishlist for months; I was so excited when it arrived in the mail – and that’s about the most excitement this book caused. And it doesn’t help to know I’m in the minority here. A quick browse through amazon’s customer reviews proves that most found it not only engaging but even "unputdownable".

Maybe a humble “it’s not you, it’s me” would be in order here, but I just can’t quite bring my reader self to that level of self-doubt. A literary critic I am not, but I know a bland book when I read it.

Sad as it may seem to say it (or even cruel) “Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey through China” is one of those books that I could have never read and would have made no difference to me whatsoever.

Jen Lin-Liu is the daughter of Chinese immigrants who grew up in San Diego, maintaining few cultural connections with her parent’s homeland. She decided to relocate to China and style herself as a food writer/journalist in 2000. Based first in Shanghai, the book opens as she moves to Beijing which, she explains, has a more “genuine” Chinese feel to it, where she begins taking cooking lessons.

Her colleagues are hardly foodies – mostly men who need a certificate in order to work as cooks – and the teachers have little patience for questions, deviations from standard recipes or even for allowing students to do actual cooking. The author befriends a different teacher at the school, and soon the two become friends, with the middle aged woman telling the author about life under Mao.

However, Chairman Wang’s “revelations” seemed vague and, to me, felt impersonal. I surely did not learn anything I didn’t know already about the Chinese communist regime, and it didn’t really bring the teacher to life either. As for Beijing it sounds grey, cold, chaotic, polluted, a city where the historic quarters were being bulldozed just in time for the 2008 Olympics.

Next up the author starts as an “intern” at a noodle stall – I honestly felt that she had somewhat arm-wrestled herself into the position (by her own admission no established restaurant offered her a job), taking advantage of a kind cook. Lin-Liu speaks of being an “apprentice” noodle maker and that she felt “guilty” showing up for work in a taxi when not even the stall owner could afford such a luxury. She never makes it clear whether she was being payed for her time at the stall. I hope not – Zhang, the cook, was just scraping by, sending most of his money home to his family in the province.

Then there is a chapter where she “interns” at a Shanghai restaurant, where a Malaysian born chef is attempting to follow in the footsteps of western style celebrity chefs. Once again she is not taken on for her cooking skills – she “infiltrates” the kitchen as a journalist. Here cooking is a means to building a business empire – the young chef is clearly, unabashedly, ambitious in a cut-throat manner.

The last pages serve up the author’s blooming relationship with an American expatriate – which felt out of place to say the very least – and the book ends with her decision to open a cooking school.

All in all there seems to be little passion for cooking in the characters the author meets: some are cooks because that was the profession the Maoist regime assigned them, some because it’s a living, others a means to achieve fortune.

A lot of the food didn’t really sound appetizing to me, but I’ve read food-themed books before that I enjoyed even if I wouldn’t eat any of the dishes described.

Sometimes Lin-Liu seems to pull out the shock-value card: but somehow, and I could hardly believe it, she managed to keep me unmoved even as she ate dog-stew and various animal’s penis and testicles. She describes eating fish head at least twice – as if she couldn’t believe it herself – seemingly ignoring that fish head is a common enough dish in many parts of the world.

Then there is the glaring mistake, when she states that the “Portuguese egg tart” is a Chinese dish (so why did she think it’s called “Portuguese”? Fact Check anyone?). Even though Lin-Liu offers precious little historic or cultural culinary facts during the book, this one obvious mistake made me doubt the rest.

“Serve the People” felt stilted and shallow, like one of those short-story collections from Creative Writing program graduates, where every bit of quirkiness feels calculated. I felt the author was unable to put across the magic and wonder of becoming immersed in a different culture – her encounters with Chinese people felt artificial, lacking in empathy and her visual descriptions of cities and landscape didn’t really come alive on the page. It just felt foggy, as if you never really get to the meat of anything, not food, not people, not China and definitely not the author.

Also, the chapters felt disconnected like a bunch of magazine articles thinly put together. And while I hardly wish to seem mean-spirited, if I mention that the author wrote for Time-Out Beijing, you'll probably get a better sense of the kind of urbanite, disconnected, flighty and somewhat entitled tone I'm hinting at.

I almost feel guilty being so critical, but while I didn’t hate this book (it failed to elicit that kind of strong reaction) I certainly would not recommend it.

Vicki Croke "The Lady And The Panda"

Ruth Harkness and Su-Lin

Being cute blows. Pandas know this. They might be predators who weigh up to 150kg and can cause some serious pain when annoyed (“A man has been attacked by a panda at a park in southern China, after he climbed into its enclosure hoping to cuddle the creature.” – “Teenager Hospitalized After Panda Attack at Chinese Zoo” – “Giant panda in China bites third victim”) but somehow it never quite registered with humans “I always thought they were cute and just ate bamboo” said victim of third attack. Well, now.

See, pandas decided to go veggie somewhere along their evolutionary path. Because the mainstay of their diet, bamboo, provides so little energy, they are forced to spend much of their time munching just to keep the sugar levels up. When they move it’s mostly slowly. But apparently, some part of their brains and bodies still know they are bears.

To humans though, they are first plush toys and second cute animals. Few other wild animals have been the source of such prolonged infatuation (dolphins come to mind, and by the way they can get mean too). Scientists point to the big round faces, roly-poly bodies, the appearance of big eyes caused by the black spots, and the fact that pandas sit in an almost human manner to eat and feed their young as irresistible to our species. They are soft, fluffy and their color looks artificial and modern, dreamed up by an avant-garde toy inventor, certainly not threatening like leopard spots or tiger stripes.
Ever since a panda pelt was brought to the west by a French missionary in 1869, we have been panda-crazy. Curiously enough the sons of American President Theodore Roosevelt (whose ordering of a “mercy” killing of a wounded bear inspired first a political cartoon and then the birth of the modern toy, the teddy bear) Theo Jr and Kermit were the first westerners to shoot a panda (Alanis me this).

Vicki Croke’s “The Lady And The Panda” certainly provides food for thought but is primarily the story of Ruth Harkness (whose account of her panda adventure was published under the same name in 1938. Married to adventurer and heir (as adventurers are advised to be) Bill Harkness, Ruth enjoyed the sort of “Thin Man” movies Manhattan night style: a dress designer that could down martinis and scotch with the best of them while husband sailed the world in search of natural treasures.

After being gone for two years on an expedition to bring pandas back to the west (an expedition that never left Shanghai) Bill Harkness died of cancer in China. Ruth was distraught but undaunted: after all she had always dreamed of accompanying Bill in his expeditions but had always been discouraged by his male associates. She would go to China and bring back a live panda to the United States.

It helped that her home-base in China, Shanghai, was in the early thirties even more cosmopolitan than New York. People from all nationalities crossed their paths in the city: there was sophistication and jazz in the luxury western hotels and exoticism in the Chinese side. Harkness soon fell in love with Chinese people and their culture, while developing a healthy disdain for westerners ill-concealed racism.

Being a charming young woman helped her circumvent the bureaucratic pits which had detained her husband. But Harkness was more than an elegant creature – she had a knack for assessing character and soon was convinced that Bill’s associate Floyd Smith was an incompetent moocher, and sent him packing, inadvertently setting in motion a lifetime of hatred and jealousy (on account of which not a few pandas died untimely deaths at Smith’s hands).

Against all odds Harkness kept the pace, travelling to inner China, near the border of Tibet, trekking in arduous terrain and sleeping in an abandoned lamasery. A fantastic intuition told her to pack a baby bottle with her expedition material and soon enough a baby panda just about fell into her lap. Harkness felt blessed and treated little Su-Lin with a mother’s attention: always carrying her around, trying different foods. She couldn’t help but feel, despite all the discomfort she surely endured that this was a magical land, for she loved the landscape, the people, the baby panda and her expedition organizer, a young and handsome Chinese-American named Quentin Young.

After much bureaucratic wrangling, Harkness arrived in the United States with Su-Lin and received a hero’s welcome. Harkness and baby were the celebrities of the day. After negotiations with the Bronx Zoo stalled, it was Chicago’s Brookfield who won the honor (and the long waiting lines) of first presenting a live panda to the American audiences (and here is the origin of the phenomena which still, today, leads American Zoos into leasing pandas for astronomical amounts from the Chinese government).

Harkness wanted twenty thousand dollars to immediately launch a new campaign into the Chinese interior, and bring back a male panda (although a male panda is what she had brought unbeknownst to her and zoo staff). Although the zoo gave her less for her troubles, it was still an astronomical amount for that period, and instigated a few other expeditions including Floyd Smith’s.

But from here on it was mostly downhill for Harkness – she tried to recapture the happiness of that first expedition but personal and world events seem to conspire against her. Young was now married and things were awkward between them to say the least. A male panda was captured and Harkness, used to baby Su-Lin (who was still able to scratch and bite quite forcefully) was shocked at the wildness of this panda.

The male panda actually died from illness or internal injuries caused by his capture. Harkness and the press would never mention him again. They didn’t need to. In a last stroke of luck she came about a new baby panda (also a male that, like Su-Lin would be erroneously labeled a female). Harkness managed to get out of China just as the Japanese invasion was getting started.

Harkness with Su-Lin and Mei-Mei

Her third and last expedition into China would find Harkness braving a war torn country and going into the terrain with only Chang, her cook of previous journeys at her side. She would also do something unprecedented for an explorer, certainly a male one: she would double back into the wild, to release the female panda her hunters had captured.

By this time Harkness was well aware of the panda persecution and killing going on, mostly by, or at the instigation of, westerners eager to get their hands on this most valuable of trophies. This last panda was reckless, forever wanting to scale walls, trees and generally get into trouble. Harkness saw in the animal a desire for her predestined life, her wild life.

Ruth Harkness would never go back to China, although she would try for quite some time. But by then World War II was in progress. She fell deeper and deeper into alcoholism, drinking herself to sleep most nights. What was she seeking oblivion from? From constantly missing her husband? China? Unrequited love for Young? From the panda eyes behind Zoo bars or the ones that had died in her care (a second one had to be shot after going berserk in captivity, still in China)? Maybe all of it.

The dress designer turned explorer who had travelled to some of the more inhospitable regions on earth, endured conditions most men could not and returned home with the catch of the century, was unable to keep herself financially afloat, or sober. She dallied in this and that, travelled to South America, wrote for Gourmet Magazine.

In 1947 she was found dead in a hotel room in Pittsburgh.

Today, four American, three European, one Mexican and one Australian zoos have pandas. The rest are in China and Asian neighboring countries. They are incredibly expensive to lease and their conservation in the wild is proving to be multi-billion dollar endeavor. Last year a British naturalist led to some conservationists into hysterics when he suggested funds ought to be reassigned from panda conservation to habitat conservation (Americans, with their need to cause trouble came up with the headline “Wild Life Expert Says Let the Pandas Die” – yikes…). In fact his article published in the Guardian makes a lot of valid points:

“Extinction is very much a part of life on earth. And we are going to have to get used to it in the next few years because climate change is going to result in all sorts of disappearances. The last large mammal extinction was another animal in China – the Yangtze river dolphin, which looked like a worn-out piece of pink soap with piggy eyes and was never going to make it on to anyone's T-shirt. If that had appeared beautiful to us, then I doubt very much that it would be extinct. But it vanished, because it was pig-ugly and swam around in a river where no one saw it. And now, sadly, it has gone for ever.”

Jiang Rong - Wolf Totem

After I finished “Wolf Totem” I went online in search of reviews. To my surprise critics everywhere seemed (at the very least) hesitant about this great book: most were uncomfortable at the harsh criticism of Chinese mentality (because they're on “our” side now and we mustn’t bother them), many resented the fact that characters talk at length about their world-views (“didactic” is now a four letter word, apparently), and quite a lot were genuinely upset at how long the book is.

I almost let out an audible sigh of relief as I read Jonathan Mirsky’s words for the Literary Review – I might not be as clueless and ignorant a reader as I thought.


Ursula K. LeGuin for the Guardian: “…that is the sorrowful theme of the rest of this long book” (which I honestly cannot believe she actually read, since she doesn’t mention the main theme of young man/ wolf cub relation). And how offensive is this entry line?
“I don't know what it means to sell four million copies of a book in China - that's a lot of books, but there are a lot of Chinese.” – ah yes, the old “there are so many of them” schtick…

Pankaj Mishra for the NY times: “It’s even more remarkable that a novel so relentlessly gloomy and ponderously didactic has become a huge best seller”

German critic Wolfgang Kubin, got so hot and bothered over “Wolf Totem” he deemed it “fascist” …

Literary critics being so much more cultured (clutered?) and informed than the rest of us, have to read this book in light of their extensive knowledge of millennia of Chinese culture and a complete understanding of contemporary politics – however, the rest of us might enjoy it for what it is: a spellbinding tale, that is also cautionary.

Clifford Coonan wrote in the Independent that “Wolf Totem” can be seen as “a moving novel of nomads and settlers and their relation with wolves on the Mongolian steppes, a guide to doing business in New China, an ecological handbook, or a piece of military strategy.”

To me, the strongest motif was one of condemnation of human nature. As we witness Chen Zhen embark on a series of bad decisions, all of them motivated by his very real love of wolves it becomes impossible not to feel strongly that human love and interest often ring the death toll for the object of their attention. Zhen regrets stealing the wolf cubs, leaving the mother bereft and the siblings dead at human hands, he regrets forcing his own bitch to nurse a wolf against her instinct, he regrets keeping the cub chained under the scorching sun, unhappy he cannot run or play with the other puppies, he regrets breaking the wolf’s incisors rendering him useless for a life in the wild and breaking his will with violence. And yet, all the time, the protagonist rationalizes to himself and others that this is the only way to “understand”, to “learn” about wolves.

Is “Wolf Totem” a rant against Chinese culture? Or is the real reason it bothers western mentality so much, the fact that it indicts all of us? Hasn’t our society been built upon the continual destruction of resources without care for the cycles of Nature? Isn’t our relation with animals built in terms of function? – for food, for work, for lab research, for our pleasure and entertainment? Aren’t we all part sheep, part Han Chinese?

believe me when I tell you these are great...

...but I'm not in a reviewing mood - it's too hot

Golden Boy - A Hong Kong Childhood
Martin Booth
I honestly did not want this book to end

From The Ground Up - The story of a first garden
Amy Stewart
I think I'll re-read pieces of this one - and not necessarily wait until I have a garden of my very own

Yummy Wishlist

Reading memoirs and chronicles that center around food is something I love, but haven't really done lately. Last books I read on the subject were "Climbing the Mango Tree" by Madhur Jaffrey and Elizabeth David's "My Life in France". I much preferred the first - I like my books, if not my food, on the exotic side.

Then I read the second part of Ruth Reichl's autobiography: "Comfort me with apples" which honestly wasn't that good, especially compared with her first "Tender at the Bone", and sort of let the food thing slide for a while.

But no more! I found these three books which I feel certain will provide hours of food craving:

Staling Buddha's Dinner: A Memoir - Bich Minh Nguyen



Bento Box in the Heartland - My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America - Linda Furiya



Serve the People: A Stir-fried Journey through China - Jen Lin-Liu




Although, in the spirit of thrift I should probably get to these two - which I got on may last food book binge and still haven't read:

The Passionate Epicure - Marcel Rouff



Endless Feasts: sixty years of writing from Gourmet

My absolute favourites in this collection, you ask? Why, here they are:

Clémentine in the Kitchen - Samuel Chamberlain



Katish - Our Russian Cook - Wanda Frolov