Christy Fu (no relation to Fu Pei-mei) is the mother of a friend. I was eager to interview her when I discovered that she had relied exclusively on Fu’s cookbooks to learn how to cook after she came to the United States. She was born into a Hakka family in Miaoli County in Taiwan. Hakka is the second largest dialect group in Taiwan (fifteen percent), after Hokkien speakers (seventy percent). We had never met before our interview, and at the start, Christy seemed withdrawn and reserved. I wondered what, if anything, I might learn. But by the end of our two-hour conversation, Christy was open and relaxed, reminiscing about her late husband. There was so much more resilience and strength in this gray-haired, older Chinese woman than met the eye, and I was moved by the way she had created a life for herself and her family in the United States from humble beginnings. The experience reminded me of encountering Fu’s own cookbooks for the first time—unless you get to know more about what is under the covers, you can’t appreciate everything they contain.
Where were you born?
I was born in Miaoli, Taiwan. We are Hakka people and mostly we ate Hakka food. The food we ate was very plain, very light. Very basic. Salt, scallions, that sort of thing. My mother would make chicken soup and put in bamboo and luobo [daikon radish]. It was Hakka home cooking. Not as elaborate as Fu Pei-mei, with as many ingredients.
Did you speak Hakka at home?
When I was a child, we spoke Hakka. My parents were born and raised in Taiwan but they had gotten Japanese educations. Before I turned seven, at home they spoke Japanese. We had a lot of Japanese magazines, and we listened to Japanese radio stations. When I was about seven [in 1957], Taiwan’s government stopped all of this overnight. No radio stations, no more magazines coming in. Everything was in Mandarin. When you went to school, they taught you Mandarin. They realized that my parents’ generation was very resistant to learning Mandarin, even twelve years after the end of World War II. They just weren’t willing to learn it. In the 1940s, they spoke Japanese. In the 1950s, they started to learn Mandarin to speak to their mainlander customers. They ran a hardware store. But they didn’t speak it well because most of the time they spoke Hakka. In Miaoli everyone was Hakka.
How did you get the idea to come to the United States?
I went to nursing school in 1968. Everybody wanted to go to the United States at that time. Of our 58 nursing students, every single one chose to apply to the US. At the time the US had a law, if you were a skilled person, if you can get a job in the US, then you can apply for a visa.
What was the most difficult part about being in the United States?
I didn’t really speak a word of English. That first year was hard. My mother later told me, if you were to look at your letters, that first year you really regretted going to America! All of my letters were full of complaints. I was lonely and I had no place to go because I couldn’t drive. I watched a lot of Sesame Street programs. I learned basic English from there. I worked as a nurse’s aide in a neurology department, with a lot of people who had had strokes. And they couldn’t express themselves. Sometimes I could understand them, sometimes I couldn’t. But in nursing you are doing basic stuff, feeding them, helping them get up, cleaning them, helping them walk. It didn’t need a lot of speaking, so I got by OK.
Had you heard of Fu Pei-mei before you came to the United States? Had you seen her television program?
I never saw her television program before. I was too busy working as a private nurse to watch television. But I had heard of her name. Everyone knew her. I think I brought her first cookbook with me from Taiwan. But the second volume I know I bought here in the United States because the price tag is still on it! $8.95 from Goh’s Market in Chicago.
When you first came to the United States, what did you miss the most about Taiwan?
Oh, the food, for sure. I think that’s probably the reason why I went to Fu’s cookbook. I missed the food. Not that I ate a lot of the cookbook style of Fu, but just the general cooking of Chinese food that I missed. When I was in Taiwan, I never cooked. Not one day. At home, my mother cooked. In college, I ate in the cafeteria or ate out. When I lived with my older sister in Taipei, she cooked. Back then [in the United States] you couldn’t really go out to eat every night because there was no place for you to go. Besides the cost was so expensive, eating out all the time. So you had to learn to cook something for yourself.
How did you get started?
When I first started, I had no idea even how to cook meat. I didn’t understand temperatures or how to prepare the meat. Then I read Fu’s cookbook, and I learned you can use corn starch to marinate meat. I read her cookbook a lot, especially in the beginning. Looking at her cookbook, she had a beef and green peppers recipe. I would change the peppers for mushrooms or onions or broccoli. I learned the principles from her, like how to season things. And then slowly, I would substitute other ingredients and experiment with this and that.
Were there specific Hakka dishes that you missed that you couldn’t make because they weren’t in Fu’s cookbook?
There were some ingredients that I couldn’t get here. I couldn’t get jiucai [garlic chives]. I couldn’t get other vegetables that I really liked. Couldn’t find them here. You couldn’t even buy napa cabbage. Usually I was missing one or two kinds of ingredients, so I just had to prepare what I had, or add whatever I had. Whatever you made, the taste was not the same.
Was there a point in time where you felt, “OK, this now feels like home”?
Oh, it’s never home.
Even now?
Even now I still miss Taiwan. I feel more comfortable in Taiwan. I visited two years ago with my children and grandchildren. I felt at ease. I had to look for places, but I knew what I was looking for, and I could get to places I wanted to go pretty easily. The food is more familiar. It’s all convenient; you can eat anywhere. It’s a smaller area.
When I was living in Taiwan, to get from my house to school I had to ride a bike. It took five or ten minutes. At the time, I thought, “Oh my god, that’s so far.” [Laughs.] One year when I went back to visit my parents, I walked from the Miaoli train station to my house. It didn’t even take five or ten minutes. It wasn’t even a quarter of Michigan Avenue [in Chicago]! I thought, “Oh my god, this is so short! How come I always thought it was so far away?”