Print In the last couple of months, three fantastic cookbooks that contextualize what it means to cook Chinese food from a second-generation perspective have been published. Taken together, they provide a snapshot of how the authors of these books detail the push-and-pull of assimilation into Western culture as children while also maintaining connections to previous generations’ cultures and traditions by learning to cook from the most important women in their lives. In “My Shanghai: Recipes and Stories From a City on the Water,” Boston-based blogger and author Betty Liu details the cooking of Jiangsu province, or “the land of water” just north of Shanghai, with influences from the Zhejiang province to the south and the “hard-to-describe” cooking of Shanghai proper. As Liu states, “Shanghai’s culinary borders are blurred, drawing deeply from its neighbors.”