Lu Wenfu, like the wonton-sellers, rickshaw pullers, and petty bureaucrats in these stories, was buffeted by four decades of changes in Chinese politics and society since the 1949 Revolution. Denounced as a writer and demoted in 1957, in 1965, and again in 1969 during the Cultural Revolution, he returned to writing in 1978 after two decades of enforced silence.

Still, his voice remains one of the most attractive and sympathetic among China's major writers - understanding, not spiteful, capable of humour and gentle irony. His outstanding novella The Gourmet and the other stories in this, his only fully-curated collection in English, reveal the China that opened to the world after Mao's death. Here the tensions of a society emerging from years of upheaval are drawn with the relaxed, lyrical line of a master painter.