Tastes Like Home

Yangyang Cheng reviews Michelle T. King’s “Chop Fry Watch Learn” and Curtis Chin’s “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant.”

By Yangyang ChengSeptember 20, 2024

• Food & Drink

• Cultural Studies

• Memoir & Essay

MY MOTHER SENDS me messages from China complaining about her mother’s diet. My octogenarian grandmother has diabetes, but each time my mother visits her, she finds a fridge containing steamed buns and white rice, not the leafy greens and lean proteins the doctor recommends. My mother offers to cook for her. My grandmother says no.

I understand my mother’s frustration, but I also empathize with my grandmother. For as long as I can remember, my mother was not much of a cook. At all. My father knew how to cook, but my mother insisted that a man’s time should not be spent on housework, so she did most of the food preparation. When I was 10, my father died suddenly in his sleep. Putting presentable dishes on the table became an even greater struggle for my mother, and it was a bit of struggle for me to eat what she came up with. She made tomato egg drop soup, a Chinese classic, but not the way it should be made. She just cracked whole eggs into a pot of boiling water, and then threw in entire tomatoes. The pot was served with a terse command: “Yao yan ziji jia” (“If you want salt, add it yourself”).

It was not that my mother didn’t care what and how we ate. Quite the contrary—she handled our meals with a militaristic discipline, painstakingly selecting the ingredients and strictly forbidding dining out, bringing in takeout, or having heavily processed foods in the house. Nutritional value was all she cared about; it was all she could care about. We consumed food like it was prescription medicine. And we ate fast, since a minute saved at the dinner table was an extra minute for my studies.

I left China in 2009 to go to graduate school in the United States. Away from Beijing’s censorious grip and my mother’s tyrannical love, I eagerly sought out what I had been denied. I googled “Tiananmen 1989.” I dove into books I had been prohibited from reading. In every American city I visited, I headed to Chinese restaurants, indulging in dishes that I had heard about but whose tastes I could only imagine during my youth.

As I try to piece together a homeland from foreign soil and retroactively fill in the blanks, I often wonder how my relationship with my birth country might have been different had I been allowed more time in it, or had my upbringing been a little more forgiving. If my father had lived, if my mother were less sad or angry, if family meals constituted happy memories, then, between the freedom to speak out and the freedom to return, would I have been more tempted to choose the latter instead? Had I eaten differently, would my life have taken me down another path?

Food is never only about sustenance. What and how we eat speaks to who we are, where we came from, and where we may be going. Descendants of displaced peoples use foodways to trace their genealogies. Recipes from other countries and cultures provide a bridge across oceans and through time.

Two new books about Chinese cooking and immigrant life—one by the University of North Carolina historian Michelle T. King and the other by the writer, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Curtis Chin—illustrate this. They are exciting additions to the rich genre of food writing, where ashes of empire linger on the stove, wayward seeds take root in alien soil, and food making becomes homemaking and placemaking.

King’s Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (2024) recounts the life and legacy of the most esteemed TV chef in the Sinophone world. Born in 1931 in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, Fu Pei-mei followed the Nationalist government of the Republic of China (ROC) to Taiwan, where she embarked on an unexpected path as a cooking instructor and celebrity chef. Generations of women in and out of Taiwan, including King’s mother, learned how to make Chinese food from Fu’s recipes. King, who is the American-born daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, first encountered Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book on her mother’s shelf. Rereading it decades later as a new mother conjured old memories and fresh revelations. In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King deftly weaves discussions of feminism, nationalism, and geopolitics into a lively account of one woman’s remarkable life. Organized chronologically along the steps of Fu’s career and interspersed with “Kitchen Conversations” featuring King’s female family members and their friends, all older than the author, the chapters are bookended by moving personal anecdotes about King’s parents and children. As King puts it, the book is “a history of Chinese food from the inside, centered on the place where most Chinese actually eat it: at home […] made with love […] by mom.”

For Chin, Chinese food is the family business. In Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant (2023), he offers readers a tender coming-of-age tale set in Chung’s, his family’s restaurant. For 60 years, this popular joint served Detroit’s diverse population. It bore witness to the city’s complex history, including racial segregation and deindustrialization. Chin’s journey began in the long, hot summer of 1967, when the bloodiest urban uprising in US history forced Chung’s to close for a record five days. Chin was conceived during this time. The next two decades unfold on the page through Chin’s eyes, as he navigates his entwined identities: being gay, Chinese, and Republican (the last of which he would eventually grow out of). We travel with him as he searches for safety and belonging amid hostilities and heartbreak. Starting with tea and concluding with the fortune cookie, the sections are titled like the stages of a five-course Chinese American banquet. The book opens with a question, the customary greeting at Chung’s and what Chin often asks himself, a simple inquiry that forms a thematic refrain: “For here or to go?”

Like Fu’s recipes and the menu at Chung’s, Chop Fry Watch Learn and Everything I Learned are distinct in content and style yet interconnected. In King’s book, food is a central figure. In Chin’s, the dishes are part of the stage setting. Intertwined with transpacific crossings at divergent points in history, the two volumes tell stories of Chinese people and what they ate, of leaving old homes and making new ones. The dinner table is a refuge and a site for adventure. The fridge holds intimate secrets. The love unleashed in the kitchen can fill an entire universe.

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In traditional Chinese philosophy, the body and the state are miniature reflections of the cosmos. The position and movement of the stars informed medicine and governance. A perfectly balanced meal became a metaphor for harmony in politics. As King points out, the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen’s signature political manifesto, The Three Principles of the People (ca. 1911), echoed an ancient Chinese adage. “The nation considers the people as its root, while the people take food as heaven,” wrote Sun, as he sought to forge a modern republic from the ruins of the Qing empire (1644–1912).

For Chinese elites of the late Qing dynasty, violent clashes with Western powers and with Japan shattered a millennia-old sense of cultural superiority. The country’s rich culinary tradition was a remaining vestige of national pride. In his speech known as “Psychological Construction, a Strategy for National Foundation,” Sun said that “China lags behind in all areas of modern civilization, but in the realm of cuisine we have no peer.” Amid foreign invasions and internal upheaval, the nation Sun envisioned was never fully realized. After losing the Civil War to Mao Zedong’s Communists in 1949, the Nationalist Party retreated to Taiwan. The party, founded by Sun Yat-sen and later led by Chiang Kai-shek following Sun’s death in 1925, had held national power in China since 1927. Alongside funds from the central bank and the most prized imperial artifacts, Chiang’s government also brought with it into exile “a coterie of China’s best chefs, who were,” as King puts it, “national treasures in their own right.”

Over one million Chinese people, including Fu, fled the Communist takeover. The exodus transformed Taiwanese politics and society, as well as its culinary landscape. The mainlanders came from diverse regions with distinct eating habits. In their new abode, a taste of home was an insatiable desire.

In 1951, 20-year-old Fu married a fellow mainlander in Taipei. To the disappointment of her husband and his mahjong buddies, Fu did not know how to cook. Eager to fulfill her duties as a wife, she exhausted her dowry hiring chefs from local restaurants for private lessons. After two years of hard work, Fu mastered the dishes from a wide range of Chinese regional cuisines. By the end of the decade, she had opened her own cooking school.

Fu’s talent in the kitchen and the classroom extended to the screen. After her on-air debut in 1962, Fu quickly stood out as the face of Chinese cooking on Taiwan Television, though she occasionally made Japanese savory dishes and Western desserts as well. The network’s programming combined education and entertainment, King notes, and Fu personified the aspirational, middle-class values the government wished to promote. As her cooking career took off, Fu was no longer a homemaker, despite portraying an idealized version of one on TV. Her show both adhered to and unsettled patriarchal norms.

Gender is not, however, the only variable in the construct of the housewife. It takes privilege to do domestic work in one’s own home for free, while the poor and disenfranchised—men and women alike—have historically labored in other people’s homes to feed themselves and their families. As a wealthy mainlander with perfectly coiffed hair and a welcoming smile, the apron-clad Fu projected innocence and warmth. Her popular cooking show helped soften the Nationalist government’s dictatorial image, associated with the martial bearing of ruler-for-life Chiang (a.k.a. the Generalissimo), and quietly reinforced the social hierarchy that privileged mainlanders in Taiwan.

The Nationalists sought more than control in Taiwan. Officially, the ROC claimed that there was only one “China”—itself, in which the vast territories it had lost to the Communists were merely temporarily out of reach. As hopes of taking back the mainland faded over time, authority over Chinese culture, including culinary culture, was crucial to the Nationalists’ claim to legitimacy. Food became a vital tool in the ROC’s effort to foster a unified Chinese consciousness in Taiwan and present itself to the rest of the world as the vanguard and protector of Chinese tradition. With her northern Chinese accent and mastery of culinary techniques from various parts of China, Fu was the perfect spokesperson for this mission.

As King writes, “there was some merit in these grand Nationalist claims.” When Fu made her TV debut, an estimated 40 million Chinese people had perished in the Great Leap Forward famine (1958–61), and waves of political campaigns decimated cultural heritage on the mainland. Names of traditional dishes were changed to remove feudal elements. Chefs were denounced for facilitating bourgeois lifestyles. My grandmother’s fondness for white rice and steamed buns is also a result of the hunger she endured during this time, when refined grains were a luxury.

Yet, in Mao’s China, treating food as “a ‘problem’ […] to be solved for the masses” did not mean abandoning gastronomic desires, as King seems to suggest. Communal canteens not only promised plenty of food but also boasted that they provided meals superior in taste to home cooking. When the collective model failed, people subsisted by foraging and experimenting with unconventional ingredients. The foodways forged in extreme scarcity were no less Chinese than imperial banquets or the dishes Fu showcased on TV.

What was really contested by the rivaling regimes in Taipei and Beijing was not “authentic China” versus “fake China” or “Old China” versus “New China,” but “Free China” versus “Red China,” capitalism versus socialism, an especially sharp distinction before the market reforms on the mainland began in the late 1970s and foreign fast-food chains like KFC arrived in the 1980s. In Mao and Chiang’s time, each side used selective portrayals of abundance to prove the superiority of its system. The standoff across the Taiwan Strait forced Fu to be separated from her family members on the mainland, while the ROC’s position in the Cold War facilitated her professional success. Wives of US military advisers stationed in Taiwan learned cooking from Fu. One of them helped with the English translation of her first cookbook.

Released in 1969, Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book Volume I features bilingual text, colorful photographs, and over 100 recipes. In its English foreword, Dorothy McConaughy, wife of the US ambassador (Washington had an embassy in Taipei back then but not in Beijing), stated that the book “will further advance the friendship and interest between the Chinese and American people.” The inaugural volume included a map of the ROC that inherited the Qing empire’s domain from Mongolia to Taiwan, from Manchuria to Xinjiang. By the time Volume III came out in 1979, the map had disappeared. The decade of publication for the three volumes, King notes, “coincided precisely with the international shift of diplomatic recognition” from Taipei to Beijing. Through the 1970s to the 1990s, Fu took part in a “culinary charm offensive” around the globe, bolstering Taiwan’s soft power against the ROC’s decline in formal authority.

Outside official tours, one of the most enduring transnational impacts of Fu’s work was realized through the humble luggage of students. “It was often said that all overseas students from Taiwan in those years brought with them the same two items,” King writes, “a Tatung electric rice cooker and a copy of Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook.” King’s mother had already moved to the United States by the time Fu’s first book was published, so King’s grandmother in Taiwan mailed her a copy. Years later, a young King would find Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book on the shelf next to Irma S. Rombauer’s The Joy of Cooking (1931), and a battered Tatung rice cooker beside the Cuisinart in the kitchen.

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Growing up in Midland, Michigan, King felt she led “a secret Chinese double life.” The only two Chinese restaurants in the area were owned by white people. It was not until 1980 that the first Chinese-run eatery opened in town. Two hours south in the city of Detroit, Chin’s parents ran a well-liked Chinese restaurant. For Chin, the family establishment was his home, playground, and first classroom.

Like many Chinese families who have been in the United States for generations, the Chins’ transpacific journey began in the late 19th century, when great-great-grandfather Gong Li left home in Guangdong on China’s southern coast. The search for jobs and community took him to Detroit, where the auto industry was sprouting. Racial discrimination kept him out of the factories, and the young man toiled in laundry and domestic service. “After a decade of scrimping and sending money home,” Chin writes, Gong Li managed to open a dry goods store. With his new status as a “merchant,” Gong Li was able to sponsor a visa for his eldest son, great-grandfather Joe.

Before the restrictions were loosened during World War II, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 barred most Chinese immigration to the United States, with narrow exceptions for students and merchants. The US government saw undervalued Chinese labor as a threat to white employment, but educational exchange and trade were regarded as mutually beneficial. Not every business owner qualified as a merchant. The notoriously strict category excluded service work such as laundry operators. However, in 1915, a federal court ruled in United States v. Lee Chee that restaurant owners could gain merchant status. The legal decision marked a pivotal moment for Chinese food in the United States. Plates of lo mein paved a path for Chinese people to emigrate and bring in their families. As UC Irvine historian Yong Chen elucidates in his 2014 book Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America, Chinese eateries also helped democratize dining in the US and provided a haven for the marginalized and the misfits.

In 1940, Chin’s great-grandfather Joe opened Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine in Detroit’s old Chinatown. For the next two decades, business flourished. Yet despite the vibrant communities in Chinatown and nearby Paradise Valley, a Black neighborhood, city officials designated the areas “slums” and demolished them in the name of “urban renewal.” A freeway was constructed in their place to connect suburban white residents, who had left the city, to their downtown jobs. Chung’s moved north to Cass Corridor, an inner-city neighborhood sandwiched between the glossy riverfront and the headquarters of General Motors.

“For generations of Detroiters, our ninety-four-seat dining room was the happiest place on earth,” Chin writes. The menu at Chung’s listed over 100 selections, “mainly Cantonese with a smattering of Sichuan, Hunan, and Singaporean.” Coleman Young, Detroit’s first Black mayor, was a regular and loved the lobster egg foo yung; at $12.95, it was the most expensive offering. Local reporters rallied for the daily special, where $4.99 fetched an entrée of “almond boneless chicken with egg roll and vegetable soup.” Like many Chinese American establishments, Chung’s catered to a mainstream American palate, while its kitchen kept a “secret menu” for family and staff, serving “more traditional fare” deemed unmarketable. “Not surprisingly, these were some of our tastiest dishes,” Chin notes. On slow nights, his parents played with new recipes from countries they could not afford to visit; cooking was “their way to see the world.”

With fluency and candor, Chin paints a vivid portrait of a rambunctious multigenerational household, threading familiarity while avoiding clichés. The reader meets a tough grandmother who did not hesitate to call Chin “useless,” an overachieving brother who did well in science, and an immigrant mother from Hong Kong who pushed for academic excellence and sounded a lot like mine. As Chin gathered life lessons at Chung’s and worked his way from kitchen hand to waiter, his recollections of seismic events were also connected with food. Time and again, he witnessed his hometown in flames, as the underprivileged used property destruction to express their rage. On one such night, Chin’s mother made zhu yook bang. The steamed pork patty with water chestnut and egg was a star on the secret menu and “the most comforting of comfort food.”

In 1982, Vincent Chin (no relation to Curtis) was beaten to death by two white autoworkers who blamed Japan for their economic woes and mistakenly thought the 27-year-old Chinese American was of Japanese descent. The tragedy shook the Asian American community in Detroit and across the country. The author recounts how, as a teenager who knew Vincent, his mind kept racing back to the victim’s mother. In one of the most haunting sentences in the book, Chin writes: “I had seen her slurping my mom’s pork-bone soup at the kitchen table in our home.” Life in the inner city had acquainted Chin with death, but this murder of someone he knew and shared characteristics and a surname with was different. It crushed prior illusions of security. “We were outsiders,” Chin bemoans. “We were vulnerable.”

Throughout the book, Chin narrates quotidian frictions and life-altering trauma with graceful restraint, a lived maturity. But the reflections that follow rarely exceed the understandings of a bright and introspective adolescent. This may be a stylistic choice, but I suspect it’s also a way to make the book, with its hefty material, easier to stomach for a mass audience. It illuminates the contours but does not interrogate the foundation of structural injustice. In trying not to offend, it does not challenge. In a way, this makes it like Chung’s famous egg roll, over 4,000 pieces of which were sold each week. The crispy treat was satisfying and without pretension. Its making embodied a voyage, a story of migration and adaptation, of strength and versatility. I appreciate the egg roll, but I also crave the secret menu, the dishes reserved for kin, the bold expressions that refuse to apologize, explain, or accommodate whiteness.

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Toward the end of his memoir, Chin recounts his time at the University of Michigan, where he was the only student of color in its new creative writing program. During a fiction writing class, a white girl composed a story, laden with exoticizing tropes, that was told from the point of view of a lower-caste boy in colonial India. When pressed by Chin, she admitted to having never been to the country but thought “the culture sounded so cool.” The rest of the class commended her creativity. After Chin turned in a story based on his time at a Cantonese school, the instructor accused him of plagiarism because the piece was too good. “Why did she praise the other students for writing as other people but question the authenticity of my voice?” Chin asks.

Language, like food, is a product of movement and exchange. Ingredients and vocabulary are borrowed and made into one’s own. Borders are transgressed and redrawn. The charge of cultural appropriation is never about an isolated act of crossing a boundary to write, eat, or look like the Other. The offense lies in its purpose and consequence, manifested across uneven terrains of power: to put on a costume without understanding its meaning; to perpetuate harmful stereotypes; to project entitlement and disrespect, usually from the center; to exploit the margins for personal gain. Like what took place in Chin’s class, members of the majority often feel free to pick tokens of curiosity from the minority and reap the benefits, while those of the minority are made to justify their existence and prove their worth, to fit into norms that uphold the status quo.

In a 1971 article, The New York Times introduced Fu as the “Julia Child of Chinese cooking.” As King points out, however, Child’s show began a few months after Fu’s first TV appearance; it might make more sense to call Child the “Fu Pei-mei of French food.” The seemingly innocuous reference reveals a broader power dynamic associated with whose tastes are centered and whose culture is presumed dominant.

As a Chinese woman, Fu was a minority in American discourse, while in Taiwan under Nationalist rule, she enjoyed power and privilege as a mainlander. In 2017, a TV series inspired by Fu’s life aired in Taiwan. What She Put on the Table took many creative liberties, but, as King notes, the “most fascinating” choice was to add an entirely fictional figure with equal screen time to Fu: her Taiwanese housemaid Ah Chun. The introduction of the native character reflected the profound shifts that have taken place in Taiwan since the height of Fu’s career. The long road to democratization was also a process of decolonization. Instead of the Nationalists’ chauvinistic notion of “China,” the people of Taiwan increasingly see themselves as a distinct collective and take pride in their Taiwanese identity.

“By placing Fu and Ah Chun together on the screen,” King writes, “the series producers were making a statement about the shared history of mainlanders and Taiwanese in postwar Taiwan.” Despite the earnest intention, the show stumbled in execution. The actress who played Ah Chun even darkened her complexion with makeup. The depictions of the two women only accentuated the hierarchical relations between mainlanders and natives in Taiwan.

Still a teenager when war uprooted her to Taiwan, Fu was not responsible for the Nationalist government’s oppressive policies. She nevertheless benefited from her position as a mainlander, and her efforts to recreate tastes from home were used for the ROC’s propaganda. Rather than fixating on the individual and dispensing judgment, the real lesson is in understanding the unique historical, social, and political contexts that enabled Fu’s incredible career and shaped her complex legacy. Refugees from the mainland, military wives from the United States, second-generation Taiwanese Americans who found their parents’ old cookbooks—all have followed the same recipes from Fu, but their dishes tell very different stories. As King reminds us, what we put on the table is never made from scratch. We are always channeling culinary knowledge accumulated during our journeys and across generations: “With each dish we create, whether for the first time or the hundredth, we write ourselves into that story.”

Fifteen years after I left my country of birth with little prospect of return, I cannot say I miss my mother’s cooking, but my bones ache for another moment at our dinner table. I picture her at my grandmother’s place, fighting over what my grandmother should eat. Arguing is their love language. I hope, after the heat, that they will sit down and share a meal. I hope they eat well.