Leung was ahead of his time because he felt strongly that his

daughters were valuable in their own right, and that even though

they weren’t the much longed for sons, they too would contribute

to the all-important family tree. Their efforts might not bear fruit

until a future generation, but they would not be wasted. My

grandmother took this conviction, and her own natural self-belief

and determination, and changed her destiny; in doing so, she

changed the destiny of her daughters and their daughters in turn.

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From Submission to Resistance

Tender mothers, miserable concubines, brave revolutionaries and innocent princesses are some of the archetypes in East Asian literature. They can be roughly into two categories — traditional and non-traditional. For centuries, women have been expected to be passive and dependent, but their counterparts demonstrate self-assurance and self-determination. Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Helen Tse’s Sweet Mandarin present images of women cast in different molds. Both authors show that women, having undergone a transition from submission to resistance, are slowing emerging from victimhood.

Ishiguro, Tan and Tse portray women of the last generation as obedient, exemplifying the kind of submissiveness expected of them by mainstream society. Etsuko in A Pale View of Hills, for one, does all the housework and serves Jiro, her husband, and Ogata, her father-in-law. Likewise, Tai Po in Sweet Mandarin also is subservient to her husband Leung and belongs to his family – to be used at their whim. Although Etsuko and Tai Po take care of their entire families respectively, neither has a right to speak for herself or anyone else. Being a wife, the responsibilities are to keep the house tidy and to cook – as well as bear a son to the household. That era believed women do not have any sense for serious matters. In A Pale View of the Hills – his colleague demonstrates an equally patronizing attitude towards women when he criticizes his own wife for being an ignorant voter in elections. “My wife votes for Yoshida just because he looks like her uncle,” he says. “That’s typical of women. They don’t understand politics. They think they can choose the country’s leaders the same way they choose dresses” (Ishiguro, 63).

In The Joy Luck Club, women’s submissiveness can be attributed to their lack of self-determination. Lindo Jong, one of the mothers, is forced to marry a boy younger than she. An-mei Hsu, another mother, is taught by her mother not to speak up and to bear whatever that is bestowed upon her. It is fate that one cannot resist, according to an old Chinese saying. In that historical period, a woman was seldom allowed to exercise her free will.

Women of the last generation, however, have changed with the times and have learned to be brave survivors of human tragedies. Although Mrs. Fujiwara in A Pale View of Hills has lost her son and husband in the war, she manages to forget the pain. “But that’s all in the past now,” she tells Etsuko. “We’ve all had to put things behind us. . . .” (Ishiguro, 76). She always teaches Etsuko to be optimistic about the future as people could not reclaim what has been lost. Although nothing could compensate for her loss, Fujiwara’s stoicism helps her look forward.

Likewise, when Lily in Sweet Mandarin gives up Ah Bing for adoption, that guilt 89 years later pierced her heart yet she hardened herself to become the first woman to open a Chinese restaurant in the United Kingdom. This was a remarkable achievement for  a Chinese woman to succeed in post – war Britain because initially, the locals thought she was Japanese and boycotted the restaurant fearing she would poison them. It was Lily’s decision to hire the local loudmouth, Mavis, which saved the business and helped pave the way for Lily’s restaurant empire to take off.

In The Joy Luck Club, the mothers were once passive, but they learned to be optimistic during the war and to resist what is supposedly their destiny. Suyuan Woo, for example, brings cheer to her peers during the war by forming a club to play mahjong and hold parties. We may think that she is escaping into a world of fancy, but “to despair was to wish back for something already lost,” she says. “What was worse, we asked among ourselves, to sit and wait for our own deaths with sombre faces? Or to choose our own happiness?” (Tan, 25). She knows perfectly well that she could not change the course of the war, but she could take control of her attitude toward her life.

As for Lindo Jong , she succeeds in devising a clever scheme to annul her “blind marriage” to a child husband. Meanwhile, An-mei Hsu, having learned from her mother’s suicide, rejects the self-destructive path she has taken. She comes to realize that bearing one’s suffering quietly only intensifies the pain, and decides to speak up, claiming what she deserves.

Independent and self-assured, Niki in A Pale View of Hills is irritated by whatever she perceives as an intrusion into her private life or infringement on her freedom. She would chastise her mother, Etsuko, for asking such an innocuous question as what her boyfriend’s name is. She frankly challenges the concept of marriage as a respectable institution and does not think there is any problem having children born out of wedlock.

The daughters in The Joy Luck Club lack the confidence and to shape their own lives as Niki does. Therefore, they turn to their mothers for advice and emotional support in their struggle against the forces of a patriarchal society. A mother may serve as a marriage counselor, advising her daughter to assert her right to speak or to leave her husband if that is the only option left. Rose, for example, finally discovers the power of her words (Tan, 196) and claims what she deserves in her marriage while Lena decides to lead a new life without her spouse.

The next generations of Lily Kwok in Sweet Mandarin – Mabel and her daughter Helen Tse (the author) are seen to grow in confidence and the grandchildren are given opportunities to achieve success (something not available to Lily nor Mabel). Indeed the grandchildren, The Tse sisters who opened Sweet Mandarin were a lawyer, financier and engineer and education became the key to unlock this family from the poverty trap.

The women characters in The Joy Luck Club, Sweet Mandarin and A Pale View of Hills demonstrate a change of attitude towards the subservient status assigned to them. They have learned to be assertive, claiming their rights of speech and of self-determination. They strive to shape their own lives, challenge unjust practices, or at least dodge them.

Written by students of FC1750.06 at Founders College, York University Vol.1, no. 3, June-August, 1996 and adapted April 2008

(a portrait of Lion Heads in their Lion Headquarters – they are so gorgeous, you just want to scoff the lot of them now)

Q: So Lion Head, tell me about yourself

LH: Well, I’m the best lunch companion you can get from Sweet Mandarin – I am king of all the dim sums. Some call me ’smooth and a real meaty treat’.

Q: Where does your name originate from, Lion Head?

LH: My name comes from the clan “Lion’s Head Meatballs” from 900 B.C. An old Chinese spinister who became the only woman chef to the Emperor of China made delicious pork meatballs for the Emperor’s afternoon tea. To ward off evil curses, she gave my ancestors (the meatball) the courage of a lion and the Emperor, on first sight exclaimed “Wow this mere meatbll resembles a Lions Head”. The Emperor bit into the Lion Head and jumped for joy that he had tasted Heaven.  So, that’s how Lion Head the name, and reputation stuck with us.

Q: What advice would you give to other wannabes who want to join the list?

LH: Exercise, only the trimmest meats get into the gang, and you gotta be the best you can. So even the chicken wing (heheh) can get in there, just.

Q: What are your interests?

LH: I love singing karoke, but sometimes the neighbours tell me off for singing too loud. I can’t apologise for my natural talents – that’s the roar of a real lion head!

Q: You’re an eligible bachelor dim sum. Tell the audience what your ideal dim summette would be like?

LH: (laughs) Someone who is carries herself well, smells gorgeous and loves to sing. Ahem, like the Beautiful Beef Ball – she’s mighty fine.

So, now you’ve met the mighty Lion Ball. Meet him face to face at Sweet Mandarin for lunch from Wed – Sun (inclusive) for the DIM SUM SPECIAL (EAT ALL YOU CAN FOR A TENNER).

I gotta just blog-wax lyrical about the Chicken Wings - I just ordered a portion whilst we had our Dim Sum Special at Sweet Mandarin (See earlier blog). Now there is a saying that “the Chinese will eat anything with its back to the Heavens except the table and chairs” – that is true, so true. Nonetheless, whilst some people are a bit snobby towards chicken wings but I gotta tell you if you fall in that camp you are missing out big time. Whether you are Chinese or not, you gotta love the chicken wings.

Growing up in a chippy family (and a Chinese one at that) we were surrounded by food – when we finished school, mum would have cooked us a ‘mini steak sandwich’ (full 9oz steak of the tenderest kind on the softest bread), a ‘lill’ pasta’ (a full bowl of pasta that most italians call a main with peaches!!!) or chicken wings (6 per portion crispy on the outside, juice and moist on the inside and my favourite).

Well have you ever taken a first bite of a dish and it takes you back to your childhood? Everytime I order a portion of Sweet Mandarin Chicken Wings I’m nine again, sitting in the back of the 505 pegeout (which we nicknamed the ‘Big Elephant’) and enjoying the scenic route home with my mum. Its priceless and I got to tell you more about these delightful Chicken Wings.  

 I guess I got to start way way back with this story. Let me introduce you to my gran, Lily Kwok (who by the way is the main heroine in our book Sweet Mandarin – God Bless your cotton socks gran :0). You know we purchase whole chickens in this industry, because only then do you know where the meat is coming from, if you get my drift. A chicken is a chicken. You can’t substitute quality ever, in this business. So we had all these chickens every Sunday which were lined up like an exercise class. I could imagine them all doing their press ups and stretches together. Well we serve the breasts and legs to the customers, and had all these gorgeous chicken wings (2 per chicken = yippie) to enjoy.

Often, it was a battle between me and the pet dog, as to who would get my gran’s attention first, and in return she’d toss us a hot, steaming, tender chicken wing – the meat was almost about to fall off the delicate bones and the sweetness of the chicken was moorish.  Soon, we closed the back door so our doggie had no part in the chicken wing extravaganza. By the time I was 11, my brother Jim (who was 8) and I used to have competitions, as to who could eat the most chicken wings in one sitting. So ever since I could walk, eat and shout out ‘ Chicken Wings’ – I was enjoying them, loving them and fighting for my share on a weekly basis.

A family like mine is never full, we’ve got to be stuffed. If anyone visited, you’d eat with us, whether you had already eaten or not. Eventually, we’d cry out with our arms in the air “I’m gonna pop if you keep stuffing me like this!”

My mum would sweetly respond “Well I don’t want you to go hungry. You might starve!”

 So that is how my fascination with food and in particular Chicken Wings started.

Well, no wonder Chicken Wings are on the menu at Sweet Mandarin. I’m made this special crispy coating for them – oh my word – you just bite and know its going to be a winner. Its just crispy enough to go hhhmmmm delicious. Then the actual meat is just juicy and sweet – just the way my mum taught me.

So don’t forget, next time you come to Sweet Mandarin, you gotta try the Chicken Wings

Excerpt from Chapter One

My great-grandmother gave birth to and lost three sons, none of whom survived beyond their second birthday, and although in the end she gave Leung six children who survived to adulthood, they were all girls.

Some of my grandmother’s first memories are of her brothers’ deaths. She remembers the eldest sleeping in his cot one night, and then, the next day when he did not wake, the way her mother screamed. A dark cloud fell on the house. For months her parents were tearful and solemn; no one in the family was allowed to speak about what had happened.

Buy the Book: www.amazon.com

(the photo shows Firecracker Prawns – nice and juicy – you should try it)

As T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the crullest month”. Very true, I thought as I shook my head like a wet dog. It feels particularly cruel in Manchester because we get lashings and lashings of rain, and another bucket or so for good measure. If you are as unfortunate as I have been these last evenings, I’ve become caught in the rain, drenched and shrivelled like a prune to serve my customers their takeaways - I was in between delivery drivers – just for a few days – but I take my hat off to them for their service and commitment to delivering hot foot come rain or shine.

I was chatting to my friends who are also my customers (its funny how customers become friends after a while) and getting their feedback on Sweet Mandarin’s takeaway and delivery offering – always listening and trying to improve our service. 

My friend Julia said many nights, she had gone home hungry – craving good Sweet Mandarin food – she remembered our wholesome Chinese food with a steaming bowl of rice after a corporate night out with her firm. She said “No where else does what you do – offer simple but delicious food at reasonable prices.” That’s true. Most restaurants will charge you restaurant prices for takeaway and will not deliver. What we offer is takeaway at takeaway prices with restaurant quality. We’ve also chosen our containers with thought, to ensure it comes to your door piping hot. We consider takeaway to be one of our core businesses and we value customers at home, as if they were sitting at Sweet Mandarin.  We’ll even accompany the dinner with our choicest wines, so you can have the Sweet Mandarin experience in the comfort of your own home.

You can’t beat a takeaway in April – here are Julia’s top ten reasons:

1. I am home alone

2. Its raining/cold/late/got no car/car’s broken down/don’t want to venture outside

3. I’m already wearing pygamas and hooked to the tv set – you can’t just leave if Pop Idol or Desperate Housewives are on can you???

4. I just want to eat some decent Chinese food – no one else does Lily’s curry or Mabel’s claypot and the more I think about their food, the more hungry I get.

5. The fridge is bare apart from some mouldy cheese and stale bread – even a mouse would decline that offer!

6. I don’t want to cook, and even if I did, I have no food. Can’t cook won’t cook.

7. Its cheaper to get Sweet Mandarin take-out, than to buy all the ingredients and try to cook it yourself.

8. When I cook it tastes funny- I’ll leave it to the experts at Sweet Mandarin.

9. Takeout is great for a romatic night in, especially accompanied by the fine selection of wine Sweet Mandarin has (hehehe, I’m not alone, so you can ignore point 1 tonight :0))

10. Sweet Mandarin takeaway is the best…because the staff are friendly,  the food is superb and the price is right.

Now that you are in a state of ravenous hunger, here’s what to do – call 0161 832 8848 and see their online new menu for takeaway at www.sweetmandarin.com – if you are really good with the computer, order online.

where’s the phone?

who’s taken my phone?

I need takeout NOW!

spring rolls – sweet and sour chicken – peking duck – firecracker prawns – special fried rice – chicken chow mein – one hot and sour soups – no make it two – and some prawn crackers…..and hurry. i’m about to faint with hunger.

village close to the city of Guangzhou, a port on the Pearl River in south eastern China. Downstream of the city, the Pearl splits into a vast delta and spills into the South China Sea, and on either side of itsmouth lie the prosperous old colonies of Hong Kong and Macau. Guangzhou has always been called ‘the Flower City’ because it has warm, wet, monsoon weather which means that, unusually for China, flowers bloom there all year round. According to local folktales, the fields of flowers which surrounded the city first blossomed when five celestial deities rode in on five rams, each with an ear of rice in its mouth. The immortals gave the rice ears to the farmers and promised them that there would never be famine in Guangzhou. When they flew away, they left behind the rams who turned into stone and became the sculptures which now sit in Yuexiu Park in the city.  The legend is beautiful, and promises prosperity, but when my grandmother was born in the region in 1918 she only knew extreme poverty.

Lily Kwok was born in a small village in Southern China in 1918, confounding the midwife who’d predicted that she must be a boy because she had kicked so hard in the womb. That independence, strength and energy stayed with her all her life. Lily is 88 now, and still a fit, intelligent and – I’m afraid to say – stubborn woman despite all that she has been through. She and I are very alike. Lily and my mother, Mabel, inspired and shaped much of what I have done with my life: my success at school and in business; my return to the catering trade; my journey back to China to rediscover my roots, and in doing so, discovering her roots too. Her story is my story, and it’s the story of Sweet Mandarin. My sisters and I were immersed from birth in the Chinese catering business – the fourth generation of our family to make a living from food. We grew up in a family firm that was built on decades of graft and hard-earned experience, and we were expected to give up our evenings and weekends to help out behind the counter or in the kitchen. Not surprisingly, by the time we were teenagers we just wanted a way out. I became a lawyer, Lisa, my twin, a financier and Janet an engineer, but for all our efforts to escape we found ourselves choosing to follow in Mabel and Lily’s footsteps in the end. We opened our own restaurant together in 2004, and called it Sweet Mandarin. None of our friends in the Manchester Chinese community understood why we were doing it. The restaurant business is a very demanding one – the hours are long, the work hard and the economics precarious. One moment you’re in the black, the next something unexpected has plunged you into the red. It’s a tough, male-dominated world too, so why would three twenty-something professional ladies with good degrees and white-collar careers want to risk it all for something they’d seen their parents slave over all their lives? Our friends in Manchester had done everything they could to avoid taking on any responsibility for their own parents’ restaurants and takeaways, even moving hundreds of miles away so it was impossible for their family to call them up and expect them to rush home to help out. Living any nearer would involve a burden of guilt and obligation from which they were desperate to be free. I could count on one hand the number of my Chinese peers who were going back into catering.

Very little has been written about the experiences of mainland Chinese immigrants to Hong Kong and to Britain, but I knew that as I discovered more about the journey my grandmother had made, and the extraordinary things that had happened to her, this was a story that had to be told. It’s shared by many of the Chinese who settled in this country, who also carved out a place in their new homeland through the catering trade.

Here’s a date for your diaries: 8 July 08 – our launch date in the USA for the book. Eight is a lucky number for Chinese – it means wealth, and luck especially if you throw in a dash of red.

So far, this book, SWEET MANDARIN which started off with a few scribbles on the back of the greaseproof paper (used to wrap delicious morsels of food such as spring rolls) has escalated into a published book by Random House that has been distributed to 33 countries and recently been recorded as an audio book by BBC Books.

So the next step is the U.S.A. 84 days to go and counting. To celebrate this new breakthrough, and getting the book endorsed by Amy Tan and Oprah’s chef, I’m going to post a little of the book every day. That way, you can read about our family’s history and understand why Sweet Mandarin is important to us, and why when we welcome you in with open arms and a delicious meal, you are more than a customer – you are a friend of the family.

If you want to buy the book, UK stockists include bookshops like Waterstones, Borders, USA stockists include Barnes and Noble, Books & Books, as well as the department store Harvey Nichols. You can also find the book on www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, etc.

Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt,  announced the appointment of the new  appointments of the Ethnic Minority Business Forum which includes Sweet Mandarin’s CEO, Lisa Tse. 

The Ethnic Minority Business Forum is an advisory non-departmental public body which strengthens the Government’s dialogue with black and minority ethnic (BME) business communities over Government policies and services which affect the ability of BME entrepreneurs to start and successfully grow their businesses. EMBF members are ethnic minority entrepreneurs from across the nine English regions and include people of different ages, gender and backgrounds. 

Lisa Tse took up her appointment on 1 April 2008, and said “I am honoured to represent the Chinese community on the EMBF Board and be a voice for the Chinese people to Government level. Indeed at the EMBF Awards 2008, I was delighted to have nominated Wing Yip, who ultimately won Business of the Year 2008. It shows that the Chinese community, which has predominantly been silent within the media and political arenas are nonetheless strong performers and excellent business minds in the entrepreneurial sphere.”

The EMBF reports to the Secretary of State and meets the Minister for Small Business, and the Chief Executive of the Small Business Service on a regular basis.

This is Lisa Tse here, CEO of Sweet Mandarin. People often wonder what makes me tick. How do I juggle everything and how come you are everywhere? The question I often get asked is “What do you do in your spare time?” I look at them and smile. Do you really want to know what I do in my spare time? hehehe What spare time?

I’ve just been appointed on the board of the UK Government body EMBF which helps start ups and new businesses grow – how to be more entrepreneurial I guess.

Another exciting ’spare time’ activity is representing TIE as the Manchester Regional Head. I love what I do. Therefore it never feels like ‘work’. I’m not tied to the rat race. I’m not tied to the monthly pay cheque. I meet the most fascinating of people from Liz Hurley to politicians to local businesses. I learn every day and I love my life.

 So, what do I do in my spare time – I would say that I ‘go out with friends’ – and we talk business, build business and have a whale of a time. If you want to learn more, come and join me at TIE.

What is TIE ?

TiE Members are entrepreneurs and professionals with an interest in entrepreneurship, either in a start-up context or within a larger company. They represent a diverse set of industries, including academia, software and information technologies, biotech, legal, financial, and other services.       Membership is open to individuals of all backgrounds and experiences with the payment of annual dues. 

If you fancy joining, drop me an email at sweetmandarin@gmail.com

All the best,

Lisa