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The level of the story is good, but the world of Chinese cuisine that’s portrayed is great

How did you end up in China?

I ended up in China by moving to the West Coast after university, and with the perspective that a general degree in history gives you. The Wound Arts, they called them – all these movies, operas, plays—

Kind of their version of Holocaust literature.

Exactly.

Lost in Translation won the 2000 JanetHeidingerKafkaPrizeawarded by the Susan B. AnthonyInstitute for Gender and Women's Studies and the Department of English at the University of Rochester for best work of fiction by an American woman, and also the PacificNorthwestAnnual Book Award, a five-state prize. It was also the main seasonal selection of France Loisirs, the French book of the month club.

As of March 2013 she has published four novels, entitled Lost in Translation, whichappeared in 1998, A Cup of Light, and The Last Chinese Chef, and in March 2014, "Night in Shanghai. I think it was brilliant marketing because there was a generation that was growing older and was somewhat fundamentalist: when you got into a conversation they’d say, “Yeah, it was bad, but it was a different kind of bad to us than the way you see it.” And if you press them on it, they say, “Maybe it was misguided, but we were living for something.

Now it’s like a cross between, oh, Dodge City and Dickensian London. So through the meeting of an American food writer and a half-Jewish, half-Chinese grandson of the last imperial chef, it tries to encapsulate the philosophy, the whole culture of Chinese gastronomy, which is something quite elegant and quite aesthetically highly valued in Chinese civilization.

I know food is hot right now – we have the Food Network – but believe me, in Western civilization we have never elevated cuisine historically to the level of art, to which it’s been elevated in China.

It’s the kind of thing that fascinated America in the 1950s when we were waking up from a long period of repression. A week or two before I came to his store, he told me, Ruth Reichl was on a book tour for Tender at the Bone, and when he offered her her choice of any book in the store, she took Lost in Translation.

The weird thing is, the films about China and the novels about China which are popular in China, and the films and novels about China which are popular in the West, are always a mutually exclusive group. No, I still think that the tapestry of Chinese cuisine and gastronomy exceeds the level of the story. Ha Jin and Amy Tan get translated into Chinese; they don’t do that well in China.

The people that are doing really well in terms of writing narrative in China – people like Wang Shuo and Wei Hui – they write kind of alienated, louche, urban characters who are disaffected, they’re gambling, they’re up all night, they take drugs, they have a lot of casual sex, there’s violence.

One of the reasons Americans like to read fictions set in Asia is that we romanticize it. We’ve read about people bein’ bad. I’m not saying that wasn’t just as multi-faceted a world, but here, in our time period, we have accepted a narrower vision about it.

We think we understand it—

Yes.

—and there isn’t immediate evidence to contradict it.

Yes.

After spending much of his adult life as a writer, copyeditor, and proofreader, with only occasional forays on the stage, he started working seriously as an actor in his late 40s, in 2005. I know I’m not supposed to say that; I’m supposed to say it’s all brilliant, but honestly that’s what I think. What if the goods are pilfered?” You know, what if this happens, what if – and yes, those things are scary, especially for a young woman doing it essentially alone.

But remember, China wasn’t the wild wild East then, that it is now.

For instance, after a basic survey of restaurants in Shanghai, I said, you know, if you want me to do something about Beijing, what would be really interesting and nobody’s ever written about it before, would be to explore the sub-culture of nostalgia in restaurants.