Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

Free Food For Millionaires by Min Jim Lee
In her noteworthy debut, Lee filters through a lively postfeminist perspective a tale of first-generation immigrants stuck between stodgy parents and the hip new world. Lee’s heroine, 22-year-old Casey Han, graduates magna cum laude in economics from Princeton with a taste for expensive clothes and an “enviable golf handicap,” but hasn’t found a “real” job yet, so her father kicks her out of his house. She heads to her white boyfriend’s apartment only to find him in bed with two sorority girls. Next stop: running up her credit card at the Carlyle Hotel in New York City. Casey’s luck turns after a chance encounter with Ella Shim, an old acquaintance. Ella gives Casey a place to stay, while Ella’s fiancé gets Casey a “low pay, high abuse” job at his investment firm and Ella’s cousin Unu becomes Casey’s new romance. Lee creates a large canvas, following Casey as she shifts between jobs, careers, friends, mentors and lovers; Ella and Ted as they hit a blazingly rocky patch; and Casey’s mother, Leah, as she belatedly discovers her own talents and desires. Though a first-novel timidity sometimes weakens the narrative, Lee’s take on contemporary intergenerational cultural friction is wide-ranging, sympathetic and well worth reading.

Transparency by Frances Hwang
A largely unlovable cast of hard-nosed Chinese-Americans search for their rightful places in the 10 carefully wrought tales of Hwang’s debut. “The Old Gentleman,” which opens the collection, finds a Taiwanese émigré widower remarryinig for love, ironically scandalizing his divorced, thoroughly Americanized daughter. The complicated relations between two family branches of émigrés drives “A Visit to the Suns”: young women home from college feel “blunted” by their parents’ strictness, while the coddling of the boy cousin leads him to sloth and rudeness. “Garden City” follows the aging, fallen-out-of-love Chens, whose tragic loss of their young son from a brain tumor leaves them at the mercy of an unreliable tenant (“the Christian lady”) in the throes of her own private misery. Several stories resonate with youthful pangs of heartache and rebellion: “Blue Hour” finds a group of mid-20s friends unsure how to behave among themselves on a New Year’s Eve trek into New York City, while “Sonata for the Left Hand” delineates a young woman’s disappointing love affair with an exciting, coldhearted fellow teacher at an upstate New York boarding school. More panorama than thematic set, Hwang’s debut is brisk and direct.

Strangers From a Different Shore by Ronald Takaki
This popular history of Asian Americans–Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos, and Indians–based frequently on primary sources, shows how they have made their presence felt in America from the early 1800s. Their immigration has been marked by the cruelty of forced labor, poverty, and intense prejudice. Many had come searching for a better life after hearing tales of gold nuggets on city streets, money on trees, and the famed “gold mountain.” Instead, they found the endless chopping of sugar cane, the sweat of laundries, the backache of building railroads. Later generations discovered the lack of opportunity despite prestigious university degrees. This is fascinating reading, highly recommended.

The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer 8. Lee
Readers will take an unexpected and entertaining journey—through culinary, social and cultural history—in this delightful first book on the origins of the customary after-Chinese-dinner treat by New York Times reporter Lee. When a large number of Powerball winners in a 2005 drawing revealed that mass-printed paper fortunes were to blame, the author (whose middle initial is Chinese for prosperity) went in search of the backstory. She tracked the winners down to Chinese restaurants all over America, and the paper slips the fortunes are written on back to a Brooklyn company. This travellike narrative serves as the spine of her cultural history—not a book on Chinese cuisine, but the Chinese food of take-out-and-delivery—and permits her to frequently but safely wander off into various tangents related to the cookie. There are satisfying minihistories on the relationship between Jews and Chinese food and a biography of the real General Tso, but Lee also pries open factoids and tidbits of American culture that eventually touch on large social and cultural subjects such as identity, immigration and nutrition. Copious research backs her many lively anecdotes, and being American-born Chinese yet willing to scrutinize herself as much as her objectives, she wins the reader over. Like the numbers on those lottery fortunes, the book’s a winner.

Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home by Kim Sunee
On making Sunee’s acquaintance in the introduction to this charming memoir, it’s hard not to envy the young woman swimming laps in the pool overlooking the orchard of her petit ami’s vast compound in the High Alps of Provence, but below the surface of this portrait is a turbulent quest for identity. Abandoned at age three in a Korean marketplace, Sunee is adopted by an American couple who raise her in New Orleans. In the 1990s she settles, after a fashion, in France with Olivier Baussan, a multimillionaire of epicurean tastes and—at least in her depiction—controlling disposition. She struggles to create a home for herself in the kitchen, cooking gargantuan meals for their large circle of friends, until her restive nature and Baussan’s impatience with her literary ambitions compel her to move on. The gutsy Cajun and ethereal French recipes that serve as chapter codas are matched by engaging storytelling. Alas, for all Sunee’s preoccupation with the geography of home, her insights on the topic are disappointingly slight, and the facile wrapup offered in the form of resolution seems a shortcut in a book that traverses so much rocky terrain.

No related posts.