When Fu Pei-mei received her first bound copy of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book《培梅食譜》(Peimei shipu), she could not bear to put it down. It had that new book smell. It had rows and rows of words arranged neatly in their proper sequence. Her name featured prominently in yellow Chinese characters down the left-hand side of the front cover, while it stood out in bright blue English capital letters across the top. The vibrant front cover photographs had been carefully staged, with a rich, red fabric backdrop (her sofa cushion) draped behind a blue and white ceramic table setting. The back cover featured a cold appetizer platter artfully arranged in the shape of a phoenix. She pored over every detail: it was a thrill to see it all finally in print. “I had no way to describe the joy and excitement I felt inside,” she recalled. The book had been the result of intensive research and recipe testing, time and effort measured out by every catty, ounce, cup, and spoon. Many dishes required painstaking tinkering to perfect each measurement and direction. How much stock, sugar, wine, or soy sauce did a dish need? How could every dish achieve the proper color, fragrance, and taste? Fu was determined to include only those recipes that she could guarantee readers could replicate on their own.
When Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book made its debut in 1969, there was nothing else like it in Chinese publishing. In an age when cheap, small format, softcover paperbacks were the standard, Fu’s expensive, large format, hardcover book made an immediate visual impact. Fu proudly boasted that her self-published Chinese cookbook was the first to include full-color photographs. At the time, color photography was still a new technology in Taiwan, and Fu spent an entire day to prepare and style each dish for the photographer, using costly ingredients. Yet because of his incompetence—he either forgot to take off the camera’s lens cap or pressed the wrong button—none of the first batch of photos turned out, so Fu had to cook another round of the same dishes again the next day. “That day I nearly fainted,” she wrote. Later editions would expand to include full-page, full-color photos of every dish in the book. There were photos of formal place settings for the traditional, round Chinese banqueting table; later editions named each ceramic dish and added color photographs of frequently used vegetables and other special ingredients. Fu also included a series of black-and-white photos of her multiple professional engagements, as she appeared on television, judged cooking contests, and taught different groups of students.
The results may seem modest to our eyes today, but at NT$80 (roughly equivalent to today’s US$20), Fu’s cookbook was a definite extravagance. One woman in the southern city of Tainan recalled that as a girl, she would buy a copy of TV Weekly every week, so that she could cut out the featured recipe and picture, and paste it into a special album. She watched Fu’s television program for several years before she finally saved enough of her pocket money to buy a color edition of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book, “reading it until I could recite each dish by heart. When I finally had the chance to try things out in the kitchen for myself, I really did treat this cookbook as a kind of ‘sacred text,’ practicing everything in it.” Her comments underscore a major distinction between Fu’s domestic fans and her international ones. While Fu’s domestic fans had a chance to get to know her personality through their television screens, most of Fu’s international fans would only ever know her in print, through her cookbooks.
The front covers of Fu Pei-mei’s most iconic, eponymous three-volume cookbook series, Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book, (L to R) Vol. I (1969), Vol. II (1974), and Vol. III (1979). The covers are distinguished by the dominant background color, red (I), blue (II), and green (III).
Beyond the splashy, full-color layout with photographs, by far the best marketing decision Fu made was to publish her cookbook in a bilingual, Chinese–English format. It was a brilliant move, crucial to launching her global career. The book itself is printed in Western style, bound on the left, with the text read horizontally from left to right. By contrast, Chinese-only books printed in Taiwan at the time, including Huang Yuanshan’s cookbooks, Pan Peizhi’s cookbooks, Hu Peiqiang’s cookbook and The Television Cookbooks, were bound in traditional Chinese style on the right, with the text running vertically, read from top to bottom and right to left. Each recipe in Fu’s cookbook appears in Chinese on the left-hand page, with the corresponding English version of the recipe on the facing page on the right. All other textual elements of the book, including the introduction, photo captions, and list of foodstuffs in the back, also appear in both Chinese and English. The cookbook’s bilingualism allowed Fu’s name and vision of Chinese cuisine to spread beyond the borders of Taiwan and the Sinophone world, circulating among international, English-speaking audiences. Indeed, it is the cookbook’s accessible bilingualism that continues to give it a robust afterlife in the used book market in the United States today, with pristine original copies often priced online for several hundred dollars.
Photographs of dishes from the first edition of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book Vol. I (1969), which includes (L top) “Spiced Pork,” (L bottom) the infelicitous “Mould Pork in Brown Sauce,” and Fu’s favorite demonstration dish (R), “Sweet and Sour Fish.” Note the raisins sprinkled on the fish, which are included only in the Chinese version of the recipe.
Bilingual recipe layout for Fu’s Sweet and Sour Boneless Fish/松鼠黃魚 songshu huangyu (which I have translated more literally as “squirreled fish” throughout this book), from the first edition of Fu’s eponymous cookbook (1969). Several differences mark the Chinese and English versions of the recipe, beyond the actual dish name. The Chinese version specifies using either a whole yellow croaker or black carp and calls for two optional tablespoons of raisins for the sauce, details omitted in the English version. Meanwhile, the English version notes that “our foreign friends prefer” this preparation, while the Chinese version notes that this preparation suits “the average person’s taste” (yibanren kouwei).
The bilingualism of Fu’s cookbook allowed her access to an entirely new, global audience, but few of her readers, whether Chinese or English-speaking, have probably ever given this essential fact much thought. We often imagine the act of translation to be like a clear soup, 清湯 qingtang, which allows you to see through to the bottom of the bowl. The meaning reflects back to you directly, in an instant. Instead, it is much more like a bowl of rice gruel, 粥 zhou, where the meaning is cloudy and veiled, and you can never see the bottom of the bowl. (Even here, for example, I wonder which English word best evokes the concept of zhou. I’ve seen it translated as everything from “rice gruel” to “rice porridge” to “congee,” a derivation from a Tamil word, and transliterated from the Cantonese pronunciation as jook. To make things even more complicated, it is also known in Mandarin as xifan, which literally means “diluted rice.”) In the case of Fu’s cookbook, despite tidy appearances to the contrary, English readers are not always getting a precise translation of the original material in Chinese. Although the recipes themselves are by and large accurate, some of the rest of the English copy bears only a passing resemblance to the Chinese original. It is as if every assiduous non-Chinese restaurant-goer’s worst nightmare has come true: Chinese readers do get a separate menu, and English readers don’t even realize it.
Take, for example, the very title of the book. Although in English it is called Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book, in Chinese it is simply “Pei Mei’s Cook Book” (Peimei shipu 培梅食譜), without any elaboration on the type of cuisine. For Chinese audiences, there was no need to spell this out because the default cuisine of all cookbooks published in Taiwan at the time was Chinese cuisine. Only cookbooks featuring non-Chinese cuisine, such as Huang Yuanshan’s Yuanshan’s Western Cuisine Cookbook (Yuanshan xicanpu) (1960), necessitated an explanatory adjective. On the one hand, these linguistic differences may appear to be minor because they make no material difference to someone just trying to learn how to make eggrolls. On the other hand, such differences in translation are precisely the point: Fu Pei-mei was speaking very deliberately and consciously in two different ways to two different audiences at once.
Sometimes the English translations of Fu’s recipes read like coded riddles. One example is Fu’s recipe for Mold San-Sze Soup. Does it actually contain mold, or is that a way of naming an unfamiliar fungus? Only after learning the Chinese name of the dish, 扣三絲 kou san si, do its everyday qualities come into focus (at least for Chinese readers). “San-Sze” (three shreds) refers to three main ingredients shredded evenly into strips: in this version, Fu uses chicken breast, ham, and eggs fried in an even layer. The shreds are arranged artfully in sections in the bottom of a medium-sized bowl, steamed, and then, just before sending it to the table, the steamed bowl is inverted into a larger bowl and removed. Soup stock is carefully added such that the ingredients retain their original form and arrangement for an attractive tableside display. Mystery solved: the “mold” is not fungus after all, but rather the culinary technique (扣 kou) of arranging ingredients neatly into a bowl, steaming, and inverting so that the dish retains its shape—plausibly a “mold” in English. (Fu’s Mold Pork in Brown Sauce, 走油扣肉 zouyou kourou, uses the same cooking technique and suffers from the same infelicitous translation.)
Oddly translated Chinese dish names (whether in Fu’s cookbook or your average Chinese takeout menu) might seem funny at first glance to English speakers, but they hint at a much more fundamental dilemma of cross-cultural culinary translation. For anyone fluent in Chinese, it can seem like an impossible mission to convey even the most basic notions about Chinese cuisine to English speakers who have no reference points to Chinese geography, history, language, or culture. Direct equivalencies often do not exist in English for Chinese cooking techniques or ingredients, to say nothing of dish names incorporating historical, geographical, or poetic allusions, which might require elaborate footnotes to explain fully. Capturing the multiple embedded meanings of a Chinese dish name in a few evocative English words requires almost as much skill and creativity as cooking the dish in the first place.
The bilingualism of Fu’s cookbooks bears the strong imprint of their immediate Cold War context. From 1951 to 1978, the United States sent American servicemen and CIA operatives as part of the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to Taiwan, dubbed “Free China,” as opposed to Communist “Red China” on the mainland. These American service members worked as advisers to their counterparts in the Republic of China’s military. As one ROC government magazine explained in 1966, “Of all U.S. activities around the world, military advisement probably brings Americans into the closest contact with the nationals of other countries. The working level is direct—man-to-man. MAAG in the Republic of China is no exception. Americans and Chinese have come to know and understand one another—and many have formed close friendships that continue through the years.” Yet it was not only “man-to-man” contact that MAAG initiated—woman-to-woman contact thrived too. “MAAG wives” figured prominently in the American presence in Taiwan, with six hundred out of eight hundred MAAG servicemen stationed in Taiwan living there with their families, for a total community of more than twenty-seven hundred in 1966.
While their husbands were stationed in Taiwan, American military wives enjoyed taking advantage of one of the many cultural opportunities available to them: Chinese cooking classes taught by none other than Fu Pei-mei. This intimate link to the American presence in the country was illustrated in Fu’s cookbook by the inclusion of a foreword from Dorothy D. McConaughy, wife of Walter P. McConaughy, the American ambassador to the Republic of China from 1966–74, when the two countries still had diplomatic relations. No doubt Dorothy McConaughy had American audiences in mind when she explained in the foreword that Fu had “skillfully compiled and up-dated recipes for more than one hundred traditional dishes which will appeal to both western and eastern tastes.” McConaughy hoped that Fu’s cookbooks would build diplomatic bridges, to “increase interest in Oriental cuisine” and to “further advance the friendship and interest between the Chinese and American people.”
Fu herself explained in the Chinese version of her introduction that her original motivation in writing the cookbook was to have a convenient way to share recipes directly with her students: all the recipes included in the cookbook were for dishes taught at her cooking school. “For many years now,” Fu wrote, “many Chinese and foreign ladies have hoped to buy my lectures notes or recipes in order to be able to refer to them when making a dish. This need has felt especially urgent for those going abroad or those with friends or relations overseas. Also, many overseas Chinese have encouraged me, hoping to have Chinese food recipes written in English that are both correct and authentic.” Fu spoke some English herself, but never felt entirely at home in the language. Still, it was the only way for Fu to communicate with her American students, as well as with overseas Chinese who did not speak Chinese.
Yvonne Zeck accompanied her husband Frank from Illinois to Taiwan from 1966 to 1968, during his posting there as a colonel in the US Air Force. In Taipei, the Zecks enjoyed the typical life of American expats. Their photo albums from the time show pictures of their black dog Ching-mi, their attractively appointed home with Chinese motif furniture, and their amah (housemaid), Miss Lee. For fun, Frank and Yvonne rode in a three-wheeled pedicab, golfed at Tamsui, shot skeet, and gathered for cocktail parties with fellow military officers, both American and Chinese. There are pictures of their travels in and around Taipei, to the National Palace Museum, which had only just opened in 1965, and around the island of Taiwan, to the tourist attractions of Taroko Gorge and Sun-Moon Lake. Zeck was fascinated by the bustling cityscape that surrounded her, often involving food, with ducks and fish hanging on a line to air dry outside, a pedicab delivering pork, narrow back alleys lined with street food vendors, or two boys grinning impishly as they stand at a roadside food cart. The Zecks also visited Hong Kong, and in the New Territories caught of hazy glimpse of Red China in the distance. Their photos evince a moment in Taiwan’s modern history when it stood on the brink of massive urbanization and industrial development. A few pictures showcase the rural beauty of terraced rice paddies, and traffic occasionally included water buffalo, but change was already on the way. Zeck saved a clipping of a news article with the headline, “Taipei’s Pedicabs on Last Legs,” which captured how these old-school, human-powered, three-wheeled vehicles were now being phased out in favor of automobiles.
In January 1968, Zeck, along with a dozen or so other American military wives, took part in a series of cooking classes taught by Fu Pei-mei, organized by the Foreign Affairs Office of the ROC Joint Logistics Headquarters. Zeck’s black-and-white photos depict a simple classroom, with a blackboard listing ingredients and plastic checkered tablecloths. In that particular session, Fu had a male assistant, who is “making covers for spring rolls,” according to Zeck’s photo album notes. Fu stands next to him, holding up an example wrapper, clearly in the middle of an explanation. Another photograph shows Fu using a cleaver to chop the ingredients for the filling. The American women, decked out in pearls and beehive hairdos, look on attentively, waiting expectantly for something delicious to happen.
At the time she was teaching Zeck’s class, Fu had been working on translating her cookbook, but felt that she needed a native English speaker to help. “I had not studied English much myself,” she explained, “but even a foreign language major in college might not have been able to translate all the specialized cooking actions and nouns. In English there was simply no exact equivalent for these terms.” Fu was not the only Chinese culinary expert to feel that English terminology was wanting. Qi Rushan, playwright, scholar, and gourmand (whose views on Chinese cuisine have been discussed in Chapter 1), considered these distinctions not simply as differences, but as deficiencies on the part of Western cuisine. In 1954, Qi claimed that “Chinese cooking techniques have long surpassed Western cooking techniques” because there were twice as many distinct words for them. Although both Chinese and Western cooking techniques encompassed a range of slow-cooking methods, such as 煨 wei, 滷 lu, 燒 shao, 燴 hui, and 燜 men—all variations of simmer, stew, roast, or braise—Western cuisine made no such distinctions with quick-cooking methods. There were no precise English equivalents for techniques such as 爆 bao, 溜 liu, 烹 peng, or 爆炒 baochao—frying methods which might be rendered as quick-fry, sauté with sauce, quick-fry followed by sauce, and quick stir-fry at high heat. Only the Chinese cooking term “stir-fry” (炒 chao), first coined by Buwei Yang Chao in her cookbook for American wartime audiences, How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (1945), had made much headway in English. Unfortunately, the popularity of the term had the unintended consequence of giving foreigners the mistaken impression that stir-frying is the only essential technique of Chinese cooking. As Fu later explained, there are dozens of Chinese words for distinct cooking techniques (she once named more than thirty in a 1993 article), which are often difficult to translate concisely into English equivalents.
This was why Fu was keen to approach Zeck for help. Every time Fu translated ten pages of her cookbook, she would bring them to Zeck’s house in Tianmu and ask her to make corrections. Zeck spoke no Chinese herself, though she occasionally taught English classes to ROC military personnel. When the cooking techniques were particularly tricky to explain, such as how to fold a dumpling, how to squeeze out meatballs by hand, or how to score in a crisscross pattern, Fu would even bring the ingredients over to Zeck’s house to demonstrate for her in person. “To write the recipes in English that first time was tremendously difficult,” Fu recalled, “but for the sake of future students, it would be a million times more convenient. So all of the hard work seemed worth it.”
After the cookbook was finally published, Fu sent a copy to Zeck, who by that point had already returned to the United States, accompanied by note handwritten neatly in English:
How are you and your family? I miss you very much. My cook book just come out. I got many trouble from Printing Co. . . . . . . . . Please let me know as soon as possble when you received this book, so I will be send more books to you later.
Please give my kindest regards to your family.
Sincere
Pei Mei
30. May. 1969.
The note is charming in its intimacy and reminds me of my own grandmother’s careful looped, English handwriting, written with fountain pen, which I read on the thin blue airmail letters she regularly sent to my mother. Yet in the slightly uneven English conjugations of Fu’s note, I also hear the echoes of every Chinese auntie and uncle I’ve ever known who has stumbled over the illogical grammatical constructions of English and its tricky and infuriating pronunciations. This is how I imagine I sound when I speak in my second-generation Chinese or what it looks like to others when I write in my schoolchild’s Chinese scrawl. I know what it is like to sweat as you think about pronunciation, word choice, grammar, diction—and still get it wrong. In Chinese, it is enough of an effort for me to get my meaning across in whatever way I can, but in English, I have no worries: I make puns, tell jokes, make up silly rhyming songs with my kids, and write anything at will. No wonder Fu wanted a native English speaker to read through and smooth out her translations; in her place I would have done the same.
The second volume of Fu’s bilingual cookbook, published in 1974, had a different translator, with better but still imperfect results. Monica “Nicki” Croghan was in Taiwan at the time as a graduate student from the University of Pennsylvania, studying Chinese. Croghan communicated with Fu entirely in Chinese, and never spoke English with her. She met Fu after taking one of Fu’s cooking classes (in which Croghan was the only foreign student); Fu asked for her help in translating the second volume of her series. As Croghan recalls, Fu was eager to complete the project quickly because she was aware that a competing bilingual cookbook from another author (likely the revised edition of Huang Su-huei’s Chinese Cuisine cookbook, published by the Wei-Chuan Food Company) would soon appear on the market. “She didn’t think there was room for two cookbooks to come out at approximately the same time. So she wanted hers to be out first,” says Croghan. Croghan translated the Chinese manuscript into English, which then got typed up by young women “who didn’t really have much education in English, so their typing skills weren’t exactly up to par.” However, because Fu was in such a rush to get it out, she “was more interested in the time frame than correct English. Some of the typing mistakes were corrected, but a lot of them were not corrected,” Croghan adds. The rush job paid off, however, when Fu’s second volume did ultimately come out before Huang’s, to Fu’s great pleasure and relief.
Fu made one more radical decision in the presentation of her first bilingual cookbook. She offered a four-part regional framework to organize the vast expanse of Chinese cuisine. “In this book,” Fu explains in the Chinese introduction to the first volume, “Chinese cuisine is divided into large sections by East-South-West-North.” (Here, Fu uses the traditional Chinese sequence of cardinal directions, as opposed to the typical North-South-East-West sequence of English speakers.) “The East has Shanghai as its center and contains Jiangsu and Zhejiang cuisines; the South includes Fujian and Guangdong; the West indicates Hunan and Sichuan cuisines; the North primarily indicates Beijing cuisine.” Fu seems to have been the first Chinese cookbook author ever to use this organization of culinary regions by cardinal direction; later Chinese cookbook authors writing in English, such as Florence Lin (1975) and Deh-Ta Hsiung (1979), would follow. Fu’s immediate predecessors in Taiwan had instead arranged their cookbooks by cooking method, main ingredient, dish type, and even season.
Fu anticipated that Chinese readers might object to her four-part organization of Chinese regional foods as overly simplistic, yet as she explained in her Chinese introduction, such a general schema was necessary “for the sake of foreign readers.” China had more than thirty provinces and dozens of cities large and small, each with its own famous local dishes. How could a foreigner, who was already not familiar with Chinese language or geography, keep all their names straight? The organization by cardinal direction was elegant and concise, and attended to the most obvious distinctions of Chinese regional cuisines.
At the same time, most dishes Fu selected for her cookbook also took into account “the difficulty of buying ingredients or the lack of various ingredients in foreign countries,” and featured common cuts of chicken, beef, pork, and readily available fish, shrimp, vegetables, and eggs. Only a handful of recipes called for what a foreign reader might deem as exotic (though typically Chinese) ingredients, such as shark’s fin, abalone, winter melon, or sea cucumber. (The Chinese master chefs who prepared the welcome banquet for President Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972 strictly avoided serving sea cucumber, a worm-like marine invertebrate with a highly prized gelatinous texture. A Chinese protocol officer remarked to an American reporter, “we found that our European guests hardly ever touched the seaslugs, so we dropped them.”)
Finally, Fu chose to include recipes for dishes that would be most familiar to foreign restaurant-goers. Theresa Lin, Fu’s daughter-in-law, confirmed that the cookbook was conceived of as much as a potential guide for Americans to order dishes in a Chinese restaurant as it was meant to be followed as an actual cookbook. Color photographs were included in the hopes that foreign students, in particular, would be enticed to purchase the cookbook to give to friends as gifts. This is why you can find a recipe for Peking Duck in her cookbook, even though it’s too elaborate for most amateur cooks to replicate successfully at home, and a recipe for Chop Suey, the signature dish of mid-century Chinese American restaurants. (Though chop suey (zasui), a Cantonese dish, originally featured stir-fried animal entrails, its American incarnation included any mishmash of stir-fried meat and vegetables served with a sauce over rice or noodles. Fu’s version features a stir-fried and sauced mix of pork, pork kidney, smoked squid, shrimp, ham, bamboo shoots, carrots, green peppers, bean sprouts, and spring onions.)
None of this logic or rationale, however, for the cookbook’s organization or selection of recipes, is made apparent to English readers of Fu’s cookbook. The English version of Fu’s introduction says nothing about how or why Fu came to write the book, why she organizes in it four regional sections, or why certain well-known dishes appear but not others. Instead, English readers get a simple, direct lesson on regional distinctions in Chinese cooking: “Looking at a map of mainland China one understands why each area soon developed its own style of cuisine. Easy transportation was unknown and the provinces made best use of its own products. Several main types evolved which include the famous Peking roast duck from the North, the Szechuan food also known as Honan [Hunan Province] or western style featuring highly peppered food and camphor-smoked duck. The Foochow [Fuzhou, a city in Fujian Province] and Cantonese style specializes in light tasting dishes often stir-fried to preserve texture and flavor. The eastern area around Shanghai is noted for its oily food and wonderful special sauces.” Foreign readers unfamiliar with Chinese geography might not realize that Fu had collapsed Sichuanese and Hunanese cuisines—distinct regional culinary identities—into one category of dishes from western China, or that she has done the same with Fujianese and Cantonese cuisine, collapsing the two into a single category of dishes from southern China. Nor is any mention made of accommodations for foreigners who have difficulty accessing specific ingredients. Instead, “American cooks” were instead merely reassured by Fu that the selected dishes were “typical of my country.”
Given her own limited English skills and the complex collaborative process of translation that required the help of Zeck, who knew no Chinese, there were many pragmatic reasons why Fu’s presentation might have been simplified for foreign audiences. There may have been limitations of page space and layout to consider—the condensed grammatical structures of the Chinese language can make texts pithy, and translating them fully into English often requires more space. Or perhaps, after years of teaching American students, Fu had taken the measure of her typical foreign audience and decided that a handful of Chinese place names was enough. English readers didn’t necessarily need more geographical or historical details than they could handle anyway, if the big picture was more or less accurate. If you aren’t already familiar with Chinese history and geography, will the storied culinary city names of Yangzhou, Hangzhou, or Ningbo (or for that matter, Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces) and the distinctions of their cuisines even mean anything to you? Or will your eyes glaze over at yet another list of unpronounceable Chinese place names that you cannot locate on a map? At the end of the day, the most important feature of the cookbook—the bilingual recipes themselves—correspond in their lists and measurements of ingredients, and largely overlap in their instructions. If you tend to head straight to the recipes in a cookbook and skip everything else, or if you are already very familiar with Chinese regional cuisines, then these linguistic differences may not matter much to you.
The plethora of Chinese or English-language Chinese cookbooks today underscores the singular importance of Fu Pei-mei’s bilingual Chinese and English-language cookbooks. In that particular postwar moment, when both Chinese-speaking and English-speaking audiences were hungry for guidance on how to cook Chinese food, Fu was the first one to claim, audaciously, that she could and would speak to both audiences at the same time, within the covers of the same book. (Later cookbook authors from Taiwan, such as Huang Su-huei, who wrote for the Wei-Chuan Foods Corporation cooking school, would follow very closely in Fu’s bilingual footsteps.) Bilingualism made Fu’s work truly transnational, appealing to domestic and overseas Chinese and to foreign audiences all over the world. Although some of the cookbook’s English translations may have been a little vague, in practice they worked well enough to impart Fu’s general ideas about Chinese cuisine. Most importantly, Fu’s cookbook gave audiences useful versions of reliable recipes for a range of typical, regional, home-style Chinese dishes. This was a huge step forward over most other English-language Chinese cookbooks available at the time, which gave foreign readers little sense of that vast regional variation.
Other American military wives stationed with their husbands in Taiwan were just as eager as Yvonne Zeck to learn how to cook Chinese food, and they did so by taking classes with Fu Pei-mei at her school. Some were so excited to share the fruits of their study that they taught their own Chinese cooking classes upon their return to the United States, where they found audiences hungry for more than chop suey and chow mein. Curiosity about Chinese food, particularly its distinct regional cuisines, increased steadily through the 1960s as Americans became more aware of a broader range of Chinese food, thanks in part to new restaurants established by postwar Chinese migrants to the United States who were not Cantonese, such as Cecilia Chiang (owner of The Mandarin in San Francisco), who was from Jiangsu Province, and Joyce Chen (owner of the Joyce Chen Restaurant in Cambridge), who was from Beijing.
Judy Getz, of Camden, New Jersey, was featured in her local newspaper in 1973, under the headline, “She Studied Chinese Cooking With Taiwan’s ‘Julia Child.’ ” Getz had lived in Taiwan from 1968 to 1970, while her husband, a surgeon, was stationed at the US Naval Hospital in Taipei. “If you think television cooking shows are a strictly American venture,” the article begins, “you haven’t been to Taiwan, Republic of China.” Getz proudly describes what she learned under Fu. “It wasn’t the ‘chop suey’ type of Chinese cooking,” Getz explains. “I was taught the dishes enjoyed by the wealthy Chinese.” (Ironically, of course, Fu had indeed included a recipe for Chop Suey in the first volume of her cookbook.)
The article specifically mentions that Getz learned “the gourmet foods of many regions,” including Canton, Shanghai, Hunan, Peking, Yunnan, and Sichuan. Getz shared Fu’s recipes for Chicken and Cucumber Salad, Paper-Wrapped Fried Fish, Egg Roll Soup made with homemade pork stock, and Eight Treasure Rice Pudding. “After the first few sessions,” the article enthuses, “Mrs. Getz’ students were using chopsticks like pros when they sat down to enjoy the food prepared in the lesson.” Other American military wives, such as Ruth Aston in Bangor, Maine, Val Sterzik in Petoskey, Michigan, or Midge Jackson in Tyler, Texas, had similar stories written about them in the pages of their local newspapers throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. All of them were profiled for introducing their families, neighbors, and home communities to the flavors of Chinese dishes they had learned from Fu Pei-mei.
But American military wives were not the only foreigners inspired by Fu Pei-mei. American men were equally excited to share what they had learned about Chinese cooking from Fu. Ed Faist, a sanitation worker from Passaic, New Jersey, was such a fan of Chinese cooking that, after years of taking classes whenever he could in New York’s Chinatown, he traveled to Taiwan in 1976 for the sole purpose of studying for a week with Fu. “To the Chinese, the way Americans cook their food is a joke,” Faist explained to a local reporter. Faist too taught adult education classes in Chinese cooking, complete with tours of New York’s Chinatown. Bruce Borthwick, a political science professor at Albion College in Michigan, took a six-week cooking course with Fu Pei-mei in the summer of 1974. The following year, he taught his own ten-week class on Chinese cooking to a group of college students and community members. The students learned how to make soy sauce chicken, fried wontons, fried rice, egg rolls, various noodle dishes, egg foo young and sweet-and-sour pork. In Borthwick’s opinion, learning how to cook was the best way for Americans to get over their fears and get to know a foreign culture.
As a graduate student in Asian history at Indiana University, Michael Drompp traveled to Taiwan for the first time in the early 1980s. His homeward journey each day in Taipei happened to pass right through Fu’s neighborhood, so one of his colleagues suggested that they take cooking classes there in the evenings, both to learn how to cook and to improve their Chinese. They would scan the teaching schedule ahead of time to see which dishes would be taught that week and sign up for the specific classes that interested them. All the dishes Michael learned were taken from the first volume of Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book, a copy of which he purchased and in which he took copious notes, including his own hand-drawn illustrations. “What helped me most as a foreigner, sitting in on the class, was having the [cook]book with me,” says Michael. “I’d have it open to the right page, and there it was bilingually. Now, sometimes the English isn’t perfect in the book, but that’s where my Chinese was good enough that I could look over and see what it should be. I could understand what was written.”
The cooking school’s one and only classroom occupied the floor directly below Fu’s own family apartment, making the daily commute an easy one. Students sat on tiers of risers, in the manner of a small lecture hall, with the focal point on the teaching kitchen in the front. The classes were taught entirely by lecture and demonstration, with no active student participation, but this didn’t bother Michael. Fu was an excellent teacher, earnest and conscientious. The tone was not formal, but neither was it “giggly or funny or laughing. It wasn’t that kind of entertainment. It was serious, in the sense of ‘I’m here to help you. You can do this. And here’s how you do it. Just watch. And if you have questions, ask.’ ” He adds, “To me it struck a perfect note, and that’s why I enjoyed it.” Michael would go home to his tiny, shared apartment in Taipei and practice what he had learned, though not every dish was a smashing success. On one occasion for a dinner party, he had planned to make Crispy Chicken 脆皮肥雞 (cuipi feiji), which requires dipping a whole chicken into hot oil and then cutting it into pieces. “It was a hot chicken, I had my cleaver, and I was nervous anyway because I had company.” Michael slipped and cut his finger badly, bleeding all over the kitchen. The dinner party ended with a trip to the hospital. “I never made that dish ever again,” he laughs.
Besides learning directly from Fu, the experience of strolling through Taipei’s back alleys was itself a first-rate culinary education, one that Michael had not anticipated before he arrived in Taiwan. Growing up in a small town in northern Indiana, he mostly ate “standard Midwestern fare,” such as hamburgers, spaghetti, and fried chicken, dishes he had learned from his mother and grandmother. There were no Chinese restaurants nearby. Moreover, the Chinese restaurants that did exist in larger towns did not serve high-quality food. As his horizons expanded in his first year of college, Michael distinctly remembers trying to make “what I thought was Chinese food,” using packages and cans of La Choy processed food, then available in the local grocery store. “It was awful,” he admits. “So I never had good Chinese food until I went to Taiwan, and suddenly I’m faced with this smorgasbord of incredible food. Taipei is an eater’s paradise.”
Michael describes how in Taipei, “there was food around me all the time. Not just food, but people making food right in front of me.” In every back alley of the city, people cooked and sold foods of all kinds, all day long, from breakfasts of doujiang (soymilk) and youtiao (fried dough sticks) when he walked to work in the morning, to vats of tofu prepared for sale the next day when he went home at night. Many food stalls were open at midnight, when he could grab a late-night snack with coworkers or friends. “Taiwan opened my eyes to the quality of everyday food and the incredible diversity” of regional Chinese foods, he says. “I think most Americans, if they went to China and got a chance to eat in restaurants where Chinese people eat, would be surprised at the variety and the quality. It doesn’t really taste like a lot of what they get here; it’s not all sweet and sour,” he says.
This culinary experience has made Michael dissatisfied with what he can find eating out in Chinese restaurants in the United States, especially outside of urban centers with large Chinese populations. Instead, he prefers to cook with his battered copies of Fu’s cookbooks at home. Michael purchased all three volumes of Fu’s cookbook series while in Taiwan but finds that he uses them in “descending order.” He turns to Volume I, with its familiar regional homestyle dishes “a lot,” Volume II with an expanded list of dishes “some,” and Volume III “very rarely,” because the last volume focuses mainly on fancy banquet foods. Drompp likens the comprehensive approach and universal impact of Fu’s cookbooks to the two volumes of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (published in 1961 and 1970, respectively), except that he uses Child’s cookbooks “far less than my trusty Fu Pei-mei books!”
What did all these Americans ultimately gain from their study of Chinese cooking with Fu Pei-mei? Did they learn more than simply how to make fried rice, egg rolls, and sweet and sour pork? Did they begin to think about Chinese people and culture differently, after learning about Chinese cuisine? Dorothy McConaughy, the American ambassador’s wife, certainly hoped that learning how to cook Chinese food would “advance the friendship and interest between the Chinese and American people,” and Fu Pei-mei agreed. When asked to give the keynote address at the fiftieth anniversary meeting of the Chefs de Cuisine Association of America in Los Angeles in 1976, Fu emphasized the role of cuisine in promoting cross-cultural friendship and understanding: “I think that cooking is a vital part of a country’s culture. . . . By sharing our various cuisines, we can increase mutual understanding and friendship around the world.”
On good days, I want to believe in Fu’s dream, that “mutual understanding and friendship” might blossom from a bowl of noodles. Why not? Cooking classes with Fu Pei-mei and daily strolls through the back alleys of Taipei certainly changed the eating habits and palate of Michael Drompp, opening his eyes to the amazing variety and deliciousness of regional Chinese cuisines. For a young man starting out from small-town Indiana, it is no small personal journey to undertake, to go from La Choy to 拉麵 la mian (hand-pulled noodles) in a lifetime. The same might be said about Fu’s influence on other American women and men, including Yvonne Zeck from Illinois, Judy Getz from New Jersey, Bruce Borthwick from Michigan, Midge Jackson from Texas, or any number of others profiled in their local newspapers.
But on not-so-good days, I wonder: does loving the food of a place necessarily translate into a deeper, more compassionate, and more humane understanding of its people and culture? I think about this question repeatedly during the recent coronavirus pandemic. At one 2021 event in New York City protesting the sharp rise in anti-Asian violence, a young woman, Jessica Ng, holds up a sign that poses the idea not as a question, but as an imperative: “Love our people like U love our food.” The slogan quickly goes viral, copied not only onto other protest signs, but also onto T-shirts, sweatshirts, stickers, magnets, egg tarts, and frosted cakes alike. The slogan’s popularity among Asian Americans demonstrates that it has struck a deep nerve, situated right at the confluence of food and identity, demanding that we be seen not just as a source of tasty food, but as human beings deserving dignity and respect. But perhaps the very existence of the slogan instead implies that the opposite sentiment largely prevails: although Asian food is readily loved and accepted in the United States, it is not such an easy path of acceptance for Asian people.
Fu Pei-mei’s bilingual cookbooks were the product of her historical circumstances and context as much as her own hard work. They are also utopian statements of hope: that it is indeed possible to bridge cultural and linguistic divides in the world through the language of food. Maybe it is easy to be so confident when you live in a world where Chinese cuisine is the default, so obvious as to be unnecessary to include in the title of your cookbook. Fu spoke from a position of respected culinary authority, in a world where foreign students clamored to learn how to cook Chinese cuisine. From everything she had experienced, of course Fu could believe that teaching and learning about Chinese cuisine would lead to “mutual understanding and friendship.” Yet the ultimate work of translation, it seems to me, lies not in what Fu was able to accomplish on the page, rendering her Chinese into English with the assistance of Zeck and other translators. The real act of translation lies instead in the hands of her foreign readers. By choosing a cookbook over takeout, will they no longer see these dishes as a delicious end unto themselves, ready to order and devour? Getting results in cooking requires time, effort, and patience: these are small, hopeful steps in a lifelong journey of understanding, making real the possibility of connecting distinct peoples and cultures through food.