![]() The restaurant contains a whole world – “a dying planet”, as Ah-Jack calls it, that is struggling to modernise. He might shrink, but he never goes away.” Relationships are complex and real: difficult and tense at times, but often loving and caring. Uncle Pang, a gangster and “VIP” patron of the restaurant whose presence is felt throughout, is “like the moon. ![]() Descriptions are imaginative and evocative when Ah-Jack takes his friend’s hand, it opens acceptingly, “like a mollusc” an eel dish, “buttery and sweet”, flakes “against tongue like snow”. This is Li’s debut, yet she writes with a confidence that suggests decades of experience. “They were all friends,” Li writes, “if one defined friendship as the natural occurrence between people who, after colliding for decades, have finally eroded enough to fit together.” The restaurant’s owners, the Han brothers, manage tensions among the staff. Multiple families, each with its roots in China, come together under the restaurant’s roof. New recruits Annie and Pat are the teenage children of staff members together they skive and complain (“every day at a Chinese restaurant was bring-your-kid-to-work day,” Annie jokes). The oldest is Ah-Jack, a veteran of the restaurant who can wrap duck in his sleep but no longer carry heavy dishes from kitchen to dining room. metro area, she lives in Ann Arbor.The tireless staff of the Beijing Duck, a Chinese restaurant in Rockville, Maryland, form the cast of this Women’s prize-longlisted intergenerational family saga. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Granta, Guernica, Glimmer Train, Bon Appetit, and Jezebel. Lillian Li is the author of the novel Number One Chinese Restaurant. ![]() When disaster strikes and Pat and Annie find themselves in a dangerous game that means tragedy for the Duck House, their families must finally confront the conflicts and loyalties simmering beneath the red and gold lanterns. Nan and Ah-Jack, longtime Duck House employees, yearn to turn their thirty-year friendship into something more, while Nan’s son, Pat, struggles to stay out of trouble. Jimmy’s older brother, Johnny, is more concerned with restoring the dignity of the family name than his faltering relationship with his own teenage daughter, Annie. ![]() Owner Jimmy Han has ambitions for a new high-end fusion place, hoping to eclipse his late father’s homely establishment. The popular Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland has been serving devoted regulars for decades, but behind the staff’s professional smiles simmer tensions, heartaches and grudges from decades of bustling restaurant life. RELATED: Review: The Diary of a Bookseller - Shaun Bythell About Number One Chinese Restaurant With scheming brothers, underhand Uncle Pang, and long-suffering mother and badly behaved children to contend with, there’s barely a quiet moment at this Rockville restaurant.Ī pacy, plot-driven tale about familial ties, loyalty and resentment, all the while underpinned with a dark humour and simmering tension that bubbles to the surface, it’s easy to see why the smart and steadfast Number One Chinese Restaurant is a surefire contender for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. One of the book’s biggest selling points for me was its rich cast of colourful characters, all of whom grow and evolve throughout the story. Nan’s seventeen year old son, Pat, has recently been expelled from school so now works a lowly job at the restaurant, while Ah-Jack’s wife is in the late stages of cancer with mounting medical bills. A long-running restaurant beloved by many, two of its key employees, Nan and Ah-Jack, continue to work despite their advancing years as they struggle to support their dependents. Managed by brothers Kimmy and Johnny Han, who inherited it from their late father Bobby. Published to wide critical acclaim from the likes of Book Riot, Publisher’s Weekly and The Financial Times, Number One Chinese Restaurant is a memorable debut from this American author, set within the Chinese immigrant community of Maryland and centred around popular eatery, The Duck House restaurant. And so, while the first of the books I read from the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction long-list was a writer I already knew the second was one I’d not yet come across. One of the joys of reading literary prize lists – other than the excuse to carve out even more time that usual for books – is the reading of authors you might otherwise not have come across.
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