By the time they went to Lāna’i, Maxine and Earll were looking to overcome the sense of drift that had lingered after the sixties. Earll studied acting at the University of Hawai’i, and Maxine taught high school, writing in her spare time. There was only one other guest at the hotel: Frederick Exley, whose début novel, “A Fan’s Notes,” had been a finalist for the National Book Awards in 1969. Maxine would see him at the bar each morning, though they never spoke. This is a place where writers come, she thought. This is where people find inspiration. She went back to her room and continued writing down stories and memories.
“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts,” the resulting book, was published three years later, when Kingston was thirty-five. In the seventies, publishers had begun responding to America’s social realities by offering challenging, textured depictions of what it meant to be part of a minority. “The Woman Warrior,” which was marketed as a memoir based on Kingston’s upbringing, seemed to adhere to typical preconceptions—the cascading effects of patriarchal traditions, the stern and unaffectionate immigrant parents, the children caught between duty and dreaming. But, unlike most ethnic coming-of-age tales of the time, it seeded doubt about its own authenticity. The characters tell one another stories drawn from Chinese lore and Chinatown gossip, imagining alternative time lines. The book is complex and captivating, a constant toggling between the mundane grit of the family’s laundry business and epic, surreal dreamscapes. By the end, you don’t know which, if any, of these stories are true, or whether they constitute a reliable depiction of Chinese-American life.
Shanghai was opened to the world as a commercial port after the end of the First Opium War in 1843. As a result of the war, British, American and French “concessions” (or enclaves) were set up successively in 1845-46. Despite the shadow cast by the humiliating surrender of China’s sovereignty over these districts, the colonists residing in them introduced many opportunities for the rest of the city, opportunities that saw Shanghai grow from a small town at the mouth of the Yangtze River to the largest metropolis in the so-called “Far East.” The influences of a recently industrialised West mingled, interacted and cross-pollinated with the traditions of a culture that had developed over many centuries. As a contact point between East and West, with its unique location, Shanghai paved the way, acting as a testing site where various ideological and cultural ideas were welcomed, accommodated and re-imagined. Among these ingredients was a complex and diverse literary tradition that established Shanghai as, arguably, the literary capital of China.
Love has not destroyed me, but it has helped to create me. It has made me a better lover and creator. In return, I make my memories of love into objects—not archives of experience, but relics of vision. The story of some way that I saw, before I changed and had to look away. If I’m lucky, they will be mirrors for those I’ll never meet.
You might think that being the wife of René Redzepi, chef and owner of the world-renowned Noma, might be challenging if you also love to cook. But you’d be wrong—Nadine Levy Redzepi may well be the best chef in the Redzepi household. “René is not demanding at all. I just think he is appreciative of someone cooking for him, since he spends so much time cooking for others,” she says.
Not only does she help run the Noma franchise, she also runs the household, does all the shopping and cooking for six people, throws together last-minute dinners for guests with aplomb. She even managed to write a best-selling cookbook in her spare time.
Again and again, throughout this entertaining and brazenly improbable novel, Bennett stops readers — or at least stopped this white reader — in their tracks with such pointed observations about privilege and racism. As another melodramatic novelist, Charles Dickens, recognized: If you tell people a wild and compelling enough story, they may just listen to things they'd rather not hear.
My last of days was there to contemplate
when words absconded from me
as long ago as Nineteen-forty-one.
I must have heard the nurses talk of death.