Most food memoirs about diaspora move in one direction — away from the homeland, toward the kitchen where the author reassembles what was lost. Lydia Pang’s Eat Bitter does something rarer: it moves in several directions at once, and the kitchen is not a destination but a site of negotiation.
The title is a Hakka proverb — eat bitter, endure hardship, and sweetness follows. The Hakka, a Chinese ethnic group defined by centuries of forced migration, developed a food culture built on fermentation and foraging, on making something from not enough. Pang takes this inheritance and turns it into a framework for her own difficulties: burnout, fertility struggles, the slow work of caring for a parent.
The book is structured around eight recipes, each one a doorway. The silly egg noodles her father made when her sister was ill. Bone broth boiled in a New York apartment while homesick. Courgettes grown in rural Wales as an act of reconnection.
Where Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart made grief the engine and Korean food the vehicle, Pang is working with quieter material. This is a book for a grey afternoon when the rain has been falling since morning and you have run out of ways to describe what you are feeling — because the feeling is not dramatic enough to name, only persistent enough to carry.
The courgettes in the Welsh garden. The steam rising off the broth.
