Diane Morrow

The Last Chinese Chef [Part Two]: Food for the Soul

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 7, 2007 in Healing Conversation, Recommended Books

[This is a continuation of yesterday’s post on the novel, The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones, which has just been released.] There’s one passage in particular—a conversation between Maggie and Sam Liang, the chef, that I think fits in especially well during this month in which I’m writing about healing conversation. This particular conversation occurs as one of a series of conversations that they have while Sam is cooking and Maggie is watching him cook. Sam has prepared a chicken, Chinese-style, and he offers some of the chicken to Maggie and she begins to eat the chicken and, as she does so, feels herself begin to “melt with comfort.” She speaks: ”Are you going to make this for the banquet?” “No,” he said. “This I made for you.” She looked up quickly. “These are flavors for you, right now,” he explained, “to benefit you. Ginger and cilantro and chives; they’re very powerful. Very healing.” “Healing of what?” she said, and put her chopsticks down. . . “Grief,” he said. ”Grief?” The unpleasant nest of everything she felt pressed up against the surface, sadness, shame, anger. . . Her voice, when it came out, sounded bewildered. “You’re treating me for grief?” “No,” he insisted, “I’m cooking for you. There’s a difference.” She tried to master the upheavals inside her. She would not cry in front of him. “Maybe you should have asked me first.” “Really?” “It’s a bit difficult for me.” “Well, for that I’m sorry. Forgive me. You’re American and I should have thought of that. Here, this is how we’re trained—to know the diner, perceive the diner, and cook accordingly. Feed the body, but that’s only the beginning. Also feed the mind and the soul.” There. That’s it. I think that’s what Nicole Mones is doing especially well in this book. She’s touched that aspect of culture–of Chinese culture in this case–that feeds the soul. And she’s found a way to translate that into the writing itself—into this novel— There’s a sense in which, in her grief, Maggie, the central character, is longing for a kind of food, a kind of conversation, that she doesn’t even quite know that she’s longing for—until it appears—and then she is able to be comforted by it. Here is how Nicole Mones describes the feeling of comfort that blooms inside Maggie after she eats that chicken: “It put a roof over her head and a patterned warmth around her so that even though all her anguish was still with her it became, for a moment, something she could bear.” . . . even though all her anguish was still with her it became, for a moment, something she could bear. At its best, I think this is what healing conversation–and sometimes healing books–and healing poems–can...

The Last Chinese Chef: A Recommended Book [Part One]

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 6, 2007 in Recommended Books

One of the things I like about our public library here is that it offers several shelves of advance reading copies—uncorrected proofs of books released before their publication date. Not only are the books new and clean but they offer an opportunity to read a book before hearing anything at all about it. Often, I’ll put three or four of these in my bag when I go to the library. Sometimes I’ll only end up reading the first page of one of these books, or a few pages. But this novel, The Last Chinese Chef, by Nicole Mones, I savored right through to the end. It’s a book that made me want to learn the Chinese language, take up Chinese cooking, or, better yet, travel to China, and visit the city of Hangzhou, a city centered around a manmade lake described thus: Then their street ended at a T intersection, beyond which stretched a dreamy blue mirror of water dotted by islands and double-reflected pagodas. Hills covered with timeless green forest ringed the opposite shore. Small, one-man passenger boats sculled the surface, their black canopies making them seem from a distance to be random slow-moving water bugs. As far as she could see around the lake, between the boulevard and the shore, there stretched a shady park filled with promenading people. The noises of the city swallowed themselves somehow into silence behind her. She felt a sense of calm spreading inside, blue, like water. The woman feeling this sense of calm in Hangzhou is Maggie McElroy, a forty-year old woman, an American, a food writer, a woman who’s lost her husband in a sudden accident, and who begins the novel, a year following his death, still absorbed by grief. She lives on a small boat at a marina in Los Angeles. She refuses invitations from friends. Her life has “shrunk to a pinpoint.” Then, p. 3, she receives a phone call from Beijing that sets the novel in motion. A former colleague of her husband’s, from his Beijing office, calls to tell her that a woman there has filed a paternity suit against her husband’s estate. Maggie flies to Beijing. A food writer, she also manages to land an assignment for the trip: writing a feature on Sam Liang, a young chef vying for a spot on the Chinese national cooking team, a team preparing to compete in a cultural competition that is set to coincide with the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. In Beijing, and later in Hangzhou, the two plot lines of the novel unfold—the story of the paternity suit against Maggie’s husband and her growing relationship with the young chef, Sam Liang. In a sense though, these plot lines are pretext—a way to keep us reading as Nicole Mones, a food writer herself, offers elaborate and loving and gorgeous descriptions of the food and culture of China. Healing place and healing food and a series of healing conversations—that’s what Nicole Mones is offering here—- [You can read part 2 of this piece...

Green Apple Soap: An Image of Healing Conversation from White Oleander

Posted by Diane Morrow on May 3, 2007 in Healing Conversation, Healing Images, Recommended Books

White Oleander, the novel by Janet Fitch, is a lovely and often heartbreaking story of a girl, Astrid, in search of a mother. Perhaps you’ve read it. (Or seen the movie—Michelle Pfeiffer plays Astrid’s birth mother, Ingrid.) The first thirty-eight pages of the book depict scenes of Astrid with her mother—a poet, extremely gifted, very beautiful, and also exceptionally self-absorbed—a woman who requires her daughter to serve as a kind of audience for her own life. Eventually, Astrid becomes a reluctant and then bewildered audience as her mother plots the murder of an ex-lover, carries out the murder, and then is sent away to prison. This leaves thirteen-year-old Astrid an orphan, a child whose name becomes, in her own words, Nobody’s Daughter. The remainder of the novel is a story of Astrid’s odyssey through the foster care system, her quest to become Somebody’s Daughter. In Astrid’s fourth foster home she finds herself under the care of a woman by the name of Claire. This woman, Claire, is the first foster parent to actually see Astrid as a person separate from herself. She is, at the same time, the first mother who helps Astrid begin to see herself. There’s one particular conversation, very simple, and especially poignant in that it’s the first conversation of its kind that Astrid has ever experienced. Claire asks Astrid if she likes coconut soap or green apple. Astrid finds the question baffling—– She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there really wasn’t much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable. Astrid goes on to tell Claire that she doesn’t know if she prefers coconut soap or green apple but Claire will not allow equivocation. She presses her to decide. So I became a user of green apple soap, of chamomile shampoo. I preferred to have the window open when I slept. I liked my meat rare. I had a favorite color, ultramarine blue, a favorite number,...

Writing and Healing Idea #36: A Letter for Breaking Through Resistance

Posted by Diane Morrow on April 30, 2007 in Writing Ideas

If you want to write and you can’t write, and when all else has failed, you can always write a letter—a letter perhaps something like this: To Whom it May Concern: I have not written a word in six weeks. Please send any advice or encouragement that you can muster. Sincerely———- And then, if you like, you can write yourself a letter back. And you can, if you like, go ahead and mail either of these letters to yourself. There’s something about getting a letter in the mailbox that can give it that certain extra...

Writing and Healing Idea #35: My Favorite Piece of Writing Advice from Natalie Goldberg

Posted by Diane Morrow on in Writing Ideas

In her book, Writing Down the Bones (published in 1986), Natalie Goldberg includes a wonderfully direct piece about how hard it is to get the conditions just right for work to flow. What she says here is true of writing, and it can be true of healing, and it can be true, I suppose, of any serious work. And sometimes, she suggests, the antidote may simply be to acknowledge this—that the conditions are not perfect, never perfect, that the world is filled with competing demands and distractions. So—-her advice: Okay. Your kids are climbing into the cereal box. You have $1.25 left in your checking account. Your husband can’t find his shoes, your car won’t start, you know you have lived a life of unfulfilled dreams. There is the threat of a nuclear holocaust, there is apartheid in South Africa, it is twenty degrees below zero outside, your nose itches, and you don’t have even three plates that match to serve dinner on. Your feet are swollen, you need to make a dentist appointment, the dog needs to be let out, you have to defrost the chicken and make a phone call to your cousin in Boston, you’re worried about your mother’s glaucoma, you forgot to put film in the camera, Safeway has a sale on solid white tuna, you are waiting for a job offer, you just bought a computer and you have to unpack it. You have to start eating sprouts and stop eating doughnuts, you lost your favorite pen, and the cat peed on your current notebook. Take out another notebook, pick up another pen, and just write, just write, just write. In the middle of the world, make one positive step. In the center of chaos, make one definitive act. Just write. Say yes, stay alive, be awake. Just write. Just write. Just write. There it is. Just write. For ten minutes or fifteen minutes or twenty minutes. About anything at all. About, if you like, the dog that needs to be let out, that solid white tuna on sale, your mother’s glaucoma. . . In the teeth of resistance, make one definitive act. Just...

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