8/9/2019 A Recipe Worth the Weight

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A Recipe Worth The Weightby Lt. Col. Presleigh Sanders

350 pp.

Reviewed by Armen Chakmakjianfor mynamemeansflintstone weekly

Clem Mitchell loves fried chicken but his fourth trip that week to the local Dumplingʼs Chicken inCrawfordville proved to be his undoing. Presleigh Saunders presents us with a vivid portrayal ofthe collision of eastern and western culture in northern Florida. Sanders, a Viet Nam veteranand historian of that era, weaves a great tale with vivid descriptions of both southern hospitalityand Chinese sensibility. As his main character races across Alabama, Mississippi, Louisianaand Texas, he creates a multitude of fresh characters out of familiar archetypes.

The main difficulty with this book is the unbelievable detail in which Sanders presents all hischaracters, their environment and their actions. In one scene, a Joseph Conrad style mind-numbingly-detailed description of the death of a prostitute who protects Clem in his flight forcesone to put the book down and walk away while dealing with the mental trauma.

Dumplingʼs was owned by Luc Tan, a recent immigrant from Shenzhen, China who had a secretrecipe for skinless deep fried chicken and an entrepreneurial spirit. Sanderʼs story is as muchabout Luc Tan as Clem. As he develops the backstory you get a sense of the difficulty of aliensassimilating into American culture. What the 350 pound Clem did not know was that Luc, hisnew friend, had gambling debts he had incurred playing all-night sessions of Mahjongg run bythe Everglades Chinese Association. On that day the gourmand , with a bucket of chicken in hisleft hand and nibbling on a chicken leg in his right hand, would witness the murder of hisgourmet in cold blood by a Chinese gang.

The Everglades Chinese Association was, prima facie, a community group for new immigrantsto learn English and assimilate into the Northern Florida Chinese community, meeting in rentedspace at Bellamy Hall at FSU. As the author peels away the layers of intrigue, we discover thatthe ECA was part of a nationwide gambling and money laundering ring and was deeply involvedin the trafficking of illegal Chinese immigrants into the US. Clem Mitchell, now a witness to amurder, must get away from the ECA as they try to track him down as the only witness in LucTanʼs death.

Sanders has a masterful way of dealing with pace. When moving at 100 miles per hour in aDodge Charger, you feel time dilation as Clemʼs thinks about how to right all the wrongs of hislife. In several chapters, we also get the feel of how the FBI agents, frustrated in their attemptsto crack into the ECA world, use forensic data from the murder scene to help find Clem.

As he speeds away from the murder scene in his ʼ78 Orange and Blue Dodge Charger, little didClem know that his denouement would be in the Texas Panhandle caught between FBI agentspursuing the ECA members and the ECA members sent to silence him. Sanders, through Clemand Luc, tries to prove that what you eat might be the death of you.