Szechuan and the City

In The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (Reviews, Dec. 3, 2007), Jennifer 8. Lee takes readers on a culinary journey into Chinese-American cuisine.

How did your search for the fortune cookie’s origins evolve into this broader social and cultural history?

Cookies weren’t the main story in the beginning. I had all these discrete chapters on different subjects like cookies, General Tso’s chicken and so on. The Powerball incident [in which several winners had all chosen the same numbers from a fortune cookie] gave me a larger narrative to hang the other, smaller stories on. Then I saw that I could trace the cookies back and tell the history of Chinese food going forward. I couldn’t make everything fit. I would have liked to have done more, say, on woks or the Chinese-fast-food chain, Panda Express.

You write for the New York Times, but this is your first book. What was that experience like?

Jon Karp [publisher and editor of Twelve] gave me the major suggestion that the book can be about one thing on the surface and about something else underneath. He suggested I read Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck and Killing Yourself to Live by Chuck Klosterman. My schedule at the Times sometimes allowed me to compress my hours into a couple of days in order to fly out Friday morning to somewhere like Bangkok to do research, and then fly back a few days later and be at work later the day I landed.

You studied applied mathematics and economics at Harvard. What led you into journalism?

Between high school and college, during a summer workshop for Dow Jones, I was interviewing a black student who had a very compelling personal story. He might not have found a way to tell it, and by interviewing him I realized that I was helping him. Right then and there I knew that I wanted to do this for the rest of my life. I’d already applied for all these college scholarships for mathematics. So I just did a lot of internships at newspapers.

Do you actually like Chinese restaurant food?

The difference between kinds of Chinese food is sometimes like the difference between pizza from the freezer and a pizzeria. When I went to restaurants, I really enjoyed it, but my appreciation didn’t really deepen until I finally went to China. I especially appreciated the Chinese food in Japan. The food there is small and cunning, the way Japanese things are, but the ingredients and flavors are all packed into it.