Chop Suey, USA: The Story of Chinese Food in America
Yong Chen
Columbia University Press: 2021
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Chop Suey, USA is a sprawling saga that plays out over decades, with a backstory that spans millennia. The plot is tangled, and the last chapter, like that of many other modern epics, has yet to be written. There are dozens of characters, backed up by what Hollywood used to call a cast of thousands. The style is popular rather than literary, but then again, it’s also non-fiction, written by a professor of history at the University of California.

But all written histories are, on some level, fiction, if only because they spin a single thread from reality’s tangled skein. Perhaps strangely for a book about Chinese food, the thread Chen follows is the story of American empire, and its all-conquering hunger.

• Tags: Tse Wei, United States, Yong Chen