Name: Number One Chinese Restaurant
ISBN: 9781911590095

Lillian Li

Number One Chinese Restaurant

"The Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland, is not only a beloved go-to setting for hunger pangs and celebrations, it is its own world, inhabited by waiters and kitchen staff who have been fighting, loving, and aging within its walls for decades. When disaster strikes, this working family's controlled chaos is set loose, forcing each character to confront the conflicts that fast-paced restaurant life has kept at bay"--Amazon.com.

A Novel

This was exactly what I was hoping for a contemporary lit novel. So well written and moving, the characters were so real and from the first chapter I felt like I knew their makeups. Would recommend to anyone!

Katie Allard

Karis Ryu

3.5. by the time i finished the book, i knew that i was going to round that number up.

i thought that i wasn't going to continue after the first chapter. i would describe my experience with it as abrupt, like i was getting immediately swept into an unfamiliar commotion. it felt like there were too many moving pieces and i couldn't latch onto any of them. but i decided to continue with one more chapter, and there was a certain passage at the end, from nan's point of view, that piqued me. "oh, lillian li gets it."

i'm reading some reviews from readers who said they found the book hard to follow and the characters hard to understand, and that juxtaposes quite interestingly to how increasingly shaken i was by lillian li's investigations of love, loyalty, and humanity in all of their forms, which are messy, uncomfortable, and quite honestly at times disgusting. i do think writing from asian american diasporas bring unique insights on the complexities of human nature that people outside of that, particularly white people, find disconcerting and unfamiliar. unsanitized, perhaps. but really, cultural complexities mean that asian american authors often exist in gray areas others have not ever had to consider or deal with before, and having to grapple with the constant clashing of worlds (while living in a world that clashes against you!) enables them to see the good and the bad and the in-between of the human condition. i thought lillian li's strongest work came when she wrote from and through that precise tension of: what is hate and what is love, and when are they not that different? there are layers to this, the kind that need to be revisited over and over again: as all good things should make you do.

without giving away spoilers, this passage from ah-jack kinda wrecked me: "He didn't know where he was lying and where he was telling the truth and where he was simply confused. He only knew that this reality was the safest one to believe in. He was learning how to protect himself" (276).

also lillian li is from the dc area and this takes place there on the maryland side, where i lived from ages 4-10 so it was also really fun to know that events were taking place in neighborhoods and cities i recognized.

Nadine 

The reality was less than the hype around this book. A somewhat sad a little bit flat story of the intertwined lives of the wait-staff, owners and backers of a Chinese restaurant.

LILLIAN. LI

NUMBER ONE CHINESE RESTAURANT.

Jade Flynn

A multi-generational family saga with lies as entangled as freshly made Lo Mein. What a good debut, looking forward to seeing what Li publishes next.

Daryl Houston

It's really hard to believe that the authors of the cover blurbs and I read the same book. The story is uninteresting, the characters either flat or cartoonish, and the prose generally pretty wooden. I wanted to like it but really just didn't, and it took me far too long to slog through it; I dreaded every reading session.

Caitlin Berger

This is a great book! What I appreciated most was that it was written in the third person; Li allowed her characters’ personalities and problematic behaviours to speak for themselves. The reader isn’t meant to love the characters just because they are all protagonists. We can dislike some of them and still enjoy the book, which actually is a fairly rare phenomenon.

Eva Ströberg

Rosie Yakob 

Named a Must-Read by TIME, Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, Star Tribune, Fast Company, The Village Voice, Toronto Star, Fortune Magazine, InStyle, and O, The Oprah Magazine "A joy to read—I couldn't get enough." —Buzzfeed "This novel practically thumps with heartache and sharp humor." —Chang-rae Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Native Speaker An exuberant and wise multigenerational debut novel about the complicated lives and loves of people working in everyone’s favorite Chinese restaurant. The Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland, is not only a beloved go-to setting for hunger pangs and celebrations; it is its own world, inhabited by waiters and kitchen staff who have been fighting, loving, and aging within its walls for decades. When disaster strikes, this working family’s controlled chaos is set loose, forcing each character to confront the conflicts that fast-paced restaurant life has kept at bay. Owner Jimmy Han hopes to leave his late father’s homespun establishment for a fancier one. Jimmy’s older brother, Johnny, and Johnny’s daughter, Annie, ache to return to a time before a father’s absence and a teenager’s silence pushed them apart. Nan and Ah-Jack, longtime Duck House employees, are tempted to turn their thirty-year friendship into something else, even as Nan’s son, Pat, struggles to stay out of trouble. And when Pat and Annie, caught in a mix of youthful lust and boredom, find themselves in a dangerous game that implicates them in the Duck House tragedy, their families must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to help their children. Generous in spirit, unaffected in its intelligence, multi-voiced, poignant, and darkly funny, Number One Chinese Restaurant looks beyond red tablecloths and silkscreen murals to share an unforgettable story about youth and aging, parents and children, and all the ways that our families destroy us while also keeping us grounded and alive.

Number One Chinese Restaurant

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