Chop Fry Watch Learn Q&A with Michelle T. King

What was your inspiration for writing Chop Fry Watch Learn?

I grew up with Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks on my mom’s cookbook shelf during my childhood in Michigan in the 1970s and 80s. I always thought of her as “that cookbook lady”—at the time I had no idea that she was a huge celebrity in Taiwan, having taught cooking shows on television for forty years.

It really wasn’t until after I had my own children that I found myself flipping through Fu’s cookbooks once again, looking for easy Chinese recipes to make for them. Now I noticed things in the cookbook that I had never paid attention to as a child—photos of Fu shaking hands with VIPs, teaching foreigners, traveling the world, and heaps of newspapers clippings about her. That’s when I got excited and thought—hmm, maybe there’s more to discover about Fu Pei-mei.

The topic seems pretty different from your first book. How have your research interests in Chinese women evolved? 

I was trained at Berkeley as a Chinese gender historian and my first book was about female infanticide in nineteenth-century China—an important topic, but quite depressing and very different from food! Most frustrating for me, however, was the simple fact that although my first book was about female infanticide, there were almost no historical sources on the topic written by women. All of the sources were written by men.

I really wanted my next book to feature and celebrate women’s voices and historical experiences. That’s why Fu Pei-mei’s decades-long career as a cooking instructor really appealed to me—women’s voices are front and center throughout the whole story. Not only that, the arc of Fu Pei-mei’s career maps directly onto larger social transformations for Chinese women in that postwar generation. At the start of Fu’s career, she was teaching eager housewives how to cook new dishes for their families, but by the end, she had to shutter her school because women had entered the work force in such great numbers, they had no interest or time to cook at home anymore. 

Where does the title of your book, Chop Fry Watch Learn, come from? Is it some kind of traditional Chinese saying?

No, but I wanted you to think so! The Chinese language is filled with idioms that are exactly four characters long. Sometimes these sayings refer to ancient Confucian texts, such as the phrase “Eat Drink Man Woman”— meaning food, drink, and sex, the most basic of human desires. I made up my own four-character idiom to capture Fu Pei-mei’s entire career. Chop/Fry (切 qie/ 炒chao) refers to the two pillars of Chinese cooking, knifing skills and the control of heat-time. Watch/Learn (觀 guan/ 學 xue) refers to viewers watching her on television and learning how to cook from her.

It’s my way of fooling readers and making a point: you read the title and feel like you’re reading an ancient saying that you’d find in a fortune cookie, but really it’s a made-up idiom that’s completely modern. It’s the same with Chinese cuisine—everyone always talks about the ancient roots of Chinese cuisine, but really so much of what we understand today as Chinese cuisine has been shaped by modern phenomena, such as television, electric rice cookers, and trans-Pacific jetliners. 

What’s your favorite Chinese dish?

Hah! That’s like asking who your favorite child is! Once you start to learn about Chinese cuisine, you quickly realize there is an infinite number of local specialty dishes, styles, tastes, and flavors, as well as continual new inventions. It’s impossible to have tried every Chinese dish out there, and there are so many wonderful dishes to sample. However, I will say that the dishes that linger most in my memory are my father’s scallion pancakes and my mother’s hot and sour soup.

My dad was from northern China and made all the flour-based dishes in our house—scallion pancakes, steamed buns, dumplings, mushu pancakes—but it was his scallion pancakes that we clamored for the most. My mom always made hot and sour soup for my birthday at my request, filled with brined shrimp, bamboo shoots, tofu, shredded pork, lily buds, wooden ear fungus. I loved it. I can’t help but order these items in Chinese restaurants when I see them on the menu, because I am filled with eternal hope. But, of course, it’s never the same. If you want to find those elusive childhood tastes, you have to learn to cook these dishes for yourself.