More from Oracle Bones, on the historical baggage our innocent take-out dinners can carry. The author is accompanying his Uighur (Chinese minority) immigrant friend on delivery rounds in DC:
Many customers were lawyers working late; they came down, bleary-eyed, fumbling with wallets and purses. None of them looked at us twice. It would have been a lot for them to process if they had known all the baggage that accompanied their General Tao Chicken. That name was a misspelling of General Tso, or Zuo Tongtang, the brilliant and ruthless Qing general who had expanded the Chinese empire. Under Zuo’s command, in 1884, Xinjiang [the Uighur homeland] had become a Chinese province; and now the Uighurs were delivering his namesake chicken in the American capital. General Tso and Colonel Sanders: great chicken imperialists.
-Hessler, p. 377
The last bit is particularly amusing because KFC is the most popular foreign fast food chain in China, even more than McDonald’s. (This is kind of true in Japan, too, though arguably Starbucks is going to win the war soon. Anyway, they once had a very successful ad campaign in Japan that led all Japanese people to believe that Americans eat fried chicken traditionally every year for Christmas. The myth remains. Colonel Sanders statues get dressed in Santa suits outside restaurants all over the country every winter. We also eat strawberry-decorated cakes with white frosting. You know, in case you didn’t know.)
I’m usually exhausted by Christmas Day. A bucket from the Colonel doesn’t sound like such a bad idea (the big shindig is on Christmas Eve and there is brunch Christmas morning.)
As it is, I’ve resorted to ordering the ham dinners in a box from Meijer. My stepdaughter-in-law, who can sniff a deal from a mile away, discovered one year they sell the unclaimed (pre-ordered) ones for half-price shortly before they close for the only time all year, so we kick everybody out of my house by 5 on Christmas Eve so we can go wait for the announcement. Unfortunately, it didn’t happen for a year or two, so now I just pre-order them at full price.
However, if KFC were actually open on Christmas, I would totally do that and pass out in front of a DVD that someone had gotten in their stocking (I always give them something I want to watch.)
The KFC thing is marketing, but I’m curious about the origin of the strawberry cake myth. This is not food related, but one of my young male Japanese students also once informed me in an essay that it is impossible to find a room in a “love hotel” in Japan on Christmas day. It sounds like a very different celebration there.
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