Fu Pei-Mei taught a generation how to cook Chinese food

Seven decades ago, long before Fu Pei-mei became a beloved authority on Chinese cooking, she was struggling to make jiaozi.

These boiled dumplings from northern China were her husband’s favorite and one of the few dishes she knew how to cook from memory. He watched intently as Fu stuffed, folded and boiled his meal — plump purses of prawns, pork and seasonings. According to her autobiography and a new book about her, after he tasted the food he spared no kindness: “How could anyone eat these jiaozi? Every single one is just a bag of water.”

Others may have balked or abandoned cooking entirely after this tirade and the many more that would follow. But Fu wasn’t deterred. In fact, her competitive spirit was only beginning to simmer, spurring an influential, lifelong culinary journey.

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She has been called “the Julia Child of Chinese cooking,” but in Taiwan, where she first became a household name, many see Child as the Fu Pei-mei of French cooking. Over her lifetime, she would star in a television show that ran for 40 years, pen more than 30 cookbooks and recruit a legion of devoted students from around the world. In 2017, Taiwanese producers debuted a series based on Fu’s life, “What She Put on the Table,” now on Netflix. This month, historian Michelle T. King takes an even more comprehensive look into Fu’s legacy in her book, “Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food.”

When thinking of the early pioneers of Chinese cooking, Americans tend to bring up Joyce Chen or Cecilia Chiang, but thousands of Chinese speakers in places such as Taiwan and the United States flocked to Fu. To them, Fu was a culinary hero, the teacher who showed an entire generation how to cook Chinese food. But she also embodied a bundle of contradictions: She was a housewife who became an accomplished professional, and she arrived in Taiwan as essentially an outsider and became an enduring symbol of the island.

Born in Dalian, China, in 1931, Fu was the oldest daughter and third child in a family of seven. While she was working as a typist at age 19, her life was upended during the Communist takeover in 1949, and she fled to reunite with her brother and father in Taiwan. She soon married her husband and had three kids — all by age 25. As a housewife in Taiwan in the early 1950s, a common role for women at the time, it was her primary duty to feed her husband and his group of mahjong-playing friends, and one she initially accepted with gusto.

But in the kitchen, she struggled. She knew few people in Taiwan to shadow, and cooking schools weren’t common. So Fu took it upon herself. She sent out a flurry of requests to restaurants — “Seeking famous chefs to learn cooking from, high pay” — and plenty agreed to teach her. For two years, she rotated among chefs, learning new recipes and techniques every day. Soon, Chinese dishes from Sichuan, Beijing, Guangdong, Jiangsu, Fujian and Hunan became second nature.

Fu’s remarkable career follows the arc of contemporary Taiwanese history in the 20th century. Today, Taiwan is composed of ethnic groups — Hokkien and Hakka descendants whose ancestors migrated from Fujian and Guangdong in the 17th century onward — as well as the island’s Indigenous groups, both having experienced 50 years under Japanese colonial rule. The year 1949 marked the passage of another migrant wave from all over China. Fu belonged to the latter group of migrants, who maintained core memories of food from home.

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After committing hundreds of Chinese recipes to memory, Fu had no problem recruiting students who missed the specialty dishes they had left behind. They clamored to Fu’s residence for private lessons, hoping to glean any wisdom on sticky rice zongzi or Fu’s favorite sweet and sour “squirreled” fish. Soon enough, her efforts caught the attention of Taiwan Television, the island’s first broadcast station. In 1962, only one year after her classes started, she made her debut on camera — coincidentally, the year before Child’s “The French Chef” debuted on U.S. public television.

Her show couldn’t have come at a better time. On camera, Fu was a bona fide natural. Audiences became enraptured by her no-frills explanations, how she handled newfangled electric appliances, and her ability to cook while talking in Chinese, Hokkien and even Japanese. Seven hundred of the 2,000 episodes she filmed still appear on Taiwan Television’s YouTube channel, standing in contrast to today’s flashy short clips. She was never broadcast in China, where Mao Zedong once famously said, “A revolution is not a dinner party.”

Luke Tsai, a Bay Area food writer who grew up surrounded by Fu’s recipes and wrote about her for Taste, was drawn to Fu’s confident style and warm approach. “Here was a person who could be your mom,” he says. “And in a very direct and straightforward way, she would teach you how to cook this thing.”

Fu’s already-mounting popularity ascended to even greater heights after her bilingual “Pei Mei’s Chinese Cook Book” was released in 1969. Differing from other cookbooks of the time, its pages brim with colorful photos and recipes translated into English by Fu and her collaborators, plus collages of Fu posing with foreign dignitaries. With her book, people all over the world had a front-row seat to her recipes and phenomenal life story. According to King, this book alone marked one of Taiwan’s earliest efforts at gastrodiplomacy.

Fu’s culinary influence held steadfast for many years. But in the early ’90s, her cooking class enrollment began to dwindle as more people began opting for fast food and a new wave of restaurants. Still, Fu wasn’t done with her tenure. Before retiring in the mid-1990s, she struck up partnerships with convenience food companies. She consulted on products including instant noodles, frozen foods and in-flight meals for China Airlines. “Fu didn’t want to replace home cooking entirely, but was also a realist when it came to women’s lives and Chinese cooking,” King writes in her book.

Around the same time, as the Taiwanese feminist movement caught fire and Fu had more time on her hands, she began to deeply consider her role as a housewife.

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“I was educated in a Japanese school where they taught us that women should be obedient, and I also watched my mother also dedicate her life to serving my father,” Fu writes in her autobiography, also called “What She Put on the Table (五味八珍的歲月).” “So I did not question a lot of the things that happened then. I never considered that perhaps the times were changing, and this mentality may no longer have been acceptable.”

King considers this complexity in her book, which spans the length of Fu’s career while acknowledging the broader societal tensions. “It’s a story not just about food, but it’s really about the unsung labor of women, including my mom, and the generation that grew up with Fu Pei-mei,” she tells me. “In this particular case, I get to talk about Chinese women or women in Taiwan who have done so much domestic labor in terms of cooking meals for their families.”

After a seven-year battle with cancer, Fu died at age 73 in Taiwan in 2004 (a month after Child died in California at age 91), and she was mourned as a “legend of Chinese cooking.”

Thanks to the internet, she lives on. Years after her first disappointing attempt at jiaozi, Fu made the very same dish for her audience on Taiwan Television. Sporting a pink apron and an easy demeanor, she glides her cleaver through garlic and greens and pleats the wrappers like a pro — all while detailing the history of the dish. There’s no sense of anguish or any hint of being a housewife who formerly stumbled over the recipe. A talented personality who has captivated audiences around the globe, Fu stands tall — and grins.

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