Random Things Tours: Chinese-ish by Rosheen Kaul and Joanna Hu

 

Chinese food is underrated. Reduced to the level of an ´exotic´ and cheap, eventually oily, ´fast food´ it is rather avoided - as per the high ´healthy´ standards of European diet and expected to be...cheap, oily and predictable. Oh, how I pitty those who never had the chance to take a bit of a Peking roast duck! We need more authentic Chinese food stories, explaining not only the history of the very diverse cuisine, but equally the techniques and the choice of ingredients. In fact, the lack of proper knowledge about the ingredients keeps many otherwise dedicate food lovers away from trying to prepare their own variants of Chinese meals. 

Chinese-ish. Home Cooking Not Quite Authentic. 100% Delicious by innovative chef Rosheen Kaul and brilliant illustrator Joanna Hu offers way more than it promises: an authentic food story which reflects the diverse identities of the authors, but also offers an exercise in taste, adapted to the palate of the Australian food lovers.

Even if you are not a great cook - like me, sometimes - the more than 200 pages of illustrations, tips and recipes are delightful in the most hungry way. The above mentioned Peking duck is there, alongside with a smart selection of stocks, noodle soups, dumplings, noodles and rice - I may revise over and over again the notes about ´how to cook rice without a rice cooker´. There are tips about techniques and pantry staples.

The recipes shared in the book convene memories and identity stories - both personal and generational. Through generations, exposed to various influences, those recipes developed into authentic identity stories. The next generation of Asians born in Australia will most likely rewrite those recipes and so will do their children and grand-children. It is part of the beauty of identity to be on the move. For the rest of us, reading about and/or maybe having a bit of the featured meals, it´s a story that repeats itself. Only to become better and better.

I only wish I can travel to Australia soon to experience myself the menus offered by Rosheen Kaul at Etta Dining. 

Rating: 5 stars

Disclaimer: Book offered as part of the book tour but the opinions are, as usual, my own

Film Review: Dead Pigs by Cathy Yan

 

Dead Pigs directed by the Chinese-born American film director Cathy Yan is a perfect tragi-comical parody of Chinese capitalism. Yes, China, that communist country that went through a horrible cultural revolution, got a shiny glamorous re-brand, and red banners with yellowish characters inspired by the Little Red Book (not Hood) by Chairman Mao may still hang on bridges and buildings all over the country. Party technocrats dressed in cheap suits are promoting fancy real estate projects using the knowledge of failed American architects, just because they look good in the glass box.

The movie is inspired by the 2013 Huangpu River incident, when pigs in Shanghai were affected by an unknown pandemic. In the movie, the pigs´ drama is shadowed by Miss Candy Wang drama: a brave permed small entrepreneur, owner of a hair saloon, her 3-generation house is in danger of being demolished because it bothers the bold development plans of a real estate company. She´s also bothered permanently by her loser of a brother, a pig farmer affected by the pandemic, who´s always under threat by lending mafia for his impressive debts. 

Capitalism and professional success in general, are infantilized. This is a parody of a society, where grannies wasting their time in a smoked-filled taverna are enjoying playing with VR games and Gucci claded characters are abusing poor waiters. Faced with demolition of her blue 1-storey house surrounded by rubble, Miss Candy Wang is facing the bugger from the roof, in her night outfit, with ther white puddle with a pink ribbon in her arms. At the end of the incident, all those present, victims and oppressors do not sing the International but a love song that we, we can sing too, as on the screen is shared a Mandarin transliterated version. Welcome to kitsch capitalism!

Spoken in the Shanghai dialect, this movie is a delightful parody that displays the drama of a country in a transition to no one knows where. At least, there are talented film directors to create visual stories of various fragments of this unfolding show.

Rating: 4 stars

Book Review: A Lover´s Discourse by Xiaolu Guo

Something is happening this year with my reading list that two weeks into the year already and I haven´t fully enjoy ANY of my current reads. (There is a book that may have a potential for a four-star review but I am still struggling to finish it, although a relatively short one, but the intensive work of the last days prevented me from it).

A Concise Chinese English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo is a book I´ve read many years ago, in German. I loved very much the idea of the book but was disappointed by the execution. The conversations between lovers were stereotypical and false, sophisticated on purpose.

A Lover´s Discourse is a continuation of the idea - lovers from two different cultural environment, trying to cope with the other´s diversity sometimes in a very adverse and conflictual way. As in the case of the ...Dictionary, when it´s come to intellectual exchange the two lovers are both of them in an alienated state of mind. Here, when he says something, she is wondering rhetorically and keeps telling her own little story. The book is envisioned like a long letter the woman - Chinese-born, moving to London to pursue a PhD, falling for a German-Australian man, a desirable immigrant, getting pregnant, failing to accomplish her dream - writes to her man. The story takes place during the pre- and post-Brexit referendum which amplifies the alienation and jeopardizes her future chances of the future she was aiming at when arrived in the UK. The book is the story of their relationship.

The title is from a book by Roland Barthes and there are other intellectual references in the book, like Walter Benjamin. Indeed, we are wearing the language as a skin, as Barthes said. But the skin has a natural flexibility and so has the language. The fact that the woman in the book applied for a PhD in London, in English, and things that ´hangover´ may be the name of a place, it´s belonging to a very different intellectual category. In relationships when the two belong to different cultural and linguistic realms misunderstandings and alienation and the feeling of loneliness are an occurence, but so it´s the chance of a beautiful dialogue, even it takes place in a language that it is not the mother tongue for any of the two. However, in this book, the fact that the two of them are different and want to maintain their differenve on purpose turns tragi-comical any attempt of a dialogue. 

However, there is something that I really liked about this book that I had access to in audiobook format: the beauty of the cover. 

Rating: 2 stars