Eat Everything Before You Die: A Chinaman In The Counterculture (Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies)

Rating:
Summary: The Soup Tastes Great
Review: Jeffrey Paul Chan's fictional tale of Chris Columbus--Chinese American everyman-- and his richly idiosyncratic extended family, endows an already fascinating cultural history with the tangible tastiness of sex, drugs and fermented red bean. My senses were so taken with the novel's swirls of fish paste and fresh sweat that I almost missed the striking syntactic nuggets of social comment (i.e. "the bamboo curtain") fried up by the author.

One of my favorite things about the book is how much its structure mimics its central metaphor.  My relationship to the text, especially upon completion but also throughout, was the same I might have if presented with one of the fishy melanges described so beautifully within it. As I taste, I am not positive if I recognize cilantro or parsley -- is that a hint of ginger, even?  Rather, the flavors mingle in such a way as to blur my discrete understanding of each ingredient. Likewise, while I wouldn't trust my accuracy if asked to recreate a recipe from the Neon Moon to the commune, the soup tastes great.  Ultimately, I am thankful that I am not granted a clarity that Chris, the protagonist, himself doesn't have.  As the reader, I am offered the vicarious experience of displacement; I am dual, too; I am myself not always sure why I ended up West when I tried to go East.  And I don't think I'd want it any other way.