Nicole Mones
Nicole Mones
Nicole Monesis an American novelist and food writer. As of March 2014 she has published four novels, entitled Lost in Translation, which appeared in 1998, A Cup of Light, and The Last Chinese Chef,, and in March 2014, "Night in Shanghai. Lost in Translation won the 2000 Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize awarded by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester for best work of fiction by an...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
Chinese food tries to engage the mind, not just the palate. To provoke the intellect.
Food is the main engine that drives connectedness, relationship in Chinese society.
You can't portray wartime Shanghai without writing about the Holocaust - about 25,000 Jews survived the Nazi death machine by taking refuge there.
In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.
In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen.
You know how someone - something - surprises you. You wake up a little bit. That's done through Chinese cuisine - for example, through dishes of artifice. That's a whole sub-tradition in Chinese cuisine. To create a dish that comes to the table looking like one thing but actually is something else.
Great food needed more than chefs; it needed gourmet diners.
But I get frightened sometimes," she admitted."I know. Fear is only fear, though.""And somehow you live without it.""No," he corrected her. "You live with it.
So this is one of those times when life is just handing you something, telling you what to do, which way to go. So enjoy it. It'll be fun. I guarantee. I can't guarantee we'll find the goddamn thing, but it'll be interesting. Then if we do find it - if we do- the payoff's huge.
What was more brutal than loss of hope?