A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts | A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts
Nov.14.2009
As a child, the only trip my parents took me on was to Southern China, to visit my dying grandmother. My parents spent months applying for various travel documents, retrieving permits from the local police and standing in long lines for days to buy the train tickets. When we had to spend a night...
|
Nov.05.2009
For three years I worked as the food editor for Martha Stewart's magazine, Body+Soul. I began with my own food column, "Yin/Yang Diner" in which I developed recipes based on the Chinese concepts of Yin/Yang balance and harmony. Before long I was asked to develop all of the recipes for...
|
|
Nov.03.2009
In Chinese folklore, hungry ghosts devour everything they can find and are never satisfied. We may scoff at their appalling lack of self control. Yet if we look around, how many of us have become entwined in the same fate?
In the story "Tofu with Chili-Garlic Sauce" from A Banquet for...
|
Oct.30.2009
While I was writing A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts, I frequently wondered if at some time every child has fantasized about having a powerful ghost come to their aid. The brightest light in my childhood was torn from me when, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, my father was imprisoned for the...
|
|
Oct.29.2009
The last boyfriend I dated in China, before I left to attend graduate school in the US, was an army officer whose father was a general. One afternoon at work I received a distraught call from him asking to see me immediately. I met him in a park near the Seismological Bureau where I was working...
|
Oct.27.2009
As a young girl living under the Communist system in China, nothing was more thrilling for me than breaking government rules and getting away with it. I traded ration tickets at the black market, and bought meat and eggs from the "back door," where Communist Party members obtained their...
|