Serve the People by Jen Lin-Liu

I started reading Serve the People by Jen Lin-Liu, which is pretty great. I’m glad I’m reading non-fiction, and I especially love non-fiction that is about food. The book is divided into parts, and I’m done with Part One, which is about her experiences going to cooking school in China. It’s very interesting to learn about Chinese food, culture, the revolution and the stories of ordinary people. I did not know much about the Communist revolution at all, and it’s making me want to find books about it.

I’m glad it was divided into parts because I can never put down a book until I am done with it, and this gave me a natural stopping point. I believe Part Two is about her apprenticing to an actual restaurant, and the people she meets. I’m looking forward to it.

Posted on LibraryThing on Jan 28, 2011, 2:17 am

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Finished Serve the People by Jen Lin-Liu which was very interesting. I’m usually finicky about what meat I eat, so some of the recipes/foods made me shiver a little bit (i.e. the restaurant that only served animal genitalia, eating dogs, snakes, civets, cats...), but aside from that, the book was great! I talked about Part One earlier, in #17 (for some reason, touchstones didn’t work), the rest was about Lin-Liu’s apprenticeships in a noodle shack, a dumpling place and then a gourmet fusion restaurant. She tells the story of the people she meets very well. There’s the determined migrant who owns the noodle shop but has to keep opening new restaurants every few months since he’s only breaking even. He’s been living apart from his wife for eight years and is cheated regularly by his niece who works for him. There’s Jereme Leung, the Chinese celebrity-ish chef she works under, and his life story. There are many, many slices of Chinese life.

An interesting quote/tidbit:

When I started writing about food, two years before I enrolled in cooking school, I started by interviewing old Chinese chefs, most of whom began their careers not long after the Communist Revolution. I’d ask them how they got interested in cooking. I quickly learned that it was a stupid question. The answer was always the same: “I wasn’t interested. I didn’t have a choice.” Under China’s state-planned economy, the government drafted people for their jobs, ...”

This makes total sense, of course, but it was still funny to read about it in a book devoted to food :). Even today, cooking isn’t an art in China, it’s just a low paying job. I’m from India, and my family ran a restaurant for a while, so it was very familiar to me - people are not drafted into their jobs, but there is no glamour associated with cooking, and people who specialise in one form of cooking generally cannot cook anything else.

It was also interesting to read about how the Chinese perceive Chinese-Americans like Ms. Lin-Liu, and how they were unable to comprehend the concept of a Chinese-American!

The recipes scattered throughout the book were a great idea (although I’m biased; I always think recipes are a great idea.) I probably will not try a lot of them out, but the noodles and the dumplings look interesting. There’s also a eggplant sauce that looked pretty cool.

Anyway, definitely a good read!

Posted on LibraryThing on Jan 28, 2011, 8:46 pm