Books + Food = Warm Goodness:
Former Viking assistant editor Ann Mah left New York for Beijing, took a job as the dining editor for the English-language magazine That’s Beijing, and wrote a novel about a young Chinese-American woman who moves to Beijing in the midst of an identity crisis. Mah spoke to PW from Paris, where she now lives, about Kitchen Chinese: A Novel about Food, Family, and Finding Yourself, which Avon will publish as a paperback original in February.Check out the full interview here as well as Mah's blog
PW: What surprised you most when you moved to Beijing?
AM: I’m ethnically Chinese; I was born in the States and grew up in the States [in Huntingdon Beach, Calif.]. I thought I knew everything about Chinese food because I grew up eating it every single day. But one of the things that surprised me the most when I moved to Beijing was how different [the food] was. I realized I grew up eating a type of Chinese food from a specific region of China, and there was a whole country of regions of cuisine to discover. That’s what inspired me to start the book.
