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COOKING
WITH COURAGE
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LILY KWOK
British-Chinese
lawyer Helen Tse's attempt to collect her restaurateur family's most
famous recipes into a cookbook instead turned into a tale covering
four struggling generations and involving murder, gambling and triads.
When Helen,
Lisa and Janet Tse announced their plan to open a modern Chinese
restaurant called Sweet Mandarin in Manchester, their parents were
not pleased.
For Eric and
Mabel Tse, seeing their three ambitious, aspirational and
professional daughters being drawn back to the very trade they had
worked so hard to escape was a recipe for disaster. But for
29-year-old tax lawyer Helen, this was not just a business
enterprise. It was a gesture of gratitude to an extraordinary family
history that included brutal murder, ruinous gambling, triads and 70
years of devotion to cooking. Her extraordinary memoir, Sweet
Mandarin, stretches across four generations and encompasses a journey
from rural Guangdong to 1920s Hong Kong, on to 1950s Britain and beyond.
But it was so
nearly never written. |
"The
book was an accident. I wanted to write a cookbook that compiled the
popular recipes from my family history and explain where the food
came," Helen says.
"But
when I went to my publishers they said they wanted the story behind
it because there were already plenty of cookbooks out there.
Apparently we are [among] the first British-born Chinese family to
have their story published. I guess the cookbook will have to wait."
Helen's skill
lies in combining the fine detail of food preparation, past and
present, with the history of her family, largely seen through the
eyes of her grandmother Lily Kwok, a formidable but intensely human
matriarch now aged in her 80s.
Born into
poverty in a village outside Guangzhou in 1918, Lily was one of six
sisters. Her father, Leung, was a peasant with ideas above his
station and an enlightened view of the role
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