Jennifer 8. Lee > Quotes

“Food is an intimate language that everyone understands, everyone shares. It is the primary ambassador of first contact between cultures, one that transcends spoken language. Food crosses cultural barriers. It bridges oceans. Becoming competent in a foreign language takes a lot of time, and learning a culture’s history and literature requires a great deal of effort. But everyone can immediately have an opinion on food.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“The purpose of fortune cookies became startlingly clear to me then: this is Western wisdom recycled for an American audience. The Chinese are just the middlemen.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“Chinese have a bigger sense of self-sacrifice. Americans are about self-enjoyment, not self-sacrifice,” he’d”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“Chinese restaurants have spread nearly everywhere across America—from Abbeville, Louisiana, to Zion, Illinois, to Navajo reservations, where, in a distinction shared with only a handful of businesses, they’re exempted from tribe-member ownership.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“When word got out that Wonton was thinking of switching to computer-generated numbers, it caused a consumer backlash. One e-mail from a customer in Cranston, Rhode Island, urged them not to switch:”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“It cannot be denied that the fortune cookie is an odd member of the Chinese dessert family. Traditional Chinese desserts, as any Chinese-American child will tell you, are pretty bad. There is a reason Chinese cuisine has a worldwide reputation for wontons, and not for pastries.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“The economic and political backlash culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act, passed in stages between 1882 and 1902, which restricted Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese arrivals from becoming naturalized citizens. It would be the only law in American history to exclude a group by race or ethnicity.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“No appendages or extremities (no tongues, no feet, no claws, no ears).”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“But other New York City Council members expressed concerns over freedom of speech. Misa, too, argued that the menus were little different from the political fliers that were distributed on the streets.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“Before Americans loved Chinese food, you see, they loathed it. Because, in part, they feared the Chinamen on their shores. Then along came chop suey, and that changed everything.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“On the East Coast, the wire always runs the short length of the box; on the West Coast, it runs the long way.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“On the East Coast, it was rare to find an Asian-American over forty-five who spoke English without an accent.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“As he joked to me, his motto during his senior year was D is for diploma.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“We’re also known as bananas (yellow on the outside but white on the inside) and Twinkies (which has more of a pop-culture but processed ring to it).”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“To these Chinese restaurant workers, who can barely read English, the United States is not a series of towns or states. It is a collection of area codes,”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“But not everyone finds the terra-cotta warriors charming. “Chinese people would never put that in a restaurant,” Jim told me, pointing at the statues. “It’s not lucky. It’s something you put in burial site! But in America, they think it’s a Chinese thing.” From a Chinese perspective, P. F. Chang’s is decorated with death.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“I had traveled eight thousand miles, by plane, train, and foot, to try a cookie.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“In her 1975 essay “Ethnicity and Anthropology in America,” anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote, “Being American is a matter of abstention from foreign ways, foreign food, foreign ideas, foreign accents.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“I used to, when I was younger, be into personal growth.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“A Chinese customs official confided over dinner in Changsha one night that one of the biggest, most frequent illegal exports from the United States to China is chicken feet—along with pigs’ ears, cows’ stomach, and assorted other animal parts.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“P. F. Chang’s sees itself in the same category as the Cheesecake Factory,”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“The budget “Chinatown buses” that shuttle between New York and Boston and New York and Washington originally started out as routes for Chinese restaurant workers, before college students and the Lonely Planet crowd caught on. The buses exploded in popularity in the late 1990s, and the competition sparked violence between rival bus companies.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food

“My father is just a Ph.D. away from being a deliveryman. I’m just an education away from jotting down takeout orders.”
― Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food