BLOOMINGTON, IN – Taking place on Friday, October 18, at the Global and International Studies Building, UNC-Chapel Hill professor Dr. Michelle King visited Indiana University, sponsored by the Taiwan Studies Initiative, to present a talk on her new book Chop Fry Watch Learn: Thinking Through Chinese Cookbooks and Cuisine with Fu Pei-Mei. The Taiwan Studies Initiative and East Asian Studies Center were so thrilled to have Dr. King here to discuss her work. History professor Fei-Hsien Wang gave the introduction to approximately 15 people, a mix of graduate students, teachers, and undergraduate students alike. Released this year, Chop Fry Watch Learn looks at the life of famed Taiwanese chef and author Fu Pei-Mei and analyzes how food, translation, politics, the digital age, gender, and more come together. At the start of her talk, Dr. King sets up the background of who Fu Pei-Mei was and why she is so important today. “There’s more to Taiwan than the security relationship,” she says, while presenting a slide showing clipped headlines from the last week questioning Taiwan and America’s relation vis-à-vis China. Transitioning to Fu Pei-Mei, she describes the bright, technicolor images visible in her first cookbook. This book is special, King explains, because it’s bilingual! Prior to Fu Pei-Mei, there were no bilingual English-Chinese cookbooks available for a specifically American audience. Fu Pei-Mei was born in Dalian, China when it was under Japanese occupation and known then as Dairen, in 1931. Due to the civil war in China, her family moved to Taiwan. After getting married, Pei-Mei’s husband was not the nicest to her and complained often about her cooking to his mahjong mates. This became the impetus for her learning to cook, and after a while she had mastered many regional cooking styles that other Chinese refugees brought to Taiwan.
Going beyond the food itself, Dr. King also explored how politics and the imagination inform and influence our culture(s). Because Fu Pei-Mei’s books are bilingual, there is then the problem of translation and representation. How are Chinese and Taiwanese dishes, and even instructions, presented to English speakers? Dr. King explained that, for example, in the Chinese instructions, information about replacement ingredients, cooking techniques, etc., are plentiful, but in the English they are either translated incorrectly or just flat out aren’t there; “The Chinese and English don’t even correspond!” she said. Because her books are geared towards American housewives, Fu Pei-Mei’s books are “implicitly bilingual and implicitly transnational”, Dr. King explains. Another example is how geography is presented. Dr. King showed that the maps included in her cookbooks show China, but as it was before the founding of the People’s Republic (PRC), taking the Taiwanese view at the time. In this way, the China presented to American housewives only existed in the cultural imaginary, it was what the government at the time believed China to be, even though it had been decades since those maps were accurate. This choice was deliberate, and it underscores Dr. King’s point that even something as simple as a cookbook can contain implications and make statements that reach far beyond “cook for 20 minutes on high”.
Post by EASC student program assistant, Dominic Lowery.
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