In China, I lived in a dormitory, and the government paid for everything - food, buses. In Iowa, I had to run after the bus, and cook for myself. The first weeks in the U.S., I was asking, 'Where is my food?'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I had a working mother. She worked for IBM. My dad lived in another town - not very far away, but another town. So food was - I guess food was my friend.
You know most of the food that Americans hold so dear - things like hamburgers and hot dogs - were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.
I'm a simple hillbilly. I don't like eating modern, industrialized, fast food. I grew up eating home-cooked food. So when I'm traveling abroad, like when I recently received a six-month writing fellowship to Iowa in the U.S., I like to cook my own food.
Sometimes, we didn't have enough to eat. I'd go to school with no lunch money, and my school would have to provide it.
When I was growing up, my parents told me, 'Finish your dinner. People in China and India are starving.' I tell my daughters, 'Finish your homework. People in India and China are starving for your job.'
I had a restaurant in Georgia for a while, and I really miss feeding everybody.
I actually didn't grow up in a household that loved Chinese food particularly, and it's not really my go-to food or anything... We were more a pizza family, being from the Chicago area and all.
I spent a college semester in a small town in Italy - and that is where I truly tasted food for the first time.
I've been a foodie most of my life. I started when I lived for a year in Germany in my early 20s, and here was this new food environment, and I decided I needed to make sense of it. And I found it was the rules of economics that do the best job. Food is a capitalist product of supply and demand.
I was in Berkeley when the food energy in America was in Berkeley. Then it moved to Los Angeles, and I went to Los Angeles. It moved to New York, and I went there.