Authors@Google: Jen Lin-Liu

Jen Lin-Liu visits Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters to discuss her book "Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China." This event took place on November 5, 2008, as part of the Authors@Google series.

Lin-Liu's Serve the People records her years living and working in Shanghai and Beijing, when she attended a vocational cooking school and discovered a passion for Chinese cooking and culture. Growing up in the U.S. to Taiwan-born parents, the author admits feeling alienated from her heritage when she first moved to China in 2000. She begins her account with her frustrating yet ultimately rewarding study at the Hualian Cooking School in Beijing, where she apprenticed to one of the school's instructors, Chairman Wang, an old-style cook raised during the Cultural Revolution, who taught the author the rudiments of chopping, shopping and how to pass the cooking exam. Incorporating stories of many of the Chinese she worked alongside (and their recipes), as well as trips to the MSG factory in Henan or to the rice-growing Guangxi province, Lin-Liu offers a thoroughgoing, spirited celebration of overcoming cultural barriers.

Jen Lin-Liu is a Chinese-American writer and the founder of the cooking school Black Sesame Kitchen. A restaurant editor for Zagat Survey and the coauthor of Frommer's Beijing, she has also written for Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Saveur, Food & Wine, and Time Out Beijing.

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