Article: The line between passion and...
The line between passion and obsession is a porous one. Passions sound enthusiastic and healthy. Obsessions sound unstable, and bring to mind celebrity stalkers, math savants, and University of Alabama football fans. After I sold the book, I had lunch with my book editor, Jonathan Karp, who told me he loved books about obsessions, and that he wanted to get to the root of why I was obsessed. I thought to myself: "What is he talking about? I'm not obsessed."
So it was a bit humbling when I realized that (although in many ways I was otherwise an emotionally well-balanced person) indeed I had tumbled into an all-consuming obsession with Chinese food in America—an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit-hole plunge into the world of chop suey, fortune cookies and illegal immigration.
A spark of interest was lit in junior high when I learned that fortune cookies weren't Chinese by reading Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. Until then I had assumed they were Chinese. After all, we always got them in Chinese restaurants (since I was born in New York, I had never been to China at that point and didn't know there were no fortune cookies in China). It was like learning I was adopted and there was no Santa Claus at the same time.
But the obsession snowballed when an inordinate number of people won second place in the March 30, 2005 Powerball lottery because they all played the same lucky numbers from a fortune cookie. In understanding this phenomenon and tat of Chinese restaurants, the elaborateness of the trips, the depth of the research became more extreme.
Obsessions give you a defined universe inside which you can navigate. They set up tangible goals that you can fulfill: flying around the world to taste the original General Tso's chicken and holding the genetic forebearer of the American fortune cookie in my own hand in the outskirts of Kyoto; reading every mention of chop suey in American newspapers before 1900 to understand where it had come from circumnavigating the globe to find the greatest Chinese restaurant.
It seems obvious in retrospect, but I finally came to grasp the roots of my obsession. The book started out as an exploration of Chinese food in America. But six continents, 42 states and dozens upon dozens of orders of General Tso's chicken later, I finally realized (of course) it was a book about myself. It was about coming to understand the global Chinese diaspora around the world and where I fit in. Look at me, and you see someone Chinese. Close your eyes and you hear someone who is American. I am like the recipe for General Tso's chicken. We both appear to be foreign, but are actually indigenous to America.
Copyright © 2008 by Jennifer 8. Lee