“I was taught a great deal of what it is to be a Chinese woman in the kitchen at my mother’s and grandmother’s sides. Cooking is at the heart of the Chinese family and for a Chinese woman it is at the very core of her identity.”

Helen Tse’s Sweet Mandarin tells the story of four generations of women in her family, though the great majority of the book concentrates on the life story of her grandmother Lily Kwok, the first to emigrate from Hong Kong to Manchester, UK where she opened the first of a series of restaurants owned by family members. The origins of the book and much of its content derive from family stories and rumors; one senses an unwillingness on the part of the author to delve into hard times or into topics that her family is shy to speak of (her grandmother, for example, is reluctant to speak of WWII; the narrative implies that she and her Dutch employers essentially collaborated with the Japanese in order to survive). This sensitivity (the people she writes about are mostly still alive) leads to a certain flatness and sense of incompleteness in the narrative. Curiously, this simplicity and detachment is even reflected when Tse speaks of what she has personally experienced—compare, for example, her description of experiencing Hong Kong for the first time with that of Martin Booth in Golden Boy: Memories of a Hong Kong Childhood. There is also a desire to view situations positively, though there is clearly ambivalence: one example is her father’s dedication to building his business and the consequent distance from his children while they were growing up; or her mother Mabel’s feeling that she (Mabel) had no childhood because of her responsibilities in Lily’s restaurant, a feeling echoed briefly by Helen about her own youth and then excused. This is an interesting story, made more so if the reader is in a position to compare it to other Asian American or Asian British memoirs, but in the end one comes away from the book feeling that one has only gained a surface knowledge of any of these individuals.