Daughter of Heaven: A Memoir with Earthly Recipes

by Leslie Li

Overview

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 Zogren, was China’s first democratically elected vice president, to whom Chiang Kai-shek left control of the country when he fled to Formosa 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 tantalizingly 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 at home between her rigid, traditional Chinese father and her progressive American-born 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. A loving ode to family and food, Daughter of Heaven is an exquisite blend of memory, history, and the senses.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611456950
Publisher:	Arcade
Publication date:	01/02/2013
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	760,495
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Leslie Li is the author of
Bittersweet: A Novel and coauthor of Enter the Dragon, a book of children’s plays based on Chinese folktales. She has written personal essays and feature articles for various publications, including the New York Times, Gourmet, Saveur, and Travel & Leisure. She divides her time between New York City and Vermont.

Table of Contents

Recipes ix

Preface: Sucking on a Stone xi

Acknowledgments xix

1 A Walk in Nai-Nai's Garden 1

2 Food Shame and Sand-Wishes 11

3 Chinese New Year 23

4 Three Short Fish Tales (and One Shrimp Cocktale) 35

5 Against the Grain 55

6 The Sound of One Stone Falling 69

7 Bitter Rice, Sweet Rice 81

8 In the Forest of Osmanthus Trees 99

9 Dashao 117

10 Moon Cakes, Jade Rabbits, and Elixirs of Immortality 139

11 Seated on a Stone 155

12 Juk Sing 179

13 Clear Brightness and Hungry Ghosts 197

14 The Village with No Name 219

15 Centenary 229

Afterword: If Stones Could Speak 259

Editorial Reviews

Warmly seasoned, sharply observed . . . If food, with its attendant emotions and symbolism, is at the heart of the book, it is just one layer in a very rich composite.

Associated Press Staff

Like an amuse bouche, each vignette in Li's memoir tantalizes with a taste of Li's life as a Chinese-American in suburban New York, leaving readers longing for more delicious tidbits. Li chronicles incidents in her life from her 1950s childhood to her grandmother Nai-Nai's centenary in Guilin, China, in the 1980s. The essays lyrically show the tension in Li's family between her father and mother, between herself and her father, and most of all, between Li's American ways and her Chinese history. Li uses the food of her family to tell her stories: "At a Chinese table," she writes, "it's the unspoken words that count. The meal is the message." A silent meal with her Chinese-born father speaks more of the disintegration of her parents' marriage than explication could. She writes, "I... didn't want him to have to eat alone, not when my parents' marriage was dissolving, like the pierced egg yolk seeping and disappearing into his noodles." The prose comes most alive when Li focuses on Nai-Nai, who lived with the author's family for 15 years when Li was young. Leaping decades ahead, Li returns to China to visit her senile grandmother, and she begins to try to reconstruct Nai-Nai's life. The focus shifts as Li begins writing her novel, Bittersweet, and she includes some of her conjecture about the years her grandmother spent in the U.S. While readers may wish for yet more stories of Nai-Nai and of Li herself, the book is more than satisfying, and the mythical ending (Li recounts a fable of her own) is haunting. Agent, Joanne Wang. (May) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A Chinese-American daughter recalls the kitchen and its chores as a safe haven from the tensions within a family trying to assimilate while maintaining traditional values. It's not news that ethnic cooking forges a vital link to one's cultural heritage in the turmoil of the American melting pot. But Li (Bittersweet: A Novel, 1992), whose paternal grandfather was the first elected president of Nationalist China, conveys surprising depth of feeling in her description of food's impact on her upbringing. Though she begins with a somewhat self-absorbed series of girlhood recollections, the narrative quickly picks up steam with the arrival from China of her grandmother to put at least the culinary side of the house in order. Watching the aging Nai-nai sharpen her cleaver "with the single-mindedness of an axe murderer" on the flagstone porch of their suburban north Bronx home or dodging traffic to access the vegetable garden she has installed on the median of a nearby expressway, the author begins to plumb the relationship of food preparation to the integrity of a Chinese household. Knowledge is imparted with every meal. The painstaking shaping and even tinting of New Year's holiday bread to resemble a peach, for example, evokes that fruit's connotation of longevity, although the fiercely pragmatic Nai-nai suggests that eating the peach itself would probably be better for the teeth. Authentic recipes from Nai-nai and others appear at the end of most chapters. Some seem at first starkly minimalist, but American cooks who think they know their way around a wok may find themselves realizing they've never tried it exactly that way. (One surprisingly recurrent ingredient: brown sugar.) It's anunusual format, but the author artfully blends episodes of gastronomic education with often poignant recollections of a stern father who could never quite bridge the cultural divide between himself and an essentially American daughter. An engaging family portrait enriched by an insider's view of the Chinese kitchen. First printing of 30,000

Kirkus Reviews