Headline writing is an art form.
We might be shifting away from a Eurocentric view of the United States into something that's much more multicultural, multinational, and Chinese food is just one slice of that.
I like to say, 'Chop suey's the biggest culinary joke that one culture has ever played on another,' because chop suey, if you translate into Chinese, means 'tsap sui,' which, if you translate back, means 'odds and ends.'
When a dish really hits a nerve with the American palate, it can really take off across the entire country, facilitated by food vendors' freedom to copy good ideas.
For most of our young lives, my family was baffled by elementary school bake sales, to which we were told to bring in goodies to sell. While other kids arrived bearing brownies, chocolate chip cookies, and apple pies, Chinese families didn't bake.
In deference to American traditions, my family put our oven to rare use at Thanksgiving during my childhood, with odd roast-turkey experiments involving sticky-rice stuffing or newfangled basting techniques that we read about in magazines.
Some books that I've read on the Kindle, I've been like, 'I want that on my shelf.' Because it says, 'I'm the kind of person who has read this.' The kind of books that says, 'I'm serious and intellectual and historical and race-conscious.'
People think of fortune cookies as being Chinese, but in essence, they are fundamentally American.
When I signed up for Google Plus, my reaction after playing around with it for a little bit was like, 'Huh, I think Facebook should be scared.' In part, because it's a really elegant product. It's very fast.
You know, search has never been a strong suit of Facebook.
When I signed up for Google Plus, it recommended 500 people for me to invite. You know, and once I invited those 500 people I got another 500 people. So it has a huge install base that it can start from.
People often think that reporters write their own headlines. In fact, they almost never do. The people who do write headlines are the copy editors who are the front and last lines of quality-checking in a newspaper before it goes to print.
Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.
The worst headline is one that contains a factual error. Bad headlines are ones that are bland, and don't tell the reader anything specific, like 'Democrats at it Again.'
Chinese cooking is noisy - a multitasking activity that requires constant vigilance. There is no downtime.
The Chinese use every spare bit of an animal: cow lungs, pig ears, chicken feet, duck blood.
With wok cooking, you chop things up into little pieces for maximum surface area, so they can cook in minutes, if not seconds. Sauteing is energy efficient; baking is not.
So, fortune cookies: invented by the Japanese, popularized by the Chinese, but ultimately consumed by Americans. They are more American than anything else.
Broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable; in fact, it is originally an Italian vegetable. It was introduced into the United States in the 1800s, but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s.
Chinese restaurants have long been a weekly or monthly ritual for many Americans.
