My mother’s first experience cooking Chinese food in Iowa reminds me of my own first attempt at cooking a Chinese meal for my host family in Germany, while studying abroad in college in the 1990s. Though it takes place three decades later, on another continent, and in another language, my story is filled with the same gendered cultural expectations on the part of outsiders and the same outsized optimism and desire to please on my part. “Wir lieben chinesische Küche!” enthused my host mother. So, ja, natürlich, I offered to cook a Chinese meal for them, to thank them for their kindness to me. At the time, however, I had little idea of how to cook anything, beyond some casual observations of my mother cooking at home. Moreover, the only Chinese ingredient my host mother had on hand was a tiny bottle of soy sauce. Still, I somehow believed that I would be able to conjure up something vaguely Chinese and tasty from nothing when the time came (how hard could it be?), only to realize when faced with the stove that no culinary miracle would save me.

I was mortified, and everyone tried to be polite about it, but the results—a valiant attempt at stir-fried beef—were terrible. That same summer, I tried cooking eggplant for myself for the first time, craving its purple, glistening skin, stir-fried with a garlicky sauce, which I had eaten so many times before. The soggy mass of oily, brown glop that resulted was barely edible, but I forced myself to finish it. I remember calling my mother long-distance from a phone booth after the eggplant incident to analyze what had gone wrong. That was the year that my mother first suggested I try some recipes from Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook. I started with her recipe for Shredded Beef with Green Pepper, then made my own substitutions to cook a dish of chicken with red peppers. Only after I started writing this book did I realize that I was not alone in these early forays into Chinese cooking, guided by Fu’s cookbook. When I would tell other second-generation Chinese and Taiwanese American friends that I was writing a book about Fu Pei-mei, they would say, “Oh yeah, we had her cookbooks too, growing up,” or, “My mom gave me that cookbook.” Along with oil splatters, the pages of Fu’s cookbooks have absorbed all kinds of memories, and not just those of my own making. What seems most remarkable about Fu Pei-mei’s durable legacy is the way she continues to appeal to fans in the second-generation, even in our digital age.

Denise Ho’s father, an avid home cook who built a separate outdoor kitchen equipped with an open-flame burner and wok just for making Chinese food, gave her a used copy of Pei Mei’s Home Style Chinese Cooking (1984) before she went to graduate school in the 2000s. Denise most appreciates its approachable, family style recipes and the bilingual format, which helps when shopping for ingredients. Yet Denise’s general impression of Fu’s cookbook as “old-fashioned” in its style, descriptions, photographs, and layout, suggests some of the barriers Fu’s cookbooks face today in appealing to a new generation of Chinese home cooks. Compared to a contemporary Chinese cookbook author such as Fuchsia Dunlop, Denise says, for whom “everything is a poem, and you start salivating by the time she’s done describing something,” Fu’s recipes are far more “practical and utilitarian.” Denise explains: “There’s no ode to the food, there’s no background or historical context, no ‘Here’s my first experience walking along the streets and there were cleavers chopping, and this smell of something wafting in my direction.’ There’s nothing like that. It was just, ‘Here’s this food, here’s a list of things, and here’s how to make it.’ ” All the same, Denise still returns to Fu’s recipes for dishes such as Three Cup Chicken (sanbeiji), Lion’s Head Meatballs (hongshao shizitou), or Steamed Ribs with Rice Powder (fenzheng paigu).

At least one second-generation fan has attempted to bring Fu Pei-mei’s recipes up to date. In 2009, Jaline Girardin started a blog called Pei Mei a Day, inspired by the movie Julie and Julia, which detailed writer Julie Powell’s attempt to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Jaline’s goal for her blog was less deferential to Fu than pragmatic, “adapting recipes from her for the twenty-first century, where MSG and lard (two of PM’s staples, along with hot oil) have both fallen out of favor.” To make it easier on herself, Jaline didn’t actually cook one Fu Pei-mei dish a day, but she did make several dishes per month. She stuck to the project for more than a year, documenting her trial of almost seventy dishes from Fu’s cookbooks. Jaline received her copies of Fu’s cookbooks from her mother, who emigrated to the United States from Taiwan for graduate studies in the 1970s. Like Catherine Chen, Jaline’s mother was not terribly interested in cooking and was more devoted to her career as a math professor, but she did regularly cook diced chicken with walnuts from one of Fu’s recipes, which is still bookmarked in Jaline’s copy. Jaline has always thought of Fu as the “cooking authority” of record, wondering to herself when preparing to cook a dish, “Let’s see what Fu Pei-mei has to say about this.”

Jaline’s dish choices from Fu’s cookbooks were idiosyncratic, reflecting her own preferences and personal circumstances. She never chose to make sea cucumber, for example, since she finds the taste and texture unappealing. As a graduate student at the time, Jaline also chose dishes that did not contain expensive ingredients (which excluded most seafood dishes), and dishes that would pack well for lunches. Jaline’s favorite dish is what Fu calls Eggplant Sze-Chuan Style (yuxiang qiezi), also known as fish-fragrant eggplant. Jaline has made yuxiang qiezi so often that she calls it her “signature dish,” her nashoucai. Only once was Jaline truly defeated in her cooking experiments with Fu’s recipes, when she attempted to make dan bing, the pancakes used to wrap Peking duck and mushu pork. Jaline labeled the recipe difficulty level as “fiendish,” mostly because Fu uses the traditional method of rolling out two pancakes at once, separated by a layer of oil, which are cooked together in a pan and then immediately pulled apart. (My northern Chinese father, in his culinary heyday, excelled at making dan bing for us in exactly this fashion.)

Jaline’s blog not only served to document her own cooking experiments, but it also encouraged other fans to share their love for Fu’s cookbooks. Mark’s wife from Taiwan, who grew up watching Fu on TTV, was given Fu’s three volume cookbook set by her best friend when she left for the United States. “Now that we are getting on in years, wife decided we should have the steamed chicken recipe on page 114 3–4 times per month,” he writes. “She says Chinese will always be different from Americans because Chinese like vegi’s fried & meat steamed, Americans like meat fried & vegi’s steamed.” Carol Yu received her copy of the first volume of Fu’s cookbook from her godmother in the Philippines, who was herself a restaurant owner, when she got married in 1979. Dennis was introduced to Fu’s first two volumes by a Chinese friend in 1977. He wrote to the address in the back of the book to see if he could purchase his own hardback copies and was surprised by the results. “I assumed I would receive a response from a secretary, however I received a handwritten letter from Fu Pei Mei stating that I could send the payment directly to her (either cash or check) including the shipping charge (either airmail or seamail). . . . I promptly sent a money order for $14.50 and received the books within a two week period. I have treasured both the cookbooks and her letter for all these years.”

Fu achieved the ultimate digital status in 2015 when she was made the subject of a Google Doodle on what would have been her eighty-fourth birthday. Digital artist Olivia When drew Fu standing behind the counter on the set of her television show, Fu Pei-Mei Time, except in place of the show’s title on the signboard was the search engine’s familiar name. A silhouette of the camera and boom mike cut in from the side, while Fu is shown stirring a bowl of something with her chopsticks. A handy wok stands by (but strangely no cleaver or burners), along with two finished dishes, prawn slices with sour sauce and the Cheng family meat dish, and a heaping portion of rice. Fu is of course wearing a tidy apron, and her face is lined with grandmotherly wrinkles.

More recently, in 2020, Leslie Wiser, owner of Radical Family Farms in Sebastapol, California, launched a Pei Mei cookoff challenge online in an effort to sell her stash of nearly one thousand pristine out-of-print copies of the first volume of Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook series. Wiser’s mother is Taiwanese, and her enterprising German-Hungarian father had purchased his lot of Fu’s cookbooks for $5 each in the mid-1980s. He had intended to sell them through magazine ads as part of a mail-order Chinese dry goods business, but the plan never took off. Instead, Wiser inherited the cookbooks, keeping them in storage over the years, and occasionally selling a few on eBay in college. Every time she moved, she lugged all fifty boxes of books with her, from Ohio to Indiana, back to Ohio, and finally to California. Now an organic farmer specializing in growing Asian heritage vegetables (@radicalfamilyfarms), Wiser came up with the idea of hosting an online Pei Mei cookoff to sell the rest of the cookbooks that she still had in her possession. She posted pictures of the cookbooks still in their original packaging from Taiwan, with their familiar bright red covers. “I’m not going to lie, it’s hard to let go of these babies,” she wrote on Instagram. “But I’m very thankful so many orders came in so Fu Pei Mei’s legacy can spread across the US.” Within a week, she had sold eight hundred cookbooks, at $75 per copy—a very reasonable price for these out-of-print classics. Meanwhile, participants in the cookoff joined from both the United States and England, and shared images of dishes they had cooked from Fu’s cookbook—Steamed Chicken with Green Onion, Assorted Meat Soup in Winter Melon, Eggplant Sze-Chuan Style, and even Fu’s favorite, Sea Cucumber in Brown Sauce (#rffcookoff).

There is a distinct difference between the way Fu’s cookbooks are regarded today by Instagram foodies in the United States and the way that Fu’s cookbooks are regarded in contemporary Taiwan. Ironically, among her overseas fans, many of whom have scant knowledge of the woman herself and her exceptional career, Fu’s original cookbook can still serve as a living culinary document, with solid recipes for Chinese dishes that meet the needs of today’s home cooks. Among her fans in Taiwan, perhaps precisely because they are more familiar with Fu’s entire career, Fu’s cookbook is treated as more of a relic of a bygone era. In 2013, for example, Andy Wu (Wu Enwen), a food television program host in Taiwan, published a Chinese cookbook which he called a “neo-classical salute to Madame Fu Pei-mei.” In his cookbook homage to Fu, Wu offers updates on Fu’s recipes, interspersed with his own observations on the dishes and excerpts from Fu’s autobiography. His ultimate goal, he says, is to allow more readers to “become reacquainted with this contemporary legend.” But Wu’s reverence for Fu’s reputation means that he does not interact with her as a culinary equal, treating her as merely one more potential source on Chinese cooking among many. Instead, he places her on a pedestal, beyond reproach or critique.

Cheng An-chi, Fu’s oldest daughter, shares this nostalgic vision of Fu’s cooking. The most notable example is her repackaging of Fu’s recipes in her cookbook, Mom’s Dishes: Fu Pei-mei Hands Down the Taste of Family Happiness (Mama de cai: Fu Peimei jiachuan xingfu de ziwei) (2014). In it, Cheng offers a selection of Fu’s favorite recipes, including dishes she liked to perform on television, family favorites, dishes she invented, essential dishes taught at her school, and northern and southern dishes representing the regional background of Fu and her husband, as well as his Shanghainese coworkers. The copy on the front cover recalls Fu’s impact on the postwar decades in which she lived: “During that era of simple, homely fare, Teacher Fu Pei-mei’s cooking instruction let countless people gain happiness from their dinner tables.” The recipes are largely the same as Fu’s originals, with some minor edits, but all the photos have been updated, with food-stylist curated images similar to those that can be found in any contemporary cookbook. These changes may appeal to a domestic audience in Taiwan, but fans of Fu Pei-mei abroad don’t necessarily want updated, repackaged versions of Fu’s recipes with new covers; they want the mid-century retro feeling of the original red cover and the gaudy color photos. It is the physical heft of the original hardback, splattered with stains and smudges, that offers us the most direct connection with our culinary pasts, and with our own childhood memories.

The generation of women who originally grew up with Fu, learning how to cook from her through the television screen and her cookbooks, is now aging and passing away. I was deeply struck by this sense of the passage of time when I was in Taiwan conducting research in September 2014, which coincided with the tenth anniversary of Fu’s death. Her three children, especially Cheng An-chi, had organized a special commemorative event in which three well-known restaurants in Taipei sold their versions of several of Fu’s dishes, in a limited-time special offer for customers. The press conference kickoff was a special “family reunion” banquet featuring a selection of these dishes; Cheng An-chi had worked closely with the chefs at each restaurant to ensure that they were making Fu’s dishes in her mother’s signature style. Dian Shui Lou, a Jiang-Zhe style restaurant, had chosen Fu’s recipes for several famous dishes from Shanghai and Zhejiang, such as deep-fried whole shrimp (youbao xia), sautéed crab with bean paste sauce (jiangbao qingxie), and red bean paste pancakes (dousha guobing). Chao Jiang Yan, a Chiu Chow style Cantonese restaurant, tackled several of Fu’s Cantonese recipes, including classics such as sweet and sour pork (gulaorou) and homestyle pan-fried noodles (jiachang liangmianhuang), as well as a dish featuring Western flavors, baked prawns smothered in cheese (qisi ju mingxia). The Taiwanese restaurant Shin Yeh did not offer its versions of Fu’s Taiwanese recipes, who of course was never known for her expertise in Taiwanese food. Instead, the restaurant’s founder and a close friend of Fu, Lee Hsiu-ying, cleverly chose to offer a more personal selection of the Cheng family’s own favorite dishes: the Cheng family roast pork loin (Chengjia darou); “firewood bundle” duck soup (chaiba yatang), so-called because the main ingredients are chopped into matchsticks of equal lengths then tied together in a tidy bundle with a length of dried gourd; and deep-fried custard fritters with sesame (zhima guozha).

No one at the event even pretended that Fu’s dishes were au courant, catering to contemporary tastes. On the contrary, they were appealing precisely because they evoked the culinary past and reminded diners of how people had eaten in Taiwan forty or fifty years earlier. Publicity posters urged diners to “savor the original taste of Teacher Fu’s famous classic dishes.” In her remarks at the time, Cheng An-chi said that these dishes “remind us of the taste of Chinese food in our parents’ time,” underscoring a sense of generational difference. Ironically, because cooking and eating in Taiwan have changed so dramatically over the past several decades, it is impossible to see Fu’s cookbooks as timeless there: they are instead poignant reminders of a fleeting culinary past. The mainlander restaurants that built Taipei’s reputation as a postwar culinary mecca and that imparted Fu with her own authority as an expert in various Chinese regional cuisines are slowly dying away as younger diners favor international tastes and seek out novel dining experiences.

Meanwhile, overseas, Fu Pei-mei has not aged in the pages of her cookbook, or rather, has aged directly into a kind of mid-century retro cool. Even today her cookbooks are still useful for their methodical instructions on how to cook a wide range of standard Chinese dishes, especially for those who already possess a basic knowledge of cooking. From there, it isn’t difficult to adjust the ingredients and seasonings to whatever you happen to have on hand or whatever suits your own tastes, a kind of adaptive cooking practice that Fu herself always preached. More than one user has echoed the sentiment expressed by Fu’s daughter Cheng An-chi: “Many people would say if you just follow her recipes step-by-step, even if the results aren’t always one hundred percent, they’ll at least reach eighty percent.” Cookbook reviewer and blogger Jon Tseng put it this way in his review of Fu’s best-known cookbook series in 2012: “The recipes actually do work! That’s a big danger, particularly for cookbooks of a certain age. . . . I can also defer to my mother on this one—having cooked from Volumes I and II for over twenty years she can certainly say they work.”

In the United States, the most recent wave of Chinese migration has occurred since the 1980s, in the wake of post-Mao reform and prosperity in mainland China. The People’s Republic of China began allowing out-migration of its citizens again in 1977, and since then ever-greater numbers of mainland migrants have come to the United States. By 2018, mainland China was the origin of the greatest number of new immigrants coming to the United States, with 149,000 that year, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000), and the Philippines (46,000). At the same time, the general improvement of economic conditions in Taiwan has meant that fewer students have been lured away to settle permanently overseas. (The number of students coming from Taiwan to study in the United States from 2010–20 averaged only 22,438 per year for the decade.)

Mainland Chinese immigrants in this most recent wave fall at both ends of the socioeconomic spectrum. One group consists of working-class migrants, some of whom may be undocumented and arrive with little knowledge of English. Without other marketable skills, they often must make their living by working in Chinese restaurants, as cooks, waitstaff, busboys, and delivery workers, or alternatively in garment shops or construction work. A 2019 Pew Research Center report estimates that thirteen percent of all Chinese living in the United States live in poverty, with an even higher percentage, fifteen percent, of foreign-born Chinese living in poverty. Another group of recent Chinese immigrants consists of highly educated and skilled workers, often coming to the United States for undergraduate or graduate studies. As a group, Chinese immigrants in 2018 were “more than twice as likely to have a graduate or professional degree” when compared to the general population of arriving immigrants or when compared to US-born populations.

What is most striking about the current generation of working-class Chinese immigrants is that, like the nineteenth and early twentieth century generation of predominantly Cantonese immigrants that came before them, most of today’s Chinese restaurant workers come from a single province, and even a single region in that province: Fujian Province, particularly from the areas around the provincial capital of Fuzhou. Fujianese not only now own the majority of Chinese restaurants in this country; they also run the support networks (employment agencies, bus routes, ancillary businesses to buy phone cards and wire money home) for the entire Chinese restaurant industry. Fujianese have become the largest subethnic group in New York City’s Chinese enclaves, for example, replacing the earlier dominance of the Cantonese.

In my classes on Chinese food history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I have had several students whose first-generation Fujianese parents have toiled in the family’s Chinese restaurant for years, all in the hopes that their second-generation college-educated children will become high-earning, white-collar professionals. The hours are long, requiring much precious time away from the family, and the work is exhausting. As Hannah Jian, the daughter of Fujianese restaurant owners in Greensboro, North Carolina, explained to one of my students, for her parents, “owning a restaurant is the last resort. If you don’t do well at school, you’re gonna be a restaurant owner and you’re gonna do this for the rest of your life.”

Understanding Chinese migration as a series of distinct waves helps to explain why I did not recognize myself in books by Chinese American authors from earlier generations, which I read as a teenager, during my adolescent search for examples of what it meant to be Chinese American. Jade Snow Wong’s acclaimed autobiography, Fifth Chinese Daughter (1950), details her life growing up during the Depression in her father’s overall factory in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown as she tries to find her way toward an independent life, working as a housemaid to put herself through college and as a secretary in a shipyard office during World War II. Our differences were not only temporal and socioeconomic; they were also linguistic and regional. Her family’s Cantonese roots, her father’s Christian beliefs, her parents’ traditional values and inability to speak English, their working-class San Francisco Chinatown existence—these all described a world very far from my own. My own parents spoke Mandarin and had white-collar careers as a research chemist and a librarian, which required daily communication in English; we lived in a small corner of mid-Michigan surrounded by a white majority. Cantonese was essentially a foreign language to us, one that I associated only with going to Chinese restaurants in big cities, such as Toronto.

Today I wonder how the most recent third wave of Chinese immigrants from the mainland and their children will respond to my parents’ and my own second wave story. Our chapter in the Chinese American story of migration immediately precedes theirs, but do they see points of resonance—living among majority white communities in far-flung corners of the United States, the struggle to reconcile Chinese and American aspects of one’s identity, the irrefutable bonds of family? Or do they see only irreconcilable differences, given the vastly different political histories of China and Taiwan and disparate paths of labor and migration that our families have tread? One of my former students, Jacky Zheng, is the son of Fujianese immigrants who owned a small Chinese restaurant in Wilmington, North Carolina. When Jacky talks about what his parents sacrificed to give him the opportunities in life they never had, he says, “Symbolically, the restaurant represents how my family wrote our story in America and carved out a place for ourselves.” I admire Jacky’s insistence on his parents’ labor as a tremendous act of will, from which they have crafted a sense of national belonging, rather than waiting for it to be handed to them. Yet I wonder if Jacky and Hannah see me as part of their story. Their relationship to Chinese food—as a basic, material means of survival, not just as a prominent marker of home and Chinese identity—is bound to have its own unique contours, ones that may or may not coincide with my own.

No one can claim to speak for all Chinese American experiences—let alone all Asian American ones—across all time. They are simply too diverse, shaped by language, region, religion, gender, generation, sexuality, socioeconomic status, politics, and geographic location. I am struck by the idea, suggested by the title of historian Erika Lee’s book, of the “making and remaking of Asian America.” Each generation of Asian migrants must discover anew for itself (or even each migrant for him or herself) how to form or navigate relationships to their own ethnic identities and homelands, to other racial groups, to the social relations that sustain them, and to the system of laws or societal assumptions that constrain their actions. Although Lee encourages Asian American readers to see the “significant similarities and connections” of their historical experiences, she admits that “Asian Americans with long roots in this country may wonder what they have in common with today’s recent arrivals. Similarly, new Asian immigrants and their descendants may not think that the histories of earlier Asian Americans are relevant to their own experiences. But they should. . . . Both the diversity and shared experiences of Asian Americans reveal the complex story of the making and remaking of Asian America. There is not one single story, but many.”

Rereading Jade Snow Wong’s 1950 memoir now as an adult, there are scenes I do readily recognize—and all of them involve food. Wong describes how she learned to cook rice properly at the age of six, rinsing until the grains ran clear, adding enough water to cover her knuckle joints, and waiting for the pot to boil and then steam, without ever lifting the lid. At eleven, she learns to shop for groceries at various Chinatown purveyors, such as the fishmonger, the butcher, the vegetable stand, and the dry goods store. While in college, she lives and works at the dean’s house, and invites her group of girlfriends (all of whom are Asian or Asian American, along with one white girl), over for a home-cooked Chinese meal, making egg foo young and tomato-beef. Having distinguished herself in this way, the dean asks her to cook a Chinese meal for an esteemed group of visiting musicians. Wong’s family, which has never before shown the slightest interest in any of her college activities, is suddenly stirred into action: her father and mother decide on a simple, workable menu, her father acquires freshly made chicken stock from a restaurant for the soup and gathers all the kitchen equipment she will need, her mother goes over all of the detailed instructions for cooking each dish, her older brother drives over all of the necessary pans, pots, utensils and ingredients to the dean’s house, and her younger sister accompanies her to help her cook the whole meal and clean up afterward. The event is a success, in no small part because of the support of her entire family. I recognize the unspoken elements of this episode: the pride entangled in presenting Chinese food to foreigners, the desire to feed guests well, and the willingness of her entire family to pitch in, as a tangible manifestation of their love.

This is why, I think, that food is such a fundamental anchor of Chinese American identity. It is a bind that stretches across different immigrant generations, even as other ethnic markers, such as language fluency or cultural awareness, recede. As a perceptive undergraduate once observed to me, food is the only thing that he, a second-generation kid with parents from Taiwan, and a new immigrant fresh-off-the-boat have in common: “You don’t know the language, history, or culture—that’s all gone. But you can both sit down at the table and eat the same things.” In other words, even after the Cantonese or Mandarin or Taiwanese is forgotten, the language of food remains. Fu Pei-mei, Jade Snow Wong, my parents, my students, and I may have come of age at very different historical periods, in distinctive national, political, and social contexts, speaking different dialects of Chinese or none at all. But I’d like to imagine that we could still all sit down at the same table and enjoy a Chinese meal together, over steaming bowls of rice (or noodles, or buns, or pancakes) and a delectable feast of endless dishes. Pull up more chairs to the Yellow Emperor’s table—it extends not only across geographies and national boundaries; it also passes into the past and future, into generations unknown.

Viewers hungry for footage of Fu Pei-mei now have the chance to see for themselves how she wielded her cleaver with speedy finesse or handled boiling hot oil in the wok. Since 2017, Taiwan Television has uploaded almost seven hundred and fifty episodes of Fu’s last and most widely known cooking series, Fu Pei-mei Time (Fu Peimei shijian) to YouTube. Fu estimated that she taught more than four thousand dishes across her sixteen years on the show, which broadcast more than fourteen hundred episodes. (Julia Child’s cooking program, The French Chef, meanwhile, consisted of only two hundred and one episodes across nine seasons.) Prior to that moment, the only Fu Pei-mei videos available on YouTube were those that had been dubbed into Tagalog for rebroadcast on a Philippines television station, uploaded by a Filipino fan. The episodes, which originally aired in Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s, are all in Chinese and not subtitled in English, but this has not prevented viewers from all over the world from tuning in. Comments from viewers are written not only in traditional Chinese (used in Taiwan and Hong Kong) and simplified Chinese (used in the PRC, Malaysia, and Singapore), but also in English, Spanish, Thai, Tagalog, Japanese, and Korean. The most popular episode by far is Fu’s demonstration of scallion braised duck with 693,058 views, but several others, including her episodes on hot and sour soup (263,469), Hunanese cured meat (190,576), and scallion braised sea cucumber (178,500), have also garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

It remains to be seen whether these recent digital updates will keep Fu Pei-mei relevant for a new generation of viewers, especially in Taiwan, where so many fans connected with her originally through her years of television appearances. Those under age thirty won’t have seen Fu live on television and most of her cookbooks are now out of print. Thus the 2017 Taiwan Television dramatic series, What She Put on the Table, added another plotline set in the contemporary period. The plotline involves the grandson of Fu’s fictional Taiwanese kitchen maid, Ah Chun. Chuan Bao, her grandson, finds an old VHS videotape of Fu Pei-mei Time in his grandmother’s cupboards and says, “Who? I’ve never heard of the name.” After learning more about his grandmother’s past, Chuan Bao decides to revive the fortunes of her restaurant, which had specialized in Fu Pei-mei’s signature dishes. He learns to cook—not directly from his grandmother, who is temporarily incapacitated in the hospital—but by watching videos of Fu Pei-mei Time on his tablet device.

Chuan Bao is not alone. Perhaps the most noticeable difference between my mother’s generation of Chinese home cooks and my own are the greater numbers of men in the kitchen, who are taking on some or even all their family’s regular cooking duties. In my own family, although my mother was responsible for the everyday cooking and stir-frying, my father was the sous chef, responsible for chopping all the vegetables and meat, as well as washing dishes. As a northerner, however, my father also made all the flour-based specialty dishes in our family, such as dumplings (jiaozi), red bean paste buns (doushabao), plain steamed buns (mantou), pancakes for mushu pork (xiaobing), and his signature scallion pancakes (congyoubing). He also dabbled in making soymilk and undertaking various pickling projects. As it turns out, among all the siblings and spouses in the second generation, it is my non-Chinese husband who is most likely to keep alive the culinary traditions of my father’s flour-based specialties. When we met, my husband was already a dab hand at making homemade pasta, bread, pie crusts, and pizza dough, so it has not been a huge stretch for him to expand his repertoire to include numerous tutorial sessions with my father on achieving the perfect layers of flakiness in a scallion pancake or the perfect level of crispiness in a potsticker. He shares with my father a scientific mindset when cooking and continually tinkers with recipes and procedures until achieving desired results. Working together, the two of us have made strides in our collective effort at making steamed buns for our own children: he makes the dough for buns and rolls out the skins, while I make the meat fillings and fold them for the most attractive and delicious results.

My friend Harrison Huang best represents this new generation of male Chinese home cooks. He is the most talented, dedicated, and obsessive Chinese home cook I know, male or female. He has opinions about everything, from the proper filling for a vegetarian jiaozi to which brand of kitchen knives he will deign to use. He has recently explored a passion for the varieties of Chinese vinegars and their myriad uses, one of his many obsessions. He argues that the way that most Asian Americans think about their food heritage is far too narrow. His sister, for example, will say, “Oh, that’s not the Chinese food I had when I grew up,” equating her personal experience with a broader definition of Chinese food. “Somehow your own individual experience becomes the boundary for some notion of cultural identity or cultural character.” But for Harrison, “being Chinese is so much bigger than that, so much bigger than what you have experienced. It can’t be limited to your own lifetime. . . . You have to be able to imagine a community that’s broader than yourself.” Harrison’s convictions are compelling. China is too big, its regional foodways too broad, deep, diverse, and complex, that it would take several lifetimes to ever learn it all. It puts into perspective my own personal search to transmit a Chinese culinary identity to my children, as but one small wrinkle in an immense culinary story. It is humbling to know that no matter what culinary techniques I might someday learn or master, I will only ever know one tiny corner of the vast culinary traditions that comprise Chinese food.

More than any other Chinese culinary figure of the twentieth century, the emergence of Fu Pei-mei signaled a new era of modern Chinese cooking, distinct from its traditional past. Her impact was both domestic and global in its reach, centered on the role of women in feeding their families, and shaped by a raft of new kitchen technologies, industrial food processing techniques, and mass media. She not only introduced the range of China’s regional specialties to new middle-class housewives in Taiwan via television and multiple cookbooks; she also traveled the world as the Republic of China’s self-appointed culinary ambassador, ensuring that millions would associate her name with authentic Chinese home cooking.

As the most successful of a postwar generation of female Chinese cookbook authors, Fu Pei-mei acknowledged and supported the central role of women in the daily task of feeding their families. This responsibility generally fell upon women’s shoulders, regardless of whether they considered themselves housewives or career women, and Fu wanted to do everything she could to make their lives easier and their families happier. Fu Pei-mei both reflected and shaped the expectations of the new, middle-class housewife, who, in addition to braising sea cucumber and wrapping dumplings, was eager to learn how to bake birthday cakes and banana bread. Women in Taiwan were curious about the ways in which their new Sichuanese, Fujianese, Hunanese, Shanghainese, northern and other regional neighbors were eating, and they wanted to serve their families nutritious, novel foods they would love. Fu’s intimate connection to her female audience was distinct from the centuries of male-authored Chinese food writing that preceded it, which was more concerned with the discerning taste of the gentleman eating the food than with the cook whose hands happened to make it. Meanwhile, within Fu’s own domestic relationship with her male chauvinist husband, in which she ceded to him financial control and did not challenge his position as the ultimate decision-maker within the family, she still carved out the operational freedom to devote herself to a flourishing career outside the home, entirely of her own making.

Fu’s success in disseminating modern Chinese cooking techniques was built upon the rise of mass media, particularly television, and shaped by the spread of new kitchen and food technologies, which Fu embraced. Beyond Taiwan, Fu endeared herself to television audiences in Japan and the Philippines, who loved her skilled approach to Chinese home cooking. Fu collaborated and consulted with a range of food purveyors interested in either capturing Chinese tastes for mass consumption or capturing the Chinese market for foreign food products, including China Airlines, the Ringer Hut restaurant chain in Japan, Uni-President’s line of instant ramen, and the Australian Meat and Livestock Association. The rise of the supermarket, refrigerator, gas stove, and electric rice cooker eliminated the need for daily shopping at the traditional market and cooking over charcoal braziers, and dramatically expanded the possible range of dishes to make by extending natural seasons and improving food preservation. In Taiwan, it became possible to eat out every day, with the sudden proliferation of vendors, restaurants, night markets, and the overall postwar abundance of food.

Most significantly, Fu Pei-mei went global with Chinese cooking in a way that is still unmatched by any other contemporary Chinese cookbook author, thanks to her visually appealing, bilingual Chinese–English cookbooks. She managed to attract audiences at home in Taiwan while reaching out to new, foreign audiences with growing appetites for Chinese food, both in Asia and around the world. Fu’s cookbooks also traveled the world in the suitcases of students from Taiwan going overseas, as portable totems of Chinese culinary identity in a new era of global migration. Her attempts to promote the international profile of the Republic of China and to serve as its self-appointed culinary ambassador mark some of Taiwan’s earliest efforts at gastrodiplomacy, undertaken in a climate of shifting Cold War alliances.

Today’s generation of Chinese food bloggers and vloggers may be unaware of Fu Pei-mei’s legacy and her pioneering role as the first global Chinese cooking instructor of the twentieth century. But she paved the way for all of those who would follow, and today’s Chinese food media stars stand in her shadow. “I don’t dare say whether I’ve achieved success or not,” Fu wrote as she looked back over her career, “but I have certainly devoted my entire life and exhausted all my efforts trying my best to develop the culinary arts in the East and the West.” Past and present, Fu and today’s food media stars are part of the same sprawling, continually evolving story of Chinese cuisine as it has spread around the world in the modern era. Although it seems as if each of us must discover for ourselves the tricks of proper wok seasoning and the secrets of dumpling wrapping, in truth we never really make a dish from scratch. We are always channeling culinary knowledge accumulated through our cookbooks and travels, through countless meals and family observations. With each dish we create, whether for the first time or the hundredth, we write ourselves into that story, one dish at a time.