04/14/2026
Join us and Professor Michelle T. King to discuss Fu Pei-Mei and the making of Modern Chinese Food!
📍Thompson Hall, Room 317
🗓️ May 14th, 2026
🖋️ RSVP at bit.ly/ChopFry
Fu Pei-mei (1931-2004), Taiwan's beloved and pioneering postwar cook book author and television celebrity, was often called the "Julia Child of Chinese cooking." Fu appeared continuously on television for forty years, wrote dozens of best-selling Chinese cookbooks, owned a successful cooking school and traveled the world, teaching foreigners about Chinese food. Women in her generation, which included both housewives and career women, turned to Fu because she taught them how to cook an astounding range of unfamiliar Chinese regional dishes, in ways their own mothers and grandmothers never could. Her cookbook also represents the transpacific journeys of thousands of migrants, as they carried her recipes in their suitcases, traveling far from home. Fu's story offers us a window onto not just food, but also family, gender roles, technology, media, foreign relations, and cultural identity. This is not a story of timeless culinary tradition, but one of modern transformation-- of self and family, of cuisine and society.
Michelle T. King, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, specializes in modern Chinese food and gender history. She is the author of Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food (2024), which was named one of the best books of 2024 by the New York Times and NPR, and received the support of a NEH Public Scholars Fellowship. She is also co-editor of Modern Chinese Foodways (2025), editor of Culinary Nationalism in Asia (2019), and author of Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China (2014).
This event is sponsored by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation.
