Jennifer 8. Lee, a New York Times metro reporter, has a new book about Chinese food that is generating quite a bit of buzz, including last night on The Colbert Report. The book is called The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food, and its supposed to be full of eye-opening facts about what Americans think of as “Chinese food.”
For example, did you realize that there are more Chinese restaurants in the U.S. than McDonalds, KFCs, and Burger Kings combined?
There are so many Chinese restaurants– about 40,000, in fact– that Chinese food might be thought of as America’s “national cuisine.” Lee writes, “Our benchmark for Americanness is apple pie. But ask yourself: How often do you eat apple pie? How often do you eat Chinese food?”
The book also takes a look at the employees– many of them Chinese immigrants– of these tens of thousands of restaurants, which are often scattered around the US in out-of-the-way locations. She answers the question: How do these middle-of-nowhere Chinese restaurants open? Where do they find employees?
“[W]hiteboards and walls of Post-it notes… list the hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese-restaurant job openings that pass through the area each week. Three numbers identify a job to a restaurant worker: the monthly salary, the area code where the restaurant is located, and the number of hours by bus from New York City… A job could be summed up thus: $2,400, 440 near Cleveland, 10 hours.”