His sister, Coral, left Pingle to pursue a glamorous TV career. Shengqiang, the youngest of three siblings, was pushed into the family business at a young age by Gran, while his older brother went off to university and later became a professor. Although this positions her as an unreliable narrator, she seems the most level-headed and sane character in the story.
We learn that the narrator-daughter is in a psychiatric hospital, but we aren’t told why. The family soap opera centers on Shengqiang, who runs the family’s Mayflower Chilli Bean Paste Factory, and his mother, Gran (called Gran because her granddaughter tells the story), whose 80th birthday is fast approaching. It seems that Shengqiang has slept with nearly every woman in town. As the omniscient narrator explains it, “Dad used to pepper his love-making with a lot of swearing.” In fact, they were almost born eating Sichuan pepper powder.” And for Xue Shengqiang, mala is a key thread in his story––the sweat it induces, the sex it inspires, and the fiery temper and constant stream of expletives it arouses.
The narrator explains that the “townsfolk grew up with a hole in their tongues. The narrator of the story, who is the absent daughter of the main protagonist Xue Shengqiang, describes Pingle as a “piddling little town, where walking from East Street to West Street only took fifteen minutes.” And Pingle was all about mala, the numbing heat born of mixing chilli bean paste and Sichuan peppers. Yan Ge’s The Chilli Bean Paste Clan should come with a warning on the cover: “contents may cause readers to break into a sweat and consume unhealthy amounts of Laoganma spicy chilli crisp.” The setting for this complicated and often humorous story of the Duan-Xue clan, a family consumed by resentments, betrayals, matriarchal machinations, and sibling rivalry, is Pingle, a small town in Sichuan province, which the author tells us in the foreword is essentially the town she grew up in.
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