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THE SEARCH FOR GENERAL TSO | PRESS NOTES

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CONTENTS:

Short SynopsisPress ContactProduction CreditsDirector BioLong Synopsis

SHORT SYNOPSIS

Who was General Tso? And why are we eating his chicken? The Search for General Tso is a feature-length documentary exploring the phenomenon of Chinese American food through the lens of America’s most popular Chinese takeout meal. On a lively journey through restaurants, Chinatowns, and the American appetite, the film seeks out the origins of General Tso’s Chicken—and in the process, tells a larger story of cultural struggle, acceptance, and exchange. Interviews with historians, chefs, and customers punctuate behind-the-scenes visits to Chinese restaurants from New Orleans to Shanghai. A quest brimming with mystery and humor ends in a surprisingly poignant visit with the 92-year-old inventor of the chicken that conquered America.

PRESS CONTACT

David Magdael President/CEODavid Magdael & Associates600 W. 9th Street, Suite 704Los Angeles, CA. 90015Office 213 624 7827Cell 213 399 1434Email:  dmagdael@tcdm-associates.com

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Directed by IAN CHENEY Produced by JENNIFER 8. LEE & AMANDA MURRAYEdited by FREDERICK SHANAHANCinematography by IAN CHENEY & TAYLOR GENTRYOriginal music by BEN FRIES & SIMON BEINSAnimation by SHARON SHATTUCKCo-Produced by CURTIS ELLIS, DONALD LACEY, ERIC T. LEE, JULIA MARCHESI &

LILY SPOTTISWOODEAssociate Producers CYNTHIA LEE & TAYLOR KRAUSSAdditional Editing IAN CHENEYSound Editor BARBARA PARKS

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Re-Recording Mixer PETER LEVINAudio Post Facility SPLASH STUDIOS NYCAssistant Editors BEN NIMKIN & TRICIA HOLMESAdditional Cinematography JACK SHANAHAN, ARTEM AGAFONOV, TAYLOR KRAUSS & NICK BERGERColorist ALEXANDER BERMANDistribution Advisory Services CINETIC MEDIA

DIRECTOR BIOGRAPHY

Ian Cheney grew up in Massachusetts and Maine, and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. from Yale University.

After graduate school, Ian directed the short documentary TWO BUCKETS, about a reclusive loner living in the woods of mid-coast Maine. TWO BUCKETS won a WGBH-Boston “6:55” grant and was broadcast on WGBH-Boston in 2006.

From 2003-2006, Ian co-created, co-produced and starred in the feature documentary KING CORN, about the role of corn in America’s epidemics of obesity and type-II diabetes. Premiering on PBS’ Independent Lens in 2008, KING CORN was released theatrically in 60 cities, awarded a George Foster Peabody Award in 2009, and followed by a short sequel entitled BIG RIVER.

Ian subsequently directed the feature documentary THE GREENING OF SOUTHIE, about the men and women who built Boston’s first residential green building. SOUTHIE aired as the 2008 Earth Day broadcast on The Sundance Channel, was released theatrically in a dozen cities, and was subsequently featured in The New Yorker and on Good Morning America.

Ian’s film TRUCK FARM explored urban agriculture through the story of an old pickup truck with a garden growing in its bed. TRUCK FARM screened in over 150 communities, won numerous film festival awards, and inspired a nationwide school garden contest and a fleet of 20+ mobile gardens in cities around the country. The film was broadcast on PBS in 2012. 

Ian was also a contributing cinematographer on the Oscar-short-listed documentary UNDER OUR SKIN, and was the outreach producer for Kaiulani Lee’s film about pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, A SENSE OF WONDER.  In 2011, Ian and longtime collaborator Curt Ellis were given the prestigious Heinz Award for their work in environmental advocacy.

Ian’s film THE CITY DARK is a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearing night sky. It premiered in competition at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2011, and theatrically at New York’s IFC Center in January 2012. A New York Times Critics’ Pick, the film aired nationwide on PBS’ POV and was nominated for a 2013 Emmy for Outstanding Science & Technology Documentary. 

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Ian’s latest production, THE SEARCH FOR GENERAL TSO, a collaboration with author Jennifer 8. Lee, was awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the New York State Council of the Arts, and will premiere at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.  

Ian is currently at work on three new films: BLUESPACE, NORTH STARS, and THE TRANSLATORS, a collaboration with author Reif Larsen. 

Ian is a co-founder of FoodCorps, an Americorps farm-to-school program aimed at improving school nutrition. He has served on film festival panels and juries including South by Southwest, the Wisconsin Film Festival, and the Camden International Film Festival. Since 2011 he has been a visiting professor of film at the Università degli Studi di Scienze Gastronomiche in Italy. Ian travels frequently to show his films, lead workshops, and give talks about sustainability, astronomy, and the human relationship to the natural world. LONG SYNOPSIS

The Search For General Tso unfolds in three parts.

Part I, Mystery in the Menus, highlights the myths and origin stories surrounding our hero. The trail begins with a simple question: who was General Tso? Across American sidewalks and dinner tables, theories abound: “He must have come up with the dish himself.” “They just named it after somebody nobody’s ever heard of.” “I picture a Mongolian warrior?” Looking to China for an answer, the film lands on the streets of Shanghai, where few locals recognize the dish but many know the name: Zuo Zongtang, or General Tso, the fiery leader from Hunan Province.

In Hunan, west of Shanghai, the trail seems to heat up. A local researcher leads us to General Tso’s Hotel, where a bemused hotelier raises a toast with General Tso’s Liquor. We are shown proudly to General Tso’s Kindergarten, General Tso’s Museum, General Tso’s Square, and General Tso’s Home, where furniture is resplendently decorated with images of roosters. Is this where the deep-fried chicken dish began? “He was a very powerful general,” explains Liang Xiao Jin, shaking his head at notion of red nuggets on a bed of broccoli. “But he did not invent this dish.”

Eluded by the true inventor, we move to San Francisco to delve into the broader origins of America’s Chinese food. Experts place us in nineteenth-century California, when the earliest large waves of Chinese immigrants, from Guandong Province, flocked toward the Gold Rush. Author Bonnie Tsui points out that before long, Chinese miners and railroad workers were seen by white Americans as a threat to their own livelihoods. Anti-Chinese violence proliferated. Archival handbills convey the “Chinese Must Go” mentality that culminated in the 1882 Exclusion Act, barring most Chinese immigration to the U.S. until the 1940s. For those who remained: “Restaurant work was one of the few jobs the Chinese could find,” says author Andrew Coe. “And restaurant owners discovered that if they adapted simple dishes to suit American tastes, they could make money.” The first Chinese dish to capture American hearts? Chop suey. In Arizona, the owner of Sing High Chop Suey House describes the dish as a little bit of everything and says, “It was very obvious that it catered to a more Americanized palate.” Chop suey sounded exotic but tasted safe, even familiar. Old-timers at the Grand Canyon Café in Flagstaff describe their first, mystified encounters with chop suey,

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and owner Fred Wong shows the decades-old menu split between Chinese and American fare. Chop suey is as popular as chicken-fried steak.

Animations of chop suey restaurant marquees popping up across the landscape highlight the first American Chinese food craze to pave the way for General Tso. Author Jennifer 8. Lee hints, “Chop suey laid the groundwork for what was yet to come.”

Part II, Diaspora, charts the spread of Chinese restaurants and regional dishes across rural America. Economist Susan Carter explains that from the early twentieth century, Chinese restaurant workers migrated further inland from the coasts, both to escape persecution and to stake out new turf. Chinese restaurants opened all over the U.S., even in remote locales. The migration continues today. In rural New Mexico, we meet Tammy Fang, beloved by locals for her Golden Dragon Restaurant’s lunch buffet, which includes General Tso’s Chicken and corn on the cob. “It can be hard. People think I’m crazy,” she says. “We’re the only Chinese family in town!”

Over lunch at his favorite dim sum spot, we meet David R. Chan, a tax attorney and self-proclaimed “restaurant observer” who has eaten at over 6,000 Chinese restaurants. He suggests that the Chinese American diaspora was enabled largely by the traditional Chinese family and district associations carried over by immigrants to the U.S. New arrivals could turn to an association for help finding work and acquiring new skills. In New York’s Chinatown, Eddie Chiu, president of one of the city’s oldest Chinese associations, describes the loneliness and isolation felt by many new restaurant workers across the States. The association’s bulletin board flickers with ads, area codes, and maps of midwestern bus routes. One young Chinese man in line says, “Everyone here is hoping to find restaurant work.”

We meet more restaurateurs who have helped Chinese food stick in surprising places. In Missouri, the elderly David Leong and his enterprising sons, who run Leong’s Asian Diner, describe a trying start in the 1950s and 1960s. After his first restaurant was bombed by xenophobic locals, David Leong adapted his native Chinese cuisine to match midwestern cravings. The results were egg rolls plied with peanut butter, and the now-famous Springfield Cashew Chicken, a fried chicken dish with gravy that seems a close relative of General Tso’s Chicken.

In Louisiana, chef Frank Wong recalls training in his grandmother’s chop suey restaurant in Texas. Catering to Louisiana locals, Frank now prepares spicy Szechuan alligator and crawfish and honey pecan shrimp. Frank’s brother Tommy describes the fusion of southern sweetness and Chinese-Cajun spice. “Isn’t it funny,” he muses, “that Chinese food has become comfort food?”

In response, Don Siegel, author of the kosher Chinese cookbook From Lokshen to Lo Mein, reminisces about the role of Chinese comfort food in his family’s Jewish traditions, during his childhood in upstate New York. Siegel marvels, with a wink, that because the ancient Hebrew civilization predated the Chinese, Jews were forced to survive without Chinese food for 1,500 years.

As other interviewees chime in with their own nostalgia for Chinese takeout boxes and neon signs, historian Robert G. Lee adds context to the fraught process of cultural assimilation. Lee explains that by the 1940s, the U.S. had become allied with China during World War II. With the decline of virulent anti-Chinese violence, and the repeal of the Exclusion Act, Chinese restaurants continued to open across the country. Perceptions of Chinese in America shifted yet again, however, with the Communist

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Revolution. Author Peter Kwong says that amidst heightened fears of Communism, “everything about China was negative—including Chinese Americans, including Chinese food.”

Interest in Chinese food waned until 1972, when President Nixon made his landmark state visit to China. Glued to their televisions, “Americans saw Nixon eat real Chinese food, and they salivated,” says Andy Coe. Nixon’s widely publicized banquet dinners and hearty toasts helped turn the tide for Chinese American restaurants. Through the 1970s, a new wave of Chinese immigrants, from diverse regions of the country, arrived with new and spicy specialties. Among them, one dish stood out.

Part III reveals how a deep-fried chicken dish finally conquered the nation. In New York City in the early 1970s, famed restaurateur Michael Tong opened Shun Lee Palace. “In the 1970s, Americans craved something new. We were the first ones to serve General Tso’s Chicken in the U.S.,” Tong asserts. “But I do have to confess… Taiwan had General Tso’s Chicken in the 1960s.” With a fresh lead, our search for the General rebounds.

Energetic animations, inspired by Chinese shadow puppetry, launch the scene to Taiwan, where we learn of Chef CK Peng. Peng escaped to Taiwan during the 1949 Communist Revolution, and later cooked for the Chinese Nationalist Guomindang government. Author Fuschia Dunlop explains that Peng’s culinary inspiration was his much-missed home province of Hunan, known for its spicy peppers as well as the legendary General Zuo Zongtang, or General Tso. One of the many dishes Peng invented during the 1950s and ’60s to commemorate his homeland was a dish he named “General Tso’s Chicken.”

When Peng learned that New York restaurateurs had visited Taiwan and returned home to copy his recipe for General Tso’s, he found a way to his own restaurant on the Upper East Side. Peng debuted his dish on television for ABC’s “Eyewitness Gourmet,” hosted by Bob Lape. Now retired, Lape remembers the intent and focused Peng preparing his fragrant, spicy General Tso’s Chicken, with ginger and garlic and vinegar. “Americans didn’t get the whole story, though,” laments restaurateur Ed Schoenfeld; it was Peng, late to the scene, who looked like the copycat in New York City. After ups and downs in Manhattan, Peng returned to Taiwan without firmly establishing his claim on the now-ubiquitous dish.

Meanwhile, through the 1970s and beyond, General Tso’s Chicken caught on, becoming a Chinese American menu staple—a dish, not unlike chop sup suey, that sounds exotic but tastes familiar. The recipe was altered from Peng’s spicy, vinegary original. “Chefs took poetic license, adding sugar, adding color,” says Ed Schoenfeld. Chefs across the country chime in with their “secret” ingredients, all to amp up the sweetness that Americans love. A montage of menu printers, fortune-cookie presses, and take-out box factories illustrate today’s massive infrastructure and demand that enable Chinese American food to persist even in far-flung places. As Ed Schoenfeld points out, “Just in orders of General Tso’s Chicken, we’re talking about a business in the billions of dollars.”

What would Chef Peng think? In a contemplative moment, the film lands in present-day Taiwan, where we approach a red-carpeted banquet hall hung with elegant chandeliers. At last, we meet the 92-year-old inventor of General Tso’s Chicken: Chef CK Peng. Seated with his son Chuck, the chef leafs through images of General Tso’s Chicken as shown on countless American restaurant menus. It’s bright red, thickly breaded, surrounded by a halo of green broccoli. “It shouldn’t have broccoli. No scallions,” they agree. CK Peng strikes a somber note: “Americans can’t accept our authentic Chinese food.” He’s dismayed by what his original dish has become.

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Back in Hunan, where both Peng and the General have their roots, is another reveal. Our researcher and guide Liang Xiao Jin tells us he is the fifth-generation grandson of General Tso—and he’s not altogether pleased either. He says, “Americans don’t know the many great things that General Tso has done. They don’t know Chinese culture. They just know the chicken.” Chef Fuschia Dunlop laments that much of what’s most remarkable about China’s cuisine—its diversity, its freshness, its intimate connection to family and community life—is lost in translation. “The world’s most diverse culinary culture,” she says, “Has been reduced in the West to such a very narrow range of dishes.”

In the film’s conclusion, historian Robert Lee offers a counterpoint: perhaps we place too high a value on authenticity; perhaps there is no such thing. Quite simply, people want to eat what’s delicious. Restaurant owners, whether in New York or Taipei, adapt their food to suit those tastes, to find acceptance, to make a living. Chef Peng’s son Chuck expresses pride that the dish his father created has become so popular. “Every day, everywhere, people order Zuo Zongtang’s chicken. I think it’s an honor,” he says. PF Chang’s China Bistro co-founder Philip Chiang remarks that Chinese American food—like Chinese Indian, Chinese West African, Chinese Mexican, and myriad other versions we see in the film’s closing beats—has become a cuisine in itself. As Michael Tong of Shun Lee puts it, as we revisit the menu stylist glimpsed in the film’s opening moments, “I don’t think this dish will disappear. Americans are still enjoying the groovy sauce. And why not?”

THE SEARCH FOR GENERAL TSO | PRESS NOTES