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| The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food | 
 enlarge | Author: Jennifer 8 Lee
Publisher: Twelve
Category: Book
List Price: $24.99
Buy New: $11.95
You Save: $13.04 (52%)
New (58) Used (14) Collectible (2) from $11.94
Avg. Customer Rating:  52 reviews
Sales Rank: 22859
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6 x 1.2
ISBN: 0446580074
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.5951
EAN: 9780446580076
ASIN: 0446580074
Publication Date: March 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Take-out observations on an American obsession... June 23, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Jennifer Lee has written an engaging book on the phenomenon of Chinese food in America. It is filled with factoids that most likely you did not know before, such as the fact that there about twice as many Chinese restaurants in America as there are McDonalds.
She delves into such arcana as the origin of General Tso's chicken, the history and anatomy of fortune cookies, the making of those trapezoidal carry-out food boxes, why Jewish people especially love Chinese food and a stroll through the best Chinese restaurants in the world.
It would be tempting and a cliche to say that, thirty minutes after reading it, you're hungry for more. Alas, that line has apparently been taken by a prior reviewer.
If you enjoy Chinese food, you will enjoy "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles."
Confucius say, "You have a fun reading ahead of you..."
Entertaining; pinball-like organization June 21, 2008
This is a breezy and entertaining foray into the world of Chinese/American cuisine diaspora. Lee writes well. This book, however, would have benefited from better editing. Some parts of the book resemble a chop suey. The book contains several typographical errors that should have been corrected during the editing process.
Ex:
p. 183. "Robert Borgas." Lee means "Robert Porges." Lee should have asked Seth Faison for his comments before the book was published.
 Lively, bright, readable, entertaining, educational, enlarging June 17, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The opening chapters of this book by Jenneifer 8. Lee have a merry verve. Who invented chop suey, a dish unknown in China? Who was this General Tso, anyway? (A Chinese Colonel Sanders, perhaps?) Can it be true that Japanese invented the fortune cookie? (Gasp!) But there's more to this book than Kung Pao chicken, chopsticks, and zodiac calendars.
Chapters on Chinese immigration and the movement of immigrants around the nation to work in restaurants are told in a lively reportorial style that still provokes thought. They give stale discussions of immigration policy a human face, and her visits to China bring alive such abstractions as "push" and "pull" factors.
Sprightly chapters on the business side of restaurants and supplies -- and "The Soy Sauce Trade Dispute" -- deliver a lot of commonsense economics in a most agreeable way. The economic side of the book culminates in a theory of "open source" economic adaptation that is, to this reader, quite fresh.
Finally, the book has a lot to say about America, our history, and our culture. Lee even proposes a new metaphor to replace the old "melting pot" and the newer "salad bowl." Our nation is "stir-fry," she writes. We'll see whether the new label gets a larger market share among academics and pundits.
Finally, an advisory: Reading this book is like watching the Ang Lee film, "Eat, Drink, Man, Woman." As soon as you put it down, you'll have a strong urge to drive to the nearest Golden Dragon, Peking Gourmet, or Hunan Garden and order too much.
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 A Peek into the Hidden World Behind Chinese Restaurant Dining Rooms June 12, 2008
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.
Two hours after finishing the book, I was hungry for another chapter May 19, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Is Chinese food more American than apple pie? When's the last time you had an apple pie? When did you last eat Chinese? In Baghdad's green zone, do troops feel nostalgic for pie or beef with broccoli? Did a Western Massachusetts National Guard platoon get care packages of pies or chow mein sandwiches on wonder bread? Ms Lee, a reporter for The New York Times, spent over three years, and visited 33 countries and 43 North American states and provinces on her quest to understand Chinese food. And along the way, she realized that this was a personal journey to understand herself and aspects of the American Asian experience. Her book opens with a story on how some numbers printed in fortune cookies led to an unprecedented number of Powerball winners in March 2005. Lee embarks on a journey to interview these 110 winners and the owners of the Chinese restaurants that distributed these cookies. Along the way we learn how this Harvard educated daughter of Chinese immigrants grew up on Manhattan Chinese takeout and became obsessed with how American Chinese food evolved.
For me, each chapter was more exciting than the preceding ones. Chapter 2, The Menu Wars, is a must read for every NYC apartment dweller; it tells the tale of the first NYC Chinese restaurant to offer delivery and distribute menus under apartment doors and in lobbies. Chapter 3 begins to tell the story of the origin of fortune cookies. Were they Chinese? Japanese? LA? San Francisco? Or.... ? And as in a good mystery, clues get dropped in later chapters. Chapter 4 explores the origin and proliferation of chop suey, but between the lines, is a history of the Chinese Exclusionary laws in America. Chapter 5 is a search of the source of General Tso's (Zuo Zongtang) chicken (aka Admiral Tso at Annapolis), which was harder than finding the source of the Nile. Lee visits the ancestral village of the dish's namesake and meets the descendants of this ruthless military leader. The chapter is garnished with stories on why woks won out over baking in Chinese cuisine, why American like brown over white and avoid rubbery jellyfish-like textures, and what the heck broccoli and baby corn have to do with Chinese dishes. In another chapter, Lee searches for the best Chinese restaurant in the world (NYC? Dubai? Paris? Rome? or...?), and another explores what Confucius really said. Of course, the chapter on why Chinese of the chosen food for the chosen people is a necessary read, but my favorite chapters were the one on the plight of the surviving passengers of the Golden Venture ship that ran aground in NYC, filled with undocumented alien restaurant workers, and the one in which Lee explains how Chinese restaurants are bought and sold in the USA (and where the best town to open a restaurant is) and her travels with one family that escapes NYC and ventures to rural Georgia to run a restaurant. In the non-words of Confucius, "May you read books in interesting times."
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