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Summary
Summary
This alluring novel of friendship, love, and cuisine brings the best-selling author of Lost in Translation and A Cup of Light to one of the great Chinese subjects: food. As in her previous novels, Mones's captivating story also brings into focus a changing China -- this time the hidden world of high culinary culture.
When Maggie McElroy, a widowed American food writer, learns of a Chinese paternity claim against her late husband's estate, she has to go immediately to Beijing. She asks her magazine for time off, but her editor counters with an assignment: to profile the rising culinary star Sam Liang.
In China Maggie unties the knots of her husband's past, finding out more than she expected about him and about herself. With Sam as her guide, she is also drawn deep into a world of food rooted in centuries of history and philosophy. To her surprise she begins to be transformed by the cuisine, by Sam's family -- a querulous but loving pack of cooks and diners -- and most of all by Sam himself. The Last Chinese Chef is the exhilarating story of a woman regaining her soul in the most unexpected of places.
Author Notes
Nicole Mones is the prizewinning author of three previous novels, The Last Chinese Chef , Lost in Translation , and A Cup of Light , which are published in more than twenty-five countries.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A recently widowed American food writer finds solace and love-and the most inspiring food she's ever encountered-during a visit to China in Mones's sumptuous latest. Still reeling from husband Matt's accidental death a year ago, food writer Maggie McElroy is flummoxed when a paternity claim is filed against Matt's estate from Beijing, where he sometimes traveled for business. Before Maggie embarks on the obligatory trip to investigate, her editor assigns her a profile on Sam Liang, a half-Chinese American chef living in Beijing who is about to enter a prestigious cooking competition. Sam's old-school recipes and history lessons of high Chinese cuisine kick-start Maggie's dulled passion for food and help her let go of her grief, even as she learns of Matt's Beijing bed hopping. Though the narrative can get bogged down in the minutiae of Chinese culinary history (filtered through the experiences of Sam's family), Mones's descriptions of fine cuisine are tantalizing, and her protagonist's quest is bracing and unburdened by melodrama. Early in her visit, Maggie scoffs at the idea that "food can heal the human heart." Mones smartly proves her wrong. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Food writer Maggie McElroy fights a losing struggle with grief following her attorney husband's death. When a woman in China files a paternity claim against the estate, Maggie pulls herself together and rushes to Beijing to find the mother and determine her charge's validity. Maggie's editor suggests that as long as Maggie must travel to China anyway, she should research an article about a young American-born Jewish Chinese chef. Determined to open a restaurant dedicated to the most ancient examples and purest principles of Chinese cuisine, this young chef has begun a translation of his grandfather's celebrated book about cooking in the imperial court. Under the guidance of his kitchen-savvy uncles, he must also prepare to compete in a nationwide culinary competition. In Mones' skilled hands, the grandfather's memoir becomes a book within the novel. Mones' achievement appeals not just to devotees of fiction but equally to anyone interested in Chinese cooking. --Mark Knoblauch Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN 1893, André Gide coined the term mise en abyme - literally, "placing into the abyss" - to describe the technique of framing a story within a story. Contrary to what the TV show "Lost" might imply, mise en abyme does not translate as "evasive flashback device (signaled by spooky whooshing sound)." Ovid, Chaucer and Shakespeare nestled tales within tales to deepen the "reality" of their framing stories. More recently, the formidable abyss has been made safe for tour bus explorers by writers with less audacious literary itineraries. Nicole Mones's third novel, "The Last Chinese Chef," features a story interrupted by excerpts from a 1925 culinary masterpiece titled "The Last Chinese Chef" (also written by Mones), and is as unrelated to the old abyss as General Tso's chicken is to an elaborate dish one of its characters makes from tofu and a sauce of 30 crabs. For this, Mones should not be faulted; her novel is more "Mostly Martha" than "Metamorphoses." Still, it's worth recalling the philosophical ambitions driving mise-en-abymers when savoring the works of these very distant offspring. Mones, who often writes about Chinese food for Gourmet magazine, ran a textile company in China for 18 years. The enthusiasms and expertise displayed in her embedded texts enrich but fail to rescue the frame story, a predictable 2-D romance about the healing powers of pork spare ribs in lotus leaf. The plot: Newly widowed, workaholic Maggie McElroy is a columnist for Table magazine living on a boat in California. She discovers that her husband, a lawyer and frequent business-tripper to China, had an affair and possibly fathered his mistress's child. Maggie must travel to Beijing to deal with a patrimony claim, as well as the emotional consequences of her husband's infidelity. Fortunately, Ruth Reichl - I mean Sarah - comes to the rescue with a work assignment. Sarah is Maggie's guardian angel editor, and even though Maggie's expertise is American food ("not the haute stuff, either"), Sarah greenlights her proposed profile of a Chinese-American-Jewish chef named Sam Liang. Sam is opening a restaurant in Beijing; he's also translating his grandfather's 1925 food classic, "The Last Chinese Chef," into English. With her cook-off palate and her amiable foodie ambition, Maggie resembles a psychically wounded Rachael Ray. "Could the food in China be truly exceptional? It was possible, she thought now." But only possible. Mones sketches her quaintly xenophobic protagonist with transformation in mind; in a story where the emotional journey mimics that of a Hollywood date movie, there can be no enlightenment without sweet cluelessness. Eleven dutifully written pages into the book, Maggie is already in Beijing. She consults with her husband's ex-colleague and nightclub buddy, then decides she must meet the 5-year-old girl who may be her husband's daughter. But first a more pressing issue arises: her article. Maggie shadows Sam - long-haired, sexy, publicity-allergic, an "old-fashioned formalist" (i.e., nothing like those showboating Ming Tsai types back in America) - a philosopher-chef prone to such Zen Master flashery as "food should be more than food." Sam's restaurant opening is put on hold, allowing him to wiggle out of his grudgingly agreed-to profile. But wait - Sam's auditioning to be on the national cooking team for the 2008 Games in Beijing, the "Olympic competition of culture." In other words, a perfect article redirect for Maggie and, more important, a perfect segue toward territory Mones herself is more fervent about - namely, the unique tangle of Chinese food and culture, and the ways both have been influenced by the country's volatile political history. But not so fast. There's more, first, about the budding romance, neon lit to all except the lovebirds themselves, whose artificially delayed awareness provides ample opportunity for unintended double entendres. Observing Sam at work in his kitchen, Maggie realizes she likes "the rhythms of the sounds he made, and the raw, unblended smells." Maggie's hand, while she is awaiting Sam's call, "crept into her pocket and lingered on her cellphone." Later, as Maggie's leaving for a massage, Sam looks at her "with a smile, one that seemed to penetrate through her shell to the inside of her, one that said, You're about to feel good." A reader can't be blamed for talking back to characters when they express disbelief in their own paint-by-numbers plot. When Maggie thinks to herself skeptically, "As if food can heal the human heart," this reader couldn't help retorting: As if, Maggie McElroy! While the Maggie-Sam romance achieves a wincing tolerability by the long-foregone conclusion, it functions primarily as a pesky garnish that prevents the reader from eating Mones's entree - like fighting through a thicket of parsley to savor the eight-treasure dongpo pork obscured beneath. Mones becomes a far more relaxed and confident writer when freed from Maggie and her straitjacket of a recovery-via-food-and-love plot. Embedded texts offer her a way to fill in the back story and escape the stifling romance, and you can tell she feels liberated by them - there's a captivating e-mail message from Sam's father describing his own escape from Communist China, and equally absorbing excerpts from "The Last Chinese Chef." Mones also permits herself point-of-view shifts; she movingly inhabits the head of the Chinese mistress's mother, who traces the generational difference between her own life expectations and those of her post-Mao daughter. In addition to the evocative factoids Mones dots throughout - the shiny black floor tiles of the Forbidden City, for example, were soaked in oil for one year - she is admirably adept at capturing the limbo state of the American businessman stuck too long in a country where he will always be an exotic foreigner. For some reason, however, Mones felt she needed a bland wonton skin to enclose the meatier interior of her book. Perhaps, as a cultural guest for decades, Mones worried she would overstep a hospitality boundary by writing entirely from the perspective of Chinese people. As Maggie notes when she arrives in Beijing, "she'd always loved to be the better tourist." Mones is clearly an exemplary tourist. She fails to fashion a convincingly escapist romance for the literary sojourner, but through her piquantly drawn minor characters, her researched "texts" and her invaluably quirky knowledge about Chinese culture and food, she serves us armchair travelers an inspiring meal we can almost, were it not for the parsley thicket of a framing device, taste. Mones captures the limbo of the American stuck too long in a country where he will always be an exotic foreigner. Heidi Julavits's most recent novel is "The Uses of Enchantment."
Kirkus Review
American food writer has a dual assignment in Beijing: cover a chef competition and deal with a paternity claim against her late husband. Maggie, 40, lives on a boat in L.A., adjusting to widowhood after her world-traveling lawyer husband Matt is hit by an errant motorist in San Francisco. She writes a peripatetic column about culinary Americana, but now Matt's former colleague Carey has summoned her to Beijing: Grandparents are claiming Matt fathered their five-year-old granddaughter Shuying, and litigation looms under the (fictitious, alas) Children's Rights Treaty. (Matt did have a brief fling with Shuying's mother, Gao Lan, whom he met in a Beijing club.) Maggie's editor assigns her to profile a Beijing-based Eurasian chef named Sam, scion of the illustrious Laing clan. Sam's grandsire Liang Wei wrote The Last Chinese Chef, the definitive treatise on cuisine based on centuries-old dining traditions at the Forbidden City, where the Liangs wielded woks. Sam's father Liang Yeh fled China for Ohio during the Cultural Revolution. Now Sam has returned to carry on the family tradition under the tutelage of elderly mentors Jiang, Tan and Xie. Sam's Imperial-style ancestral restaurant lost financing, but he is a contender in an upcoming culinary Olympic trial. If he wins a coveted spot on the Chinese team, celebrity chefdom is guaranteed. When Maggie journeys to the south to take a DNA swab from Shuying, Sam tags along to visit dying Xie, who alone can impart sufficient refinement to Sam's wok chops. Maggie learns that another man is most likely the father, but after meeting Gao Lan, now a kept woman whose parents think the money she sends home derives from a career in "Logistics," she resolves to help her anyway. As Sam's audition banquet approaches, Maggie is increasingly drawn to him. Mones (A Cup of Light, 2002, etc.) has a subtle touch when portraying growing affection between genuinely nice people. Meticulously researched gastronomy will entice foodies, even those whose familiarity with Chinese food is limited to takeout. Warning: Avoid reading while hungry. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
From the author of Lost in Translation; the story of a woman coping with her husband's death and a paternity claim against him in Beijing, where his firm had an office. Chinese chef Sam makes all the difference by cooking up some wonderful food. The first fiction ever excerpted in Gourmet. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
