Early in her marriage, Fu tried to make her own 餃子 jiaozi—boiled dumplings that were a northern Chinese staple and her husband’s favorite dish, especially when filled with prawns. Making jiaozi required mixing flour and cold water to form a dough; rolling it out into thin, even, identical circles for the wrappers; filling them with a balanced mixture of chopped prawns, ground pork, scallions, yellow chives, ginger, salt, soy sauce, and sesame oil; and sealing the edges neatly with pinched folds to make rows of plump, identical, standing soldiers. Fu’s husband, Cheng Shao-ching, had exacting tastes: the wrappers had to be thin and exquisitely wrapped; the filling had to be generous, with a bit of juice. Moreover, the filling could only be made with prawns, not shrimp, which had a different flavor and texture that he did not care for. They were to be boiled and served hot, with a dipping sauce. Fu tried to make them to please her husband, but he never seemed satisfied. Finally, one day she asked, “Were they good?” and he answered angrily, “How could anyone eat these jiaozi? Every single one is just a bag of water.”

She looked at the plate, and indeed, the wrappers had opened at the edges, allowing boiling water to get inside and dilute the taste of the filling. “How could they have leaked?” she thought to herself. She had taken care to pinch every fold tightly to seal in the filling. From that meal forward, Fu carefully inspected every jiaozi before serving them to her husband, setting aside all the burst ones to eat herself, while giving him only those which were still intact. Yet despite her meticulous efforts, some leaky jiaozi still managed to slip by. She had to watch as her husband would “take a bite and throw it aside.” Once her husband got so angry that he flung aside his chopsticks and walked away from the table. Fu was mortified. “I felt my tears well up. I was so ashamed, but had no place to hide.”

The next day Fu marched over to her neighbor’s apartment, old Mrs. Liu’s, to beg for help, bringing filling, wrappers, and all. Could Mrs. Liu please show her how to wrap jiaozi so they didn’t burst when boiled? Mrs. Liu laughed, and said, “Hah, missy! How could you be this old and still not know how to wrap dumplings?” But Mrs. Liu agreed to help and watched Fu’s technique. First, Fu put some filling in the center of a wrapper, then she used chopsticks to moisten the edge of the wrapper, then she folded it over into a half circle and pinched tight each layered fold. Wasn’t that how it was done? “Not like that, not like that,” tsked Mrs. Liu. “Why on earth are you using a chopstick to moisten the edge? It’s all oily—it’ll burst open just as soon as you boil it.” As soon as Mrs. Liu spoke, it dawned on her: they were the same chopsticks she had used to mix the filling, which had a bit of oil in it. The dumpling wrappers, made of flour and water, might appear to be sealed before cooking, but once they hit boiling water, they would never stay closed. She felt like an idiot. “Something so simple, but I didn’t know anything back then. Because of this I had endured so much resentment!” How many times had she inspected the cooked jiaozi, examining each one to ensure it had not leaked? How many times had she stood by, watching and worrying, counting how many jiaozi her husband would toss aside?

At the time of the jiaozi episode, Fu Pei-mei and her husband, Cheng Shao-ching, were living in Kaohsiung, a city in the far south of Taiwan, in an apartment with a kitchen at the end of the hallway that was shared with five other families. The newlyweds had been introduced barely a year earlier, while Fu was working as a secretary in Taipei. Another colleague had invited her over for lunch, and afterward, three young men from her hometown of Dalian also turned up, one of whom was Cheng. Fu had no idea that it was a setup, meant to introduce her to a potential mate. Because she had not been told, she was naturally chatty and warm, instead of awkward and shy, and Cheng took immediate interest. For her part, Fu hoped to find a partner from her hometown of Dalian to make it easier to return to the mainland someday to see her mother and other siblings. Within a month, the two were engaged. Cheng and Fu were married in 1951, when Fu was twenty, only two short years after she had arrived in Taiwan.

Though he never wished for his wife to work outside the home, Cheng Shao-ching was the one who inadvertently pushed Fu toward a culinary career. Cheng had a gift for numbers and was trained as an accountant. He worked in the Kaohsiung office of a Hong Kong shipping company as a manager in the finance department before moving back to Taipei where he rose in the ranks to vice president of the company. In those early years, Cheng’s office handled only two ships arriving in the docks every month. There was not much to do every day—except play mahjong. Thus Cheng’s love for numbers took the form of mahjong tiles in the afterhours: he was so good that he earned himself the nickname, Master of the Tiles.

Cheng brought his workmates back to their apartment to play because he and Fu did not yet have any children to disrupt their game. At the time, the only thing that Fu could cook for their guests was fried rice or fried noodles, and even her versions of these were terrible. Cheng would grumble to Fu, “Can’t you change it up a little, and make something tasty?” “What on earth have you cooked?” “Anyone could do better than you!” He was acutely embarrassed by appearing to be a cheap host because all the players chipped in each week to pay for food and cigarettes. On no account, he warned, should she skimp on spending for the food, lest they appear to be trying to stretch the money too far. Fu seethed inside and thought to herself, “I don’t care a fig about your money! Better that you don’t even take it out of your pockets anymore! Instead, I’ll treat and you can all eat for free on me!”

Yet Fu neither confronted Cheng openly nor did she reject the notion that, as a housewife, she was responsible for cooking all the meals for her husband and his friends. She just kept quiet and strategized about how to become a better cook. In early 1950s Taiwan, there weren’t many ways for a grown woman without nearby friends and family to learn how to cook, and formal cooking schools and cookbooks were still uncommon. Fu surreptitiously tried to watch various street food vendors—the rice noodle man near the market, an old Shandong lady making scallion pancakes near the bus stop—but it was haphazard and difficult to glean much. Luckily, she soon gave birth to their first child, and the mahjong players moved their game to another apartment, sparing her the indignity of having to cook badly for Cheng’s friends for the next few years.

For Fu Pei-mei, there was no such thing as food for food’s sake; cooking was always an act of energetic devotion to the family—whether or not they appreciated it. In a radio interview in the 1980s, after she had been teaching for more than two decades, Fu observed, “Cooking has to have some love in it. . . . Most women want to make good dishes for their husbands and children to eat to make their homes happier and cozier. I don’t think there is anyone who doesn’t have a family or doesn’t have a sweetheart, whether a young lady or an older woman, who would think to learn how to cook just for herself. That’s just not very likely.”

Marriage and children gave Fu’s life a shape and purpose, conferring upon her a well-recognized status in Chinese society. Tellingly, the first line of Fu’s preface to her autobiography describes her family, not her culinary career: “I had a husband who loved me absolutely, and still have a filial son and two daughters devoted to me, a daughter-in-law, two sons-in-law, and seven adorable grandchildren.” Fu’s attitude toward cooking and the family stood in stark contrast to Julia Child, Fu’s American counterpart and culinary contemporary. Child gushed and enthused about French food for American television audiences, but to her, children were more of a hinderance to the enjoyment of good food, not a motivation for making it. Julia married at age thirty-four; she and her husband Paul never had any children and didn’t seem to regret it. Of her childlessness, Child only briefly remarked in her autobiography, “It was sad, but we didn’t spend too much time thinking about it and never considered adoption. It was just one of those things.” In the introduction to her classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), Child baldly wrote, “This is a book for the servantless American cook who can be unconcerned on occasion with budgets, waistlines, time schedules, children’s meals, the parent-chauffeur-den mother syndrome or anything else which might interfere with the enjoyment of producing something wonderful to eat.” Nor did the American public seem to care much about Child’s childlessness. When Child appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1966, the focus was solely on food, not family. Fu, on the other hand, never left behind her identity as a housewife and mother, even as her professional life flourished and her everyday reality was lived as a career woman.

Fu’s attitudes (and her husband’s expectations) toward family and a woman’s role within it were not unusual at the time. They were influenced by a combination of long-standing Chinese views about gender roles, as well as a host of social circumstances that were unique to postwar Taiwan. Some of these societal shifts, such as the modern trend toward living in small family units, consisting only of parents and children, could already be observed in mainland China in the first half of the twentieth century. Other changes, however, resulted from the social dislocations and adjustments of mainlanders fleeing to Taiwan in 1949, with families divided and many older family members left behind. In the decades of postwar peace that followed, the ideal of the modern nuclear family took hold in Taiwan, centered on the figure of the housewife, who simultaneously served as the family manager, emotional center, and household drudge.

Confucian teachings had long prescribed the division of labor between the sexes as a complementary distinction between the “inner” (內 nei) and “outer” (外 wai) realms. While men were to make their way in the wider world, gaining money and glory for their families in public, women were to hold sway over the household and private life. In earlier centuries, women were described in Chinese solely by their family roles—daughter, sister, wife, mother, mother-in-law, sister-in-law, aunt, grandmother, concubine, servant—and only occasionally identified by their roles outside of the family (e.g., midwife, nun, prostitute). In the premodern era, there was no Chinese word for housewife to describe a woman whose specific job was to stay at home and care for the family because staying at home was the only socially acceptable role for most women. Instead, a woman’s idealized role as the primary nurturing and guiding force in the home was captured in the four-character Chinese phrase, 賢妻良母 xianqi liangmu, meaning “virtuous wife and loving mother.”

After marriage, family always meant a husband’s family because a woman became part of her husband’s lineage and went to live under the same roof as her husband and his relations. Beyond a woman’s husband and their children, a wealthy joint household would include her husband’s parents, her husband’s brothers, their wives and children, any of her husband’s unmarried sisters, plus any concubines and servants of all kinds. Ban Zhao’s Admonitions for Women was an influential book of advice written by a well-known female historian during the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). Even in the first century, Ban Zhao had no illusions about the potential difficulty of a young married woman adjusting to living her life entirely within her husband’s extended family: “There are times when love may lead to differences of opinion; there are times when duty may lead to disagreement. . . . Excepting only sages, few are able to be faultless.” The only way for a woman to get along successfully under these conditions, according to Ban Zhao, was for her to be a paragon of humility: “Let a woman modestly yield to others; let her respect others; let her put others first, herself last.” This was Ban Zhao’s essential recommendation for dealing with every significant relationship in a woman’s life, starting with serving her husband, obeying her parents-in-law, and gaining the good will of her brothers- and sisters-in-law.

While living in a large, extended family brought its own set of headaches, at least in one regard it was less burdensome—for elite women, in any case. In imperial China, the phrase “women’s work” (女功 nügong) had never referred to housework. Instead, the term encompassed the tasks of spinning, weaving, embroidery, and sericulture (raising silkworms to produce silk), which were the preferred occupations for proper elite women. Elite women in the late imperial period could be seen as competent household managers and “virtuous wives/loving mothers” without undertaking the actual drudgery of housework or childcare. Caring for small children, cleaning, or cooking were tasks of manual labor that could be readily completed by a variety of household servants. Wang Xifeng, for example, an ambitious and omni-competent female character in the classic eighteenth-century Qing novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, acts more like the household’s CEO than its cleaning and cooking staff. She makes decisions about significant household expenditures and manages rent incomes, disciplines maid servants, and decides on menus, but she doesn’t roll up her sleeves herself to cook or clean.

Apart from serving her husband and parents-in-law, a traditional Chinese woman’s other major responsibility was to bear sons to continue her husband’s lineage, and then to guide and educate her children. No Chinese mother was more celebrated in this regard than Mencius’ mother. Mencius (372–289 BCE) was one of China’s most famous philosophers after Confucius. His father died when he was three, and his widowed mother moved three times, away from a cemetery and away from a public market, before finally finding the most beneficial location for her son’s education, near a school. One day, Mencius came home from school while his mother was weaving, which was her only way to support them. She asked how his studies were going, and he answered lackadaisically, “Same as usual.” She beckoned him to come near her loom, and then (rather dramatically, it must be said) brandished a knife and cut the cloth in two so it fell to the ground. How would Mencius ever become a true gentleman with this attitude? Studying only half-heartedly was no better than weaving a cloth only halfway—both were worthless. Mencius, like any good Chinese son, took the lesson to heart and needed no more reminders.

For more than two millennia these fundamental family values and structures held sway, but they began to shatter under the pressure of immense political and social change in the early twentieth century, as China painfully forged a modern nation from an ancient empire. The last Chinese dynasty fell in 1911, and with it all the certainties of the old ways. Progressive Chinese social reformers in the early twentieth century promoted the idea of the “small family household” (小家庭 xiaojiating), consisting of only parents and children (and perhaps a grandparent or two), as opposed to the traditional “large family household” (大家庭 dajiating), with multiple generations and various branches living under one roof. The large household was seen as feudal and backward, with conservative family dynamics holding back individual happiness and development. Decisions were made for the sake of the family by the older generations, especially in arranging dutiful but loveless marriages. Small, conjugal households, originating from freely chosen marriages, were now described as the modern ideal. Ba Jin’s wildly popular 1933 novel, Family, reflected the negative impact of just such a feudal family, in which the three sons find their lives thwarted by the unreasonable demands of their grandfather, the family patriarch. Only the youngest son escapes his fate when he runs away to the bright lights of the city to make his own way in life.

In these same early twentieth-century decades, Chinese women began to seek alternative life options for themselves outside of the family, beyond their traditional roles as wife and mother. A handful of pioneering women blazed trails to become students, writers, newspaper editors, journalists, secretaries, teachers, nurses, principals, doctors, factory workers, civil servants, party loyalists, and even revolutionaries and soldiers. To make a distinction between women working outside of the home and women who still remained at home, taking care of the family, a new Chinese concept was needed. Enter the “housewife” (家庭主婦 jiating zhufu or 家庭婦女 jiating funü, literally “woman of the house”), the new, modern figure of Chinese female domesticity.

In the modern nuclear family, the entire responsibility for cleaning, cooking, and childcare now fell more or less on the housewife’s shoulders. The small family no longer required a staff of servants to cater to its needs and might at most engage the services of a single housemaid. Meanwhile, housework for women gained an association with virtue and diligence. In 1915, Gao Junyin, a female contributor to a Chinese women’s periodical, admonished middle-class women to “Do all of the housework yourself.” Doing without servants, she reckoned, could demonstrate a woman’s industriousness and her frugality. A similar tone was struck in a 1939 article, which warned housewives, “Don’t entrust all your housework to servants. They are ignorant and unreliable, and the dishes they cook are not hygienic.” The caricature of a middle-class or wealthy woman who relied entirely on her husband’s income and the work of servants, while frittering away her own time in wasteful leisure pursuits, such as shopping or playing mahjong, was frequently criticized in early twentieth-century Chinese writings.

By the late 1940s, popular audiences easily recognized the figure of the Chinese housewife and her many household duties. A 1947 cartoon from the prominent Central Daily News (Zhongyang ribao), for example, shows all the steps involved in the middle-class housewife’s preparation of dinner each day. Entitled “Lesson for a Housewife,” the six panels depict the housewife as she thinks about what to cook, carries home the shopping, washes all the vegetables, chops all the ingredients, cooks in a wok over a charcoal brazier, and finally serves her husband and child. Each stage becomes more and more labor intensive, sweat dripping from her brow as she chops, hands moving frantically as she cooks, until by the end she is too tired to eat, while her husband and child happily gobble down their food. The cartoon assumes that the housewife is already familiar with and skilled in all aspects of cooking, even as she must perform them alone, with no assistance.

These changing Chinese family structures and domestic arrangements acquired yet another layer of complexity as they were carried across to Taiwan in 1949. Few mainlander women came to Taiwan without any family connections and poorer mainlander women could not afford to come on their own. Without this labor pool to work as housemaids, mainlander families could for the most part only find young Taiwanese girls to work as housemaids once they arrived on the island, if they were able to afford any domestic servants at all. Class, linguistic, educational, and culinary differences meant a frustrating experience for both sides. Young Taiwanese girls could not be expected to know how to cook the kinds of typical regional comfort dishes mainlanders had known all their lives. All the same, this did not prevent some mainlander families from placing ads in newspapers seeking domestic help from their home provinces, as in this 1950 example: “Wanted: Maid. Seeking a maid from Jiangsu or Zhejiang Province on behalf of a friend. Age should be around 30 years old. Main qualification is cooking family dishes well. Inquire any afternoon, Kaifeng St., Section 1, Number 114, Yu Building. Ask for Mr. Zheng.”

In those early postwar decades in Taiwan, the most common Chinese term used for a housemaid was 下女 (Ch—xianü, Jp—gejo), borrowed from the Japanese during their colonial occupation of Taiwan, which literally meant “low girl.” The housemaid usually lived with her employers and was given a monthly salary, room, and board, in exchange for helping with cooking, cleaning, childcare, shopping, and other household tasks. The challenge of finding and retaining a housemaid in Taiwan was seen as a common problem for postwar housewives. The monthly magazine Zhongyuan devoted its entire July 1964 issue to the subject. “Any time you get three housewives together, they won’t have spoken ten sentences, and they will have touched upon the topic of housemaid problems,” explained the editors. “Once they start talking, it is like the Yellow River has breached its banks, speaking without stopping.” High demand for housemaids and growing opportunities for employment in new factories created a fluid labor market, in which a better salary or improved working conditions encouraged young women to jump ship quickly to work elsewhere. Ye Man (pen name of Liu Shilun, 1914–2017), a Hunanese woman and newspaper essayist, had settled in Taipei with her husband in 1967, after several years of following her husband’s diplomatic career abroad. She had hired housemaids in Japan and the Philippines, so she was not worried about doing the same in her home country. Yet in the year and a half since their return, wrote Ye Man with a sigh, they had run through a succession of thirteen maids who had been hired, fired, or left.

Ye Man thought the problem was one of cultural difference, between her Taiwanese maids and herself as a mainlander. But hiring mainlanders yielded no better results. Not only did these women demand higher salaries and work less, but they also gave Ye Man a feeling of wordless unease. The unspoken message was that “they had all been happy before, but now had no choice but to come out to work for others. They felt wronged, so they deserved exceptional pity and tolerance. Thus everything in the house got covered in grease and a layer of dust, white clothes were washed into gray, but I still didn’t dare say a word, and didn’t even dare lift a finger, for fear of hurting their already broken hearts.”

Frustrated by maids continually quitting or performing so badly they must be fired, after the tenth maid Ye Man decides to do all the housework herself. But the results are equally dismal. She doesn’t mind doing the hard work, it is instead the complete absence of any time to herself that suffocates her. “It wasn’t just that I never saw my own relations, but I never once stepped foot out of the house. I busied myself all day long with making three meals and washing the clothes. It got to the point where I didn’t even have the time to read the newspaper anymore.” Any other intellectual work and interests, such as writing newspaper essays or letters, were piled up high on her desk without ever being touched. “Every day I was worn out like a coolie. I only had the lowest, basic abilities of an animal: eating and sleeping,” she writes. She recalls wistfully the short time she lived in the United States with her husband, enjoying modern home appliances and kitchen conveniences. There, “if a housewife wants to be lazy, she doesn’t have to start a fire to make a meal, she can just open a can, and that can satisfy her family’s stomachs.” She could just stuff dirty clothes into the washing machine, and in the time it would take to do a load of laundry, she could sometimes finish writing an essay of one or two thousand characters, and then hang the clothes up to dry. Such luxuries were not available in Taiwan, which meant both doing all the cooking from scratch and washing clothes by hand—or hiring a housemaid to help.

Stories of woe (as well as some heartfelt tales) from mistresses about their maids filled newspapers of the time—and the stories were almost exclusively from the perspective of middle- or upper-class mistresses, who had the education and social capital to access the publishing establishment. But one sympathetic essayist writing in 1964 could at least imagine the plight of the Taiwanese housemaid, who had to satisfy the competing demands of her employer’s different family members, particularly when it came to food. The large, middle-class Wu family, for example, relied upon a housemaid to cook all its meals, since Ms. Wu was in poor health and could no longer do the work herself. Yet no one in the family had the same tastes: “The same dish that satisfies the master will not satisfy the mistress. If the older and younger daughters think it’s fine, the older and younger sons are not content.” Going food shopping was its own headache, since the maid had to inquire after Ms. Wu’s daily wishes, and then try to see whether she could stretch the budget to pay for the desired ingredients. Moreover, each family member did not eat at the same time, and schedules would shift according to the day of the week: “Number Three brought a bento lunch to school, Number Four brought a bento supper in the evening, the master got home late, the oldest had to eat early.” It was enough to drive anyone mad, especially when the family felt free to complain. At least a maid could take her services elsewhere if they were underappreciated: a housewife, however, could not quit and find a new family.

These dramatic changes in family structure and domestic arrangements in the transition from mainland China to Taiwan are best illustrated through the story of Huang Yuanshan (1920–2017), who was the pioneer of Chinese cookbook writing in Taiwan in the 1950s and Fu Pei-mei’s most immediate predecessor. Huang was from a well-to-do family in Hong Kong, whose father was cofounder of a popular film production company in Shanghai. Huang married Qi Ying, the younger son of the famous scholar of Chinese opera, Qi Rushan, in 1942, during World War II. As young newlyweds, Huang and Qi returned briefly to Beijing to live in the Qi family compound for a few months, to give Qi Ying a chance to see his parents and to allow the whole family to get to know Huang. The entire extended family lived together in a large compound, with three main branches: Qi Rushan’s family, which had seven children, the family of his older brother, with five children, and the family of his younger brother, who also had five children. The thought of living with the entire Qi clan made Huang “tremble with fear before moving in.” All the cousins of the same generation were counted by gender and birth order, in one continuous sequence. Thus, Qi Rushan’s own five daughters were denoted as Oldest Big Sister Qi, Seventh Big Sister Qi, Tenth Big Sister Qi, Twelfth Little Sister Qi, and Fourteenth Little Sister Qi.

To her own surprise, Huang Yuanshan remembered her time in Beijing with the Qis with much fondness. “When a household has lots of people,” Huang later wrote, “some people say it’s easy to stir up trouble and be at odds with one another.” But in truth, she added, disagreements had more to do with individual behavior than the size of the family. “If you are an argumentative sort of person, then even a family of just two, husband and wife, can argue all day long.” (Huang’s rose-colored vision of life in a traditional Chinese multigenerational family might also be attributed to the short time that Huang stayed with her in-laws. It only lasted one year, not her entire lifetime.) The entire clan owned a large grain shop, which was the family’s main source of income. Qi Rushan’s elder brother took care of the family grain business, while Qi Rushan adjudicated over all family matters within the joint household and stayed home to write. (This left their youngest third brother with nothing to do but happily drink.) Though Qi Rushan handled all major family matters, he always waited to consult with his elder brother before acting on anything truly important. The less important household details were handled by Qi’s wife, while the household accounting was handled by the third brother’s wife.

The move to Taiwan in 1949 meant a radical shift in the Qi family’s living situation: the once-grand clan was greatly reduced and scattered to the winds, living in separate households. At first Huang’s father-in-law, Qi Rushan, tried living with his oldest son, who had married a German woman, and their children. But the German daughter-in-law spoke no Chinese and could not communicate with him, so Qi Rushan moved in with his younger son, Qi Ying, and Huang Yuanshan (the couple had no children). Now Huang Yuanshan was entirely responsible for managing their small, three-person household, with minimal help from a housemaid.

Cooking was of particular importance in their small household because her father-in-law, Qi Rushan, had a reputation as a man of great taste. Both her father-in-law and her husband would frequently entertain guests at home, and this meant that Huang Yuanshan, as housewife, was now “personally responsible for going into the kitchen to make all the food.” Housemaids at the time, Huang explained, were all young girls, who would work for a few years before quitting to get married. Their own housemaid was a young Taiwanese girl who didn’t know how to do anything in the kitchen, so she had to be taught. “I became her teacher,” Huang wrote. In those early years in Taiwan, Huang thus gained experience in both cooking and in teaching her housemaid the basics of cooking.

Yet despite her own initiative and skill, whenever she discussed the start of her culinary career, Huang always credited the palate of her father-in-law, Qi Rushan. Huang’s relationship with Qi echoed the earlier eighteenth-century dynamic between Yuan Mei and his chef. Since her father-in-law was well-traveled, had eaten all kinds of dishes at famous restaurants in China and had dabbled in Chinese food history himself, Huang always asked him for culinary guidance. “He would tell me in general how to make something, then I would go and experiment. My father-in-law would then taste it, and if he said it was good, then I would make a record of it.” Eventually Huang began to teach other housewives how to cook at women’s association meetings, and the editor of the women’s weekly at the Central Daily News (Zhongyang ribao), approached her to write a regular cooking column. Huang’s first cookbook was published in 1954, followed by four more cookbooks in the next decade.

Fu Pei-mei, by contrast, had no connections to the traditional world of Chinese culinary arts, as it had been described by generations of male literati. She was not born into an important family of great culinary or cultural renown, nor did she demonstrate any special early aptitude for cooking or tasting. Fu’s husband was anything but supportive and encouraging in matters culinary. She had no famous father-in-law to help smooth the way for the publication of her cookbooks by lending them the imprimatur of traditional culinary legitimacy, as Qi Rushan had done for Huang Yuanshan by writing prefaces for her cookbooks. Fu’s own frustrating experience as a housewife formed the basis for her culinary authority, and she then gained prominence through the new mid-century medium of television. She developed her own palate and sense of taste through repeated trials and experiments, not from the opinions of others. This made her a distinctly modern Chinese culinary figure, as an entrepreneurial woman relying upon her own resources, without the extensive support of a family from the cultural elite. To be sure, her middle-class status gave her important advantages, the most obvious being that Fu could afford to spend both her leisure time and personal funds on cooking lessons and costly ingredients. Yet Fu’s ultimate success relied upon her hustle, tenacity, and motivation. It didn’t matter whether it was typewriting or stir-frying: Fu could throw herself wholeheartedly into any new endeavor and make things happen.

Fu Pei-mei may never have read Ban Zhao’s Admonitions for Women, yet the influence of these ingrained gender expectations extended well into the twentieth century. Fu mused that she had been well-trained since childhood to be obedient. At home, her traditional mother frequently espoused the notion that serving a husband should be the principal function of a woman’s life—no matter how he behaved. Fu’s mother was gentle and devoted, but long-suffering. In Dalian, Fu’s father liked to play billiards at the Japanese mama-san’s den every night after dinner, so Fu’s mother sent Fu tagging along to keep an eye on him. But every night the mama-san would beckon her over, give her candies, and let her fall asleep on the tatami mat. “At the time I didn’t understand,” Fu wrote, “but now when I think about it, the way women have had to defend against their husband’s extramarital affairs has always been the same, then and now.” All her adult life, Fu felt tremendous guilt about not taking better care of her mother, whom she did not see for the sixteen years that the two were separated on the mainland and in Taiwan. By the time Fu’s mother arrived in Taiwan in 1962, Fu was already thirty-one years old, with three young children, and busy with her new career on television. She simply did not have much time to spend with her own mother.

As it happened, Fu’s husband was also a typical northern Chinese “male chauvinist,” as Fu described him: “He always regarded himself as the head of the family. His wife and children should always listen to him, no matter what.” All the lessons she had been taught, in word and deed, “made me think that everything that I did for him was just as it should be, a matter of course.” It was only after forty-eight years of marriage, following her husband’s death, that she began to rethink some of these unquestioned attitudes about her role as a dutiful wife.

Fu gave birth to her three children by the time she was twenty-five. She would have liked to have had a larger family, but a dangerous ectopic pregnancy shortly after the birth of her third child led her doctor to recommend tubal ligation. Her husband still hoped to try for more sons, but a neighbor finally convinced him that it was too risky. Fu was saddened but put the abrupt end to her childbearing years in perspective: “It was only because of this that afterwards I was able to throw myself into teaching my cooking classes.” She recognized that her life would have been different had she had more children—not better or worse, necessarily, but different—and she chalked it up to fate. Moreover, because Fu had given birth to her children early in her marriage, they were soon in preschool and elementary school, giving her some time and space to teach her cooking classes. Later, Fu’s in-laws and a housemaid were also at home to help watch the kids. Starting in middle school, her children went to boarding school during the week and came home only on the weekends. (When Fu’s oldest daughter told me this, everything clicked into place: Fu had not been a superwoman after all, but had had help caring for her kids.) Fu’s three adult children cherish (and burnish) their memories of their mother as the ultimate loving mother. “When we were young,” recalls her oldest daughter, An-chi, “mother liked to sit on the floor, spread out her big circle skirt, and let us scramble for a spot. We would sit on it and play or listen to her tell us stories.”

By the mid-1950s Fu, her husband and their three children had moved into a three-bedroom apartment in Taipei, with a yard in the back for the children to play in. Since the children were now in school, the mahjong players took over their living room again, and Fu once more faced the daunting task of trying to learn how to cook. (Fu never mentions reading any of Huang Yuanshan’s cookbooks in her autobiography, perhaps in order to depict herself as a trailblazing pioneer in her own right.) Fu wanted to make delicious dishes that she could be proud of, and more, that her husband would appreciate. This time she had the idea to write to various restaurants advertising in the phonebook, to ask if any of their chefs were willing to teach her how to cook, for a generous fee. Fu quoted the old Chinese adage: “With money you can get a ghost to push a millstone.” She offered half a liang of gold for an hour-long lesson. At the time, Fu recalled, one liang of gold was worth the equivalent of NT$1600, so she was spending NT$800 to learn to cook three dishes in an hour. (By contrast, in 1956 the Nationalist government set the minimum wage at NT$300 per month, making Fu’s expenditures extravagant by any measure.)

With these generous financial terms, all the restaurants soon sent one of their chefs to teach her. Yet to call these demonstrations lessons was something of a stretch. “All of these chefs had the same problem: they didn’t want to talk. I’d ask a question, and they’d say a word. I’d bend my head down to take notes, and they’d take the opportunity to throw something else into the wok.” Because Fu had asked to learn the most characteristic specialty dishes of each restaurant, the chefs were reluctant to share their house secrets. As soon as they finished, they rushed off so she could never ask questions. Still, she persevered, writing down her observations as best she could, tasting and experimenting, making the dishes herself from her notes the next day. For two years she learned in this way, hiring chefs from six regional restaurants, which specialized in the cuisines of Sichuan, Jiangsu/Zhejiang, Beijing, Guangdong, Fujian, and Hunan, to teach her.

This secrecy was typical of the master–apprentice relationship in the traditional Chinese restaurant kitchen. A master might never reveal his secrets until an apprentice had proven his worth, often after a period of many, many years. Most kitchen apprentices never earned any salary from the master chef, but still had to work from morning until night. Any learning that happened was entirely coincidental and relied on the apprentice’s own initiative. “The master would not even teach them properly or say anything about the theories of cooking or any techniques,” wrote Fu. “It was entirely dependent on your going to steal a glance and learn in secret. You would learn through intuition, and gradually fumble around for three years until you graduated. I was one hundred percent opposed to this cheap, exploitative model.” The fear was always that a more youthful competitor might steal your culinary secrets, profiting from them and putting you out of business. The attitude was not only common among master chefs—housewives could be just as guarded about their specialty dishes. In sharing openly what she had learned about cooking, Fu was again breaking a traditional pattern, this time the typical Chinese system of culinary transmission. She was very proud that she always passed on every trick and tip of what she had learned about cooking to her viewers and readers, to ensure that they could properly duplicate the results of every dish, every time.

Thanks to the informal training she received from restaurant chefs, Fu gradually gleaned enough to tackle some complex and delicate dishes from Jiangsu and Zhejiang—the eastern provincial homes of most of the other mahjong players. With gusto they ate her braised eel with chestnuts, pork with fermented tofu, and braised pork chin, and praised her to the skies—even going so far as to send their own wives over to her to learn how to make these same dishes. By the end of the 1950s, Fu had received so much interest in her cooking advice that she decided to start to teach cooking classes more formally. One night when her husband was out playing mahjong, Fu hired a trishaw to take her around the neighborhood to put up handwritten fliers for her first class. When her husband discovered her plans, he was angry, and refused to allow her to “bring a bunch of random strangers into our house.” Fu responded to his objections by erecting a tent in the backyard to conduct her classes, and she only taught in the afternoons while her husband was at work and her children were in school.

The first class had eight students, including Miss Zhang from the national auto company, Mrs. Lin, a surgeon’s wife, Miss Liao from the Bolero Western Restaurant, Mrs. Zhao from a construction firm, and two wives of university professors. Several of these students were from wealthy Taiwanese families, which suggests Fu’s cross-ethnic appeal, at least among the island’s elites. (Miss Liao’s father had opened the Bolero Western restaurant, named after Maurice Ravel’s hypnotic music, in Taipei in 1934. The restaurant served exotic dishes such as French duck rice and was a favorite for blind dates among well-to-do Taiwanese, who would look at each other shyly while sipping coffee and listening to classical music.)

A large part of Fu’s appeal as cooking instructor was precisely her familiarity with China’s major regional cuisines. Most housewives at the time, recalled Fu, knew almost nothing about how to cook the dishes of different regional cuisines. But by that point, Fu herself had already taken lessons from six different regional chefs, from Sichuan, Jiangsu/Zhejiang, Beijing, Guangdong, Fujian, and Hunan. “Everyone wanted to learn how to cook, but at the same time they couldn’t find any well-known teachers. I had already spent so much money on learning how to cook myself, I wanted to earn some back in order to make up for it,” Fu wrote. Having met migrants from different parts of China, housewives in Taiwan grew curious about how others ate and were eager to replicate their neighbor’s unfamiliar regional specialties at home. My aunt encountered a similar situation among overseas Chinese in Malaysia in the 1970s. She learned how to make Shanghainese-style zongzi, sticky rice dumplings wrapped with bamboo leaves and filled with red bean paste, from older housewives from Shanghai, Fujianese-style zongzi with savory meat filling from my uncle’s Fujianese relations, and how to roll out proper jiaozi dumpling wrappers by watching neighbors who came from Shanxi and Shandong Provinces in northern China.

As Fu got her cooking classes underway, it became an all-encompassing endeavor. “The first two or three years when I started, every table in our house was covered. Under every bed and everywhere else were soy sauce bottles, salt containers, sugar jars, scallions, garlic, and every sort of ingredient for cooking.” Despite her enthusiasm and dedication, Fu had not yet accumulated much experience and would occasionally make mistakes. Cooking over a charcoal stove in a tent made it especially difficult to control the heat. “When I just started, I had no experience, and the dishes I made, if they weren’t too salty, then they were undercooked. I had to fix the recipes right there in front of the students. It was extremely embarrassing.” Still, she was always honest with students and never shied from critiquing her own cooking. “I’d tell the students not to make the same mistakes when they went home to try it.”

Housewives appreciated her honest and direct approach. She was one of them, a home cook, not a professionally trained chef (a career path open only to men at the time). “I figured, everyone is human, who has never failed? If you know something, you know it, and if you don’t know something, you don’t know it. Best not to mislead your students for the sake of saving face.” Her reputation as a cooking teacher grew, and eventually, opportunity came knocking. One of her students had recommended her to a Taiwan Television producer who was looking for hosts for a cooking program that would debut at the launch of the new medium in 1962. Curious and encouraged by her students, Fu said yes, never imagining how this single opportunity would catapult her culinary career onto a new level. Out of the frying pan and into the fire—or more accurately, out of the wok and onto the television.