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Eat Bitter
A Memoir of Food, Family and Resilience
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₹5/month for first 3 months
Buy Now for ₹649.68
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Narrated by:
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Lydia Pang
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Written by:
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Lydia Pang
Brought to you by Penguin.
A beautiful and fearless exploration of food and feelings – with bite – for fans of Crying in H Mart and Midnight Chicken.
Eat bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness.’ For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a persecuted Chinese ethnic group whose ingenuity shaped a food culture rooted in fermenting and foraging.
Pang reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine: the silly egg noodles her father cooked when her sister was ill, the bone broth she boiled in New York while homesick and courgettes grown in rural Wales as a gesture of reconnection.
‘Touching, absorbing and unflinching… shows you how to stomach life’s shit, celebrate the ugly, and keep going' Angela Hui
© Lydia Pang 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026
Critic Reviews
'What Lydia Pang fearlessly captures in Eat Bitter is a glimpse into the life of a creative.
Nurturing and brave, her story inspires and her recipes warm.'