![]() ![]() 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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