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A review by daumari
Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food by Michelle T. King
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
4.0
This felt like a nice followup to Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America (which I belatedly realized I never actually reviewed, whoops) as Chao Yang Buwei gets a mention later in the book coming at it from the Western side of publication. Food, culture, and politics are all intertwined, so Pei-mei's television show and cookbooks are a strong soft power component to the Republic of China asserting itself as the true China in exile while also being a comforting bit of home to students and workers going abroad. This also reminded me of the blindspots of not knowing other country's media- thousands of episodes over several decades is a lot!!
Throughout the book, Michelle King also interviews other diaspora people who've learned from the Fu Pei-mei cookbooks, and reminisces about her childhood in the Midwest where her parents moved for academia. Even in small-town Michigan they had a community of 80-90 Chinese families which shows you can find enclaves anywhere (my own grandparents are also from the midwest diaspora). She references The Making of Asian America: A History (another one of my favorites) when talking about waves of Chinese immigration and recognizes she is part of that second post-1965 wave, with the first being the exclusion era predominantly Cantonese/Taishanese immigrants (and that's where I come from!), thinking about how where people migrate from also influences how we see food. American Chinese cuisine really has its origins in modified Cantonese in so many ways because that's almost entirely who was here, but more recent waves are Fujianese (and the 70s-80s also brought in flavors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.)
Throughout the book, Michelle King also interviews other diaspora people who've learned from the Fu Pei-mei cookbooks, and reminisces about her childhood in the Midwest where her parents moved for academia. Even in small-town Michigan they had a community of 80-90 Chinese families which shows you can find enclaves anywhere (my own grandparents are also from the midwest diaspora). She references The Making of Asian America: A History (another one of my favorites) when talking about waves of Chinese immigration and recognizes she is part of that second post-1965 wave, with the first being the exclusion era predominantly Cantonese/Taishanese immigrants (and that's where I come from!), thinking about how where people migrate from also influences how we see food. American Chinese cuisine really has its origins in modified Cantonese in so many ways because that's almost entirely who was here, but more recent waves are Fujianese (and the 70s-80s also brought in flavors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.)