fortune cookies and wicked witches

i recently finished two delightful books. i have made so little time for reading these days, reading well-written prose is like a fresh drink of water.

first, "the fortune cookie chronicles" by jennifer 8. lee. yup, that's her byline, her middle initial is the auspicious number of chinese superstition. i remember her distinctive byline from college, as she wrote for our school paper. now she is a reporter for the new york times and wrote a fun treatise on the history of chinese food in america. one of her points is that chinese food is more american than apple pie: when was the last time you had apple pie? and the last time you had chinese food? other fun factoids:
- there are twice as many more chinese restaurants in the US than McD's, BK, and KFC combined
- fortune cookies are originally japanese, but the chinese marketed them more successfully (helped by the forced silence of the japanese when they got put in internment camps during WWII)
- check out your white takeout containers next time: on the east coast, the wire always runs the short length of the box; on the west coast, it runs the long way.
- the "soy sauce" that's included free with your meals is actually not made of soy, but "hydrolyzed vegetable protein." if you want real soy sauce, buy kikkoman. when kikkoman and others sought to start a campaign to create an international standard for soy sauce, they met with quite a bit of resistance. apparently there is an International Hydrolyzed Protein Council that is quite powerful.

it is a well-written text, a thoroughly enjoyable read for any foodie and definitely any asian-american. for it is a novel not only about chinese food, but about being chinese in america. as she comments wryly, "I have no idea whether my grandchildren will speak Chinese, but I feel certain they will know how to make fried dumplings." she proposes a new metaphor to replace the idea of America as a melting pot; "We are a stir-fry; our ingredients remain distinct, but our flavors blend together in a sauce shared by all."

the other book i just finished is "wicked" by gregory maguire. it is a retelling of the story of Oz, from the perspective of the green "witch." we started listening to it as a book on cd on the drive to dc, and i got hooked. so i found the book at the library and read the last couple hundred pages on one sleepless night. (i tend to do this because i find a good book so infrequently that i have forgotten restraint). very entertaining, though i'm a little disappointed in the way the author glosses over years of her life.

boy, it's really raining now. the skies looked threatening when i left this morning with boo to check out the garden centers in the area, but i thought, hey, i'll slap some goretex on and we'll be fine. nope. as i left the subdivision it started raining so hard that the noise drowned out the radio, and my wipers were on high even when stopped. toto, we're not in seattle anymore.