When i was a child, it was not uncommon for my mother to single-handedly prepare a feast of seven or eight Chinese dishes for special guests. She would scour her cookbooks—including Fu Pei-mei’s—for inspiration, creating a menu that was balanced carefully by color, ingredient, taste, and texture. 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, to name a few familiar dishes—required time, care, and multiple steps to complete, and their sheer variety meant hours of preparation, at least a day in advance. Chinese friends were always deeply appreciative, but it was 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. Home cooking by then had become a badge of honor for my mother, as it was for many of the other Chinese mothers in our community. Mrs. Lee, Mrs. Chang, Mrs. Tou, Mrs. Wang, known to us as “aunties,” were all great home cooks, and we gladly devoured examples of their latest “signature dishes” (nashoucai) at family potlucks.

It’s easy to forget that my mother’s Chinese culinary expertise, which seemed so natural to me as a child, was forged through failure. She still recalls the first time she tried to cook a proper Chinese meal, for a group of ten librarians with whom she worked at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa in 1966. All the women wanted to try Chinese food and there was no Chinese restaurant in the area, so they begged my mother to cook for them. “You must be able to make Chinese food really well,” they insisted. My mother was enthusiastic and eager to please, so she agreed—even though she had little experience in the kitchen, ate in the college cafeteria every day, and drank Tang for breakfast. She remembers none of the other dishes she made, but she still vividly recalls trying to make a soup out of bianjian—bamboo cooked in salt water and then smoked dry—an expensive ingredient that her mother had sent from Taiwan. “I wanted to take care of my guests well,” she said, “so I thought, ‘I can’t be stingy, I’ll just use all of it.’ ” She made the stock fresh from a whole chicken and then added twenty-odd clumps of bianjian. “I just threw them all into the pot, like this—dong dong dong,” she gestures. At first she was too busy cooking to eat with her guests, but finally she sat down to eat. When she tried the soup, she was horrified. “It was so salty, like a whole carton of salt had fallen into it! I said, ‘Oh, no, no, no! This isn’t what it is supposed to taste like!’ I felt so embarrassed.” She had not known that she should first soak the bianjian in several changes of water to remove the salt, and that only a few clumps of the bamboo were needed, not twenty. The bianjian had swollen up into a sodden, soggy, salty mess. “That,” she concludes, “was my first formal cooking experience.”

Starting in the 1970s, Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks arrived in the United States, carried by students from Taiwan who had no desire to leave behind their familiar comfort foods. It was often said that all overseas students from Taiwan in those years brought with them the same two items in their suitcases: a Tatung electric rice cooker and a copy of Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook. Indeed, both found spots on our kitchen counter and cookbook shelf, where they became essential fixtures in our family kitchen. Although much has been written about the history of Chinese American restaurants, chop suey, and fortune cookies, few books have focused on the social world of Chinese American home cooking or family dinners. This seems strange to me, as most Chinese Americans encounter Chinese food regularly at home and not in restaurants. Beyond what Chinese food has meant for individual families, it has also been crucial ingredient in building Chinese American communities. Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks offer us a way to enter that world, as enduring symbols of diasporic Chinese culinary identity in the twentieth century.

It was my grandmother who sent my mother the first volume of Fu’s cookbook from Taiwan, some years after she had arrived in the United States in 1963 to start a graduate program in library science at the University of Minnesota. “Why was that one special?” asks my mother. “Because it had color photographs. That was very different from other cookbooks. And it had Chinese and English, because sometimes the system of measurement was different between China and America.” Unlike those who came to the United States later in the 1970s, my mother did not bring copies of Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks with her in her suitcase, because Fu had not yet written them. Instead, my mother brought with her Volumes 1 (1954) and 2 (1957) of Huang Yuanshan’s Chinese cookbooks (Yuanshan shipu), from Taiwan’s leading cookbook author of the 1950s, discussed in Chapter 2. Ultimately, though, my mother used Fu’s cookbooks the most, thumbing through them before any dinner party and jotting down to-do lists. She eventually acquired all three volumes of Fu’s signature series, as well as Volumes 1 through 3 of Fu’s original mini-sized Television Cookbooks.

Although their publication dates are separated by only a decade, Huang and Fu’s cookbooks belong to two different eras: black and white versus Technicolor, silent film versus the talkies. Huang’s cookbooks are thin, flimsy softcovers—typical of old-school Chinese books—with only a few pages of simple brush ink drawings of cooking utensils in the first volume. In contrast, each of Fu’s thick, hardcover cookbooks feature dozens of vibrant color photographs of finished dishes, along with photos of place settings, ingredients, and Fu’s worldwide travels. Most importantly, Huang’s audience was limited to readers of Chinese, whereas Fu’s bilingual Chinese-English cookbooks could and did travel the world. For a non-Chinese reader, Huang’s cookbooks do not beckon the eye with color photographs or odd English names for the dishes. In fact, I never noticed Huang’s books on my mother’s cookbook shelf growing up and didn’t even realize that they were cookbooks.

There were other Chinese cookbooks published in the United States that my mother might have turned to at the time. Buwei Yang Chao (1889–1981) published How to Cook and Eat in Chinese in 1945. Chao was born in Nanjing and later trained in Japan as a medical doctor, but she gave up her practice after she married linguist Yuen Ren Chao in 1921. The couple emigrated to the United States in 1938, where Yuen Ren taught Chinese at Harvard, and then became a professor of linguistics at Berkeley. Buwei Yang Chao was the first to introduce Americans to Chinese dishes beyond the typical chop suey and chow mein fare popular in the United States at the time. She (or more accurately, her husband, who had edited their daughter’s translation of the cookbook into English) is also credited with coining the English terms “stir-fry” and “potsticker.” Pearl S. Buck, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Good Earth (1931) and a friend of the Chaos, wrote in the preface, “There is not a dish in its pages which an American housewife cannot produce, without qualms over its difficulty.” Chao’s cookbook proved so popular that it was reprinted several more times in subsequent decades, with the second revised edition appearing in 1949 and the third revised edition in 1963.

Joyce Chen (Liao Jia’ai) (1917–94) was another Chinese émigré who gained fame in the postwar years as chef-owner of several Boston-area restaurants specializing in northern Chinese cuisine. She had moved to the United States from Beiping with her family in 1949, and she opened her first Joyce Chen Restaurant in 1958. Chen originally self-published The Joyce Chen Cookbook (1962) in a small run of six thousand copies, but it eventually sold more than seventy thousand copies nationwide after it was reprinted by J.B. Lippincott. Chen also appeared on a public television program on Chinese cooking from 1966–67, Joyce Chen Cooks, which was filmed on the very same WGBH set as Julia Child’s The French Chef. Chen later patented her own line of flat-bottomed woks suitable for American electric ranges and developed a line of ready-made bottled Chinese sauces under the Joyce Chen Foods brand. Her impact on the American culinary scene has been recognized by the US Postal Service, which issued a commemorative stamp in 2014 with her portrait in its series of Celebrity Chefs Forever Stamps.

But although Buwei Yang Chao and Joyce Chen have been justly celebrated for teaching American audiences how to cook Chinese food, neither of their cookbooks ever made their way onto my mother’s cookbook shelf: she was not, after all, their intended audience. Chao and Chen were writing explicitly for English-speaking American (read: white) housewives, not Chinese-speaking diasporic ones, and the contents of their cookbooks reflect this. Both cookbooks contain a requisite section on how to use chopsticks, with detailed instructions and illustrations. Both contain shopping lists with Chinese characters for ingredients (with a tear-out version in Chen’s cookbook), so that a reader could take the list directly to Chinatown and wave it under the nose of a Chinese shopkeeper to find the correct ingredients. “If you recognize from my description and pictures what you want, just point out to a clerk I want some of that,” suggested Chen. “If no such things are in sight in the store, point out the items on your Chinese shopping list and ask the clerk.” Both cookbooks explain typically Chinese eating habits, with ample comparisons to American eating habits. Chao, for example, admitted that after years of living abroad, she was always conflicted as to whether she should slurp her hot soup or noodles in the Chinese manner, or make as little noise as possible the American way.

For my mother, and other Chinese immigrants like her, it would have been slightly perverse as native Chinese speakers to learn how to cook Chinese food from recipes written in English, when enough linguistic labor had already been expended translating them into English from Chinese. (Chen told her daughter that her cookbook had been “written with blood, sweat and love,” especially because of “struggling with my poor English.”) Chen’s recipes thankfully include the name of every dish in Chinese characters, but Chao’s recipes do not. Chao’s husband Yuen Ren had intentionally rendered many of the dish names, such as “Sweet Peppers Stir Beef Shreds,” “Cucumbers Stuff Meat,” or “Beef Emit-Silk,” as ungrammatical, Chinese-sounding English, “which he thinks Americans like better,” Chao lamented. Chinese readers of Fu’s bilingual recipes, by contrast, could dispense with such overt linguistic contortions and find exactly what they were looking for: clear, easy recipes in Chinese for familiar home-cooked dishes that would be welcome at the family dinner table.

For most American home cooks, Chinese food would only ever be a curious novelty, something to prepare occasionally when entertaining guests to impress them with one’s cosmopolitan tastes: it did not represent an everyday approach to eating. Neither Chao nor Chen were ever embraced as America’s culinary darling in the same way that Julia Child was, despite WGBH producers hoping for a crossover hit with Chen. (Publicity material even linked the two programs, telling viewers, “Remember, you can watch Joyce Chen and still be faithful to Julia.”) Mainstream American television audiences (and corporate sponsors) apparently did not consider a cooking program with a Chinese woman speaking accented English and cooking only Chinese food as television worth watching: Joyce Chen’s program was canceled after only one season of twenty-six episodes. It would not be until 1982 that another Chinese individual, Chef Martin Yan, would be given the chance to host a cooking program on American television, finally breaking through to white audiences with his frenetic energy on Yan Can Cook.

In her own day, it was only Fu, with her forty-year career on Taiwan Television and dozens of cookbooks, who managed to achieve a stratospheric level of culinary success and influence in Taiwan that truly did rival Julia Child’s, a goal that eluded Fu’s Chinese contemporaries in the United States. One might even argue that Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks and fame traveled even further than Child’s, escaping the borders of her home country, with a transnational audience inherently built into its bilingual platform. The different career trajectories of Chao, Chen, and Fu ultimately had nothing to do with their culinary skill, inherent talent, ambition, or even the so-called authenticity of their recipes. Instead, it had everything to do with the audiences that surrounded them: postwar American audiences were simply not yet ready or willing to embrace a Chinese woman as a culinary star. Because Fu addressed Chinese housewives, first and foremost, along with foreigners and overseas Chinese students, all of whom clamored to have a copy of her cookbook, she felt no special need to plead the case for Chinese food. It was a matter of course that readers would find these dishes delicious and want to cook them every day, or nearly every day, as part of a regular diet.

After finishing graduate school in Minnesota, my parents moved to the small town of Midland, Michigan, so that my father could take a job as a research chemist at Dow Chemical. Midland was a quintessential company town: my mother worked full-time as the supervisor of children’s services at the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library; my brother, sister, and I attended the Herbert Henry Dow High School; our rival high schoolers, at Midland High, were known as the Chemics and represented by an atomic symbol mascot. The population of Midland was almost entirely white, including most of my school friends, my teachers, and my parents’ coworkers. Although our professional and public lives took place in a white world, I felt that I had a secret Chinese double life, one which had nothing to do with my white peers. My family’s primary social network was entirely Chinese, consisting of a dozen or so other Chinese families, whose fathers had also landed in Midland to work at Dow Chemical or one of its subsidiaries. This Chinese double life influenced our daily rhythms in a thousand tiny ways: living with grandmothers who spoke no English, greeting all family friends as “auntie” and “uncle,” wearing slippers around the house, groaning about Chinese school on the weekend, storing huge bags of rice grains in the cupboard, and eating cooked rice every night for dinner.

The familiar squat white shape and black knob handle of our Tatung rice cooker, made grubby with years of use, was a fixture on countless Chinese American kitchen counters, including ours. Tatung started manufacturing electric rice cookers in Taiwan in 1960, and some time thereafter my grandmother sent one to our family. The characters which made up the company’s name, 大同, were printed on the front of the rice cooker; for years they were some of the few Chinese characters I could reliably recognize. One of my regular kitchen tasks, once I got old enough, was to make rice for dinner after I came home from school, before my mother came home from work. The technology of a basic electric rice cooker remains the same today as it did sixty years ago. You measure out the desired amount of rice grains using a small plastic cup, fill the internal rice pot with water to the corresponding mark, and press a switch. When the water boils off and the rice is cooked, the internal temperature rises above 100 degrees Celsius and triggers the switch to turn off automatically. Perfectly cooked rice, every time. On days that I would ask for a second serving, my mother would joke and call me a “little rice bucket” (xiaofantong).

Socializing for us meant family potlucks with other Chinese families, always hosted at a different house, with a table for grown-ups and a table for kids. These potlucks included a rotating group of a dozen or more Chinese families: the Lees (of whom there were several unrelated families), the Wangs (ditto), the Tous, the Changs, the Chens, the Huangs, the Kaos, the Chows, the Suns, the Tiens, the Chaos, the Shihs, the Tongs, the Yues, the Chengs, and the indefatigable Auntie Luo. The potlucks, the mainstay of our family’s social life, started before I was even born, right after my parents first arrived in Midland in 1966. “We got together almost every weekend to eat or to play mahjong,” says my mother. Gatherings at the time took place at a local park because everyone was renting a house and did not have enough room to invite people over. Families would bring simple home-cooked dishes to share: stir-fried noodles, smoked fish, braised dishes. Along with the food, families, especially mothers, swapped ideas about how to get along in their new lives. “The environment was unfamiliar to everyone, so we could exchange information,” my mother recalls. As recent immigrants, no one had any other family nearby to rely on, so they depended on each other instead.

Eventually, as the number of Chinese families expanded, someone suggested putting together an address list, with phone numbers, so people could contact one another easily. Later, in the 1970s, the informal group was given a formal name, the Tri-City Chinese Association (which included the mid-Michigan cities of Bay City and Saginaw and surrounding areas, along with Midland). Several times a year there were special celebrations involving the entire Chinese community, hosted by the Tri-City Chinese Association, which by then had a membership of eighty or ninety families. All these gatherings centered on food and eating, regardless of the occasion: bountiful Chinese New Year banquets at the Midland Community Center, a zongzi (sticky rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves) picnic at Plymouth Park for the Dragon Boat Festival. Sometimes several families would go camping together at Houghton Lake or Higgins Lake. Even then, food was the highlight: our family would sleep in our pop-up Starcraft camper and everyone would savor my father’s fruit pies around the campfire.

Eating together regularly with other Chinese families in Midland served as both an inspiration and an incentive to my mother to improve her own cooking. She distinctly remembers going to another woman’s house for lunch in the early years. Therese Shih had invited my mother, my grandmother, who was visiting from Taiwan, and several other Midland Chinese aunties. When they all arrived in Therese’s small apartment, they were confused. They saw no signs of food anywhere, nor any signs of preparation. “We whispered to each other, ‘Didn’t she invite us over for a meal?’ Everything was spic and span. Very strange.” Then Therese stood up and excused herself to go into the kitchen to cook, bringing out dish after delicious dish, which she had already semi-prepared. “We were so in awe!” my mother recalls. “Everything was so clean and then she just brought out all of these dishes. We thought, ‘Oh! There’s another way of entertaining!’ Not messy like we did it.”

With no local Chinese grocery stores in the area, families in Midland took trips to Detroit, Windsor, Ontario, and even Toronto (a six-hour drive away), to stock up on supplies. “You couldn’t even buy soy sauce in Midland,” remembers Auntie Jane Tou, who arrived in Midland with her husband James in 1965, the year before my parents. On those Toronto pilgrimages, we’d eagerly look for a dim sum restaurant, since dim sum wasn’t available anywhere near us and wasn’t anything you would attempt to make at home. We’d stuff ourselves silly, looking for the waitresses pushing the carts of our favorite snacks—radish cake, shrimp rolls, sesame balls, egg tarts. Afterward, we headed to the Chinese grocery stores. All Chinese grocery stores back then were mama-and-baba affairs, with the same familiar smell once you crossed the threshold: slightly stale, medicinal, mysterious, and occasionally fishy. The scent held the promise of haw flakes, white rabbit candy, and a renewed supply of my favorite, rousong (dried pork floss, which tastes much better than it sounds). Once, my parents bought a whole carton of fresh mangoes, which were unavailable in our local grocery stores in Midland. They covered the carton with a blanket and instructed me to sit on it in the car, so that we could sneak the fruit back over the border to Michigan.

Nor were there any Chinese restaurants in Midland or in any nearby towns when my parents first arrived. The lone exception was Rodeitcher’s Chinese restaurant in Freeland, which as the name suggests, was not owned by a Chinese family. The original owner, Leo Rodeitcher (who had spent time in Alcatraz and was friends with Al Capone), hired a Chinese man to work in his household in the 1940s. Afterward, Rodeitcher added Chinese food to his restaurant menu, possibly making it the first Chinese restaurant in the state of Michigan. Auntie Tou recalls that the place served “American food—chop suey, fortune cookies, sweet and sour.” Another Chinese restaurant later opened in Midland, the Shanghai Peddler, but that too was owned by a white man. Only in 1980 did Carl and Evangeline Chow become the first Chinese owners of a Chinese restaurant in Midland, Bamboo Garden. (Later, I found it odd to discover that a white high school friend’s family went to eat there every week, as regular customers. My family hardly ever ate there, although the food was good—why would you pay for Chinese food in a restaurant when you could eat the same thing (or better) at home for less? Our family restaurant of choice was the steakhouse Ponderosa, with its all-you-can-eat salad bar.)

In the late 1960s, Auntie Tou, who had studied home economics in Taiwan, started teaching Chinese cooking classes through the adult education center in Midland. She continued to do so for more than twenty years and even wrote her own, self-published cookbook, From a Chinese Kitchen (1979). She was proud that her cookbook did not depend upon specialized Chinese ingredients, which were so difficult to source at the time. “Where do you find haishen [sea cucumber]?” she asks. “Where do you find jinzhen [dried lilies], mu’er [wooden ear fungus], or xianggu [dried mushrooms]? They had never even heard of these things in Midland then. So, I tried to use local supermarket ingredients to cook in a Chinese way. That’s why people liked it.” Her recipe for fried rice, for example, included frozen mixed peas and carrots. Although she says the recipes in her cookbook were of her own devising, when Auntie Tou was writing From a Chinese Kitchen, she also consulted Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook. She had asked her mother to bring it with her when she came to visit from Taiwan. “I heard she was famous,” Auntie Tou remembers. “I just did it my own way in the beginning. Later I looked at her cookbook as a reference. I didn’t really copy her exact method. But she has a good way of doing things.”

In her early years in Midland, Auntie Tou recalls going to Midland’s local grain elevator, Cohoon’s, which sold wheat, beans, and other grains. She was looking for dried soybeans so she could make her own tofu, another unavailable staple. The mature yellow soybeans were sold in the store as animal feed, so the man behind the counter asked her, “What kind of animal are you raising at home?” She told him she was actually buying them to make soybean milk. (Making soymilk is the first stage of making tofu, after which it is mixed with a coagulant and pressed, much like cheese.) “Soybean milk?” he responded. “What’s that?” None of this unfamiliarity discouraged Auntie Tou, however. She is especially proud of the fact that she converted the taste buds of even the most reluctant Americans. “In Midland, there were some people who would say, ‘I don’t want to eat Chinese food.’ Have you ever met anyone like that? Especially in the early years. They just wouldn’t even touch it.” She remembers one man who was particularly against Chinese food, and later, after a cooking demonstration, returned to tell her that Chinese stir-fries had changed his life, helping him eat more healthily without using butter. Another college student in one of her cooking classes told her that he had only ever eaten hamburgers, hot dogs and broccoli growing up. After taking her class, he said, “I open my refrigerator and can always find something to stir-fry.” “This,” Auntie Tou says, “is an accomplishment.”

Non-Chinese tend to see and think of “Chinese Americans” or “Chinese immigrants” as a single, monolithic group with a shared history, but the people encompassed by this identity are extraordinarily diverse, shaped by distinct waves of migration. The first wave of Chinese migration to the United States was in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before and during the era of Chinese Exclusion (1882–1943). These nineteenth-century Chinese migrants overwhelmingly came from a single province of China, Guangdong Province (known in English as Canton), along China’s southeastern coast. Astoundingly, historian Madeline Hsu writes that until 1960, “well over half of all Chinese in the United States came from [a] single county” in Guangdong Province, Toishan. Most were male and came as laborers in the mid-nineteenth century to California and other Western states, working in gold mines and building the transcontinental railroad. As those opportunities disappeared, some shifted to making a living as laundrymen, cooks, Chinese restaurant workers, or small grocery store owners. It was overwhelmingly Cantonese migrants who settled in America’s Chinatowns, giving them their familiar culinary habits and sounds and inventing chop suey and chow mein for American palates. San Francisco’s Chinatown, established in 1848, was the first in the country, but Chinatowns in other metropolitan areas soon followed: New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Honolulu.

Cookbook authors Grace Young and Ken Hom, whose families emigrated from Canton to the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, share this Cantonese culinary background. Their cookbook memoirs, Young’s The Wisdom of the Chinese Kitchen: Classic Family Recipes for Celebration and Healing (1999) and Hom’s Easy Family Recipes from a Chinese-American Childhood (1997), are sprinkled with transliterations of Cantonese words and phrases (jook for “rice porridge,” or sik fan, which literally means “eat rice” but is often used to mean, “Let’s eat!”). Their memories, too, are intimately intertwined with their childhoods in urban Chinatowns. In Young’s case, she grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where her parents cooked Cantonese food every day for her and her brother. “Whether it was a simple weeknight supper or a more elaborate weekend meal,” Young writes, “my parents wanted us to know why, in all of China, the Cantonese were considered the best cooks.” (As Young’s recipes also demonstrate, out of all regional Chinese, the Cantonese have the strongest inclination to incorporate traditional Chinese medical concepts into their cooking, classifying foods as heating or cooling and using soups for healing.) Ken Hom recalls that the boundaries of Chicago’s Chinatown were his entire world. When cooking, his single mother “stuck close to the Cantonese approach (none better!) and never attempted other Chinese regional styles.”

Notably, both Young and Hom use the terms “Cantonese” and “Chinese” interchangeably, with the latter often standing in for the former. When Hom writes of his childhood, “We went only to Chinese-language movies; we read only Chinese magazines and newspapers; we ate foods prepared only in Chinese style,” he actually means Cantonese movies, Cantonese magazines, Cantonese newspapers, and Cantonese foods. This almost unnoticeable substitution, in which Cantonese becomes Chinese, and vice versa, illustrates an important point—almost all Chinese immigrants, no matter where they come from, consider their own identity and experience as the definitive Chinese migration experience. For Young and Hom, this is natural: in the mid-century Chinatowns where they grew up, every Chinese person they encountered probably was Cantonese. So it makes sense for Young to recall her family’s “Chinese kitchen,” or for Hom to share recipes from his “Chinese American childhood.”

But not all Chinese in the United States share this predominantly Cantonese background of first wave migrants. The second major wave of Chinese migration, which includes my parents, occurred in the immediate postwar decades, especially after 1965. The Chinese Exclusion Acts, federal legislation that by and large barred Chinese migration to the United States starting in 1882, were finally repealed in 1943, as the United States recognized that it needed to maintain a better footing with its wartime ally. Chinese migrants already in the United States were allowed to become naturalized citizens, while a tiny number of 105 new Chinese migrants were now legally allowed to arrive each year. Yet the greatest numerical and ideological shift in US migration policy came with the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which did away with restrictive national quotas favoring northern and western European immigrants, replacing them instead with policies emphasizing family reunification and the recruitment of educated, skilled labor. This shift opened the doors of America to an increasing number of immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia, as every country had a flat quota of 20,000 migrants per year. As Madeline Hsu has detailed, this shift from restrictive to selective immigration policies for Chinese and other Asian nationals over the course of the twentieth century was crucial in transforming fears of the “yellow peril” into new social myths about Asians as the “model minority.”

Very few Chinese migrants in these mid-century decades came from mainland China itself, as mainland Chinese were not permitted to travel or migrate freely overseas after the Communist takeover in 1949. Instead, postwar Chinese migrants came from outside of mainland China, primarily from Taiwan, and to a lesser extent from Hong Kong (then a British colony) and Singapore (a newly independent city-state on the Malaysian peninsula with a majority population of Chinese descent). Because many of these postwar immigrants from Taiwan were also mainlanders, including my parents and all their friends, they spoke Mandarin, not Cantonese, as their primary language, and were accustomed to eating a different range of regional dishes. Between 1966 and 1975, more than 200,000 Chinese immigrants, mostly from Taiwan, were admitted into the United States, with another 125,000 arriving between 1976 and 1980. After the establishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1979, mainland China was given its own separate allotment of 20,000 spots, and in the late 1980s, prior to the return of Hong Kong to PRC control in 1997, Hong Kong received its own annual quota of 20,000.

Most of these postwar Chinese immigrants were highly educated and skilled, coming to the United States to attain their graduate degrees in the hard sciences and engineering, such as my father pursuing his doctorate in chemistry. Moreover, these mobile, professional immigrants were no longer tied to traditional ethnic enclave Chinatowns within major cities, but rather scattered to the suburbs as their socioeconomic means and job opportunities allowed. Monterey Park, California, part of the sprawl of Los Angeles County, became the earliest and most prominent example of one such “suburban Chinatown” community in the 1980s, with a flourishing downtown business district nicknamed “Little Taipei.” Other urban satellite Chinese communities in northern California and New York (such as Flushing in Queens) developed, attracting majority Asian populations in similar fashion. Other second-wave Chinese migrants—like my parents in Midland, Michigan—settled in small towns and cities across the Midwest and South, far from any coastal ethnic enclaves and large Chinese communities.

Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks accompanied immigrants from Taiwan to all the corners of the United States where they landed throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Alice Hsu, in Billings, Montana, explained to readers of the Billings Gazette that her favorite cookbook was Fu’s first volume, from which she planned to select recipes to celebrate the Chinese New Year while far from other family and friends. Kevin Chien, manager of the Yellow Dragon restaurant in Bloomington, Indiana, named Fu’s cookbook as one of his ten favorite books, along with War and Peace, Gone with the Wind, Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles manifesto, and Foodservice Sanitation. Grace Liu, owner of the Dynasty Restaurant in Williamsburg, Virginia, recommended that readers of her local newspaper bring along Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book if ever stranded on a desert island: “It’s very, very clear. It has all the Chinese names, the materials and the ingredients and a very good English translation. It has nice pictures too and covers all the regions and everything from first course to last course.” Other Chinese cooking instructors and restaurant owners who had emigrated from Taiwan, such as Theresa Tang of Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Louise Teng of The Orient in Columbia, South Carolina; and Shan Fang of Soo Yuan in Calistoga, California, boasted of their training under Fu Pei-mei, at her Taipei cooking school.

Ming Tsai, award-winning chef, television personality, and cookbook author, grew up in a Chinese family that arrived in the United States as part of this second wave of Chinese migration from Taiwan. His paternal grandfather, a university official, fled to Taiwan from mainland China at the end of the Chinese Civil War, arriving indirectly from Macau in 1951. His father, Stephen, came to study at Yale and eventually found a job as an engineer at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. His mother, Iris, opened her own Chinese restaurant, the Mandarin Kitchen, in a Dayton strip mall, where Tsai learned about the restaurant business. On a 2014 episode of the PBS program Finding Your Roots, Tsai explained to host Henry Louis Gates, Jr., what it felt like to grow up in Dayton, a city with few other Chinese families: “Our family joke was, when we had the two or three Chinese families over to our house, we were Chinatown. [We were] always surrounded by food. All we did was cook and eat. And while we were eating dinner, we’re talking about what are we eating next.” Interestingly, for second-generation Tsai, his restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts, Blue Ginger, which first put him on the culinary map in 1998, was always known for its “East-meets-West” fusion cuisine, a branding and approach to cuisine that Tsai has never abandoned: none of his cookbooks or television programs have ever featured the word “Chinese” in their titles.

Although Fu Pei-mei was conscious of trying to write a cookbook that would be of some succor to overseas Chinese hungry for a taste of home, she could not have imagined all of the out of the way places in the United States where those suitcases carrying her cookbooks would land: Salem, Oregon; Calistoga, California; Bloomington, Indiana; Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Midland, Michigan; Dayton, Ohio; Williamsburg, Virginia; Columbia, South Carolina. Her dishes would help postwar migrants ease their homesickness, satisfy the demands of their hungry families, impress their friends, and build their communities. Those overseas readers might or might not be aware of Fu’s fame as a television celebrity in Taiwan, but they would instantly recognize the bold red, blue, and green covers of her cookbooks, and the name PEI MEI emblazoned in capitals at the top. Their colorful packaging and compact bilingual presentation have allowed the cookbooks to evolve into the symbols of a specific mid-century version of Chinese culinary identity, one that can be passed down to the next generation. Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks have never been the only cookbooks on Chinese cuisine, but as the first bilingual cookbooks of their kind, they were the ones that best embodied that trans-Pacific journey, speaking to generations on both sides of the migration divide.