Recommended Books

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,...

Swimming to Antarctica: A Recommended Book

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 25, 2007 in Recommended Books

Lynne Cox, author of Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer, strikes me as a kind of ideal heroine for this month in which I’m writing about quest. There’s a kind of purity—a single-mindedness—to her narrative that has a certain appeal. She’s one of those rare people who discovered her own personal quest—her purpose in life—at the age of nine. And then she had the good fortune, and the good sense, and the persistence, to be able to carry this out. One summer morning, as she tells it, and when she was only nine years old, she found herself in an icy-cold swimming pool in Manchester, New Hampshire, swimming laps in the middle of a storm. She was there by choice. All the other swimmers in her club had begged the coach to get out of the water, leaping at his alternative proposal of two hours of calisthenics in the locker room. This was a serious swim club. Those children who had fled the cold water for the locker room could look forward to upwards of 500 sit-ups, 200 push-ups, and 500 leg extensions. Lynne Cox stayed in the water. When it began to hail, she stopped her laps and crouched in a corner next to the steps and covered her face with her hands. When the hail changed over to heavy rain she went back to swimming laps, entirely alone in the pool, hailstones floating around her in what she describes as a “giant bowl of icy tapioca.” She wasn’t one of the fastest swimmers on the team. She was, by her own description, chubby, and because she was slower than many of the others, she rarely got a chance to pause at the wall of the pool for breaks the way the others did. What she had was endurance. And a love of the water that was nothing short of extreme. She was nine years old, swimming through ice-water that everyone else had fled, and, rather than being frightened of the storm, she was exhilarated by it: The pool was no longer a flat, boring rectangle of blue; it was now a place of constant change. . . . That day, I realized that nature was strong, beautiful, dramatic, and wonderful, and being out in the water during that storm made me feel somehow a part of it, somehow connected to it. A Mrs. Milligan saw the tail end of this three-hour swim from her car in the parking lot. She was the mother of another girl on the team, a fast girl who had already qualified for nationals. When Lynne Cox finally climbed out of the pool, Mrs. Milligan met her with a large towel. She rubbed Lynne’s back with the towel, at the same time speaking into her ear: “Someday, Lynne, you’re going to swim across the English Channel.” Lynne Cox did swim across the English Channel. A mere six years later, when she was only fifteen, she set a world record, swimming the channel in nine hours and fifty-seven minutes. A few years later she swam across the Cook Strait in New Zealand. Not long after, she became the first person in the world to swim the Strait of Magellan, a body of water between the tip of Chile and the island of...

The Wounded Storyteller: A Recommended Book (Part Three of Three)—The Quest Narrative

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 11, 2007 in Recommended Books

I’m returning now (finally) to The Wounded Storyteller, and to the third and final kind of narrative Arthur Frank suggests a person can make in the wake of illness and suffering—the quest narrative. He defines this narrative thus: Quest stories meet suffering head on; they accept illness and seek to use it. He outlines a structure for this quest story, borrowing from Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces. He describes three key stages of a quest, which I’m including here with a few comments. (These stages may already be quite familiar to many of you.): Departure: This begins with some kind of call. In a mythic hero or heroine story this call might be that moment when something or someone entirely new appears and sets an adventure in motion—say, for instance, a stranger appears with a rumor about a holy grail that needs to be located. In an illness story the call can be a symptom—a call from the body itself. Or it can be that moment when a doctor gives a name to the symptom. Included in this first stage is the typical response to this call—for most heroes and heroines as well as ordinary folks—“the refusal of the call.” No, this can’t be. No, I must have heard wrong. No. “Eventually,” Frank writes, “the call can no longer be refused—symptoms are unmistakable, diagnoses are made—and what Campbell calls ‘the first threshold’ is crossed.” Crossing this first threshold ushers in the second stage of the quest. Initiation: This stage involves what’s called “a road of trials”. This is the long middle part of the quest story. The part where a person may begin to reckon with the fact that this thing—this illness or loss or trouble or adventure—or all of these combined—this thing is going to be something of a big deal. This is not nothing. Something is happening. Often a significant part of this stage can be frightening and uncomfortable. The hero or heroine is tested and tempted. Like Odysseus on his ship steering between Scylla and Charbydis. A key part of this stage is a sense that at some point the hero or heroine is changed. Transformed. Something happens—not just outside the hero or heroine but inside. This is perhaps the key place where this narrative differs, for instance from the restitution narrative. X is no longer quite X. X is becoming Y. This stage of the quest story ends with what Campbell calls a boon. The teller of the story has received something—a blessing of some sort—or treasure—or piece of wisdom. And now is ready for the third stage. Return: Here the teller returns from an experience—an adventure—a road of trials—a journey—somehow marked. (Like Odysseus returning to Penelope. Or Frodo returning to the shire.) Here, Frank makes an interesting distinction. In one kind of hero story the hero returns as one who has conquered. And this conquering hero may, on return, boast of his accomplishments. In another kind of story—what he calls a postmodern kind of hero story—the hero returns not so much boastful as somewhat humbled. Frank writes: The paradigmatic [postmodern] hero is not some Hercules wrestling and slugging his way through opponents, but the Bodhisattva, the compassionate being who vows to return to earth to share her enlightenment with others. Compassion as...

The Wounded Storyteller: A Recommended Book (Part 2 of 3)–The Chaos Narrative

Posted by Diane Morrow on March 6, 2007 in Forms for Writing and Healing, Recommended Books

The first kind of narrative Arthur Frank writes about in The Wounded Storyteller is the restitution narrative. That’s the one where a person goes through some kind of illness or trouble and then becomes restored to one’s old self. (X = X.) The second kind of narrative possible in the wake of illness or loss is much less tidy. I can’t think of a simple equation that could represent it. The second narrative is the chaos narrative. It’s the kind of narrative that results, often, when the restitution narrative breaks down. Frank writes: Chaos is the opposite of restitution: its plot imagines life never getting better. An example Frank uses here is that of a woman with chronic illness trying to take care of her mother who has Alzheimer’s. She’s trying to tell something of what it’s like—a glimpse of the chaos in the kitchen—as she’s trying to make dinner: And if I’m trying to get dinner ready and I’m already feeling bad, she’s in front of the refrigerator. Then she goes to put her hand on the stove and I got the fire on. And then she’s in front of the microwave and then she’s in front of the silverware drawer. And—and if I send her out she gets mad at me. And then it’s awful. That’s when I have a really, really bad time. Chaos stories can feel really, really bad. They’re hard to experience. They’re hard to tell. They can also be hard to hear. But, Frank argues, it’s necessary that they be heard. He writes: The need to honor chaos stories is both moral and clinical. Until the chaos narrative can be honored, the world in all its possibilities is being denied. To deny a chaos story is to deny the person telling this story, and people who are being denied cannot be cared for. People whose reality is denied can remain recipients of treatments and services, but they cannot be participants in empathic relations of care. To deny a chaos story is to deny the person telling this story, and people who are being denied cannot be cared for. He’s saying a lot here, and I’m quite sure not everyone would agree with him, but I think he’s onto something. He continues: Those living chaotic stories certainly need help, but the immediate impulse of most would-be helpers is first to drag the teller out of this story, that dragging called some version of ‘therapy’. Getting out of chaos is to be desired, but people can only be helped out when those who care are first willing to become witnesses to the story. Chaos is never transcended but must be accepted before new lives can be built and new stories told. Those who care for lives emerging from chaos have to accept that chaos always remains the story’s background and will continually fade into the foreground. He’s walking, I think, a delicate balance here. Getting out of chaos is desirable. But you can’t get out without first honoring it somehow. So how is a person to honor chaos? And how do you eventually find your way out? Can writing help? I’ve found it can sometimes help during chaos just to begin to name it as chaos. Oh, this is chaos. A person could write just...

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