Word: gingers
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...traditional Indian meal comprised of vegetable curries, a lentil soup, Indian pickles, flat bread, a dessert and a crispy popadam. My Sindhi special featured a delicate green curry of walnut-sized eggplants flavored with cardamom, a spicy red concoction of chili and okra, and dry roasted pumpkin with ginger and cumin. The dessert was gulab jamun, two deep-fried balls of milk dough soaked in syrup. I finished off my meal with lassi, a frothy, sweetened yogurt drink flavored with rose petals. As I got up to pay the bill, I noticed that my waiter had joined the gun-toting...
...suppose I was asked to review this book because I am a Chinese novelist. But the Chinese women in Wild Ginger and all the other books in the Chinese Chick genre strike me as completely removed from the experience of the contemporary Asian woman. In the novel, Wild Ginger is regularly beaten with belt buckles and has to wrestle with big issues like the struggle for political liberty and the freedom to love. Quite honestly, the major issues I've had to struggle with the past month were a) how to lose weight, b) how to remember where...
...Prepublication reviews have lavished praised on Wild Ginger for being "true-to-life." Too often, however, this true-to-life Asian woman found the characters speaking not in realistic dialogue but in political diatribe. Take Wild Ginger's argument with her mother, in which she lambastes her father: "He was a spy. Spying was his job. He was sent by the Western imperialists. Helping China thrive was his disguise. It was false. Helping the Western imperialists to exploit China was the truth...
...Wild Ginger is in elementary school when she delivers this speech. One marvels over a schoolgirl's concern about Western imperialism, but the novel has scene after scene where Chinese teenagers talk like characters reading from scripts written by the Committee for Right Speeches...
...publishers have promoted Wild Ginger as a great literary novel. One prerequisite of such a novel should be originality. Unfortunately, if you're familiar with the basic elements of Chinese Chick Lit, you already know these characters and have seen these plot twists before. On the rare occasion where Min tries to be innovative?such as a sex scene where the characters make love while reciting Maoist quotations?it just comes off seeming weird. If you like clichEd Chinese heroines and a hackneyed love story, all set against the now-too-familiar backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, this...