Translated Space/Translated Identity: Landscapes of Chinese Food in a Sydney Street

Jeannie Martin

《中國飲食文化學術研討會論文集》 第5屆 (1998/06) Pp. 211-245

https://doi.org/10.6641/PICCFC.1-8.1998.05.12

並列摘要

This paper takes Chinese places of food consumption (food stores, restaurants) to illustrate the configuration of local ethnic ＂identities＂ in the main street of working class suburb in Sydney. The suburb has been settled by sequential waves of Non-Anglo migrants, the most recent being (in temporal order): Vietnamese/Vietnamese Chinese; Korean; Chinese; Indian; Malaysian Chinese; and Hong Kong Chinese. Establishing public food practices is a way of food appropriating a place in the new environment. Sites of food consumption- food landscapes- in the street are very local; they do not attract a significant cross-suburban eating clientele. Food landscapes configure ethnic collective identities, they are a translated spaces, mapping out the ＂translated＂ identity of diasporic populations- a complex way of ＂being in place＂ in a wandering life. Food also serves as a way of exploring ＂Australian＂ identity, as Chinese food is ＂mainstreamed＂ and modified in supermarkets and general eating places. Let me start with a reminiscence. When I was a young, impressionable adolescent in the cultural wilderness that 1950s New Zealand, the one Chinese restaurant in town drew me like a lodestone. I was transfixed by its Sphinx-like silence, by its drab edifice's refusal to speak. Its locatioin in a licentious part of town, opposite an elaborate Victorian structure housing the city's public toilets (known as the ＂Taj Mahal＂, and rumoured to be the workplace of prostitutes), and flanked by a Pawn Shop and a Milk Bar, both frequented by the ＂rough element＂ (so we were told) , made its mystery even more compelling. I used to fight with my siblings to accompany my father to buy our occasional ＂Chinese take-away＂ in the hope that my father's presence would make it speak, make it tell us what it was. In fact such was the allure of the Chinese Takeaway that , at the risk of serious punishment, I would frequently sneak off after school to peer through its windows, and to prowl round its back parts in the odd expectation that its mystery would engulf me. Even then I think I knew that it's mystery was in me, in the mysterious changes in my own mute body, and the sudden revelation of the enigma of my family. The Chinese food, and (what we imagined to be) its seductively exotic culinary practices, only enhanced my fascination. ＂Sweet and Sour＂, the transgressive fusion of opposites, so alien to the English palate, and the artful disguise of the ingredients, thrilled me, and was disastrously analogous to what I did with my body, and to what my body wanted to do. I still remember (peering over the back gate), the heaped-up crates of odd- looking vegetables, the small man in the kitchen, his strange round shallow vessels, and the terrifying, hypnotic chop! chop! of his cleaver. (Where am I?) I still remember how I savoured the smells of his yard-pungent, unfamiliar, musky- like my yearning for the steamy, rank, hot odours of forbidden classes, the imagined odours of labourers and Maoris. And (peering through the front windows) I can still see the blur of chopsticks (how did they do it? were they made different to me?) as the family sat down to an array of dishes (something more than ＂sweet and sour＂? but what?) and trying to understand, through this meal, what they were as a family, and why I never saw them in New Zealand. The comfortable relationship with Mr. Young (he had anglicised his name), our family greengrocer- one of those who had given us our childhood staple, the Chinese gooseberry (now deceitfully marketed as Kiwi fruit)- suddenly became opaque. What did Mr. Young really think? Who was he? Where did he live? What did he eat? Was he only nice because we bought him? Did he hate us? I had no answers, but I never saw my social world the same way again, but that is another story. Food and its practices- production, distribution, consumption and disposal - have great ＂semiotic virtuosity to borrow Appadurai's felicitous phrase. Because food practices are social practices that are moral as well as material, involving such things as belonging, conviviality and deference, their expressive significance is widely recognised. In addition to their own elaborate languages (cookbooks, technologies, manners, rituals, taboos, rules of commen- salism, high cuisine etc.), food practices and food codes also reveal much about our broader culture world. The ＂rituals of eating＂ are suffused with information about: politics and economics, the division of labour (international, national, domestic), the configuration of identities, ideologies, cosmologies, and status distinctions of class, gender, religion, ethnicity etc. As well, ＂eating＂, as a bodily activity, provides an imaginative repertoire of sensory (smell, taste, touch, sight, sound) and cross-sensory expressions to describe ourselves, our relation to like their are sensuous activities that give the routines of others, and to describe broader social structures. Food practices- like their semantic affine sexuality- are sensuous activities that give the routines of habitus a creative component, a synchronising rhythm emotionally tuned to other areas of cultural life. Food's semiotics certainly saturated my adolescent romance with the local Chinese take-away, as they saturate the food and eating activities of all cultures. For example, according to most contemporary writers, the symbolic ex- pressiveness of the Chinese culinary arts- perhaps the oldest and most developed in the world- has been evident from antiquity. Texts of ritual and ceremonial foods, rules of commensalism, eating etiquette, and technologies survive from at least the first millennium BC. In addition, food shares languages and techniques that link traditional cosmologies, food and the body. Chinese literature, poetry and philosophy is replete with cross-sensory metaphors, recipes, and menus, and the ＂shared vocabularies of food and lust＂, are evident in metaphor and in dining practices. Dining practices are coded with class, gender, age and politics right up to present day.