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Wenying Xu, Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature, University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. 208 pgs.

Food has long occupied an important space in art, whether in literature, film, photography, painting, and so on. From Paul Cezanne’s paintings of apples, oranges, pears and quinces to Wayne Thiebaud’s mouth-watering slices of cakes, food in visual art stirs feelings of desire and hunger while exploring colour, shape and pattern and expressing symbolism such as abundance, juxtaposed against scarcity.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is Ang Lee’s seminal film about cooking and food in tandem with the ideas of family, freedom and relations between men and woen, weaved together in a complex and significant web. Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s Big Night uses authentic Italian cuisine as a symbol of home and immigration, where the chef refuses to cater to American tastes while his brother tries to convince him that adapting to a foreign culture is the only way the restaurant can survive.

In literature, food and meals are ever-present, whether as symbolism or simply a slice-of-life scene. Food is central to contemporary novels like Durian Sukegawa’s Sweet Bean Paste (an old woman teaches an ex-convict how to make red bean paste for the dorayaki shop where he works) and Hisashi Kashiwai’s The Kamogawa Food Detectives (where a retired policeman runs a diner with his daughter and takes special requests from customers to cook long-lost or forgotten dishes), but also inevitable even in novels where food is not the main feature. In Samantha Lan Chang’s “The Unforgetting” (one of the stories in her collection, Hunger), food symbolises the change an immigrant family from China undergoes as they try to assimilate to American society:

In the kitchen, Sansan learned to cook with canned and frozen foods. She made cream of tomato soup for lunch, and stored envelopes of onion soup mix for meat loaf or quick onion dip. More often as Ming’s career improved, Sansan consulted the Betty Crocker cookbook and made something for him to bring to an office party or to entertain a co-worker at home. (Chang 139-138)

At the same time, nostalgia is evoked by memories of food from one’s hometown:

At work, Ming avoided one well-meaning co-worker who had once asked, “What was it like in China? It must be different from here.” How could he answer that question without remembering the smell of fresh rolls sold on the street, or the scent of his grandfather’s pipe? (Chang 139)

Similar themes are discussed in Wenying Xu’s Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian-American Literature, but Xu’s discourse ranges extensively from the relationship between food and identity and analysing cultural connotations of cuisine to cooking with race/ethnicity, gender, class, diaspora, and sexuality. Xu has chosen the writings of seven Asian American authors, from John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) to Monique Truong’s Book of Salt (2003).

Xu quotes French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin from his book Physiology of Taste, where he famously says “tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are”, encapsulating the function of food not just to fill stomachs but that which defines who and what we are, whether as individuals, a community or a culture. Understanding why we eat and how we eat seems inextricably linked to understanding ourselves, and others.

In the first chapter, Xu compares John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) with Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1982) in exploring how the portrayal of the maternal affects the ethnic identifications of their protagonists. Ichiro, a Nisei, returns home after serving two years in prison for answering negatively to both of the loyalty questions put to all men of Japanese descent, the gist of which were whether they were willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered, and whether they would swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America. The respondents who answered “no” to both questions as a means of protest became known as “No-No Boys”.

Ichiro rejects his mother’s deluded notion that Japan won the war and in turn rejects her as a mother figure. He abhors his home, where “his mother waits for the ship from Japan to take them home, where letters from the old country are read aloud, and where Japanese competes with English, as “his parents [. . .] spoke virtually no English” (Okada 7).  He also rejects her eating habits of “eggs, fried with soy sauce [ . . . ] boiled cabbage, and tea and rice (Okada 12)” and prefers instead “the lifegiving fragrance of bacons and eggs sizzling in a pan” (Okada 39). This echoes Kogawa’s Obasan where Stephen’s Japanese Canadian experience of being treated like enemies of the state leads him to reject Japanese food in the form of rice balls and prefers “peanut-butter sandwiches, an apple, and a thermos of soup” (Kogawa 182). The rejection of ethnic identity is apparent through the rejection of cultural foods.

Xu points out that there are also Japanese Canadian characters in Obasan who “cling to their ethnicity even at the most difficult time by continuing their food and ritual practices”, citing an example of a warm dinner being prepared to welcome home a relative from an internment camp: “The miso shiru, smelling of brine and the sea, is on the stove [. . .]. [. . .] The dried fiddleheads with their slightly tough asparagus texture have been soaked and are cooking in a soy sauce base with thin slivers of meat and mushroom. Salty, half-dried cucumber and crisp yellow radish pickles are in a glass dish” (Kogawa 157).

Xu segues into masculinity and food in the second chapter, challenging the assumption of the “essentialist connection between women and food/cooking” by focusing on a male chef. In Frank Chin’s Donald Duk (1991), Xu states that “the kitchen becomes a site for the assertion of masculinity, with the language of cooking repeatedly evoking images of martial arts and war”, where “steam and smoke bloom and mushroom cloud about Donald Duk’s father as he tosses piles of raw shrimp paste and bowls of cold sliced fish and fruit, and waves his tools into and out of the roiling atmospheres” (Chin 63). Xu points out that the chef is a sifu, a title bestowed upon both master chef and kung fu master, working in a kitchen where the wok becomes “the hot steel”, with the chef as swordsman wielding the spatula like a sword.

Nevertheless, like Stephen in Obasan, Donald also rejects Chinese cuisine in order to assimilate by eating what he thinks of as “pure American food. Steaks. Chops.” (Chin 8) Xu uses the example of Donald describing the king clam dish as “the sole of my Reeboks sliced real real thin” (Chin 46), comparing a dish cooked specially for New Year’s Eve lunch to something that is inedible and dirty.

Discussions on ethnicity and race are inextricably linked to class. In Chapter 3, Xu discusses class and cuisine in David Louie’s The Barbarians Are Coming, a novel about Sterling Lung, a Chinese American chef who loathes his ethnicity and is eager to assimilate. He has misguided dreams of being accepted into the white American community by embarking on a career as a French cuisine chef and assumes that he would be “ascending to a new station in life, home in this stately patrician edifice, planting my feet firmly in the American bedrock” even though he ends up occupying the servant’s quarters.

Like the protagonists’ rejection of one’s ethnicities in Okada, Kogawa and Chin’s novels, what used to be Sterling’s favourite foods become “barefoot food, eat-with-stick food”. (Louie 75) Sterling’s descriptions of “what look like worms bound with pink cellophane ribbon” and “hooves-in-the-house food” (Louie 75-76) turn normal Chinese cuisine into something that seems inedible and unclean, as Xu states, “elevating European (read “civilised”) cuisines over Chinese food, seen as barbaric and degenerate”. Sterling’s perception of the ideal American home had “Swanson TV dinners. Meatloaf, Salisbury steak. I was convinced Salisbury steak was served in the White House every night. Meat in one compartment, vegetable medley in another, apple crisp next door.” (Louie 76)

Sterling cooks French cuisine to be accepted by the rich white society and says that “My purest desires are in the kitchen: for the exact flavour, the clearest consommé, the perfect meringue, precise paysanne-cut potatoes [. . .]. My great desire, the one that inspires the others, is to please my diners, that they love my food and love to take me into their bodies, into their hearts” (Louie 88–89) but later realises that he would remain being seen as The Other because of his ethnicity. Sterling’s exoticism is what becomes commodified by his white father-in-law in a television cooking show when he is forced to act like a stereotypical Chinese chef with a fake accent and exaggerated behaviour. He later realises his faulty judgment of placing Chinese culinary skills below French cooking methods when he is in his mother’s kitchen and it occurs to him “that, improbable as it may seem, I’m watching Zsa Zsa perform the meal’s mise en place. To think such similarities exist between her casual, capricious, undisciplined style of cooking and what I learned at a cost of thousands of dollars in student loans.” (Louie 102–103)

It is no wonder that immigrants, whether in diaspora or exile, may feel resentment towards their own ethnic identities when the country they settle in regards their food as foreign and therefore inedible. Xu refers to Li-Young Lee’s memoir, The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, where “in the provincial eyes of the town, the Chinese foodways set the Lees apart as heathen, uncivilised and abhorrent”, despite Lee’s father being a minister of its all-white Presbyterian congregation, with children saying things like, “They say you keep snakes and grasshoppers in a bushel on your back porch and eat them. They say you don’t have manners, you lift your plates to your mouths and push the food in with sticks.” (Seed 86)

Despite the humiliation, Xu states that Lee uses the imagery of “foods that might frighten most white Americans” both as a form of protest but also an evocation of a comforting memory, like fish head “with ginger, miso, green onion, the eyes steamed to succulent jelly. Plus the rich brain, she said, You may eat the rich brain.” (Seed 96) Xu comments that “For the exile, his or her culture’s foodways must function as a cushion from displacement and homelessness, as comfort food that momentarily transports the exile to the ever-elusive home. It is often through the palate and nose that the exile awakens the memories of his or her home and loved ones” and refers to Lee’s use of “the black cooking pot” that his family “carried through seven countries” as a poignant image of the exiled.

In Lee’s poem Eating Alone, food is used to depict his grief of his father’s death:

White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas / fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame / oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. / What more could I, a young man, want. (33)  

Xu explains that despite Lee’s sorrow, the comfort provided by a delicious meal can make the absence of his father more bearable. In contrast, his poem Eating Together, although also lamenting the absence of his father, celebrates the remaining members of the family who eat together:

In the steamer is the trout / seasoned with slivers of ginger / two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. / We shall eat it with rice for lunch, / brothers, sister, my mother. (Rose 49)

The final chapter explores erotic and culinary relationships in Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt and Mei Ng’s Eating Chinese Food Naked. In Salt, Bình, a Vietnamese chef, works in the Stein household, employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and is also later employed by Marcus Lattimore on Sundays. Binh and Lattimore eventually become lovers, and the first meal Bình cooks for him is a dish with “Twenty-four figs, so ripe that their skins are split, a bottle of dry port wine. One duck. Twelve hours.” (Truong 75) The eroticism of the dish is apparent as Bình describes its preparation, where figs and port are marinated for twelve hours, and “by then the figs will be plump with wine, and the wine will be glistening with the honey flowing from the fruit”.  

Xu argues that Truong’s choice of Bình’s sexuality is significant because his queerness differentiates him in the same way race, class, and coloniality does. Bình and Lattimore’s relationship is an unequal one, with Bình taking the more submissive role to his American employer/lover, just as he is subservient to the Steins, when Alice Toklas determines menus for her lover and directs Bình to prepare the meals accordingly, and being her cook he has to “adopt her tongue, make room for it, which can only mean the removal of his own”. (Truong 211)

As Xu rightly points out, Bình is “an exile in the interior of his colonisers, a domestic chef for hire, and a sexual minority member, Bình has very limited space for the exercise of agency. Cooking seems to be the only site where he enjoys some self-determination and dignity” but even this space is invaded whenever Alice barges in to order him in meal preparations. His mode of subversion therefore is though his wilful mistakes or negligence in the kitchen when he forgets “how long to braise the ribs of beef, whether chicken is best steamed over wine or broth, where to buy the sweetest trout” or “neglect the pinch of cumin [. . .] the scent of lime”. (Truong 20)

An ideal middle ground for the individual in exile or diaspora as opposed to protest or obedience seems to be Bình’s dinner with a fellow chef, Nguyen—a combination of salt-and-pepper shrimp, haricots verts, watercress and apple pie, essentially Chinese, French, Vietnamese and American dishes served together, prepared by a Vietnamese chef who realises that he “will always cook from the all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world”. (Truong 99)

Food is used to express both familial and romantic love in Naked, where Ng shows how Ruby’s mother picks out the best parts of a chicken for her daughter and both try to give each other the best choice of meat. In contrast, at a family meal, Ruby’s boyfriend Nick fails to give her the best parts of the chicken and instead “took the good bits for himself,” leading Ruby to conclude that he is not the right partner for her.  

Food is also associated with sex and sexuality, and Xu suggest that Ruby’s bisexuality is illustrated by her preference for both “little strawberry tarts and the apple turnovers and fancy cakes like Easter bonnets” in a Manhattan bakery as well as her mother’s salted fish and sea bass in black bean sauce. Ruby’s attraction to Hazel manifests in “a sudden desire to shop at open markets for her, to buy only the most beautiful string beans and patty-pan squash and red bliss potatoes and herbs from Amish farmers. She also wanted to run out and buy some phyllo dough and wrap up something fancy in it and bake the whole thing until it was golden brown”. (Ng 230)

In the epilogue, Xu argues that as much as most forms of art mention “food, drinks, and eating”, food studies in literature have a reputation of being “scholarship lite”, and that food scholars are not merely “food enthusiasts, waxing their warm, fuzzy feelings about food, kitchen, and women’s creativity”. Xu’s stance is made abundantly clear through the particularity with which she has selected the specific texts studied here, which does not “simply scatter[s] culinary details” but “speaks from the core of the text.”

Xu’s book is a formidable exploration of the symbolism of food in literature that is all-encompassing and provides an in-depth analysis of how creatively novelists use the idea of food and cuisine to portray not only emotion and nostalgia, pleasure and desire, but also disgust, anger and the ugliness of racism and exclusion. Xu invites readers to consider food not only as a source of comfort but also something which can cause revulsion, provoking uneasiness in a way that encourages contemplation and discussion on far-reaching themes that extend beyond food as a source of sustenance and pleasure in this invaluable companion for academics and fiction writers alike.

How to cite: Tay, Janet Hui Ching. “Formidable Exploration of the Symbolism of Food in Literature—Wenying Xu’s Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 2 Dec. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/12/02/eating-identities.

Janet Hui Ching Tay practised as a litigation lawyer before leaving the legal profession to write and edit full time. Her story, “Callus”, was highly commended in the 2004 CBA Short Story competition and was adapted for the Oxford Bookworms World Stories collection in 2008. Other stories have also appeared in New Writing Dundee 4 (University of Dundee), Readings from Readings (Word Works, Kuala Lumpur), Short Story America Anthology Vol. 1, Malaysian Tales: Retold & Remixed (ZI Publications, Kuala Lumpur), the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Black and Whites and Other New Stories From Malaysia (CCC Press, Nottingham). The first act of her full-length play, “Reunion”, was longlisted for 2017 The Windsor Fringe Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing. She is a Tin House Winter Workshop 2023 alum and is currently working on a novel. She lives in Kuala Lumpur with her husband and her son.

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