Eat Bitter: A Story about Guts, and Food

From a dazzling new writer, a stirring and gorgeously written memoir rooted in Hakka culture about the lesson to accept both bitterness and sweetness in life.

Eat Bitter is a memoir about guts and feelings. In Eat Bitter food is not fuel. It's a vehicle for us to digest reality. A pause for us to pick a truth from our teeth. It's a belly full of contemplation. It's an ode to food as a material for conversation and connection.

This book is a story told through the lens of Hakka culture, the unique cultural identity of a Han Chinese subgroup that has migrated across Asia and the Americas. As a result, their cuisine has been swallowed up in the monolith of broader Chinese traditions. Indeed, hakka literally translates to "guest families," and since they have experienced the most forced migration in China, they have had to forage off the land, ingenuity thereby becoming one of their defining characteristics. As such, the process of cooking and the endurance of such things is a significant part of Hakka traditions.

In Hakka culture, "eating bitter" means to endure pain alongside sweetness, in both food and life. Lydia Pang applies this ethos and mindset to those modern-day issues we all face. Whether it's losing a parent, navigating pregnancy, pushing her marriage to the brink, or coming face to face with the fact that she's unhappy with the life she's built, Lydia learns to take the bitter with the sweet, the challenging with the rewarding. She offers a renewed appreciation for food as a medium to process emotions--one that's heartfelt and tender, witty in all the right places.

Comprising the satire and darkness of Netflix's Beef, the tender insight of Crying in H Mart, and the distinct magic of Ella Risbridger's Midnight Chicken, Eat Bitter is a very special book from a brilliant new voice and creative talent.