She’s wrong-to an extent-but the sentiment gets at the heart of the documentary, which is really a quest narrative in which the chicken is a Trojan horse for America’s history of complicated and choleric relationships with those deemed suspicious or disquietingly “exotic.” General Tso was a real person, a celebrated and formidable commander who lived in the nineteenth century and led the Qing Dynasty Army during the Taiping Rebellion, one of the country’s bloodiest civil wars. But the most sensible answer comes from a snowy-haired grandmother gesticulating in a heather-colored zip-up sweater: “I think they just named it because it sounds exotic, after somebody nobody’s ever heard of.” He’s on a horse, for sure, riding wildly,” another interviewee posits grandly. “I imagine General Tso as almost a bearded Mongolian warrior. “He, uh, had his private chef cook this dish, you know, even when he went to battle,” a man in Manhattan improvised when queried about Tso’s background. Though the myth sometimes proves surprisingly illuminating. Some people associate linguistic mastery with ability to dream in another tongue I equate fitting in with the ability to speak Chinese the way my authentically American friends do, stressing all the wrong syllables and planting false tones where there are none.īut “The Search for General Tso” is a detective story devoted to the art of un-blurring and disentangling: the “t” from the “so,” the meat from the myth. My favorite response comes from a man who makes no pretense of hiding his ignorance: “Do you even pronounce the ‘t’ or just the ‘so’? I kind of just blur it a bit, that way nobody knows if I’m saying it right or not.” I have adopted this same blurring tactic for Chinese words-or rather, for bastardized Chinese words-for as long as I can remember. “Up in Chico, we just call it General’s Chicken,” a San Francisco native says, shrugging. “I feel like no matter what restaurant you go to there’s always a different spelling of General Tso,” a woman from Queens quips in the documentary. The General’s chicken may be ubiquitous, but the ability to say his name certainly is not. Lee, who wrote about the dish in her 2008 book, “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles.” The pair embarked on a bi-continental investigation, flitting between the East and the West in pursuit of the recipe’s provenance. To explore that question, he teamed up with Jennifer 8. “Something about this time and place and town made me wonder: who is this General Tso?” Cheney said in an interview with the Web site FERNTV. Ten years ago, Ian Cheney was driving across the United States on his way to make another film (about corn) when he stopped for the night, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and ordered his old standby at the only restaurant open: a Chinese one. “The Search for General Tso,” a jovial feature-length documentary that probes the origins of this iconic poultry dish, seems to share my interest in this dilemma (if not my overgrown anxiety). I have eaten mapo tofu for as long as I’ve been on a solid-food diet, though it’s not my standard order at Szechuan Gourmet, where I sometimes choose the General, which a friend once described as “the best kind of Chinese food because it’s Chinese food without the weird stuff.” Perhaps the only thing stranger than my circuitous locution in English is my sheepishness in ordering General Tso’s in Chinese in front of other Chinese people, uttering a name that is simultaneously so evidently Chinese and not-Chinese that its very pronunciation presents, at least to this neurotic immigrant, a paralyzing problem of cultural fidelity and perfidy. When The New Yorker’s office was still in midtown, where a favorite lunch spot was the restaurant Szechuan Gourmet, I avoided calling the place by name and insisted on inviting colleagues to the “spicy Chinese joint.” This is weird for a host of reasons, not least because I am Sichuanese (Pinyin standardized spelling: “Si,” not “Sze”)-born, bred, and brined. I’m one of those people who don’t correctly pronounce the “mapo” in mapo tofu or the “Tso” in General Tso’s chicken. “The Search for General Tso” is a jovial documentary that probes the origins of an iconic poultry dish.
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