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Tse knew she was honoring her Chinese family's tradition when she and her sisters opened the Sweet Mandarin restaurant in Manchester, England. She had inherited many delicious family recipes, which had been perfected by her mother and grandmother. What she didn't fully realize was the path her ancestors had paved for her success, built with backbreaking work, ingenuity, and sacrifice. As her mother and grandmother help her prepare for the restaurant's debut, they also share with her their own journeys, revealing many details for the first time.

Tse learns of her family's triumphs: the successful soy sauce business started by her great-grandfather back in China; her immigrant grandmother's move to England and the opening of her restaurant; the secret family recipe for curry paste. But there were also difficult times, including a murder, crippling gambling losses, racism, and painful family separations. Before Sweet Mandarin's opening, the three generations travel back to China to visit family they hadn't seen in decades. Upon arriving at her grandmother's childhood home, Tse meets her great-aunt Mui for the first time and is presented with a family dish they all know and love, Buddha's Golden Picnic Basket. Despite the distance, language barriers, and many years apart, it is the love of cooking good food that continues to unite this Chinese clan. (Fall 2008 Selection)

Publishers Weekly

For Tse, looking ahead to her future meant taking a step back into family history. In 2004, Tse and her two sisters all abandoned promising professional careers to follow a family tradition and opened a family restaurant. "My sisters and I were immersed from birth in the Chinese catering business-the fourth generation of our family to make a living from food." Tse begins with her grandmother's birth in 1918 in a small farming village in southeastern China. Each successive chapter chronologically follows the family's struggles and triumphs from peasant life to prosperity and heartache in Hong Kong in the 1930s, the horrors of the Japanese occupation, life in England from the 1950s to today. Tse poses a question that serves as the core of this delightful, well-written and at times painful memoir: Why would three young, successful 21st-century women, Tse an attorney, one sister an engineer, the other a financier, return to a family business they struggled to escape? In answering this question, Tse engagingly tells the larger story not only of her grandmother's and mother's struggles but the shared story of the many Chinese immigrants who made the journey from mainland China to England and "who also carved out a place in their new homeland through the catering trade." (July)

Stacy Russo - Library Journal

This memoir by Tse, a finance attorney who studied law at Cambridge University, tells of three generations of Chinese women but focuses on the triumphs and hardships of Lily Kwok, Tse's grandmother. Lily's story is nothing short of remarkable. Tse recounts the early death of Lily's father, her work as a wet nurse and maid to wealthy British families in Hong Kong, and her disastrous marriage. The benevolence of Lily's British employers ultimately enabled her to open her own Chinese restaurant in England. Mabel, Tse's mother, followed tradition years later when she, too, opened a restaurant with her husband. Sweet Mandarin is the name of the restaurant Tse and her sisters opened in 2004, bringing the narrative full circle. Wrapped in the cultural and ancestral mystery of food, this memoir will be appreciated by general readers and students of Asian and women's studies. Recommended for public and academic libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

An intimate, unhistorical, uneven synthesis of the stories of three generations of Chinese wives, mothers and daughters. The author, a Chinese-British financial lawyer who now runs a restaurant called Sweet Mandarin with her two sisters in Manchester, England, begins her affectionate, family narrative with the hardscrabble story of her grandmother Lily, born to an entrepreneur and his wife in Guangzhou who only wanted sons but got six daughters instead. Despite a growing business making and selling soy sauce, which took them to Hong Kong in 1925, the family's fortunes turned sour when Lily's father was murdered in his Guangzhou factory by a jealous local gang. Due to the nation's patrilinear traditions, his widow and daughters were essentially turned out of their home. Lily's job as a maid/nanny to the wealthy British Woodmans in Hong Kong eventually brought her to England in the early 1950s. By then estranged from a philandering gambler of a husband, she saved up to bring her children to England and was able to start a Chinese takeout restaurant in Manchester with the money Mrs. Woodman left Lily in her will. Lily's daughter, Mabel, was brought up working in the business and in the late '70s started her own "corner chippy" in Middleton; the author and her siblings toiled there during their growing-up years. Although she belonged to one of the first Chinese families in Middleton, Tse did not feel herself a victim of racism and became thoroughly assimilated into British life. She offers interesting takes on her family's gambling, gang culture in Hong Kong and the stunning misogyny still rampant in Chinese society. An easy-flowing tale that subsumes historical changes in personal histories,especially the plight of the author's grandmother.

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