{"product_id":"mn-isbn-9780345813800","title":"Mãn","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eA triumph of poetic beauty and a moving meditation on how love and food are inextricably entwined, \u003ci\u003eMãn\u003c\/i\u003e is a seductive and luminous work of literature from Kim Thúy, whose first book, \u003ci\u003eRu\u003c\/i\u003e, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, received a Governor General's Literary Award and won the nationwide book competition Canada Reads.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e  \u003c\/b\u003e   Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman finds Mãn a husband--a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal. Thrown into a new world, Mãn discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body: they evoke memory and emotion, time and place, and even bring her customers to tears. Mãn is a mystery--her name means \"perfect fulfillment,\" yet she and her husband seem to drift along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch, and Mãn discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present dangers of a love affair. Full of indelible images of beauty, delicacy and quiet power, \u003ci\u003eMãn\u003c\/i\u003e is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language, its sensuousness and its love of life.\u003cp\u003ePraise for Mãn:\u003cbr\u003e\"This slim, wondrous book tells a story of love, food, passion and life rooted between worlds.\" \u003ci\u003eMaclean's\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A delicate and vital love story.... The writing is both heartbreaking and insistent.\" \u003ci\u003eToronto Star \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\"A story that is ageless and universal, and exquisitely told.\" \u003ci\u003eWinnipeg Free Press\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBorn  in Saigon in 1968, KIM THÚY left Vietnam with the boat people at the  age of ten and settled with her family in Quebec. A graduate in  translation and law, she has worked as a seamstress, interpreter,  lawyer, restaurant owner, and commentator on radio and television. She  lives in Montreal and devotes herself to writing.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eKim Thúy has  received many awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award in  2010, and was one of the top 4 finalists of the Alternative Nobel Prize  in 2018. Her books have sold more than 850,000 copies around the world  and have been translated into 29 languages and distributed across 40  countries and territories. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSHEILA FISCHMAN is the award-winning  translator of some 200 contemporary novels from Quebec. In 2008 she was  awarded the Molson Prize in the Arts. She is a Member of the Order of  Canada and a chevalier of the Ordre national du Québec. She lives in  Montreal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eMaman and I don’t  look like one another. She is short, I am tall. Her complexion is dark,  my skin is like a French doll’s. She has a hole in her calf and I have a  hole in my heart.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy first mother, the one who conceived me and gave birth to me, had a  hole in her head. She was a young adult or maybe still a little girl,  for no Vietnamese woman would have dared carry a child unless she had a  ring on her finger.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy second mother, the one who plucked me out of a vegetable garden  among the okra, had a hole in her faith. She no longer believed in  people, especially when they talked. And so she retired to a straw hut,  far from the powerful arms of the Mekong, to recite prayers in Sanskrit.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMy third mother, the one who watched me attempt my first steps,  became Maman, my Maman. That morning, she wanted to open her arms again.  And so she opened the shutters in her bedroom, which until that day had  always been closed. In the distance, in the warm light, she saw me, and  I became her daughter. She gave me a second birth by bringing me up in a  big city, an anonymous elsewhere, behind a schoolyard, surrounded by  children who envied me for having a mother who taught school and sold  iced bananas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eVery early every morning, before classes started, we went grocery  shopping. We started with the woman who sold ripe coconuts, rich in  flesh and poor in juice. The lady grated the first half-coconut with the  cap of a soft drink bottle nailed to the end of a flat stick. Long  strips fell in a decorative frieze, like ribbons, on the banana leaf  spread out on the stall. The merchant talked non-stop and kept asking  Maman the same question: “What do you feed that child to give her such  red lips?” To avoid that question, I got in the habit of pressing my  lips together, but I was so fascinated by how quickly she grated the  second half that I always watched her with my mouth partly open. She set  her foot on a long black metal spatula that had part of its handle  sitting on a small wooden bench. Without looking at the pointed teeth at  the rounded end of the spatula, she crumbled the nut at the speed of a  machine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fall of the crumbs through the hole in the spatula must just  resemble the flight of snowflakes in Santa Claus country, Maman always  said, which was actually something her own mother would say. She spoke  her mother’s words to hear her voice again. And whenever she saw boys  playing soccer with an empty tin can, she couldn’t help but whisper \u003ci\u003elondi\u003c\/i\u003e, in her mother’s voice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was my first word of French: \u003ci\u003elondi\u003c\/i\u003e. In Vietnamese, \u003ci\u003elon\u003c\/i\u003e means “tin can” and \u003ci\u003eđi\u003c\/i\u003e, “to go away.” In French, the two sounds together create \u003ci\u003elundi\u003c\/i\u003e in the ear of a Vietnamese woman. Following her own mother’s example,  she taught me the French word by asking me to point to the tin can then  kick it, saying \u003ci\u003elon đi\u003c\/i\u003e for \u003ci\u003elundi\u003c\/i\u003e. So that second day  of the week is the most beautiful of all for Maman because her mother  died before teaching her how to pronounce the other days. Only \u003ci\u003elundi\u003c\/i\u003e was associated with a clear, unforgettable image. The other six days  were absent from any reference, therefore all alike. That’s why my  mother often confused \u003ci\u003emardi\u003c\/i\u003e with \u003ci\u003ejeudi\u003c\/i\u003e and sometimes reversed \u003ci\u003esamedi\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003emercredi\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBefore her mother died, though, she’d had time to learn how to  extract the milk from a coconut by squeezing chunks of crumbled flesh  saturated with hot water. When mothers taught their daughters how to  cook, they spoke in hushed tones, whispering so that neighbours couldn’t  steal recipes and possibly seduce their husbands with the same dishes.  Culinary traditions are passed on secretly, like magic tricks between  master and apprentice, one movement at a time, following the rhythms of  each day. In the natural order, then, girls learned to measure the  amount of water for cooking rice with the first joint of the index  finger, to cut “vicious peppers” (\u003ci\u003eớt hiểm\u003c\/i\u003e) with the point of  the knife to transform them into harmless flowers, to peel mangoes from  base to stem so they won’t go against the direction of the fibres . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was how I learned from my mother that of the dozens of kinds of bananas sold at the market, only the \u003ci\u003echuối xiêm\u003c\/i\u003e could be flattened without being crushed and frozen without turning  black. When I first came to Montreal, I prepared it as a treat for my  husband, who hadn’t eaten it for twenty years. I wanted him to taste  once again the typical marriage of peanuts and coconut, two ingredients  that in south Vietnam are served as much at dessert as at breakfast. I  hoped to be able to serve and be a companion to my husband without  disturbing anything, a little like flavours that are hardly noticed  because they are ever-present.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMaman entrusted me to this man out of motherly love, just as the nun,  my second mother, had given me to her, thinking about my future.  Because Maman was preparing for her death, knowing that one day she  would no longer be around, she sought a husband for me who would have  the qualities of a father. One of her friends, acting as matchmaker,  brought him to visit us one afternoon. Maman asked me to serve the tea,  that was all. I did not look at the face of the man even when I set the  cup in front of him. My gaze wasn’t required, it was only his that  mattered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe had come from far away and didn’t have much time. Several families  were waiting to introduce him to their daughters. He was from Saigon  but had left Vietnam at twenty, as one of the boat people. He had spent  several years in a refugee camp in Thailand before coming to Montreal,  where he’d found work but not exactly a home. He was one of those who  had lived too long in Vietnam to become Canadian. And conversely, who  have lived too long in Canada to be Vietnamese again.","brand":"Vintage Canada","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300332654821,"sku":"NP9780345813800","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780345813800.jpg?v=1767732198","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/mn-isbn-9780345813800","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}