Join Bold Fork Books for a spirited night of conversation with author Michelle T. King for the release of CHOP FRY WATCH LEARN: Fu-Mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.
We'll hear from Michelle about the process of writing her book and what she discovered as she wove together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to understand the story of Fu Mei's life.
ABOUT CHOP FRY WATCH LEARN
A new history of Chinese food told through an account of the remarkable life of Fu Pei-mei, the woman who brought Chinese cooking to the world.
In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor that would last four decades. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother’s copies of Fu Pei-mei’s Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu’s story and in her food, a vivid portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class, female home cooks navigated the tremendous postwar transformations taking place across the world.
In Chop Fry Watch Learn, King enables us to see Chinese food as both an inheritance of tradition and a truly modern creation, influenced by the historical phenomena of the postwar era. Informed by the voices of fans across generations, King illuminates the story of Chinese food from the inside: at home, around the family dinner table. The result is a revelatory work, a rich banquet of past and present tastes that will resonate deeply for all of us looking for our histories in the kitchen.
ABOUT MICHELLE T. KING
Michelle T. King is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she specializes in modern Chinese gender and food history. A 2020–21 National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, she lives in Chapel Hill with her family.
