Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China
By Fuchsia Dunlop
Norton, 320 pp., illustrated, $24.95
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s wiped out inventive cooking in China. But by the '90s, the boring, sexless uniformity of Chinese communism was over, and China's extraordinary and ancient cuisine was allowed to flourish.
On assignment from the BBC, Fuchsia Dunlop managed to get herself admitted at the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine. There, as a poor scholarship student, the only foreigner, and almost the only woman in class, she learned the unfamiliar tastes and complicated traditions of Sichuan cooking. She ate everything - from pig's kidneys to rabbit heads - often with some trepidation but always with good humor and manners. When she presented an English dinner of roast beef and potatoes to her Chinese friends, she was surprised by their open disgust and rude rejection of a meal she had labored to prepare. From her formal lessons at the institute and her informal investigations and intrusions in private kitchens and public restaurants, she produced the "Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook." Returning to China as a published writer, she was treated with greater respect, but she never again experienced the warmth and wonder of her first visit.
Dunlop says that 15 years of traveling and eating in China have changed her, but we never really know who she is, so this insight means little to us. She mentions her parents briefly but no other personal attachments. She confesses to loneliness and fear from time to time. But this is primarily a book of information and informed opinion; it is hardly a memoir.
Fool's Paradise
By John Gierach
Simon & Schuster, 211 pp.,
illustrated, $24
John Gierach, who has been writing about fishing for many years, writes as he fishes, at a relaxed, steady pace. Fishing with unhurried smoothness, with no wasted motion and no apparent effort, is the fisherman's ultimate heroic stance: grace under little pressure.
Here Gierach chats us through his adventures of catch-and-release fishing in the Northwest, coolly adjusting to conditions in the weather and water. He rarely goes after the big fish, favoring trout, although he is attracted to muskies, which are not only big but famously hard to catch. He never boasts. He rarely gets to cook and eat what he catches. He enjoys birds and flowers. Fly fishing, as Gierach describes it, is so much a man's game that it doesn't need to show off any of the macho trappings of rougher sports. He recommends low expectations and open-mindedness as the surest ways to enjoy a fishing trip, accepting whatever happens instead of reaching for the stated goal - catching fish. "An old friend of mine always declares success on the premise that we said we were going fishing and we did." Gierach and his pals stand around in streams and rivers, elegantly casting a line over and over again, properly performing a repetitive ritual, each time expecting a different result. He defines this as a form of idiocy, but it is his own chosen form of idiocy.
"After all, fishing is nothing more than the often successful search for something genuine. . . . We're so used to the fake and the packaged that encountering something real can amount to a borderline religious experience." A common-sense kind of guy, Gierach rarely goes in for the mystical, but when he does, he has earned it.
A Good Indian Wife
By Anne Cherian
Norton, 320 pp., $23.95
From the start, I knew there would be a happy ending to this tale of marital mismatch. A marriage is arranged between the reluctant Neel, an Americanized Indian doctor, and Leila, a traditional Indian woman. They marry hardly knowing each other, he returning to his medical practice and his longtime mistress in San Francisco, she arriving friendless and clueless in a strange city and culture. Fortunately, she speaks the language, although with a difficult accent.
After some time, Neel comes to appropriately devalue and dismiss his mistress and properly appreciate and accept his wife. The former - stupid, greedy, and shallow - behaves badly, while Leila - educated, well mannered, and well liked - behaves with propriety. Mostly she waits. She also cooks and cleans. Patience, silence, and compassion are her chief virtues. And these virtues are rewarded. Neel's lying, cheating, and selfishness result in no punishment and little regret. Leila seems pleased with this ending, and it seems the author expects readers to be satisfied with it too. But as an American woman, I am not happy with this conclusion. It reinforces the traditional values of India, but it seems not simply old-fashioned and outdated in 21st-century America but perniciously regressive.
Barbara Fisher is a freelance critic who lives in New York.
