A kaleidoscope of Chinese cuisine and terror families with a generous helping of humour, Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet is a fine picture of multi-cultural England. Now, if that last comment sounds like a cliché, it deserves to be taken as a true compliment because the novel succeeds in transmitting the sights, sounds and even smells of the city’s colourful streets while treating that much-talked about phenomenon of multi-culturalism as a serio-comic experience.
Chen is a waiter in a Chinese restaurant who has been living in Britain for four years. His wife Lily is the daughter of a sifu, a slain fighter from Kwangsi. Till the age of ten, Lily, unlike her older sister Mui, has been trained in the complex and demanding techniques of traditional combat. So when we see her as the clever, yet solicitous wife of a waiter in London, we are a little surprised, so to speak. Son, or Man Kee (whose charm is enhanced by the fact that his head is disproportionately matched with his torso) is naturally the apple of his mother’s eyes, and for Chen, a future restaurateur who shall own a flourishing business:
Son was the most valuable long-term investment they possessed. On maturity the realisation of this asset could be worth far more than the business would ever return.
Elder sister Mui is for Lily, on various occasions, a help, an accomplice, and a rival for Man Kee’s affections. The sisters can deprive themselves of food, even as they overfeed Chen, but not for any stinginess on the part of harmless, good, kind Husband, poor soul. There is silent complicity between the pragmatic sisters who devoutly respect the place of the family head Chen, and any silent manoeuvres they make only seem to be intended at keeping the vital balance between Yin and Yang. They prove to be exceptionally smart and resourceful; Chen, taken by surprise, decides to allow that the women are far more capable than he has hitherto admitted. Supple, practical and charmingly unscrupulous Lily is soon perched at the counter of their own little food business as hard-working Mui runs around and Chen cooks behind the hatch connecting the seating room and the kitchen. Even clever Son starts contributing.
‘Now, Son, how much brown cash equals one green cash?’
‘Twice ten shillings is one pound.’
‘Son!’
‘Ah Mar-Mar, we play buying things at school…’
‘Clever Boy’. Kiss.
Mo’s eye for the comic is unfailing. Humour arises out of situations, speech and attitudes, leavening the narrative with a lightness that by itself makes the book unputdownable.
Lily burnt a whole series of prophylactic incense sticks in front of God… God was quiet black with smoke now but as ferocious as ever and the mantle of soot surely was appropriate, bearing in mind he was an adoptive Londoner.
The Chens' little eatery is named the ‘Dah Ling’ restaurant where sour and sweet pork is served to truck drivers and the naughty, giggling English girls whom Lily looks down upon with disdain. Strangely, the customers display great jollity in repeating the name of the restaurant and even use it to address the girls! :D
In Lily’s attitude Mo finds much to laugh at. Her mistrust of “foreign devils” and her horror at their condemnable habits reveal the prejudices immigrants nurture about the natives. But Mo is not interested in cultural politics: whatever is funny attracts his attention and it ever so subtly brings out the ludicrous in every stereotypical view.
Lily needs to convince herself of the superiority of Chinese culture and makes repeated attempts to drill this idea into Son's mind:
Really, there was no question how superior Chinese people were to foreign devils… They all looked the same to her. And how quickly their pink skins aged. How few types of face there were compared to Cantonese physiognomies: rascally, venerable, pretty, raffish, bumpkin, scholarly.
But when Grandpa is given free acupuncture treatment, Lily, who misses no opportunity to express shock at the English society’s treatment of old people, is forced to take a more considerate view of the foreign devils.
Intersecting with this innocent story of the enterprising family is the equally riveting tale of the other Chinese family, the Hung family mafia or the ‘Triads’. When the four disjointed histories of ‘Red Cudgel’, ‘White Paper Fan’, ‘Night Brother’ and ‘Grass Sandal’ appear without warning early in the book, the narrative threatens to break up. But this spell of incomprehension does not last long as Mo deftly weaves detailed descriptions of the meetings, plans and offensives of the Triads with simple sketches of the Chen family. As a trained boxer, Mo can visualise and describe fighting tactics as though he were writing the screenplay for a Jackie Chan movie. He also reveals close understanding of the innumerable stratagems and rituals that go on within the underworld where tradition and loyalty are invoked to trap pawns in ruthless games.
Mo’s style changes effortlessly from humorous to solemn, pidgin to poetic, always retaining the twin flavours of combat and cuisine.
So, again, the household changed (that amoeba), presented with change and challenge, shuddered like jelly on impact with the obstacle, but jelly-like suffered no damage, poured itself around the problem, dissolved what it was able to and absorbed what it could not. And went on its amoeba way.
If any sinister threat looms large, it is postponed repeatedly as people are given a few more -- and again a few more -- moments to watch television, water plants, listen to loud Chinese opera, drive a car without licence, crazily twist on a swing, chase a turkey across the backyard or make coffins for living friends. It is hence than when tragedy approaches on stealthy footsteps, it is absorbed into the story like all those foregone days of playing with life.
A thriller for those who like action and a heart-warming story for those who are fond of the humane. Sour-sweet indeed!
