MON MAY 6 / Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food with author Michelle T. King and moderator Marion Nestle
Regular price
$29.99
6p
Join us for a very special evening in celebration of Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food. Author Michelle T. King will be joined in conversation by the righteous Marion Nestle.
A spirited new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world. 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 that would last four decades.
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 vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.
Expect a conversation with Michelle + Marion, Q + A with all of you, and a book signing. Books and beverages will be for sale on premises. Preorder and guarantee your book above.
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More about the book:
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, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. 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. Her cookbooks have become beloved emblems of cultural memory, passed from parent to child, wherever diasporic Chinese have landed. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. 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.
MICHELLE T. KING ◤ is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializing in modern Chinese gender and food history. She is the author of Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars Grant. She is also co-editor of Modern Chinese Foodways (forthcoming), editor of Culinary Nationalism in Asia, and author of Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China. Her work has appeared in Gastronomica, Journal of Women’s History, Social History, and other publications. She lives in Chapel Hill with her family.
