HN Books @HNBooksMonth

It's likely this one https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_8_lee_looks_for_general_t...

If you are interested, this was a very good read (by same person): https://www.amazon.com/Fortune-Cookie-Chronicles-Adventures-...

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⬐ jenny8lee

Yes. Doc, TED talk, book are all from my research. Thanks for the plug! I've been waiting for this day for a while. Last time we saw him, he was 92, in December 2010, for the documentary. We suit him first since his age made us very nervous how much longer he was going to be around. But he lasted for another 6 years. Even attended a documentary showing in Taiwan.

⬐ schoen

Hi Jenny, I used to know you from DEF CON over a decade ago. Congratulations on all of the varied things you've been able to track down in your journalistic research!

⬐ rmason

Boy the people that you meet on HN;<)! Saw your documentary, General Tso's has always been my favorite Chinese dish.

I've been told by a great many people that it was invented in America and wasn't a Chinese dish at all!

My sister who traveled several times to the mainland said she has never seen it on a menu there. You think that is possibly a slight against Taiwan?

⬐ rangibaby

> My sister who traveled several times to the mainland said she has never seen it on a menu there. You think that is possibly a slight against Taiwan?

I have never seen it in my life and Japanese Wikipedia says that like Chop Suey it is an Americanized dish.

In general Chinese food is wildly different depending on where you eat it; there was not much in common between local Chinese food I ate in Beijing, Sichuan, or Kuala Lumpur.

⬐ wahern

Like most Chinese diaspora communities, ethnic Chinese in Malaysia mostly emigrated from southeast China. Many Chinese dishes in Malaysia are quite similar to dishes in the those regions.

Look at Hainanese chicken rice. It was invented by Hainanese immigrants in Singapore, and the only place you'd ever find it in Beijing would be at a Singaporean restaurant. But it's basically an unmistakable evolution of a classic dish from Hainan province. A lot of Chinese cuisine in SE Asia is like that.

Regarding chop suey, in San Francisco Chinatown there's a Chinese restaurant, New Lun Ting, popular with older Chinese-Americans that sells a version of chop suey that is arguably an authentic Chinese-American dish. Some other restaurants in Chinatown also sell chop suey or something like that, but it was always easy to dismiss as something sold to attract tourists--originally in earnest to meet their tastes, now more as an ironic thing. But now I'm fairly confident it has deeper Chinese roots, and is less adulterated, than is commonly assumed.

The longer I live in San Francisco, and the more I eat in Asia (Mongolia, South Korea, Taipei, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and all over Malaysia and Singapore), the more I realize how nuanced, complex, and interrelated the origins and evolution of Asian food can be. And the more I understand my own subtle prejudice--white Americans, at least the more cosmopolitan ones, instinctively understand that nuance and complexity when it comes to European cuisine.

And like with European fare, not all Asian fare is bold and exotic. It's easy to dismiss chop suey as something invented for the palates of Americans because it seems so plain and cheap; and because it seems so undesirable compared to common "authentic" Chinese dishes. But that's a subtle form of bias. There are plenty of boring American dishes, for example, that are completely unlike hamburgers, hot dogs, or BBQ and that foreigner would think couldn't possibly be "authentic" American.

⬐ wahern

Taiwan is also the origin of Mongolian BBQ, although in that case it was a kitsch dish targeted at the locals. Maybe Taiwanese are just more adventurous and entrepreneurial that way? A result of the mix of cultural, political, and economic life on the island? I think you have to fly all the way to Malaysia to find a similar admixture of Asian food cultures.

I think mainland Chinese culture is much like American culture--relatively isolated and inward looking in practice, even if superficially outward looking. In both cases by the time some foreign influence seeps through the culture it's thoroughly transformed and unrecognizable. And nobody really cares because both are already intensely rich universes until themselves.

But maybe we're just making too much of your anecdote.

If you are interested in more on the subject, there's a pretty good book, the Fortune Cookie Chronicles.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fortune-Cookie-Chronicles-Adventur...

Anyone who's interested in a more in-depth look should check out Fortune Cookie Chronicles. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446698970 It really explains why the food at 99.9% of the "Szchewan" and "Peking" etc. places all tastes the same.