Most mid-career adults facing a professional and personal crisis would see a therapist or perhaps buy a motorcycle.
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan wrote a book about food and family. The former newspaper reporter’s memoir, A Tiger in the Kitchen, has earned excellent reviews and is rapidly climbing the charts on Amazon.com.
Kirkus Reviews called “Tiger a recipe in itself—a dash of conjuring the ancient stories of one's past, a sprinkling of culinary narrative. The result is a literary treat filled with Singaporean tradition, including the surprisingly significant role food plays in the Festival of the Hungry Ghosts and the Moon Festival, among others.”
Born in Singapore but a long time resident of the United States, Tan unspools the thread of her life through the most universal of human experiences: cooking and eating.
You wrote Tiger after your parents got divorced and the Wall Street Journal cut your job. How did those events influence your desire to write the book?
When the earth moves under your feet all of a sudden, it does make you take stock of your life and your state of happiness. Looking back, though, I think I've always had this book in the back of my head. It took many years of being away from Singapore, from home, from my family to miss it all (and the food) to the extent that it nudged me to take a year off to travel back to discover the recipes, the dishes and the important people of my childhood.
Tiger seems like an attempt to reconnect with your roots in Singapore. Did you feel you had become "too American?"
In many ways, I was very westernized as a child -- I grew up not knowing how to speak Teochew, the Chinese dialect that my family speaks, and not really knowing a lot about my heritage. Like many Singaporeans of my generation, I was raised on McDonald's as well as Singaporean dishes like chicken rice and chili crab. It wasn't until I was actually in America for many years that I felt a yearning for a lot of the foods I grew up loving and taking for granted. It was lovely to have a year to reconnect with it all.
You draw a strong relationship between food and family. But does that relationship necessarily apply to modern American society, where people eat on the go and the idea of a traditional sit down family meal seems almost quaint?
Even though many American families don't often have the time to have sit-down family dinners, I think many have fond memories of dishes that they grew up loving -- when I first wrote about going home to learn how to make my late grandmother's pineapple tarts for the Wall Street Journal, I got emails from readers -- many of them not Asian -- who all had a dish that the story reminded them of. One reader talked about her grandmother's sugar cookies; another mentioned her father's sloppy joes -- all of them expressed a deep regret that they had not taken the time to learn how to make them. I think that's something universal -- so many of us are so busy these days we don't often have the time or think to make the time to sit down with our family members to learn how to make these dishes that have defined us. It's a pity.
Reviewers have compared your book to everything from Women Warrior and Julia and Julia to Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. How do you feel about that?
It has been very humbling for me -- I read the Woman Warrior as a teenager and was in complete awe of Maxine Hong Kingston. To be compared to her in any small way -- that really blew me away. I couldn't believe it. And I adored Julie Powell's book when I read it -- it's certainly been a wild ride.
Any thoughts of turning Tiger into a movie or a play? If so, who would play you and your family?
I haven't thought that far ahead! I do love Maggie Q in Nikita-- I understand that she spent some time in Asia and knows Singapore. I hope she reads the book and likes it!
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