Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

"Michelle King is a historian of the Republican period, so this book is a real departure. It’s beautifully written. It’s about Fu Pei-mei who is typically described as Taiwan’s Julia Child. But as Michelle King points out, Fu Pei-mei started her TV show before Julia Child, hence you could just as easily say that Julia Child was the American Fu Pei-mei. Fu Pei-mei was very important in introducing Chinese food and cooking to audiences in Taiwan as that country was developing. Her cookbooks sometimes came out bilingually, so they introduced Chinese food to Western cooks as well, and she included European dishes in her shows, so the cosmopolitanism went still further. The book fits in with the recent transnational turn in East Asian and Chinese history, moving between the Chinese mainland and Taiwan and also crossing the Pacific in different ways. Michelle King’s interest is drawn partly from growing up an American of Chinese descent. She intersperses the biography of Fu Pei-mei she’s telling with vignettes about what she calls ‘kitchen conversations’ that she has about food with her mother and other women in her family. It’s about their relationship to food and the way in which learning about food links to culture and the role it can play in individuals staying connected to a place that they’ve left behind and sometimes encouraging their children who never lived there to feel connected to it as well. Along the way, you learn a lot about the history of Taiwan, about migrants from the mainland to Taiwan, about divisions within Taiwanese society, and about other things. It’s got a lot to say about gender. The hero of the story, Fu Pei-mei, is not a natural cook. She doesn’t really know much about cooking but is called upon to provide food for her husband and men who come over. She studies cooking assiduously, becomes an expert at it, and then shares her knowledge. There’s a pedagogic side to this, a pragmatism to helping people to be able to cook. You also get a lot about the history of television and the world of TV shows. No, she left the mainland very young. It’s a Taiwan story. Because of this, the book pairs well with one of my choices from last year: Made in Taiwan . They’re two books that would be interesting to teach side-by-side. But it also pairs well with Women and their Warlords . How does a story look different when you put female characters at the center of it? You can think of this as a story of Taiwan’s rapid modernization and shifting ties to the United States, told through the life of a woman and what’s traditionally thought of as a domestic-sphere activity. Yes, it’s a story of discovering and reconnecting with family traditions—and about an author’s shift from having a casual interest in East Asia as a place her family was from and not knowing much Chinese to being a specialist who uses Chinese sources to write good books about that region. It’s always a pleasure. Actually, yes, I’ll be there for a week early in 2025. A new independent publishing house, Brixton Ink, is publishing a just for the UK updated edition of my 2020 book Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink . This edition, which has a different subtitle, places my original text, with the American spelling changed to British spelling naturally, between two completely new parts on developments in the 2020s penned by two talented journalists: a foreword by Amy Hawkins and an afterword by Kris Cheng. I’ll spend 22-27 January traveling around England doing launch events for that work, Vigil: The Struggle for Hong Kong."