Revenge Of The Mooncake Vixen

Marilyn Chin’s Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen arrives like a takeaway box with explosives in the bottom: bright, sharp, greasy-fingered, sweet, rude, mythic, and not especially interested in behaving itself for the benefit of polite society. At its centre are twin sisters Moonie and Mei Ling Wong, growing up around their grandmother’s Chinese restaurant in California, where food, family, sex, ghosts, gossip, capitalism and cultural expectation all appear to have been thrown into the same wok and told to fight it out.

The Wongs are not here to provide anyone with a tasteful immigrant-family vignette, ideally with steam rising gently from dumplings while three generations learn something tender about belonging. Absolutely not. This is a book with teeth, lipstick, dirty jokes, old-country spirits, American appetite, Chinese legend, pop culture, family inheritance, bodily chaos and the general sense that if someone tries to turn these women into a neat little symbol, they may lose a finger.

Moonie and Mei Ling tumble through stories that are part novel, part fable, part comic assault, part revenge fantasy, and part menu written during a fever. Their grandmother presides like a kitchen deity with business concerns. The restaurant becomes a battleground, nursery, temple, trap, stage and profit centre, because in fiction, as in life, no family business is ever merely a family business. It is where everyone eats, works, argues, remembers, performs identity, disappoints their ancestors, and still has to wipe the tables afterwards.

There is a glorious refusal here to be respectable. The book pokes at stereotypes, then bites them. It takes the obedient daughter, the exotic woman, the hardworking immigrant, the mystical East, the model minority, and all the other dusty little labels, and shoves them into a story where they come out dented, sticky, and no longer fit for polite display. It is comic, but not soft; outrageous, but not random; clever, but not sitting quietly in a seminar room waiting to be admired.

Expect desire, food, ghosts, insults, family mythology, unruly girlhood, loud womanhood, and the sort of cultural collision where nobody exchanges a meaningful glance over tea unless someone is also planning revenge. The title alone sounds as though a baked good has finally had enough, and the book more or less honours that promise. A mooncake may look decorative, but underestimate it and you may find it has a private agenda and several sharp opinions.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. Ex-library, so it has already been stamped, shelved, borrowed, returned, inspected and made to live under institutional supervision, which is quite funny for a book this unwilling to sit nicely with its hands folded. A lively, signed-out-and-back-again sort of copy, now released from library custody and available for readers who like their literary fiction spiky, sugared, and faintly dangerous.

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