Episode 135: Historian Michelle King and the Impact of Fu Pei-mei
September 10, 2024 | Kristen Chavez
History associate professor Michelle King specializes modern Chinese gender history and food history. In this episode, she discusses her experience in the IAH Faculty Fellowship Program and the research behind her new book, Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (Johns Hopkins University Press).
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Transcript
Kristen Chavez: Welcome to the Institute. A podcast on the lives and works of Fellows and friends of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m your host, Kristen Chavez. Michelle King is an associate professor in the history department specializing in modern Chinese gender history and food history. In spring 2023, she participated in the IAH’s Faculty Fellowship Program as an Ellison Fellow. During her Fellowship, she worked on what became her new book, Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food, which was published this year by W.W. Norton and Company. Her work has also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council on Learned Societies, the Henry Luce Foundation and more. Michelle, welcome to the podcast.
Michelle King: Thanks for having me today. I’m excited to be here.
KC: Great. To start us off, can you tell me a little bit about how you first learned about Fu Pei-mei? I understand you were familiar with her well before you started research and writing this book?
MK: Yeah, so I actually grew up with her cookbooks because they were on my mom’s cookbook shelf, and the cookbooks themselves have color photos of all the dishes. The recipes are also all bilingual, so they’re on Chinese on one side of the page and in English on the other side of the page. So when I was a kid growing up in Michigan in the ’70s and ’80s, I would just kind of look through it sometimes. You know, kids have lots of time on their hands. I would look through the cookbook sometimes and just page through them. But it wasn’t until I was an adult, that, after I had my own kids, and I was looking for easy, you know, Chinese recipes that I could make for my own kids, that I thought to go back to the cookbooks and, just like, page through them and see, you know, are there things that will not tax my time and limited cooking abilities. What can I find here from these cookbooks that I still had, that my mom had given to me?
MK: And when I looked back at them as an adult, I realized, oh, there’s not only the recipes in the photos of the dishes, there were also all these black and white photos of Fu Pei-mei traveling the world, meeting VIPs, with foreign students. You know, there was a specific picture of dozens of newspaper articles in all kinds of languages that were all about her. And as a historian, once I saw that photo of all of these newspaper articles, I thought, gee, you know, maybe there’s a paper trail here. There’s something I can follow, and maybe this is something that I can write about as a scholar of gender history. You know, the story of one really interesting and remarkable woman is obviously going to draw my attention and also just, you know, centering women’s lives in the kitchen and in the family home. It was something that I was excited to have an opportunity to explore.
So that’s kind of how I got into this subject. It was completely, I mean, it’s like all the books that I write, it’s usually because some kind of really interesting primary source catches my attention, and I think to myself, ‘Well, how did that come to be, you know? How did that come to pass that this bilingual text exists?’ I had to kind of uncover the mystery of all that. So that’s how I got started.
KC: As you got further into this research and you learned more about her, what stood out to you or what maybe surprised you about Fu Pei-mei that you didn’t expect in or at her impact?
MK: Well, when I started the research, actually you know, as a kid, I only thought of her as a cookbook author, because that’s how I knew her. Her name is really in on her cookbook, on the cover of her cookbook, it says, Pei-mei’s Chinese Cookbook in very, very large, you know, probably like 56 point font or something. And so I always associated her name with the cookbooks. It wasn’t until after I started doing my research that I realized that she had been on television in Taiwan continuously for 40 years, which is certainly has to be some kind of record.
MK: I’m glad you brought up the question of Julia Child, because I think there is a lot of, from what I’ve seen, a lot of comparisons and drawing those comparisons about these two very popular televised cooking personalities or celebrities, in a way. What else do you make about those comparisons? You know, perhaps beyond just they both have that very televised and popular presentation.
MK: But she was on television from the start of the medium in 1962 all the way until her entire retirement in 2002 and that, To me, was amazing than to explore like you know, how did she get on television? What did that mean at the time? What even was television like when it first started in Taiwan in 1962, there were all kinds of things to explore that I had not even remotely anticipated. And the interesting thing is, too, that most of her fans in Taiwan know her through her cooking television programs. You know, they also know her, obviously through her cookbooks. But she’s famous because she’s such a recognizable figure on television. So in the United States, even in 1971, a New York Times food critic called her the Julia Child of Chinese cooking.
MK: But what I want to impart to my audiences is that for people in Taiwan, it’s Fu Pei-mei who is the measure of all other outside culinary figures. So everyone else is called the Fu Pei-mei of Finland, or the Fu Pei-mei of England, right? She’s the measure by which everyone else you know, every kind of you know, culinary celebrity, is measured. So I thought that was a really funny and interesting difference. So, yeah, so that kind of, I guess, triple threat. You might call it, because she had a cooking school. She had her cookbooks, she went on TV. She also traveled the world. Like the more I learned about her, it was just what didn’t this woman do? It was really amazing to me to find all about all of those things.
MK: So the interesting thing to think about with Julia Child is that she was introducing French cooking to American audiences. So the idea of French cooking being something sophisticated, something different, elevating your daily, you know, whatever your daily meatloaf game would be, or whatever. That she was bringing French food to, you know, this is the time of, you know, Jacqueline Kennedy, and, you know, the kind of French chic and all this stuff in the 1960s. That was why she was popular with suburban audiences in the United States. So the same question is, well, why would people in Taiwan need a figure like Fu Pei-mei? Why do they need somebody to teach them about Chinese food? Don’t they already know how to cook it, you know?
MK: And the answer is, because Fu was part of a generation of mainlander Chinese who had fled the mainland after the Chinese Civil War in 1949. And one to two million of them ended up on Taiwan, which then had a population of about 6 million people. So the influx of mainlanders from every single part of China, all of which have their own regional specialties and specialty dishes and tastes. That was kind of the, you know, when she initially got started in teaching her cooking classes, it was to assuage the homesick feelings of all of those mainlander immigrants or mainlander refugees, basically, who had landed on this tropical island. Suddenly, the ingredients are different. What you can get is different. How do you recreate those familiar tastes that you have left behind back home?
And that was her original impetus for getting started. Bound up in why all these post war housewives would be interested is because now suddenly in Taiwan, you’re rubbing elbows with all these people who come from different parts of China. You see what they’re eating. It looks pretty good. You want to try it. So there’s room then, in this moment, for this figure to emerge on television, to teach all these women how to cook all these different dishes from different regional Chinese cuisines. And that’s what she was best known for, her ability to replicate the tastes of not just one regional cuisine, but many, many different regional cuisines.
KC: And as I was reading more into this, I think you’ve written a bit about the concept of culinary regionalism. Can you talk more about that and the ways that food and culinary traditions are really intertwined with the space, the geography, as you mentioned, and the history, and then the politics aspect?
MK: I don’t know how things are in the average American, you know, American, non-Chinese Americans’ head. But a lot of people just think of Chinese food as the takeout you get, or General Tso’s chicken, or sesame chicken or whatever. But actually, in China, it’s like 1.4 billion people. The area is approximately the same size as the United States, but there’s just way, way, way more people. And each of the regions of China has their own kind of taste. So in Sichuan and Hunan, you’ll get a lot of spicy foods. In Canton or Guangdong, you’re going to get a lot of fresh seafood, a lot of lighter, fresher tastes. In the east, you know, around Shanghai, you might get sweeter tastes, more delicate and refined cooking. In the north, it’s known for its heavier kind of soy sauce and scallions and garlic, heavier kinds of salty tastes. And that’s just the top four, you know.
MK: Beyond that, a recent cookbook author, Carolyn Phillips, has documented like, 35 regional cuisines, you know, in one of her recent cookbooks. Like, it’s just so varied and there’s just so much to quote, unquote “Chinese cuisine” that I think most Americans would be quite astounded. But, you know, nowadays people know more. In the cities, you’re gonna get specialty restaurants like from Shandong, or Taiwanese specialties, or whatever else. So I think people consumer awareness is growing. But that was a revelation in the 1960s; Americans in the early 20th century had just eaten chop suey and chow mein. You know, suddenly in the 1960s new restaurants like Sunanese restaurants and Sichuanese restaurants in particular, arrived on the shores of the United States and people were blown away, because it was like, ‘Oh, this is totally different. You know, spicy and different.’ And so I think, I think the regionalism part is something that I think still is….
That’s why I think, how could someone say they don’t like Chinese food? Because I can guarantee you, I’ll find you a dish that you like. There’s thousands upon thousands of different cooking techniques and different tastes and variations that you know. There’s no way that one could say, well, I just don’t like Chinese food. It was. It’s just mind boggling to me.
KC: There’s something you’ll like.
MK: Yes, there is something I can find you something you will like, for sure.
KC: So as I mentioned earlier, you worked on this project while you were an Ellison Fellow here at the IAH. What was that fellowship experience like? How did that experience impact your work and your writing of the book?
MK: Well, it was great because, first of all, just to have the time to work on it. But second of all, because, when you’ve been holed up in your little cubby writing on a project for so long — I worked on this book for 10 years — you’ve written on it for so long, you no longer know which way is up, which way is down. It’s really hard to tell. Is this any good or not you know. So just bringing it before a group of my peers who are not specialists in my particular field, but come from all over the university and different humanities fields, and for them to say, keep going, Michelle, this is great. You know, it was a great kind of affirmation that I was on the right track. They had some suggestions for specific places and specific questions that they had, all of which were super helpful and just that, you know, just so you’re not in your own echo chamber of your head, and that you get this invaluable feedback from interested readers. That is invaluable. And for academics, you have to have that feedback to kind of improve the work, but also just to know, is it landing or not? Because honestly, I’d been working on it for so long, and then with my agent, and then with the editor, and it’s like, well, I know they like it, but what about everybody else?
KC: Content-wise, this is a very different book from your previous one on female infanticide. Can you share a little bit about the differences in writing and exploring those two very different topics and through the research and the writing process?
MK: So my first book was published in 2014. It’s called Between Birth and Death, and it’s about female infanticide in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And it’s a depressing topic. When I would tell people about it, they would say, gee, you know, they wouldn’t really know what to say. And for myself, in writing that book, I’m really proud of what I wrote, but it was a frustrating experience, because almost every single one of the sources that I had to work with, related to female infanticide, were all written by men. So there were no Chinese women’s voices. Or I found one which is like, mediated by her. It’s in her son’s recollection of his mom. So it’s like, not even a direct source. And that was frustrating, because I was always trying to, like, triangulate and kind of reconstruct and maybe try to guess what women may have felt or may have been thinking, or you have to squeeze all the juice out of the source, you know the one source that I had.
MK: But I really, really wanted my next book to focus and center on women’s historical voices and women’s experiences. So to me, to have this cookbook author who left behind, not only her, you know, dozens and dozens of cookbooks and her television programs and a lot of articles and writing and things like that, I also had the opportunity to interview a lot of women who used her cookbooks and learned how to cook through Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks, and that, to me, was an essential part of the project, because I didn’t just want this to be some kind of hagiography about Fu Pei-mei. I wasn’t interested in writing that. What I was interested in doing is talking about how an entire generation of Chinese women learned cook.
MK: And you know, specifically, it’s like my mom. She came to the United States from Taiwan in 1963. At the time, she lived in a rooming house, and she was going to University of Minnesota for graduate school. I mean, she lived on peanut butter, apples and boiled eggs. She did not know how to cook. So it’s it was like a mystery to me. How did she become such a great Chinese home cook? You know, so many of the women that I spoke to in my book had the same experience where they did not know how to cook. The same experience, in fact, as Fu Pei-mei herself. They didn’t know how to cook when they first got married and started having kids. It was only after having families that they were forced into cooking for the family every single night. And practice makes you not in every case, but it can make you much better, you know. So I really wanted to kind of honor the labor that so many women have put into that, often unacknowledged domestic labor. And really just say, ‘hey, this is something that so many women have done for so many years in unacknowledged fashion. Let’s look carefully. How did they do it?’ You know, it’s like, how do you go from a non-cook to a really excellent home cook. Like every single Chinese mom that I grew up with, all my parents’ friends, they were all — almost without exception — all really excellent home cooks. And all of them learned, you know, by trial and error, kind of after getting married. I was a really interesting experience to learn more about that.
KC: Can you share a little bit more about some of those stories, about the women who learned from Fu Pei-mei and their experiences? Because in some ways it sounds very personal too. Did you speak with your mom or your aunts?
MK: Yeah, I did. I spoke with my mom. I interviewed — so my aunt is my mom’s youngest sister. She lives in Malaysia. She’s the best cook of the whole family. She too, when she first moved to Malaysia, brought Fu Pei-mei’s cookbooks with her, and she said that, you know, at the time, there wasn’t any other way to learn how to cook, right? That was it. This woman’s cookbooks was how everybody learned. Everybody had them. And she gave them to friends, orther people. You know, there was a saying at the time that the two things that every overseas student took with them in their suitcases from Taiwan was a copy of Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook and a Tatung electric rice cooker, like when they came to the United States, because they couldn’t get them here.
MK: And so, so I did, I interviewed, you know, the mother of a friend of mine whom I didn’t know the time, but she also came to the United States and had no idea how to cook and used those cookbooks. I interviewed Susanna Foo, who’s no relation to Fu Pei-mei, but she is an award-winning chef in Philadelphia who had her own restaurant, who also took cooking lessons with Fu Pei-mei when she was in Taiwan, and when she was a housewife. And she too, said to me, you know, Michelle, at the time, I just wanted to be a good housewife. I wanted to take care of my husband and kids and entertain guests. And it was only later, through the course of her life and career that she moved to the United States, her husband’s family was involved in, you know, Chinese restaurants. And basically they got dragooned into taking on one of those Chinese restaurants. And eventually she got more training at the Culinary Institute, kind of in French techniques, and then kind of elevated that family restaurant into her own, you know, Susanna Foo’s Chinese Cuisine. But it was so fascinating to me to learn she didn’t want that. It wasn’t what she had originally…. She had no plan when she started.
MK: And that was the same was true of Fu Pei-mei herself. When she got started, it wasn’t to be like the next big culinary superstar. It was just — she was a terrible cook. Her husband complained about her cooking all the time, particularly because he liked to play Mahjong. He would bring his Mahjong buddies home, and then she was expected to cook snacks and food for them. And he would be like, ‘Why are you make the same thing all the time? It’s so bad, it’s embarrassing.’ And because of his nagging, she then — this was back in the 50s, before there were lots of cookbooks or ways for, you know, there was no TV anyway — but there weren’t a lot of ways for women to learn how to cook. And so she hired a series of restaurant chefs to teach her their specialty dishes, and that’s how she got started. So the trajectory of this woman going from, you know, pretty lousy, mediocre home cook to a really fantastic, you know, like celebrity, television personality for cooking is an extraordinary trajectory.
MK: But to a lesser extent, that same trajectory was mirrored by this entire generation of my mom’s, you know, of my mom’s cohort, many of whom also did not know how to cook and learned how. So I wanted to really emphasize that cooking as an act of will, not just some kind of natural inheritance of women or something particularly, quote, unquote, “ethnic women.” You know, it’s like no. Nobody just is born knowing how to cook, or having those tastes, or whatever, blah, blah, nope. It’s an act of will. It’s, you know, practice. It’s effort. And I wanted to really underscore all of that.
KC: “Cooking as an act of will.” I like that. In addition to the work that you’ve done on this book, what are you working on now? What other research are you interested in or engaging with right now?
MK: So I’ve got an edited volume coming out next year with two co-editors. It’s called Modern Chinese Foodways. And so there, you know, it’s a much broader look at a whole range of different sites. We have some wonderful contributions from different colleagues all around the world. And then I’m working on a couple of other projects, some of which are inspired by this Chinese menu collection that’s housed at the University of Toronto. They were collected by this very eccentric New Yorker called Harley Spiller. Very nice man, but definitely has a collector’s bug. And he collected, like, thousands and thousands, I think there’s more than 10,000 or something, Chinese menus from all over the world. He started in New York, but then, you know, kind of branched out, and people started sending him stuff. So I haven’t looked at all of it, but I’ve looked at some, and there’s a few particular pieces. And I just want to tell his story of how that came to be. And so I’ve got a couple of those smaller projects that I’m working on right now.
KC: That’s really cool. The collection of the takeout menu just makes me think of my parents and the drawer of local takeout places.
MK: Yes, exactly. Imagine that drawer times by 5,000.
KC: A lot more. A lot more drawers, I can imagine.
MK: That’s basically what he had.
KC: So I have a couple more questions before we wrap up. But in thinking about your own experience with Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook, do you have a favorite recipe or a go-to that you like to cook?
MK: So a lot of people ask me that it’s like, well, that’s already taxing my already somewhat limited cooking abilities. And to be honest, her cookbooks are not so what you might call user friendly today, because today’s cookbook reader is expecting a certain level of like color pictures and vivid descriptions and the story of how the cookbook author. Like ‘found this dish in this little hole-in-the-wall and blah, blah, blah, blah.’ Her cookbooks are not what you would call atmospheric at all. It’s like the recipes, this is how you cook it. But if you are able to watch her — so her television program, which I told you, she was on TV for more than 40 years — the like 700 episodes of her television program from the 1980s onward have been uploaded to YouTube by Taiwan television.
So if you’re able to look at some of those — unfortunately, they’re not dubbed into English, she’s speaking in Chinese the whole time. However, even just watching any of those episodes, you’re like, man, this lady knows how to cook. Like everything she does is with one cleaver. She doesn’t have, you know, 5,000 kitchen implements. It’s just a simple gas stove. And the things that she can demonstrate in like five — at some points in time, her program was only five minutes long. Like the level of skill needed to demonstrate a dish, and she would have to bring half-cooked components and all the ingredients, you know, just the planning involved.
MK: Anyway, if you watch that, you get some sense of what she was all about and her skill. I started myself, I think in college with, like, I think there was a beef with green peppers recipe, or something like that I started with. Most of her recipes are just in, especially in that first volume of her cookbook, are really just straightforward, you know, kind of regional dishes that are quite popular, like eggplant, you know, yu xiang chieze, which is, I guess, the technical, or the translation is, fish fragrant eggplant. I think she calls it eggplant Sichuan-style. But any number of those dishes are a good place to start.
MK: But personally these days, my go to recipe thing is a website called the Woks of Life. So that’s what I’ll recommend to your listeners, because I use that a lot. So I have dozens of cookbooks, including Fu Pei-mei’s at home, dozens of Chinese cookbooks. And what I like to do is like, if I think of a particular special recipe that I want to make, I look it up in all of my cookbooks. I compare and contrast. What are the ingredients? What are their instructions? What do I have on hand? And then I kind of cobble together what I’m going to do for that particular. That’s like, for a special occasion recipe. For everyday things, you know, I go to, yeah, I have just a bunch of different places. But for people that don’t know how to cook at all, it’s often easier and more helpful to see the video. And so, like the modern websites and stuff like that have that. But you have to imagine, like the 1960s if there weren’t any of those options, this woman’s cookbook, was it. And you would just follow along and just, you know, try to figure it out, all the tips and tricks of cooking from all of that.
KC: Yeah, that’s great. Thank you. I love the… I imagine it’s the Woks of Life. Is it ‘wok’ as in a cooking wok?
MK: Yes, okay, that’s right.
KC: I love a pun.
MK: Yes, yes. That is definitely a pun.
KC: So we’ll wrap up with a question that we ask all of our guests. What is a book that has changed your life? Perhaps, maybe we’ll take Fu Pei-mei’s cookbook out of this as an example. But I’m also willing to go broader with this. If there’s any other piece of work, art, movie, music, anything along those lines that has really made an impact on you.
MK: Well I can think of two nonfiction works that, once I read them, I was just completely blown away, and it’s sort of the level of nonfiction writing that I aspire to. One of them is The Hare with Amber Eyes, which is about this, this, it’s basically about the long history of antisemitism in Europe, but also just this special collection of Japanese netsuke bottles that got passed along in this very wealthy Jewish family and got preserved to today by the by the author. It’s an incredible book. It’s just such a great read.
And the other book I can think of that I read, and I was like, oh, my God, this is, like, the best thing ever, is a book from a while go called The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. It’s about a Hmong family in California, and it’s about their kind of journey with their daughter, who had some special needs, but she was taken away from them because their approach to medical treatment was different than you know what the state felt was necessary for their daughter. And it’s just again, an amazing, amazing journey into this world of Hmong medicine and shamanistic healers. And, you know, just the clash with Western medicine. And so both of these books, I think what is so great about them is they open up an entire world to you that you did not know existed and/or knew very, very little about. And so the idea that you could travel in that way and kind of immersively, experience history and cultures. And, you know, when a good book does that — I mean, that’s what I aspire to. I don’t know if my book does that for other people, but that’s the aspiration anyway.
KC: That’s great. Thank you. There anything else that you would like to talk about that we didn’t maybe touch on yet?
MK: I would just say for listeners, if anyone is interested, to go to my author website, MichelleTKing.com, I keep updated there all the upcoming book talks and things related to the book. If people want to learn more, there’s recordings of other interviews, and book reviews and radio programs and stuff like that. So anyone who wants to learn more can go there and learn more.
KC: Great. And we’ll link that in our transcript and our show notes as well. Michelle, thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed being able to talk to you.
MK: Thank you so much for having me.
KC: This has been The Institute Podcast. Listen to other and upcoming episodes by subscribing on Apple podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Visit our website, IAH.unc.edu to find past episodes and transcripts. You can also learn more about our upcoming events, programs, grants and leadership opportunities for UNC-Chapel Hill faculty and read stories that feature our arts and humanities fellows. Thank you for joining us.
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