Story Description:
St. Martin’s
Press|October 13, 2009|Trade Paperback|ISBN: 978-0-312-60481-3
Spanning almost a
hundred years, this rich and evocative memoir recounts the lives of three
generations of remarkable Chinese women.
Their
extraordinary journey takes us from the brutal poverty of village life in
mainland China, to newly prosperous 1930’s Hong Kong and finally to the
UK. Their lives were as dramatic as the
times they lived through.
A love of food and
talent for cooking pulled each generation through the most devastating of
upheavals. Helen Tse’s grandmother, Lily
Kwok, was forced to work as an amah after the violent murder of her
father. Crossing the ocean from Hong
Kong in the 1950’s, Lily honed her famous chicken curry recipe. Eventually she opened one of Manchester’s
earliest Chinese restaurants where her daughter, Mabel, worked from the tender
age of nine. But gambling and the Triads
were pervasive in the Chinese immigrant community, and tragically they lost the
restaurant. It was up to author Helen
and her sisters, the third generation of these exceptional women, to
re-establish their grandmother’s dream.
The legacy lived on when the sisters opened their award-winning
restaurant Sweet Mandarin in 2004.
Sweet Mandarin shows how the most
important inheritance is wisdom, and how recipes passed down the female line
can be the most valuable heirloom.
My Review:
Helen Tse’s grandmother, Lily was born in a small
village in Southern China in 1918 and is said to be a stubborn woman, but at 88
years of age she is still fit and intelligent.
Helen and her sisters were immersed from birth in
the Chinese catering business – the fourth generation of her family to make a
living from food. Although Helen became
a lawyer, her sister Lisa a financier, and Janet an engineer they all gave up
their well-paying careers to open a restaurant they named Sweet Mandarin in
Manchester, England. All their friends
thought they were crazy to give up white collar jobs for the long, arduous and
unrelenting hours that go into running a restaurant. They viewed it as taking a step backwards in
their lives. However, the older
generation understood.
The business brought the sisters closer together
and allowed Helen to test her entrepreneurial streak and also set the path for
the sisters to be reintroduced to their beloved grandmother and mother by
opening up a bridge between them that crossed East and West, uniting the past
and the present.
Each Saturday morning, Helen, her mother, and her
grandmother shopped at the Chinese grocery store. They purchased stock for the restaurant and
their own home cooking. In the past,
Helen had only known the barest of facts about her grandmother’s long life, but
the weekly shopping trips allowed Lily to begin to reveal her real story to
Helen, bit by bit.
Helen had only been aware of the odd anecdote or
funny character who made up her family folklore – but now the detail and scale
of what Lily had gone through began to emerge.
Each bottle or package Lily picked up in the store was tied to a
different chapter of her life.
Sweet
Mandarin is a courageous true story about a grandmother, a
mother, and a daughter: three generations of independent Chinese women whose
lives take in Guangzhou in southern China in the 1920’s, colonial Hong Kong in
the 1930’s, the horrors of the Japanese occupation and a changing England from
the 1950’s to the present day.
This was an excellent memoir that was remarkable
and one I just couldn’t put down. If
only all of us had such in-depth knowledge of our family’s from four
generations back. The women in Helen Tse’s
family were definitely survivors.
No comments:
Post a Comment