Terry Tsai

“Utsunomiya is an ordinary city of half a million, an hour north of Tokyo on the Tōhoku Shinkansen line. It has no particular tourist attractions, and any foreign tourists heading that direction are probably more interested in the beautiful mountain town of Nikko. A few years ago, Utsunomiya’s city booster types, as boosters do, went looking around for something about the city to promote. Poring over official statistics, they found that Utsunomiyans eat more gyōza per capita than people of any other city in Japan. “Aha!” said the boosters. “Let it be known far and wide that we are the City of Dumplings.”
― Matthew Amster-Burton, Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo

“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

“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

“It’s nice that human society has reached a level of sophistication and development that we don’t have to spend our time bent over in fields encouraging food to appear from the ground. However, now that we’ve all become yoga teachers, graphic designers, and writers, it’s easy to forget how spectacularly bereft we are of actual life skills, how flimsy our qualifications are in the things that really count: life and death things.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places