Chinese American Eyes: Dining with Cartoonist Paul Fung

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

Dining with Cartoonist Paul Fung

Believe It or Not!: Wonder Book of Strange Facts, Universal Guild, 1957

... Recently I dined in New York’s Chinatown with Paul Fung, the Chinese artist. Much food and much talk. A real Chinese dinner has from twenty to thirty courses and lasts five hours. ...

Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), September 6, 1932: My New York

And the Chinese food at Lotus Village, in West 47th street, being the only veritable Chinese fare in the midtown section, according to Paul Fung, the artist; and he ought to know. ... The Igloo, a sort of egg roll, is particularly unnerving until you savor it.

Graphic Story Magazine #11, Summer 1970

Will Gould interview

Page 37:

I palled around with Paul Fung more than any of the other cartoonists. Paul was on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer when Billy DeBeck came through and brought him in to New York. He inked Barney Google. Then he took over Dumb Dora after Chic Young had to drop it. Later, he did some stuff for Jack Lait. We had a lot in common. He liked to play golf, and he used to play the organ well, and we had a lot of fun. We’d go out and eat at three o’clock in the morning—first time I had chili on a hot dog. I can still taste it.

The Normal Alumni Columns, March 1939, Louisiana State Normal College

The article, “From a Columnist’s Cook-Book”, begins here.

Page 21:

... Paul Fung, the cartoonist, took me up three flights off Pell Street one morning to the most astonishing—and inedible—repast I have ever tackled. He promised a “Manchu Emperor’s meal”; it’s no wonder the line is rapidly dying out. We had bird’s-nest soup, shrimp floating in money, fish with a kind of chocolate sauce, an omelet studded with bamboo shoots and what tasted exactly like the Chinaberries I sampled as a boy on Normal Hill. The eggs, incidentally, were surely young when the Chinese Wall was laid out. The meal was accompanied by a thimble-full of “Tiger-Bone Wine”, a brew alleged to be rice wine with the jaw-bone of a tiger inserted into the keg for ageing purposes. But that meal was unfortunate and I couldn’t take it; many other settos with Chinese dishes have been memorable and delightful. ...