Jennifer 8. Lee, Chinese American food, and the History of General Tso's Chicken,
Greetings, and welcome back.
Thanks for stopping by for your weekly Asian Studies Fix. It’s been a busy week here. I have been very active with the EMS journalism with one piece published ( The Widely Varying Role of the Advanced EMT in Modern EMS ) and a couple more in progress that I have been working on almost daily trying to reduce complex information into organized, easy to understand segments. Last Sunday I drove a couple hours to hang out with an Asian martial arts teacher (he’s African-American but he teaches Filipino Martial Arts). As always left with some valuable and hard to find elsewhere insights, then had dinner with a local Karen refugee who I have known for 17 years (The Karen are a Burmese-Thai border hill tribe. A lot of the refugees from Burma are not ethnically Burmese but minorities persecuted by the Burmese and the Karen are one of the large groups.) Yesterday was the nationwide “No Kings” anti-Trump regime protests where I volunteered as a “safety person” and that took all day. To relax, I have been watching old episodes of “The Librarians,” one of my all time favorite television franchises and am currently watching the Dean Martin Matt Helm spy spoof “Murderer’s Row” from 1966 and spent time trying to understand why I just can’t meet a woman who dances like Ann Margret. Then I decided it is impossible to meet a woman who dances like Ann Margret because there are absolutely no women anywhere who dance like Ann Margret except Ann Margret. 1
In the meantime, I promised all you good people that I was going to share information on Chinese who served in the American Civil War. However, I’m feeling a bit too busy and my brain too scattered to do that this week. Instead, I have dug out and updated an old blog post from July 19, 2018. 2 Regardless, I think most of you will enjoy it.
Next time, Tuesday, I hope to share word on the protest, what it was like, why I participated (I was one of the safety volunteers) and how my experiencess in Taiwan in the 1980s led me to abandon my “idealistic, young, save-the-world peace activist” phase.
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General Tso's Chicken and Jennifer 8. Lee's Chinese food presentations
Quick post. A few years ago, I stumbled across an interesting book called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles written by Jennifer 8 Lee. Although not a complete and comprehensive history of the subject, this interesting work includes a lot of interesting insights and vignettes about the history of Chinese food (or Chinese-American food) in the USA. The author is a Chinese American journalist with a long interest in subject and experience writing for The New York Times.
For a full description of Jennifer 8 Lee, I would recommend that one visit her website Jennifer 8. Lee dot com . 3 For better or worse, among her many activities what interests me the most is her work on the history of Chinese American food. (If one wonders, she and I have never met, although we did have a brief interaction in an online forum but when I realized she was a prominent Chinese American food researcher months later, I reached out to tell her of a Chinese restaurant I had heard of on the Navajo reservation where the Chinese American proprietor had learned enough Navajo to take people’s orders should they prefer to order in that language, but, alas, she was gone and never got the message. Perhaps, if the fates decree it, she shall see this here and respond accordingly.
The author, Jennifer 8 Lee, has also given an excellent Ted Talk on the truth and fiction of Chinese and Chinese American food as well as Chinese food around the globe today. It's fun and informative. However, her most famous work in this area is a documentary entitled, “The Search for General Tso’s Chicken.”
The basic premise of the work is that if, as many know and as is verifiably true, the popular Chinese-American dish General Tso’s chicken is not authentically Chinese and did not originate in China, then where and how did it originate? Where did it come from? When was it first created?
It is well worth checking out as is the Ted Talk. Everything here, everything I offer you today, is very, very good, and I recommend it all.
Trailer for the Search for General Tso documentary
Jennifer 8. Lee’s Ted Talk on the search for General Tso and other mysteries of Chinese food.
But it's her documentary, The Search for General Tso's Chicken, where the history of Chinese food in the USA and of this one dish in particular begin to come to light. Definitely worth watching if you are interested in history and the interaction of two cultures over a period of almost two centuries, and if you like Chinese food, well, it's a must see.
It’s good to see that this excellent documentary is now being offered legally and free of charge on YouTube.
The Search for General Tso documentary
And Finally Just for Fun and Culinary Inspiration
While there are a lot of recipes floating around the web on how to cook this dish, here is one. While I confess that I have not tried it, I trust the source having made several dishes after watching this channel, and hope to make it soon although there is a delightfully perverse glee in carefully making inauthentic, Chinese American popular dishes at home. As stated last week, I really did enjoy making and eating all that chicken lo mein.
#Americanhistory #China #Chinesefood #ChinesefoodinAmerica #Chinesehistory #Chinese-Americanhistory #Jennifer8Lee #mediareviews #TheFortuneCookieChronicles #TheSearchforGeneralTso
Footnotes:
This is what I mean. In 1966, Dean Martin was a famous singer, part of the ultra-cool “Rat Pack” clique that included fellow celebrities Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr, and others, and he dabbled in acting. He played the role of Matt Helm, super-spy in four films released from 1966 to 1968. (You may recall the official name of this column is “mostly Asian history.” This obviously is the other part, the “non-mostly” part.) This is early in the film, the bad guys, a shadowy bunch, have kidnapped a leading scientist and are trying to force him to create a super weapon that will allow them to vaporize Washington DC. Ann Margret, the actress in the pink and white striped shirt with the long auburn hair, is the scientist’s daughter and Dean Martin, the man in the red coat, must make friends with her and convince her to help him find her father. While she does not know where her father is, it is quite likely that she has valuable clues and information that might help others find him especially super spies. She is, of course, at a dance party. Where else could she be, after all?
I admit, at times, this is a very difficult movie to watch, but I do it for my readers.
I don’t update the blog or do much with it anymore but if anyone is interested, here’s the URL: https://history-for-fun-profit-and-insight.blogspot.com/
This post is here: https://history-for-fun-profit-and-insight.blogspot.com/2018/07/general-tsos-chicken-and-jennifer-8.html
Like many people, living, deceased and imaginary, Jennifer 8. Lee has a Wikipedia page. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee