A bright, winning glimpse inside a rapidly changing nation.
How learning to cook in China enabled the author to embrace her cultural heritage.
Becoming a chef was not her parents’ idea of a successful career, admits Time Out Beijing food correspondent Lin-Liu. They hadn’t emigrated from Taiwan to America and sent their daughter to an Ivy League college so that she could enter the “lowliest of Chinese occupations.” But the author, who moved to China in 2000 to pursue a freelance journalism career, “took up Chinese food with a fervor that came second only to my passion for writing.” She enrolled in the vocational Hualian Cooking School in central Beijing, where she dutifully listened, bowed, copied and even considered cheating on her final exam, as the other, mostly male students did. However, the school’s elderly factotum, Chairman Wang, took Lin-Liu under her wing, imparted valuable traditional cooking methods and gradually shared some staggering details of her life during the Cultural Revolution. The author displays fond respect as she chronicles China’s epic transformation through the stories of the people she met. In one restaurant, she wrapped dumplings next to a divorced woman who lost a fortune paying “snakeheads” to arrange a marriage with a Taiwanese. Despite being female and a foreigner, she managed to get a job in Shanghai’s Whampoa Club, where glamorous, successful chef Jereme Leung pioneered the use of Western presentation styles and foreign ingredients. Moonlighting as a food critic, the author was shocked by the overt bribes restaurant owners offered but undaunted as she sampled exotic fare like puppy and male animals’ genitalia. Besides a smattering of luscious recipes, Lin-Liu peppers her accessible narrative with three “side dishes”: visits to an MSG factory in Henan, to the rice paddies of Ping’an and to Yangzhou, birthplace of one of China’s four main cuisines.
A bright, winning glimpse inside a rapidly changing nation.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101291-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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