Leslie Li

In this powerful, touching memoir of a critically acclaimed Chinese American writer, taste becomes the keeper of memory and food the keeper of culture when Nai-nai, her extraordinary grandmother, arrives from mainland China. Leslie Li's paternal grandfather, Li Zongren, was China's first democratically elected vice president, to whom Chiang Kai-shek left control of the country when he fled to Formosa (Taiwan) in 1949. Nine years later, Li's wife, Nai-nai, comes to live with her son's family in New York City, bringing a whole new world of sights, smells, and tastes as she quickly takes control of the kitchen. Nai-nai's tantalizing exotic cooking opens up the heart and mind of her American granddaughter to her Chinese heritage—and to the world. Through her grandmother's traditional cuisine, Leslie bridges the cultural divide in an America in which she is a minority—as well as the growing gap between her rigid, traditional father and her progressive American mother. Interspersed throughout her intimate and moving memoir are the author's personal recipes, most from Nai-nai's kitchen, that add a delicious dimension to the work.

From the last days of warlordism in the early 20th century, to the founding of the Chinese republic under Sun Yat-sen, to the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), to the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) and the founding of the People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong, to the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in 1989, this book is the 100-year odyssey of Bittersweet, a headstrong peasant woman who rises from poverty and endures abandonment, patriarchy, and revolution as the wife of the second most powerful man in China. Unmarried at nineteen and tormented by her jealous sister-in-law, Bittersweet defies custom and arranges her own marriage to an officer in China's republican army whose favorable destiny matches Bittersweet's own. As her husband Delin's star rises with every victory in battle, Bittersweet's star rises along with it. When she gives birth to a son, her position is assured. But while her husband fights enemies on the battlefield—and the deception of his envious commander-in-chief Chiang Kai-shek—uncertainty of a different stripe intrudes upon Bittersweet's already unsettled life in the form of Dejie, her husband's beautiful and arrogant concubine. By skillfully employing the very rules that men have devised to justify their own privileges and carefully cultivating friendships and alliances, Bittersweet gains agency and authority, all the while remaining the picture of dutiful daughter-in-law and obedient wife. She has a single ambition—to see her family safe and together again.