"Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie," she writes.
"But ask yourself. How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?"
Are you surprised to learn that there are 40,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States, more than the number of McDonalds, Burger Kings and KFCs combined?
New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 writes "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food"
From the review in the Chicago Tribune:
The heart of "The Fortune Cookie Chronicles" lies beyond the table to where people work and live: behind the menu, behind the cash register, behind the wok. Lee's writing is at its most compelling in her profiles of immigrants, legal and illegal, many of whom have "paid tens of thousands of dollars" to human smugglers so they can spend "twelve-hour days and six-day weeks . . . frying, delivering, waiting tables, stirring, busing, chopping" and, more often than not, risking their lives and livelihood in the process. Lee traces the journey of immigrants from Fuzhou, a region in China that is "the single largest exporter of Chinese restaurant workers in the world today" to New York, a major nerve center for job postings:
Posted by Jill Fallon at March 6, 2008 10:34 AM | Permalink