It’s tough being a teenager in Tulsa’s gangland. It’s wryly written and, unusually, sprinkled with recipes throughout (pot roast, bacon hash, key lime pie) that buoy Rachel through her grief and eventual freedom in New York. She’s pregnant with their second child when she discovers he’s having an affair with Thelma Rice, the wife of a British ambassador. Narrator Rachel Samstat is a food writer who has moved to Washington, DC to support her husband’s career as a political journalist. Hilarious and heartbreaking, this roman à clef of the public breakdown of Nora Ephron’s marriage to Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein unfolds against the backdrop of the US capital. These pages are an earnest exploration of heritage, diasporic identity and home. Tan draws on personal experience as a first-generation immigrant to California, and her prose sweeps across the city, from Chinatown to Ashbury Heights and North Beach. The setting, the San Francisco Bay Area, reflects this jarring tug between old and new: glinting skyscrapers tower over small Chinatown shops. As the mothers play, they recount their former lives in China, unified in grief and possibility. This postmodern novel is strung together as a series of short stories about four Chinese mothers and their US-born daughters. Mother-daughter relationships unfurl over a weekly mahjong game in San Francisco.
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