Name: Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Age: 36
Location: New York City
Education: Bachelor of Science in Journalism from Northwestern University’s
Medill School of Journalism
Job title: Author, freelance fashion, travel and food writer
What she does: We all hear stories
about coming to United States in pursuit of the American Dream. But for Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, a native of
Singapore who lives and works in America, it was returning to her roots that helped
bring her life’s dream to realization.
Cheryl is the author of A Tiger in
the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, a book she wrote about journeying
back to Singapore to live with her female relatives and learn how to make the
home-cooked meals she ate as a child. “A Tiger in the Kitchen was very much
about me learning about the women in my family through spending time in the
kitchen with them, piecing together snippets of their lives, our collective
family history, by discovering their recipes,” says Cheryl. Right now, she’s traveling to promote Tiger – she just returned from doing six
book events in Singapore – and she’s currently working on her second book. She also freelances for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post and magazines like Food & Wine and Afar.
How she got her gig: From a very
young age, Cheryl knew that writing was her calling, but she was afraid that
her cultural upbringing might stand in the way of pursuing her dream career. “Growing up in Singapore, a country in which
parents still nudge their children toward professions like medicine or
business, I knew ‘writing books’ as a career would be a hard sell,” says
Cheryl. “So I persuaded my parents to
let me study journalism in college.”
After writing an expose on an illegal puppy mill in Singapore which led
to the government shutting it down right away, Cheryl was hooked. “I ended up being in fulltime journalism for
more than 10 years, working at In Style
magazine and the Wall Street Journal.
But in the back of my mind, I always thought about writing books someday.”
Returning to her roots: Cheryl was
living in the United States for more than fifteen years when she began to miss
home and the foods from her Singaporean childhood. “I had grown up in Singapore determined to
have a career, so I emulated the men in my family, who were allowed to go out
and have great careers. I wanted to be remembered for that, not for making good
braised duck for my family,” says Cheryl. “So I had shunned the ‘womanly’ lessons like
cooking that my family had wanted to teach me. It wasn’t until I was in my
mid-thirties, living far from my native land, when I started to feel a real
yearning for this food and a sense of loss over never having learned how to
make it.” Although Cheryl had spent so
many years eschewing the role of the traditional female in Singapore, she was
suddenly compelled to travel home to let the women in her family teach her how
to cook – and eventually, find the material and inspiration she needed to write
her memoir.
Setbacks aren’t always what they seem: For Cheryl, getting laid off from the Wall Street Journal in early 2009 was initially devastating – but
soon, she would come to see it as a fortuitous bump in the road. “I was covering fashion and retail for the
paper as part of a bureau that had been formed at the height of the economy to
cover retail, luxury goods spending etc. At the time, I had just made my first
trip to Singapore to learn how to make my late grandmother’s pineapple tarts
and had begun to think about writing Tiger,” says Cheryl. “When I thought about
the sabbatical I would need to take in order to research and write Tiger,
however, I decided I simply couldn’t do it. We were in the midst of a recession
-- the worst time to ask for a sabbatical.”
Two days after that regretful decision, Cheryl and the entire bureau
found out their positions were being axed.
Devastated, she briefly wondered how she’d be able to bounce back from
what seemed like an unavoidable setback in her career. “But in the very next
moment, I realized, Wait, now I can write the book I really want to write. It
was a very liberating feeling -- I felt like a big sign had been handed to me
saying, ‘OK you whiner, now there’s nothing in your way: get off your butt and
go write this book!’”
Finding your audience: While there have
been several stand-out moments over the course of Cheryl’s career, one of the
highlights so far was getting the very first review for A Tiger in the Kitchen. “It
was Kirkus, which is famously tough, and I’d been expecting the worst. But it
was a wonderful review that made a comparison with Maxine Hong-Kingston, whom I
had read as a teenager and worship. I just could not believe what I was seeing
when I read that review,” says Cheryl.
But her most memorable moment so far happened at a book party that the
Asia Society Washington and Singaporean Ambassador to the US threw for Tiger in Washington D.C. earlier this
year. “That night at the Singapore
embassy, the room was packed with more than 200 diplomats and other
Washingtonians -- I look up on a wall and my grandmother’s smiling face is
beaming down at us from a projection,” says Cheryl. “It was surreal. My
grandmother would be the first person to tell you that her recipes, her
stories, are so simple, not special at all -- and yet there we were in the Singapore
embassy in Washington, D.C., and her face was beaming down at this crowd she
would never even have imagined ever meeting.”
This job’s for you if: you have enough
faith in yourself to let go of your doubts and just allow the words to flow. “If you want to write, the best thing to do
is just sit down and do it,” says Cheryl.
“Don’t be afraid, don’t doubt yourself.
Almost everyone has something unique to say. You just have to find out what your something
is.”
