Tasting Paradise on Earth

Jiangnan Foodways

Jin Feng

• Éditeur: University of Washington Press
• Année: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780295746005
• Sujet: Storia
• Sous-sujet: Storia cinese

Preparing and consuming food is an integral part of identity formation, which in contemporary China embodies tension between fast-forward modernization and cultural nostalgia. Jin Feng's wide-ranging exploration of cities in the Lower Yangzi Delta—or Jiangnan, a region known for its paradisiacal beauty and abundant resources—illustrates how people preserve culinary inheritance while also revamping it for the new millennium. Throughout Chinese history, food nostalgia has generated cultural currency for individuals. Feng examines literary treatments of Jiangnan foodways from late imperial and twentieth-century China, highlighting the role played by gender and tracing the contemporary metamorphosis of this cultural landscape, with its new platforms for food culture, such as television and the internet. As communities in Jiangnan refashion their regional heritage, culinary arts shine as markers of ethnic and social distinction.

CHAPTER 1

Jiangnan Style

A Gendered History of Hometown Cuisine

IN fall 2012, a listing of “The Fifty Legendary Traditional Wuxi Dishes” appeared on the official city website of Wuxi, Jiangsu, and immediately ignited heated discussion. Young and old, male and female, experts and amateur enthusiasts all pitched in to challenge the authenticity of the list. Some pointed out dishes that had originated in other parts of China. Others reaffirmed the “sweet-salty” flavor principle to which authentic Wuxi dishes should adhere. Still others lamented the factors that have led to the disappearance of authentic dishes: the extinction of traditional varieties of poultry and livestock; the prohibitive amount of labor that traditional dishes require; and food safety standards based on Western science that barred traditional cooking methods such as air-drying pork.1

In some ways, this debate echoes the US foodie phenomenon and Americans’ increasing enthusiasm for cooking with locally grown ingredients.2 In China, it exemplifies the widespread food nostalgia that has flourished since the turn of the twenty-first century. Enterprising restaurateurs offer “coarse grains” (culiang) for customers to sample China’s “bitter past,” appealing to nostalgia but also celebrating recent improvements in the national economy and in living standards.3 Urbanites flock to rural tourist sites that sell “farm food” (nongjia fan) while shopping for coarse grains in virtual and brick-and-mortar stores. Young people quit their city jobs to open their own small restaurants or to “return to the land,” settling in remote areas to grow and cook their own food.4 Along with the local-cuisine boom in the 1990s, theme restaurants, culinary tourism, and web-based food discussion forums have sprung up across the nation.

Food nostalgia both signals and symptomizes the collective backward gaze demonstrated on- and offline in contemporary Chinese life. Despite technological advancement, a wider embrace of capitalism, and rapid economic growth, Chinese parents show an inordinate interest in reviving what they perceive to be traditional values through cram schools and extracurricular activities that teach their children Confucian classics and rituals. Hit web novels and TV dramas depict modern protagonists traveling back in time and changing history.5 “Red Tourism” flourishes, sending millions of pilgrims to sites and museums that memorialize events and figures that played central roles in the official historiography of nation building led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).6

By producing commodity-based cultural roots, food nostalgia, like other forms of nostalgic consumption in contemporary China, provides a social palliative to offset the dizzying pace of urbanization.7 As the CCP capitalizes on collective nostalgia to generate revenue and to manipulate historical memory, food nostalgia is shaped by state intervention. It took China only thirty years to rise from 20 percent to 54 percent urbanization in 2014, moving more than three hundred million people from rural to urban areas; by comparison, the equivalent journey took Great Britain one hundred years and the United States sixty.8 In 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping touted urbanization as the “inevitable route to modernization” and pledged to explore a “new path” to increase productivity, stimulate domestic demand, improve societal wealth and justice, and contribute to global economic and ecological developments through urbanization with Chinese characteristics.9 Yet state policies aiming for even faster urbanization, such as the reform of the nation’s decades-old household registration (huji) system—which has codified inequality that advantages urban residents in social benefits such as health care and children’s education—have led to environmental degradation and social unrest.10 With insufficient infrastructure in the city, this top-down urbanization effort exacerbates the already fierce competition for such resources as food, clean air, sanitation, employment, law enforcement, and access to education in a nation with a population of more than 1.4 billion people. By some accounts, there were 569 strikes between October and December 2014—189 per month—almost five times the monthly average between June 2011 and December 2013.11

Seen against national trends of urbanization and discontent, the Jiangnan region presents a particularly revealing case of food nostalgia. Its rates of economic growth and urbanization are higher than the national average.12 Also, it can, and often does, lay claim to a consistent self-image and cultural tradition as a vital resource for producing and consuming food nostalgia. One of China’s foremost culinary regions, Jiangnan has historically received the attention of many of the leading writers of gastronomic literature, who, by disseminating notions of culture, gentility, authenticity, and virtue through culinary discourses, effectively branded this region as a model for the entire empire.13 In modern times, Jiangnan also bears more affinity to the cosmopolitan economic center, Shanghai, than to the national political center, Beijing. Taking pride in the region’s material wealth and cultural prestige rather than in political and military muscle, contemporary Jiangnan residents display a certain aversion to ideological extremism; this was exemplified by the responses to the 1989 student demonstrations by local governments such as that of Shanghai, whose pragmatic handling of the protest contrasted markedly with the violent military crackdown in Beijing.

Yet urbanization usually leads to a “strong tendency toward a universalization of cultural norms and values” and social practices—commonly referred to as “globalization”—in many aspects of daily life.14 Chinese scholars studying the megacity Shanghai attribute its prevalent nostalgia precisely to a loss of distinctive cultural identity caused by globalization.15 How have Jiangnan foodways accommodated not only social mobility and improvement in material standards of living but also social disturbance in the two decades since the first McDonald’s opened in Beijing in 1992?16 How did its culinary discourses and practices respond to intensified urbanization and globalization? What kinds of reaction did standardization of its food induce in various audiences? To what extent can its self-image of culture and gentility, constructed against the image of a purportedly political and martial northern China, hold true amid increasing geographical mobility? Answers to these questions reveal various conceptualizations and expressions of food nostalgia and interrogate their respective claims of authenticity, tradition, and heritage. Indeed, the culinary tradition of Jiangnan generated cultural capital for the gentry class in premodern societies, provided for modern intellectuals psychological solace and literary inspiration, and continues to be wielded as a status symbol and a tool of governance in contemporary China.

A GENDERED GENEALOGY

Collecting, reading, and compiling culinary literature were common activities for Chinese literati-scholars long before the twentieth century. The recovery of three hundred fragmented bamboo strips bearing culinary recipes from the tomb of Wu Yang (d. 162 BCE) at Huxishan in Yuanling, Hunan, provides ample documentary evidence that cookbooks date at least to the Western Han (206 BCE–9 CE), and some seventy titles published before 1800 belong to the food canon and diet therapy traditions.17

Premodern Chinese gastronomic writings vary in style and content. They evolved from items listed in books on rituals and rites, manuals on agricultural production and collections of menus and dishes to literati-authored “style books,” or cookbooks that provide tips on food preparation and consumption and outline the etiquette and transcendental values attached to foods. Elite men produced most of Chinese gastronomic literature in both modern and premodern times. Premodern authors appeared more secure about their cultural heritage and superior elite position than did twentieth-century intellectuals, for whom the fear of interruption of Chinese civilization by foreign encroachment loomed large. Before the new millennium, male elites often described their culinary literary output as supplemental or counter-cultural products born out of experiences of disenfranchisement, whether imposed externally or as a personal choice.

Food and drink were linked with moral education from the earliest times in China, where people used them to express reverence to spirits and gods.18 Following a cultural tradition that accentuated the moral implications of food, premodern writers were able to transcend the microscopic level of personal dietary experiences to reflect a shared cultural ideology. Chinese gastronomic literature reflect how Chinese interpret the whole world, from premodern to modern times.19 Since the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), Daoist devotees had promoted a “cuisine of transcendence” that sought to eliminate grain from their diet, and instead to feed on qi, the primordial force of the universe, or on rare cosmos delicacies. They thus removed themselves from Confucian sacrificial rites and lineage system to pursue alternative paths of life.20 This dietary practice reflects the literati interest in diet evident through Chinese history, whether the practitioners were Confucian or Daoist, and also underlies the link between food and medicine that is still highly visible in contemporary Chinese lifestyles and belief systems.

Chinese culinary writings not only represent the ethos and sensibilities of different historical moments; they also reveal the personalities of the literati who wrote them. K. C. Chang asserts that one of the essential marks of a premodern Chinese gentleman lay in “his knowledge and skills pertaining to food and drink.”21 Literati displayed knowledge and expertise through writing about food, highlighting their connoisseurship and setting themselves off from both the merchant class and the hereditary aristocracy, both of which enjoyed far better access to food than the peasantry. By defining good taste through culinary writings, they buttressed their cultural identity and flaunted their virtue.22

Echoing both Confucian and Daoist teachings, literati used food to display their spiritual superiority in the simplicity and wholesomeness of their lifestyle,23 to signal their freedom from the corruption rampant in officialdom,24 to enhance their pursuit of the vital life force and universal truth,25 and to express their concern for the preservation of common people’s livelihood.26 Sometimes a medical doctor versed in the culinary arts could achieve a grandeur to which pharmacological allusion alone would not admit. Li Shizhen (1518–1593), a Ming doctor and author of Systematic Materia Medica (Ben cao gangmu), “enhanced [his status] immeasurably by mastery of the culinary spheres, which uniquely allowed him to claim higher authority, and through expert knowledge of food from every corner of the Ming empire, to appropriate that authority to himself.”27 For those steeped in classical Chinese traditions, eating readily transformed from a simple satiation of hunger or a social activity into a practice of self-cultivation, while culinary writings generated cultural capital for them. Although details abound on the sensual, experiential, and aesthetic pleasure that food provided, literati usually used food as a signifier of transcendental values in the moral, spiritual, literary, and artistic realms. By writing about food and eating, male scholar-officials could claim their position as arbiters of culture and taste and thereby connect with both their learned peers and a shared cultural tradition.

Premodern gastronomic literature was dominated by men. In imperial China, women wrote and published little on food (or anything else for that matter). The lucky few who had their writings published were usually helped by sons, other male relatives, or male mentors, thanks to filial piety, male patronage, and established family lineage. Moreover, female authors as a rule discoursed less on food’s transcendental value or cultural significance than on practical cooking tips and recipes. Though women may have aspired to impart moral teaching through food, they tacitly identified with and accepted their role as preparer of food and nurturer of the family. Through the late Qing, women concerned themselves primarily with regional rather than national cuisines while emphasizing women’s traditional role in the domestic space. The evolution of Chinese gastronomic literature therefore reveals a prevalent gender imbalance.

JIANGNAN IN MALE-AUTHORED GASTRONOMIC WRITINGS

Jiangnan emerges as a chronotope with a unique temporal rhythm that is evident in male-authored gastronomic writings. It has been known for material wealth and cultural accomplishments ever since the Southern Song, when the ruling imperial family moved the capital from Bianliang in Henan to Lin’an (now Hangzhou) in Zhejiang following repeated defeats by the nomadic Jurchen army. Through the late imperial period—the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties—when the cultural and economic, if not political, center of the empire continued to shift southward, Jiangnan offered a type of urban experience characterized by intensified consumerism and cultural transactions.28 Together with the spread of hedonistic consumption patterns, a vibrant print culture emerged, at times manipulated by literati publishers to enhance their own cultural prestige rather than for the sake of a wider dissemination of information.29 The economic, political, and cultural milieu of late imperial China encouraged the proliferation of gastronomic writings.30 The number of published culinary books rose sharply, reaching a peak in the Qing dynasty. Significantly, these cookbooks were mostly authored by literati-scholars, and came to be regarded by editors of the Complete Library of the Four Treasures (Siku quanshu; 1736–95), the massive official compendium of all books of the empire published in the Qing, like calligraphy and painting, as belonging to the category of literature and art rather than as books of agriculture or craft.31

Jiangnan has always loomed large in Chinese culinary writings, from the earliest extant agricultural book Essential Arts of Providing for the People (Qimin yaoshu) to late Qing works. ...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chronology of Chinese Dynasties
• Introduction
• 1. Jiangnan Style: A Gendered History of Hometown Cuisine
• 2. Suzhou: Paradise on Earth
• 3. The Commodification of Nostalgia: Restaurants and Media in Suzhou
• 4. Hangzhou: The Fashionable Capital
• 5. Nanjing: Managing Historical Time
• Epilogue: Contemporary Food Nostalgia
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index