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A Story About Guts, and Food
by Lydia Pang
From a dazzling new writer, a stirring memoir rooted in Hakka culture about the lesson to accept both bitterness and sweetness in life.
Eat bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning 'endure hardship to taste sweetness.' For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a Chinese ethnic group subjected to forced migrations whose ingenuity produced a distinct food culture based on fermenting and foraging. Pang reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine: the silly egg noodles her father cooked when her sister was ill, the bone broth she boiled in New York while homesick and courgettes grown in rural Wales as a gesture of reconnection.
Comprising the satire and darkness of Netflix's Beef, the tender insight of Crying in H Mart, and the distinct magic of Ella Risbridger's Midnight Chicken, Eat Bitter is a very special book from a brilliant new voice and creative talent.
"Touching, absorbing and unflinching, Eat Bitter is a testament to perseverance and grit through food. Lydia's writing is a marvel, like excavating beauty in the messy richness of bone marrow, gnawing on chicken feet cartilage, and watching a pot of slow-simmering soup patiently. This book shows you how to stomach life's sh*t, celebrate the ugly, and keep going." —Angela Hui, author of Takeaway: Stories from a Child Behind the Counter
"A beautiful book about family and food ... potent, honest, and unapologetic … I wolfed it down." —Emma Gannon, bestselling author of Table for One
This information about Eat Bitter was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lydia Pang is a misfit creative with a decade of experience in mission-driven marketing. She is the Co-Founder and Creative Director of MØRNING, a creative strategy and conscious storytelling studio. Previous creative leadership roles include her most recent at Nike HQ, where she led the creative and narrative team for Nike Sportswear, ACG, and the Women's category. Prior to that, she was the Group Creative Director of Refinery29 in New York. She's judged Clio Awards, D&AD and was a Cannes Lions delegate. She's worked at advertising agencies in New York (Anomaly) and London (M&CSAATCHI), always in hybrid creative roles honing her passion for digital storytelling. She has given talks on ethical commissioning at Instagram and New York Times and written articles on style and feminism for Refinery29, Riposte, Vogue, Elle, and Dazed. She spends her free time marinating meat and recently self-published a food zine about her Hakka Chinese heritage. She met her husband on myspace 16 years ago. She lives in London.
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