The Fortune Cookie Chronicles (10 page)

You can taste the general’s chicken in al -

you-can-eat $4.95 supper buffets along interstate highways, at urban takeouts with bul etproof windows, and in white-tablecloth establishments that have received starred reviews in the
New York Times
. You can sample variations where the sauce is brown and runny, red and syrupy, or yel ow and sweet like honey.

There are renditions with short squat pieces, long thin pieces, dark meat, white meat, and mysteriously reconstituted mystery meat. There are versions akin to McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, with more bread coating than meat, and others where you cannot tel where the chicken ends and the dough begins.

Hunan Province is famed for producing fiery leaders and spicy dishes. Hunanese locals brag that their cooking—based on simmering, stewing, and steaming—is one of the eight great regional cuisines of China. What the other seven are, few could tel me.

(It turns out that China’s eight great regional cuisines, like the Ten Commandments and the nine Supreme Court justices, are something that everyone knows the number of, but few can readily name.)

What I found was unsettling. Unlike kung pao chicken, which nearly every self-respecting Chinese chef can make, a request for General Tso’s chicken left many cooks, waitresses, and restaurant owners scratching their heads.

The refrain was consistent: “We don’t have General Tso’s chicken here” or “We’ve never heard of it.” Even after I showed them pictures of the dish on my digital camera, they would frown and look at me blankly, then helpful y suggest another chicken dish, often the local specialty, mala or kung pao. One waitress at a three-hundred-year-old restaurant pressed me to try another dish associated with a famous Hunan personage: “This is what Mao Zedong and his circle ate when they used to come here.”

But nothing they offered ever resembled our crispy General Tso’s, nor his American cousins: sesame chicken, lemon chicken, sweet-and-sour chicken. In fact, any batter-dipped, stir-fried chicken dish was hard to come by in this urban corner of Hunan.

I set out to find the general’s ancestral vil age in rural Hunan. Perhaps there people would know the story behind the chicken. Hunan may be poor and inland, but it prides itself on having produced a disproportionately

high

number

of

warriors,

revolutionaries, and political leaders. Aside from Mao Zedong and the general, its august roster includes Liu Shaoqi, once Mao’s presumed successor, and Hu Yaobang, the popular Communist leader whose death triggered the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

When you ask locals why they have so many newsworthy leaders, they almost universal y echo a line used by Mao. It has to do with the spicy food, they say; a lifetime of eating the cuisine generates a revolutionary temperament in the people here.

Our general, the son of peasant farmers, looked to be an early washout after he thrice failed the competitive imperial examinations. He returned to a quiet life in his ancestral home in rural Hunan. But like many men whose fates are caught up in history, his life changed forever with the outbreak of war—in his case, a rebel ion led by a Chinese convert who believed himself the younger son of Jesus Christ. The self-declared New Messiah, Hong Xiuquan, and his Taiping Rebel ion established the Heavenly Kingdom, which at its peak covered most of southern and central China. Its government abolished private property and gave women equal rights.

Tso, whose political career started when he was thirty-eight, drove the heavenly rebels out of Hunan and continued his ruthless campaign toward the coast. By 1864, he, together with his military mentor, Zeng Guofan, had dethroned the Taiping king and quashed the rebel ion at the Third Battle of Nanking, in which some one hundred thousand people were kil ed. After it was al said and done, the Taiping Rebel ion had consumed over twenty mil ion lives, making it the bloodiest civil war in human history. In exchange for his service, our general was rewarded with a promotion to earl and went on to quash rebel ions in China’s west.

That was the story of General Tso’s long march across China. But how did his long march across America come to pass? Perhaps, I thought, those in his vil age would know.

The journey to the general’s birthplace turned out to be a more difficult ordeal than my driver and I had planned on. We knew the name of the town and the direction from Changsha, but my driver never consulted a map. Automobile travel in rural China involves dodging mangy dogs, farmers pul ing carts, young motorcyclists, and plump chickens, creating the overal sensation of a live video game—Grand Theft Auto: Rural China. Stopping at red lights is apparently optional. Driving in the countryside also involves a great deal of honking. The sonorous rumbling horns of trucks, the high-pitched beeps of scooters, and the tenor tones of sedans come together in a shril arpeggio. Honking in America is a punitive action; in China, it’s considered a courtesy.

We were soon lost. We stopped to ask an old man with a missing tooth for directions. He gestured wildly and then jumped into the car with us, explaining that he was from near where the general had been born, where hundreds of members of the general’s family stil lived, where they had their own area cal ed Zuojiaduan, or “Zuo family section.” He commanded us to take a right onto a suspicious-looking dusty dirt path that seemed to lead nowhere, but then made a T-shaped intersection with a paved road. The old man got out, waved good-bye, and pointed in the direction opposite from where he was heading.

Shortly thereafter, we passed a bil board that said, “Xiangyin. A famous Qing Dynasty county and home to Zuo Zongtang.” In the corner was a picture of a refined and bearded Chinese man who was obviously General Tso. I studied his likeness. It was nice, as they say, to final y put a face to a name.

Outside a restaurant a sign advertised high-quality dog meat, a claim substantiated by a photograph of two doe-eyed puppies. Inside I inquired about the general’s chicken. The waitress gave me a confused look. I showed her the picture of the dish on my digital camera. She shook her head. “It doesn’t look like chicken,” she said. If I wanted chicken, she offered, she could kil a fresh one for less than two American dol ars. She gestured toward the back.

Whichever chicken you pick, she said. But it would take too long to pluck al the feathers, delaying my hunt for the general’s roots; we opted for some vegetables and a pork dish instead.

The restaurant’s owner gave us a hand-drawn map. The route led us down a dirt road flanked by rice paddies and to the old home—an abandoned building that had been converted into a school, then abandoned again.

In the rice paddies near the house, I encountered two men from the general’s family, Zuo Kuanxun and Zuo Ziwei, Zuo family members some five generations removed from the general. I asked them about General Tso’s chicken.

They had never seen the dish. “No one here eats this,” said Zuo Kuanxun, a faded sixty-six-year-old farmer. Zuo Ziwei shrugged as wel .

There were chickens everywhere. Black ones. Brown ones. Speckled ones. Wandering around the backyards. Tussling with puppies.

Climbing up compost piles. Crossing the road. These were clearly the original free-range chickens—not the pathetic, debeaked, declawed, force-fed ones of the American agro-industrial complex. But despite the widespread presence of live poultry, there was no General Tso’s chicken to be found.

Zuo Kuanxun invited us into his home, a century-old stone structure with wooden doors, dirt floors, and hand-pumped wel water. Except for his telephone, which he’d gotten ten years ago to keep in contact with his children, his home was probably not too different from residences during the general’s time. He handed us freshly washed apples. After I’d finished mine, I looked around for a place to put the core.

Toss it on the floor, he said. I hesitated.

“Don’t worry, I’l sweep it later.”

Onto the dirt floor went the apple core.

I offered him a fortune cookie in return. He examined it. And put on the polite smile and averted eyes of Chinese nonenthusiasm.

No one seemed to know whether the general had had a fondness for chicken. They did note that he probably didn’t cook it himself. “He had servants to cook and clean for him,” Zuo Ziwei pointed out.

“They must have used his name to do business,” Zuo Kuanxun said. It didn’t surprise him that Americans know the general’s name. “He’s famous al over the world!” he said. “He was very talented. A lot of people respected and admired him.”

I didn’t have the heart to tel him that in the United States we respected him only for his chicken

—which in the end may not even be his.

Zuo Kuanxun said he’d once raised chickens but now focuses on pigs—the preferred meat in Chinese cooking. He didn’t, however, raise only pigs. When I’d walked in, I’d noticed two energetic brown dogs wandering around with some chickens. Occasional y, they yelped outside as we talked inside. Our conversation wandered onto the topic of his dogs.

“Dog tastes good. It’s good for you,” he said.

I mumbled something about how in the United States we don’t eat dogs because we have sentimental attachments to them as pets. He nodded.

“Those dogs are made for pets. They look good.

These dogs are raised for eating.”

I pictured how Americans would react to General Tso’s puppy on their takeout menus.

The general’s childhood home, later converted to a school, had long been abandoned. It looked like any other sad building in rural areas across the world, only this one had riling Chinese slogans like “Seek Knowledge!” scrawled in gigantic red writing across the front.

“They want to develop it into a tourist destination, but there is no money,” Zuo Kuanxun said, standing at the building’s gate.

Over tea the same day, a young official named Jiang Wei told me about the big dreams they had for the general’s home, if only they could find some capital. “We don’t have the money, but we are hoping to attract tourism and to sel some General Tso–branded goods,” he said. “We want to build some industry around him. We want to make it big.”

Sitting in an open courtyard in front of the vil age hal , he gestured expansively. One could relive the General Tso experience. “You could buy the things he liked to eat. You could buy the things he liked to use,” he said. “You could sel the liquor he liked to drink.” He flicked his cigarette and rattled off other product lines: “Clothes. Hats. His official robes. You could put on a set of his official robes and have your picture taken in them.”

Truth be told, there was little else going for this town in China, so its boosters had seized upon the identity of the general as their means to economic salvation.

Suddenly Jiang Wei remembered the

reason that I had traveled thousands of miles by plane, boat, bus, car, and foot to the little town of Jietoupu in the first place. His eyes lit up with an idea.

“They could come here and eat true authentic General Tso’s chicken!”

As we got up to leave, one of the women at the table with us stopped me and asked, “You said you were from the United States?”

“Yes.”

“But you look Chinese!” she exclaimed, confused.

My question remained: Why had the general been able to conquer America with his chicken with greater ease and less bloodshed than he had conquered China? My host in Hunan was a classmate from my time at Beijing University. Wang Wei was beautiful in the way that women in classical Chinese paintings are beautiful, with large expressive eyes, flawless skin, and a slim, shapely figure. She had gone to Syracuse University for her master’s degree, but then she’d returned to Hunan to marry her high school sweetheart.

When I asked her about the chicken dish, she laughed and burst into a tirade about why General Tso’s chicken is the ultimate Chinese-American dish.

“It has broccoli. Americans
looove
broccoli.

They add broccoli with everything.” She continued:

“Americans like chicken. You can go to a supermarket and you buy chicken breast, chicken legs, chicken drumsticks, chicken wings, boneless chicken. Al different types of chicken,” she said, gesturing to various parts of her body. “They don’t do that with pigs, do they?” she chal enged. “It’s very American. It’s al -American: very big pieces of chicken, fried and sweet.”

For generations, Chinese immigrants and students have been warned not to be shocked by the Chinese food in American Chinese restaurants.

Among those dishes most likely to confuse them is General Tso’s chicken. Wei remembered her first impression of the dish when she encountered it in a restaurant in Syracuse: “Is it edible?”

Watch what the workers in American Chinese restaurants eat. In general, it is not what they are serving to the customers. It is, however, more representative of the Chinese diet. For instance, you wil often find a soup—and not egg drop, wonton, or sweet-and-sour. It wil be thin and simple, usual y with seafood, pork bones, or melon in it. There wil be lots of dishes with single vegetables.