Letter of Recommendation: Rotisserie Chicken
“The bird comes in its plastic container, often with a little handle so it can be carried handbag-style. It’s hard to resist its rosemary-scented siren call from the heated supermarket rack. Rotisserie chicken and I go way back: My mother tells me that when I was a baby in a rural Chinese village, my grandmother would dispatch one such meal to us each week via the local bus. To the villagers’ astonishment, I — diaper-clad, 9 months old — consumed each protein delivery with ecstatic abandon.
Later on, our favorite pastime in 2000s Shanghai was picking up pirated American DVDs from our street vendor and demolishing a rotisserie chicken in front of a marathon of bootlegged new releases from across the Pacific. Our fingers would rip apart the caramelized skin (that escaping puff of steam!) to tear off a juicy thigh at the joint, shred breasts strip by strip from the spinal cartilage, dig our nails into the neck grooves where dark flesh hid between bones. We worked with mechanical precision: The internal cavity, dismantled, yields secret pockets of meat, and the rib-cage membrane encases the livery richness of offals. By the time we were done, the chicken was a mound of bones.”
This story appeared in May 2025 in The New York Times Magazine.
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