Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China by Jen Lin-Liu

From the Publisher

As a freelance journalist and food writer living in Beijing, Jen Lin-Liu already had a ringside seat for China’s exploding food scene. When she decided to enroll in a local cooking school—held in an unheated classroom with nary a measuring cup in sight—she jumped into the ring herself. In Serve the People, Lin-Liu gives a memorable and mouthwatering cook’s tour of today’s China as she progresses from cooking student to noodle-stall and dumpling-house apprentice to intern at a chic Shanghai restaurant. The characters she meets along the way include poor young men and women streaming in from the provinces in search of a “rice bowl” (living wage), a burgeoning urban middle class hungry for luxury after decades of turmoil and privation, and the mentors who take her in hand in the kitchen and beyond. Together they present an unforgettable slice of contemporary China in the full swing of social and economic transformation.

Publishers Weekly

Chinese-American journalist Lin-Liu's delightful mixture of memoir and cookbook records her years living and working in Shanghai and Beijing, when she attended a vocational cooking school and discovered a passion for Chinese cooking and culture. Growing up in the U.S. to Taiwan-born parents, the author admits feeling "alienated" from her heritage when she first moved to China in 2000; a graduate of an American journalism school, she eventually became the food editor at TimeOut Beijing. Moving between Shanghai and Beijing, she begins her account with her frustrating yet ultimately rewarding study at the Hualian Cooking School in Beijing, where she apprenticed to one of the school's instructors, Chairman Wang, an old-style cook raised during the Cultural Revolution, who taught the author the rudiments of chopping, shopping and how to pass the cooking exam. Despite the flimsy certificate, bias against women working in professional kitchens and the reluctance to hire foreigners, Lin-Liu found work at Chef Zhang's noodle stall serving migrant workers and at the popular dumpling house Xian'r Lao Man; she later snagged a plum internship at Jereme Leung's upscale Shanghai restaurant, Whampoa Club. Incorporating stories of many of the Chinese she worked alongside (and their recipes), as well as trips to the MSG factory in Henan or to the rice-growing Guangxi province, Lin-Liu offers a thoroughgoing, spirited celebration of overcoming cultural barriers. (July)

Kirkus Reviews

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 "sidedishes": 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.

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Table of Contents