Inroduction

This study seeks to invite the readers to look at the most unimagined unit of everyday life – food – from an alternative perspective. In audiovisual cultures, food is more than a socio-cultural phenomenon, for it represents the audiences’ desire for self-identification. Forming a creative dialogue between Ang Lee’s film Eat Drink Man Woman 飲食男女 (1994) and the televisual documentary series A Bite of China 舌尖上的中國 (2012), this study proposes that the representation of food is also the articulation of hunger for a national-cultural identity.

Through the theoretical frameworks of cultural translation, global and food studies, this study discusses how food images are employed to resolve the post-modern identity crisis at an imagined level: (i.) solving the problem of origin with the discourse of tradition, (ii.) deferring hunger with the voyeuristic pleasure created by the spectacles of cooking, and (iii.) mystifying family and community kinships by sentimentalizing the images of eating.

In audiovisual cultures, food is more than a socio-cultural phenomenon, for it represents the audiences’ desire for self-identification.

Lee Yi-yan Paulina: Posted on Facebook and IG on Feb 28, 2022

Highlights

• Lee’s and Chen’s translations of food similarly articulate the desire of post-modern subjects for an alternative “national cultural identity” that can imaginarily resolve the problems and contradictions emerged from national developments, e.g. rural-urban migration, food scandals.
• In the two works, the chef’s hands function as a significant semiotic sign privileging the traditional culinary skills over the Fordist production of food.
• The audiovisual emphasis on the stand-in hands and the violence of cooking generates the effects of voyeuristic shock and pleasure. It effectively fetishizes Chinese food and people, and suspends the spectators’ judgments on the problem of origin and authenticity.

Highlights

• In the two works, the object-hood of the food-family harmony on screen critically brings a sensational pleasure to the spectators, as they suggest a sense of completeness, permanence and prosperity.
• Both Lee and Chen adopt a melodramatic approach of mythicizing familial kinships. The preparation of Chinese food materializes the sentimentality (情 qíng) among the family members, justifying the cultural national root as the essence of individuals especially in the context of global postmodernity.
• With the growing dislocation of workers from their homeland, the re-enchantment of the relationships between nature and food, food and family, is appealing to the city dwellers and workers who experienced multilayered of disconnection and even fragmentation (Yang, Fan 416).

Highlights

• The re-enchantment of family and sentimentality through food narratives is also important in preparing the spectators’ to imagine the national communities through the shared hunger for home-ness.
• In Chinese culinary skills, tofu curd cutting signifies one of the most challenging tasks for chefs. In the two works, it is not surprising to see that both Lee and Chen exoticize the aesthetics of Chinese knife skills through the myth of tofu-/bean-curd cutting, e.g. to cut a piece of tofu into hair-like shreds.
• The ways of seeing and translating Chinese food are not merely driven by a desire outside or inside the culture, it is also the way of how a culture desires and being desired.
• With the pluralism and complexity within the Chinese food cultures, the untranslatability of cultural differences signifies a space of ambivalence that resists the dichotomy of translation.

Experience at MALCS

The time studying at the MALCS programme is a beautiful and precious chapter of my life. Enrolled as a full-time student, the one-year intensive programme had greatly assisted me in developing a strong theoretical foundation, critical evaluation ability, open-minded world view, and a unique intellectual voice. In the programme, I learnt treasurable knowledge from my teachers as well as from my colleagues, who come from diverse cultural backgrounds and academic experiences. Currently as an independent multi-disciplinary artist in Europe, the knowledge that I received from the programme is still highly relevant to my creative projects, and they are supporting me in many ways to manifest my visions in this world. I highly recommend this programme to individuals who are eager to deepen their studies in the field of comparative literary and cultural studies.