A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts

Awards & Accolades

Children's Literature Assembly

AARP

2010 Notable Book

Grandparent's Book for Children

Cooking A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts

After reading A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts, students and I talked about writing while cooking their favorite recipes from the book!

Students from Singapore American International School cook their favorite recipes from A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts.

Why I Wrote A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts

Blog posts originally published on Tor.com

On Becoming a Hungry Ghost

In Chinese folklore, hungry ghosts devour everything they can find and are never satisfied. We may scoff at their appalling lack of self control. Yet if we look around, how many of us have become entwined in the same fate?

Ghosts to My Rescue

While I was writing A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts, I frequently wondered if at some time every child has fantasized about having a powerful ghost come to their aid. The brightest light in my childhood was torn from me when, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, my father was imprisoned for the “crime” of being a Western-trained surgeon. His act of loyalty, choosing to stay and help build a new China, was met with punishment. I was categorized as bourgeois, and attacked by working-class children at school.

True Friendship

In my debut novel, Revolution is not a Dinner Party, there is a scene where Ling, the main character, watches her father burn the family’s books and photos. This actually occurred in my childhood. My father, a prestigious surgeon trained by American missionaries, destroyed all his beloved books to protect our family from the zealous Red Guard. Yet he continued my education in secret, which included English lessons, a dangerous violation. He instilled in me a love for books and a yearning for freedom. During the Cultural Revolution, the only books we were allowed to read were Mao’s teaching and government-approved propaganda that praised the Communist philosophy. Everything else was banned and burned.

Pretending to Be a Teacher

As a young girl living under the Communist system in China, nothing was more thrilling for me than breaking government rules and getting away with it. I traded ration tickets at the black market, and bought meat and eggs from the “back door,” where Communist Party members obtained their fine food without being inconvenienced by ration tickets or long queues.

A Bird Out of the Cage

As a child, the only trip my parents took me on was to Southern China, to visit my dying grandmother. My parents spent months applying for various travel documents, retrieving permits from the local police and standing in long lines for days to buy the train tickets. When we had to spend a night in a hotel, the clerk not only demanded that my parents show all kind of official permits, she also insisted on seeing their marriage certificate. Failure to produce a certificate would have resulted in stiff punishment and public humiliation. For years in China, it was illegal for unmarried couples to stay in the same hotel room. Even today, it is not uncommon for police to routinely search rooms in the middle of the night, demanding identification and marriage papers.

Ghosts of the Great Wall

For three years I worked as the food editor for Martha Stewart’s magazine, Body+Soul. I began with my own food column, “Yin/Yang Diner,” in which I developed recipes based on the Chinese concepts of Yin/Yang balance and harmony. Before long, I was asked to develop all of the recipes for each issue. Instead of trying to pre-plan each recipe, I would go to numerous grocery stores and farmer’s markets and buy whatever ingredients appealed to me. Upon returning home, I would spend hours in my kitchen, pairing the ingredients, cooking and tasting in search of the perfect balance.

Every Word Counts

Even after publishing 18 books and over 60 feature articles in national magazines, when people ask me what I do for a living, I feel very self-conscious telling them that I am a writer. To be frank, writing is very, very hard for me, even with simple things like an e-mail. The stark differences between Chinese and English grammar make it difficult to remember all the rules. To make things worse, I was taught to memorize individual words when learning English, a cumbersome method that limits my ability to spell correctly. I didn’t hear about phonetic spelling until my son was in grade school.

Praise for Banquet

“…gruesome but delightful…laced with beautiful (as well as lurid) images… difficult to shake.”
— Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

“…chilling tales honoring Chinese food and ghost lore.”
— Booklist

“…will whet the appetites of …of ghost gourmet with a sophisticated palate.”
— Kirkus Reviews

“…offers up enough fright—and food—to keep kids returning for seconds.”
— Horn Book Review

“…deliciously frightening”
— School Library Journal

“Ghost Stories with a Chinese Twist”
— The San Francisco Chronicle

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