Chengdu, Among the Mortal World

Lin Zhiwei, a 31-year-old career woman “reassigned” from Beijing to Chengdu, carried a tattered cookbook left by her grandmother into an old teahouse hidden deep in Ginkgo Lane, a place with no sign out front. The owner, Old Chen, recognized the handwriting at a glance. It belonged to someone he had been searching for over the past thirty years. A plate of twice-cooked pork, a bowl of covered-bowl tea, and a story sealed away by time slowly unfolded in the evening breeze by Jiuyan Bridge. The choices and regrets of her grandmother, Lin Shufang, in her youth; the secret Old Chen had guarded all his life; and the true technique behind the lost dish “water-boiled cabbage” all simmered toward an answer, slowly, in a city where nothing could be rushed. This is a novel about food and memory, wandering and belonging. Chengdu teaches Lin Zhiwei more than how to cook: it teaches her how to eat well and live slowly in this hurried world.