A coffee table book photographing the Chinese-American families running restaurants in the most remote corners of the country. Starting with Alaska.
Get Book UpdatesThere are more Chinese restaurants in America than McDonald's, Burger King, and Wendy's combined. Some exist in towns of fewer than 200 people, thousands of miles from the nearest Chinatown.
"General Tso at the Edge" sends photographers to the margins of American geography to document the families behind these restaurants. The neon glow against Alaskan snow. The handwritten menus in towns that don't have a stoplight. The kids doing homework at the back table while their parents cook for the whole town.
This isn't a food book. It's a book about people who carried a culture across an ocean and planted it in places nobody expected. The format is premium: large-format photography, intimate interviews, and the kind of production quality that earns a permanent place on your table.
Placeholder photography — to be replaced with original field work
America's oldest Chinese restaurant — the neon "Chop Suey" sign has glowed above Main Street since 1911.
Above the Arctic Circle, 26 miles north of the tree line — a full Chinese menu in a town of 3,000.
The northernmost Chinese restaurant in the United States — 330 miles above the Arctic Circle, open for decades.
Large-format environmental portraits and landscapes. The contrast between vast, frozen terrain and the warmth of a family kitchen. Professional photographers embedded with each restaurant family.
First-person interviews with the families. How they got there. What they gave up. What they built. Short-form narratives that give the photographs depth and voice.
The first volume focuses on Alaska, where the distance between restaurants can be measured in hundreds of miles, and the stories are as wild as the landscape. More volumes to follow.
"We came because my uncle said there was a town with no Chinese food. He was right. There was no Chinese food because there was barely a town. But people were hungry, and we knew how to cook. That was thirty-one years ago."
"In winter, the river freezes solid. Supplies come by plane. You learn to make do. General Tso's with whatever protein you can get. Sometimes it's salmon. People don't complain."
Sample Excerpt"My parents didn't speak English when they got here. The menu was the first thing they translated — not for themselves, for the customers. Egg Foo Young, Sweet and Sour Pork. Those words came before 'good morning.'"
"People drive two hours to eat here. Not because the food is fancy. Because it's the only sit-down restaurant for a hundred miles. We're part of the infrastructure, like the post office."
Sample Excerpt"The fishermen come in after the boats dock. Hands still smelling like copper. They order the same thing every time — kung pao shrimp, extra rice. They've been ordering it since before our son was born. He's nineteen now."
"When they built the new highway bypass, we thought we'd lose everything. But people kept coming. Turns out a town will drive out of its way for familiar food."
Sample ExcerptThe generation that built these restaurants, the ones who arrived with nothing and opened kitchens in towns they couldn't pronounce, is aging out. Their children are going to college, moving to cities, choosing different lives. This isn't a critique. It's what happens.
But when the last family-run Chinese restaurant closes in a town of 300 people in the Alaskan interior, something irreplaceable goes with it. This book exists to preserve that moment before it's gone.
From 71°N in Arctic Alaska to the southernmost city on earth — every restaurant in the book, mapped and documented.
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The most American story is an immigrant family feeding a small town that isn't sure what to make of them, and staying anyway.