A review by the_local_dialect
Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah

3.0

First thing I have to get off my chest -- I live in Beijing and I found the constant insider references a bit irritating. Yes, there really is a Jenny Lou's and a Babyface and all those streets like Guanghua Lu and Dongdaqiao really do exist, but it seemed very in-your-face to me, especially considering she went out of her way to change the names of some places and things (Beijing NOW is obviously supposed to be That's Beijing or The Beijinger), but not others. Maybe the aggressive name-dropping is sort of an expatty thing to do but it struck me as very "I've lived there, I'm not just a regular tourist." This is a kind of smugness that expats get when they show their friends around their new city for the first time. I'm sure I've done a real life version of this myself but I hope that if I ever write a fictionalized book about my life in China I'd avoid falling into that trap. I feel like what the author really wanted to do was write a memoir -- she should have just done that.

Aside from that, yes, this is chick-lit in China. I don't mind chick-lit so much, but there's nothing particularly memorable about this chick lit. This was a nice, fast read and I didn't dislike it, but that's about it.