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Changing Chinese Foodways in Asia. Edited by DAVID Y. H. WU and TAN CHEE-BENG. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2001. HK $148.00.
Chinese food, Andean music, and African print clothing are among the very few traditions that have "swum upstream": not only held steady against the floods of American and European pop culture, but actually forced their way up to the headwaters, colonizing the colonizers themselves. Chinese food is perhaps the most successful of these salmon of globalization. Here in North America, hardly a town is without its Chinese restaurant, and every large city provides a wide choice of Chinese regional and special foods.
The present book, though confining its gaze to East Asia, provides much of the explanation. Chinese love food and insist on good eating wherever they go. Also, Chinese cooks are supremely adaptable. They can cope with any setting and any list of ingredients, modifying the cuisine to suit local realities-and, also, local mythologies.
This book stems from a conference on changing Chinese food, held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1996. Included here are a dozen papers, plus a foreword by Yih-yuan Li, an introduction by the editors, and a commentary by Sidney Mintz.
The papers cover Chaozhou and Shantou (Chen Yunpiao), the Pearl River Delta (Su Jianling), Hong Kong (Siumi Tam, David Wu, Sidney Cheung, Diana Martin),...