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

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

by Jennifer 8 Lee (Author)

4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

List Price:	CDN$ 28.99
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Product Details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: Twelve; 1 edition (Mar 3 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0446580074
ISBN-13: 978-0446580076
Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.2 x 3 cm
Shipping Weight: 499 g

Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)

Amazon.ca Sales Rank: #136,956 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories:

#20 in	Books > Nonfiction > Social Sciences > Special Groups > Asian American Studies
#48 in	Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Regional & International > Asian > Chinese
#100 in	Books > Cooking, Food & Wine > Gastronomy > Essays

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Readers will take an unexpected and entertaining journey—through culinary, social and cultural history—in this delightful first book on the origins of the customary after-Chinese-dinner treat by New York Times reporter Lee. When a large number of Powerball winners in a 2005 drawing revealed that mass-printed paper fortunes were to blame, the author (whose middle initial is Chinese for prosperity) went in search of the backstory. She tracked the winners down to Chinese restaurants all over America, and the paper slips the fortunes are written on back to a Brooklyn company. This travellike narrative serves as the spine of her cultural history—not a book on Chinese cuisine, but the Chinese food of take-out-and-delivery—and permits her to frequently but safely wander off into various tangents related to the cookie. There are satisfying minihistories on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food and a biography of the real General Tso, but Lee also pries open factoids and tidbits of American culture that eventually touch on large social and cultural subjects such as identity, immigration and nutrition. Copious research backs her many lively anecdotes, and being American-born Chinese yet willing to scrutinize herself as much as her objectives, she wins the reader over. Like the numbers on those lottery fortunes, the book's a winner. (Mar.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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'The book is an addictive dim-sum of fact, fun, quirkiness and pathos' - Mary Roach, author.

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4.0 out of 5 stars A Peek into the Hidden World Behind Chinese Restaurant Dining Rooms, Jun 12 2008

By	Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews (#1 REVIEWER)

Jennifer Lee answers many mysteries in this book that may have interested you. (Where do all those Chinese people come from who work in the restaurants? How did fortune cookies get started? Who writes the fortunes? What is the real origin of Chop Suey?) For those answers, it's worth reading the book.

Her lens is a most unusual one: She visits Chinese restaurants where lottery winners got fortunes that gave them the numbers they used to win an unprecedented number of second prizes.

What she learns is that Chinese food as prepared and eaten in the United States says more about Americans than it does about the Chinese. She also shows how self-organizing principles (from complexity theory) apply to explain why Chinese restaurants are so similar.

Ultimately, this book describes what it means to be human and to want a better life. In that sense, it's very life affirming.

I found that the book had two major drawbacks. First, Ms. Lee chooses to tell you the story of how she tracked down her answers rather than cutting through the preliminaries. I found much of her research reporting to be less interesting than the punch lines when finally reached.

Second, I wondered how competent she was in doing this research. She seemed to rely a lot on interviewing people face to face. Surely, a lot of answers could have been gotten in other ways. Where I became most skeptical was in her section on picking the best Chinese restaurant in the world. One of her criteria was that lots of Chinese people eat there. I have Chinese-American friends who take me to many superb, attractive (as opposed to "hole in the wall") Chinese restaurants where my wife and I are the only non-Chinese Americans in the place. None of these restaurants were mentioned by Ms. Lee. She didn't even visit the cities where our favorite Chinese restaurants are such as Honolulu.

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