Monday, May 17, 2010

Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah



I wrote previously that I don’t tend to like books written by Asian-Americans about the immigrant experience. However, I found myself picking up yet another one while I was sat the library last week. I picked this one up because it looked like it was about the Asian-American author’s journey of going back to live in China, which is something that I also did. I thought this book would help me process my own experience.

As I started reading the book though, I found out it was fiction, not a memoir.
This is the story of Isabelle Lee who, after being fired from her New York job as a magazine fact-finder, moves in with her sister in Beijing. She finds a job reviewing restaurants for an ex-pat magazine and throughout the year comes to fulfill some of her own dreams.

I sped through this book. I could tell that the author really did live in China and many of her descriptions about the confusion surrounding a Chinese-American identity hit home for me. This isn’t just pop fiction. There’s a lot of heart here.

A quote from the book: “I may think of myself as American, but that is an identity that a whole city, a country, my friends, cannot accept. I may think of myself as American, but it is my race, my Chinese-ness, that is the only part of me people understand.”

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