When 18-year-old Fu Pei-mei traveled by herself from her home in China to live in Taiwan in 1949, she joined 1 million other refugees who fled the mainland at the end of the Chinese Civil War. She worked as a typist, married, settled in Taipei, had three children, and gradually – without familial connections – became the most famous TV cook on the island. Fu cooked with precision, and was so adept at explaining what she did, that middle class women stopped what they were doing at home to watch her shows.
There were even neighborhood watch parties. She also had a profound effect on viewers who may not have been interested in cooking. In her book, “ Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food ,” author Michelle T.
King tells a story about a little girl in a desperately poor, unhappy Taiwanese home who watched the elegant Fu with all her ingredients neatly lined up. It made that girl, now a professor of nursing in North Carolina, realize that she could emerge from her chaos. Advertisement Television in Taiwan was in its infancy when Fu began.
She remained a star for four decades, opening a popular cooking school, and writing dozens of cookbooks. Later, when young Taiwanese went to the United States to study, writes King, they usually carried with them a rice cooker and one of Fu’s books. Fu came to cooking out of frustration and humiliation.
She married Cheng Shao-ching and early in their marriage made his favorite boiled dumplings with prawn.