IN HER NEW BOOK, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles,” New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee investigates the origins of everyone’s favorite Chinese-American dessert and, along the way, uncovers the history and evolution of Chinese food in America and around the world. TMM recently spoke with her about Sichuan alligator, Chinese-style California rolls and her all-time favorite fortune.

The big thing that I was wondering, and this may be the ultimate stupid-person question, is: If your book is showing how Chinese food became the quintessential American food, then what defines Chinese food now?

I guess I would push back on saying “quintessential American food.” I say it is an all-American food. There’s pizza and there’s burritos and there’s Italian food and spaghetti and all that—that is all kind of merged together. Backing up, the way that Chinese food is broadly defined is, it’s … a philosophy of cooking that has evolved both in China and also around the world. And generally it does encompass the use of soy sauce, the use of ginger, the use of garlic, oftentimes wok cooking, and oftentimes the strong presence of noodles, rice, and dumplings. This is not an all-encompassing definition, but these are common traits you will find across Chinese food in different countries, so American Chinese food, Indian Chinese food, Peruvian Chinese food, Korean Chinese food, I guess Singaporean Chinese food, Japanese Chinese food.

All of these countries have developed their own sense of Chinese food, and it’s really interesting because even in American you get to see evolutions of Chinese food. For instance, in New Orleans there’s a restaurant that serves Cajun Chinese food—Sichuan alligator and sweet-and-sour crawfish—and in Philadelphia you have Philadelphia cheesesteak roll, which looks like a cheesesteak on the inside and an egg roll on the outside. In southeastern Massachusetts, in the Providence area, you have what’s known as a “chow-mein sandwich,” which is crunchy, skinny noodles that are deep-fried, with this weird brown garlicky sauce, sometimes with celery in it, oftentimes in a hamburger bun or two slices of white bread—very Wonder Bread white. And are these necessarily authentic in the traditional sense? Probably not, but for many people—especially the people who eat the chow-mein sandwich—it is a stark reminder of a time and place where they grew up, and it brings back a lot of memories. So for them it’s a sense of comfort food.

But you know American Chinese food has, in and of itself, become defined as a unique food, and it’s its own cuisine. And if you go to Korea, there is a chain called Holy Chow, which is slightly upscale, that sells “American-style Chinese food.” So they have General Tso’s chicken and they have beef with broccoli and they have chow mein, and it’s actually kind of a fancy place—I mean, not hugely fancy, but sort of the equivalent of Cheesecake Factory, so it’s not downscale. It’s definitely professionals, young professionals often, and they’re eating American-style Chinese food, which is different from Korean-style Chinese food. One of the most famous dishes there is, I think it’s noodles in black bean sauce, zajiang mian. But zajiang mian in Korea totally looks different from zajiang mian in China.

And actually, if you go to the Dominican Republic, the Chinese food they have there is not only American Chinese food, it’s like New York-style Chinese food, with the yellow signs for takeout in Washington Heights, with the brightly lit light board with purple background. There it’s also slightly upscale. So it’s funny that American Chinese food, which is slightly downscale, once you export it it’s really fancy.

Is that from its being American and the commercial appeal of that overseas?

So, there are two things. In the Dominican Republic, there’s such a high crossover between people who live here and people who live [there] and go back and forth, and it’s actually like “Oh, this is something you can get somewhere else—this is something you can get in New York, or that reminds us of New York.” And in Korea, there’s a little bit more of “This is exotic, this is cool.”

Was there anything you came across that just did not seem to be recognizably Chinese?

I think one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever encountered is crab Rangoon, which is deep-fried wontons with cream cheese inside. I mean, that is completely “Whoah! What’s going on there?” Right, and also it’s called crab Rangoon, and Rangoon is like nowhere in China—it’s in sort of Burma-slash-Myanmar. But it’s very popular in the midwest, very popular in New England, and a lot of people like it. I was personally horrified when I first discovered that—but you know, whatever! People love it, they associate it with Chinese restaurants, we’ll roll with it.

You grew up in a Chinese household in New York—at what point did you realize there was a big different between what was being sold in New York at Chinese restaurants and what you were eating at home?

I think it really only kind of dawned on me when I went to China China, which was after college. The way that we would always think about it was: 1) it’s restaurant Chinese food; 2) it has more of a Cantonese-Hunan-Sichuan tradition, whereas my family has much more of a Taiwanese background. So my mom’s food would match more closely with what we were eating in Taiwan with what my grandmother cooked. So I was just like, “Oh, they’re different from us. It’s not mainland or Hong Kong, we’re Taiwan.” And when I went to China, where you can get real Sichuan food and you can get real Hunanese food, that I was like, “Wait a second—this isn’t the same.” And it was also much more subtle things. [In the book] I pick out much more stark differences, but the other differences are, like, fried rice. You don’t really get fried rice in China. Fried rice is what you do with leftover rice. You don’t get soup at the beginning of the meal, you get soup oftentimes at the end of the meal, and it functions as a drink. In America, people don’t like to be reminded that the food ever swam or walked or breathed, right? So you have anything even remotely animal-like excised—nothing with claws, no ears or feet, no paws. Whereas in China, they’re all about the bone. They’re all “The meat that’s closest to the bone is most tender.” Fish with bone is more tender. That’s kind of when it really dawned on me, that oh, there’s something a little bit different.

At first, it may have been a bit of a northern-southern thing, maybe. When I was in China, I was in Beijing, and you know most of the Chinese immigrants that came over in the earlier days were from southern China. But then when I traveled in China, I noticed these inconsistencies and was like, “Huh.”

Do you think that as China gets wealthier, some of the more American approaches to food will leach back into Chinese culture, and people will start demanding boneless chicken?

Traditionally, historically, Chinese food much more depended on vegetables. Americans really like meat. So there are two things. Consumption of vegetables grows with population, whereas consumption of meat grows with economic growth. So as China kind of increases its wealth, it will consume much more meat than it now does. And that’s not necessarily a good thing, I think.

I’m not going to say that American-style Chinese food will lurch into China, but that American influences in general will impact China. One of the more interesting things in China is that I saw California rolls, which is funny because they don’t have avocados in China. Avocado is a very New World vegetable. There’s no avocado in Chinese cooking. So what do they substitute? They substitute banana—which I thought was really weird.

How did that taste? Was it a mushy banana or a firm one?

Squishy.

In the book, you talk a lot about the ways that American Chinese restaurants pass between different people and families over the years. What sort of culture emerges from that? What kind of stories get told?

There are people who have done very well, and a lot of stories are spread by word-of-mouth, but the ones that are most interesting to me are the word-of-mouth stories about people who were killed or robbed or mugged while doing deliveries, usually in pretty urban areas. Because everyone is related to someone or had a neighbor who has encountered some kind of difficulty in running a Chinese restaurant. Chinese restaurants and restaurant workers in general are some of the more vulnerable parts of the food ecosystem in America. And in NYC alone, in the last six years, seven years, there’s an average of one Chinese delivery worker/restaurant worker killed per year. And although that story goes away from public consciousness, it also resonates, because everyone knows a Chinese delivery man. Almost everyone in New York, no matter how rich or how poor, has been in a Chinese restaurant.

What sort of impact does that make back in China?

The information definitely does flow back. There’s a very strong tie between American Chinese restaurants and a certain part of China that’s about the size of Delaware, around the city of Fuzhou, where they have a large number of people that have immigrated to America, some of them legally, some of them not so legally, often if not legally paying as much as $70,000 or upwards in terms of smugglers. And in this area, I thought one of the most surprising and interesting things is that they have English-language schools that teach restaurant English to young people, sometimes teenagers, who are preparing to illegally immigrate—or sometimes legally immigrate. So you have the guy on the chalkboard writing “sesame, broccoli, asparagus, zucchini” or warning them that it’s “fried rice,” not “flied lice.” And you have these grandparents who have not seen their own children for 20 years, except for photos of them standing in front of their Chinese restaurants.

Your family’s from Taiwan, right?

My parents were both born on an island that’s known as Jinmen or Quemoy. But they went to college in Taiwan. They’re technically Fujianese, but whatever. It’s one of those situations where they didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them.

With so many restaurant workers coming from Fujian, do they ever feel like this could’ve been their lives?

Not really. No, they do in a sense. My dad has a Ph.D. in mathematical statistics, which he got at Columbia, overeducated guy. Many people in my generation who are Chinese-American, our parents are super-educated and made super-educated babies—of which I am also one. But a couple of years ago, my dad and mom went to bring food to a neighbor who was sick—a Chinese woman, actually, who lived in a pretty nice building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—and my father brought her takeout, and as he walked in, the doorman was like, “No menus!” And so that just sort of emphasizes that the only difference between him and a real delivery man in the eyes of society is that he’s very educated. So, we felt very lucky that we fell on the right side of whatever policies that were developed post-World War II that favored the people who were very, very educated.

The people that come from Fuzhou tend to be a little bit more rural, not as urban—but not always the case. They tend to be from small towns. It’s not too far from the experience my parents had growing up.

I feel like I should ask you at least one question about fortune cookies, even though I don’t like fortune cookies that much. Do you have a favorite fortune?

My favorite one is the one at the end of the book, which I can’t believe I really got. It’s “Do or do not—there is no try,” which is from Yoda. It’s from “The Empire Strikes Back,” where he’s counseling Luke Skywalker in the Jedi ways. When I got that, I was like, “Oh, my God! Yoda our new Confucius is.” It was kind of startling. It shows where people get their ideas from.

So startling you didn’t even have a chance to add “in bed”?

Oh, but that totally works! “Do or do not—there is no try (in bed).” That totally works.

“The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” is available now. •

Matt Gross is TMM’s editor-at-large.