In this irresistible memoir of food, family and migration, Shiamin Kwa relates her search for identity, authenticity and belonging – and how in the end, like every migrant, she created her own menu for life
Kwa tells of first moving from Malaysia to the ‘You-Ess’ as a child, where she desperately tried to fit in; returning to her home town of Kuala Lumpur a year later to find herself an unwelcome foreigner in the place she had thought of as home; of struggling to adjust to the arcane codes of her Ivy League university; and of being baffled by ‘fake’ and ‘real’ American Chinese restaurants – just as her contemporaries were confused by her own identity. Caught between competing ideas of herself, she grapples with what it means to live an ‘authentic’ life.
Through exquisitely observed writing about food - from the curry mee of ‘home’ to the unsettlingly repellent texture of baked apples - as a site where identities are claimed, forged and questioned, The Secret Menu explores the immigrant experience, what it means to belong to and succeed in a second country and how to remain true to whatever one might consider an authentic self. Writing with humour, insight and heart, Kwa explores the unwritten codes we use to identify ourselves and others – from the social castes of university to the ‘secret menus’ of Chinese restaurants – and the confounding nature of the immigrant experience in a memoir that is as profound about the meanings of food as it is about identity