Author Event | Michelle King: Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food

When

Thursday January 30, 2025: 6:00pm to 7:30pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

Description

Michelle T. King will be joined in conversation with Miranda Brown to discuss her book, Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.

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 weaves together stories from her own family and contemporary oral history to present a remarkable argument for how understanding the story of Fu’s life 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. These include a dramatic increase in the number of women working outside the home, a new proliferation of mass media, the arrival of innovative kitchen tools, and the shifting diplomatic fortunes of China and Taiwan. King reveals how and why, for audiences in Taiwan and around the world, Fu became the ultimate culinary touchstone: the figure against whom all other cooking authorities were measured.

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.

Miranda Brown is the Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker Collegiate Professor of Chinese Studies and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor in the University of Michigan Asian Languages and Cultures Department.
 

The Library intends to provide a live stream of this event pending the presenter's permission. Please check back closer to the event for additional updates.