The Taste of Ginger

The Taste of Ginger is Mansi Shah’s debut novel. While advertised as the story of a first generation American trying to figure out where she belongs, it touches so much on race that it is hard to view the book as traditional Indian fiction. The main character is Preeti Desai, a thirty year old woman living in Los Angeles who is working seventy hours a week as an attorney. She has an older brother Neel who she is close to as they shared the experience of emigrating to the U. S. from India when they were children. The two of them emulated their white fellow students in an effort to assimilate into American culture. How much that affected both of them is not discussed between them until the family returns to India for a family wedding.

Neel's wife Dipti is pregnant with their first child when the family travels to India for a wedding. During a rickshaw ride through town, a car crashed into them and Dipti is injured. She is immediately hospitalized and soon falls into a coma. Neel calls Preeti to give her the news and she agrees to fly to India immediately. For two weeks Dipti hovers near death until a decision is made to terminate her pregnancy in order to save her life. While Preeti is in India she has to deal with her mother whom she has been estranged from for several years.  Her mother did not like that Preeti lived with a white Christian American man without the benefit of marriage. It was bad enough that she chose a white man but living with him pushed her mother over the edge. Preeti refused to give Alex up. Alex was her first relationship with a man and she took the relationship seriously.  While supporting her brother, they begin to talk about the difficulties they had in moving to America. It was never spoken out loud before. The reasons that their parents made the decision to leave India did not make sense to them as they suffered financial problems that they would have avoided by staying put. 

I enjoyed this book immensely but feel that the race card was played too heavily. Preeti saw everybody in terms of the color of their skin. She attached judgments also based not only on color but also on the darkness of a person's skin. Sure, she developed these feelings from her parents but no one else in the family had as many issues with race. She worked hard to be like the white people she worked with and thought it made her happy. During her trip to India she saw her countrymen in different ways depending how light or dark their skin was. Darker skins were from a lower class while Preeti was a Brahmin. Around the halfway point in the story I got tired of the use of labels and decided that I no longer liked the Preeti character. As the main character she should be admirable but her constant thoughts of race turned me off and I don't think that she was happy with all of her hangups. 

There was one other problem that I had with the book. The author writes about Preeti finding an old photo of her mother with a man that she did not know. Preeti asked several family members who the man was but they all told her to ask her mother. She never asked her mother and the book does not tell us anything more about the photo. It seemed like to photo was going to reveal a family secret but we never discovered what that secret could have been.

All in all, this was a good read.  I am rating it 4 out of 5 stars.