Introduction by Cathy Erway for TaiwaneseAmerican.org
You can always tell the books that have been enjoyed the most by how damaged they are. Those books have been on adventures: Maybe you took them to the beach and clogged up their spines with sand. Maybe you rounded their edges from banging them around in your tote bag for weeks.
In the case of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book Volume I, a copy of which sits in my parents’ bookshelf, the wear and tear is evident. A constant sight for as long as I can remember—indeed, this cookbook’s use predates my birth—the colors on the paper dust jacket are faded. The paper is torn in areas, but it still clings loosely to the hardcover. Open it up, and you get a sense of the kind of adventures it’s been on. Soy sauce has rained on it. Cornstarch paste has been caked on it. Ancient oils have been rubbed into it. I know that shrimp and ketchup must be smeared on it, too, from the number of times my father has cooked Prawns with Tomato Sauce, from Fu’s section on “Dishes of Eastern China.” I imagine that every well-loved copy has extra weathering on the pages of recipes that its owner loved to cook.
And there are so, so many of them out there. In her new book on Fu Pei-Mei, Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, Michelle T. King offers an accounting of the immense scope of the cookbook author’s influence. Even though I’d had an inkling about Fu’s life and legacy thanks to a few articles on her in recent years, I was blown away by how much King was able to report on her. And how much, through the lens of Fu, King was able to illuminate the lives of Taiwanese people—perhaps including some of your family’s history, too.
As I read each chapter of Chop Fry Watch Learn, which is centered around an interesting facet of social life in Taiwan (the changing roles of women! The rise of television!) I found myself connecting some dots between my family’s story and Fu’s. For instance, soon after resettling in Taipei from China’s Shandong Province as a young woman, she found work as a typist, learning the arduous craft of searching for characters on a huge machine and lifting “the handle of a heavy, flat, gliding tray filled with thousands of tiny blocks of metal type” before pressing it with a “ka-clunk,” writes King. My grandmother, a refugee from China’s Hunan Province, also worked as a typist at around the same time, also when she was around 19 years of age. She rode a bicycle to work just like Fu is seen doing so in one photo in the book.
All told, in telling Fu Pei-Mei’s life story, King tells a fascinating chronicle of Taiwanese life for the latter half of the twentieth century—a time of dramatic transformation. Maybe your family has used the cookbooks for decades and never knew they had something in common with Fu. Probably, a dish your family loved eating was thanks in part to her work, like those glossy ketchup-smothered shrimp that I grew up with. There’s something for everyone to savor within the pages of Chop Fry Watch Learn, just like within Fu’s own generous cookbooks. Take it on new adventures of your own.
We are pleased to share the below adapted excerpt from Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (W. W. Norton, 2024) by Michelle T. King, with permission by the author and the publisher.
When I was a child, I would sometimes take my mother’s copy of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book (1969) off the shelf, lie on the floor, and idly flip through its pages. I would puzzle over the odd, technicolor photographs of food and stilted renderings of recipes in English, ignoring the original versions of the same recipes in Chinese on the facing pages because I couldn’t read them at the time.
My parents had emigrated from Taiwan almost two decades earlier and we lived in the middle of Michigan. I had no idea that Fu Pei-mei’s bilingual cookbook was a best-seller in Taiwan or that Fu was a television celebrity there with her own long-running cooking show. All I knew was that Fu’s cookbook sat alongside The Joy of Cooking on our bookshelf, just as a battered old Tatung rice cooker sat next to the Cuisinart on our kitchen countertop.
Much later in college, when I was living on my own, I asked my mother how to make some Chinese dishes we had eaten growing up. She suggested that if I wanted to learn how to cook Chinese food, I could start by borrowing her copy of Fu’s cookbook. I tried my hand at a few of the recipes—the directions were minimal and the use of oil copious—but didn’t think much more about it.
It wasn’t until many years later, after my first child was born, that I found myself flipping through Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook once again, this time looking for Chinese recipes that wouldn’t make too many demands on my time or my limited cooking abilities.
Suddenly, I see Fu’s cookbook with new eyes. In the intervening decades, I have been trained as a gender historian and can now read Chinese. For the first time, I notice that alongside all the recipes and pictures of dishes, Fu’s cookbook contains copies of newspaper clippings from her world travels, photographs of her shaking hands with VIPs or teaching different groups of international students. In 1969, the United States still had diplomatic relations exclusively with the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan and no ties at all with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland; the wife of the American ambassador to Taiwan even wrote the foreword to Fu’s cookbook.
No longer was Fu’s cookbook just a curious, dusty relic of my parents’ past—now I see it as a vivid portal into another time and place, a window onto still-tangled social questions about domesticity and feminism, as they emerged and transformed the shape of postwar Taiwan. Intrigued and excited, I set out to learn everything I can about Fu.
Fu’s story ultimately reminds us that skilled home cooks are made in the kitchen, not born through blood. When she first got married in Taipei in 1951, Fu had no idea how to cook, and only learned how through a combination of grit and diligence. My mother, like so many other immigrant Chinese and Taiwanese mothers of that generation, had a similar experience. As a kid, I always thought of my mom as a great home cook. She would single-handedly prepare a feast of seven or eight Chinese dishes for special guests, and everything she made—shrimp with peas, braised pork ribs, tofu with diced vegetables, cold smoked fish, mushrooms wrapped in tofu skins, napa cabbage with dried shrimp, sticky rice cake with red bean paste—required time, care, and multiple steps to complete, often days in advance. Chinese friends were always deeply appreciative, but it was always non-Chinese guests who were the most impressed by my mother’s cooking. This was a level of culinary skill and hospitality that they seem to have rarely encountered, but it was old hat for us.
In truth, however, my mother only learned how to cook as a matter of necessity, after she came to the United States from Taiwan as a graduate student in 1963. It was in America that she had her first banana split, at Marshall Field’s in Chicago (she was aghast that anyone could eat that much ice cream), and it was from an American girl that she learned what it meant to go on a diet (she was aghast that anyone could eat cottage cheese, which tasted like soap to her). Throughout my mother’s childhood, she had been encouraged to focus on school and never spent much time in the kitchen.
Moving into a rooming house in Minneapolis at age twenty-three marked the first time my mother ever had to look after herself. She subsisted on a diet of hard-boiled eggs, peanut butter, and apples—all cheap sources of nutrition requiring little preparation. She only cobbled together the skills to cook Chinese food over the course of many years, by leafing through the occasional cookbook— like Fu Pei-mei’s— and tasting dishes that fellow immigrant mothers brought to potlucks. The fact that she cooked almost every day and our family rarely went out to eat also imposed the regime of daily practice.
Chop Fry Watch Learn is an intimate portrait of twentieth-century Chinese and Taiwanese home cooking, animated by multiple generations of women preoccupied with the fundamental, everyday dilemma of what to make for dinner—and one impressive woman, Fu Pei-mei, who made it seem possible. As it turns out, the oil-stained pages of my mother’s copies of Fu’s cookbooks contain more than just the recipes and photos of a delicious, beloved cuisine—they also reflect a tumultuous modern history, a social revolution for women, technological changes in the kitchen, and multiple generations of families, connected across oceans by an abiding love of food.
Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. A 2020–21 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, she lives in Chapel Hill with her family.
Cathy Erway is a James Beard Award-winning food writer and author based in New York City. Her cookbooks include The Food of Taiwan: Recipes From the Beautiful Island and Win Son Presents: A Taiwanese American Cookbook. Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times, Food & Wine, Eater, Grub Street, T: The New York Times Style Magazine and more. She is a columnist at TASTE, and received the James Beard Award for Home Cooking journalism in 2019. In 2021, she received the IACP Culinary Award for her column, Know Your Chicken. In 2023, her column Shelve It, which explores the fascinating origins of everyday grocery items, was nominated for both a James Beard Award and an IACP Award.
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