Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

Michelle T. King

may 2024 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrado por Rebecca Lam

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In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother's copies of Fu Pei-mei's Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu's story and in her food, a portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the postwar transformations taking place across the world. In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu's life enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured. And Fu's legacy continues. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.

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Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. A 2020-21 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, she lives in Chapel Hill with her family.

Born and raised in Southern California by immigrant parents, Rebecca Lam is an Asian American-Pacific Islander narrator. Lover of traveling, pickled veggies, and rescue animals, Rebecca resides in Los Angeles, California, with her too-curious-for-his-own-good snowshoe cat, Clark Gable.