Dear Reader,
Today’s guest author, Delia Cai, was born in Madison, Wisconsin and grew up in central Illinois. She is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism and her writing has appeared in BuzzFeed, GQ, The Cut, and Catapult. Her media newsletter, Deez Links, has been highlighted in The New York Times, New York magazine, and Fortune. Delia is currently a senior correspondent at Vanity Fair and lives in Brooklyn.
Central Places is Delia’s first novel, chronicling the story of a young woman’s chaotic Christmas break when she brings her white fiancé to her Midwestern hometown to meet her Chinese immigrant parents--forcing her past and present to collide.
You could win one of five copies of Central Places. Send an email with your shipping info (in case you're a winner) to: ethomasch@penguinrandomhouse.com
Drop author Delia a note. She invites readers to day “Hello!” deliarcai@gmail.com
On the cover of the 1997 cookbook Perfect Chocolate Desserts is a chunk of cake topped with curls of orange peel that glisten even from the image on the Etsy listing I found the other day, where the book is listed as "vintage." It’s fitting, because the copy my mother brought home 20 years ago also came pre-owned; I think she got it from a garage sale because even though she personally detested sweets, she knew how much I loved chocolate. This taste for excess, I think, was proof to my mother even then that I was growing up--and away from her--to be a real American kid.
I remember flipping through the pages with her and staring the photographs: chess pies and Swiss rolls, the swirls of a marbled cheesecake, a something gleaming like polished bronze called a sachertorte--named, apparently for a Viennese pastry shop that felt as far away from our home in central Illinois as Saturn. My mother decided this was how we’d learn to bake. For months, it became our obsession: we’d narrow down the options, then spend Saturdays at Wal-mart scouting for things like cream of tartar and other ingredients no one in our Chinese family had ever heard of. When we couldn’t find something, we decided it probably didn’t matter that much; likewise, we didn’t always understand the recipes, so we made up shortcuts.
Of course, we failed miserably. Baking might as well have been another foreign language to us both, and I remember how embarrassed my mother looked when what we pulled out of the oven looked nothing like the corresponding dog-eared page. I wish I could say that I always ate it all to make her feel better. I wish I could say we kept at it until we mastered that awful sachertorte, but after a while, Perfect Chocolate Desserts became lost to a dusty kitchen drawer.
When I come across that Etsy listing, I text my mother and ask if she remembers the book. Of course, she says. She says she still feels bad about giving up. It crushes me a little, because only now do I know why it felt so urgent for both of us to know how to bake a chocolate cake. We’d believed that was what real American families did, and our failures pointed to long-suspected inadequacy. I tell my mother now that I never minded. The best part had always been sitting at the table and looking at the pictures: the two of us united, on a rare occasion, by this want.
-- Delia Cai
Enter a drawing to win one of five copies of Central Places. Send an email with your shipping info (in case you're a winner) to ethomasch@penguinrandomhouse.com
Drop author Delia Cai a note, deliarcai@gmail.com
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
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