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  • Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature
  • Wenxin Li (bio)
Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature. Wenying Xu. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. 206 pages. $31.00 paper.

Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian American Literature examines the works of seven Asian American and Asian Canadian authors to foreground the central role food plays in the formation of identity. In this theoretically informed study, Wenying Xu complicates the prevalent models of Asian American identity formation in its political, cultural, gender, and racial ramifications by focusing on a most fundamental area of identity signification: Asian American foodways. Building on Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s dictum “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are” (qtd. in Xu 167), Xu postulates: “Food, as the most significant medium of the traffic between the inside and outside of our bodies, organizes, signifies, and legitimates our sense of self in distinction from others who practice different foodways” (2). In this conceptualization, food goes beyond its nutritional properties to become a fundamental signifier of one’s identity. Unfortunately, as one of the first signifiers of Asian American identity in the European American imagination, Asian American foodways have often been exoticized as well as maligned, feeding the stereotypes of Asian Americans as perpetual aliens and inscrutable barbarians. Discrediting both external falsification and internal “self-exoticism” (14), Xu regards food narrative in Asian American literature “as a dominant site of economic, cultural, and political struggle” (14) that paves the way for a broadened critical discourse on the relationship between food and identity.

In terms of its theoretical framework, Eating Identities draws from several schools of critical thinking, including Fredric Jameson’s Marxist literary theory, Edward Said’s postcolonial theory, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer theory, and Freudian psychoanalytical theory through its modern and contemporary exegetes Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Slavoj Zizek. Yet while Eating Identities derives much of its critical insight through a close engagement with contemporary theory, Xu rejects the domination of theory over literature. An imposition of theory and politics on literary studies, according to Xu, runs the risk of creating another kind of colonization, which may lead to the “dismemberment” of the literary subject (16).

The scope of Xu’s analysis covers mostly East Asian American texts, notably Chinese and Japanese. While her reading of Monique Truong’s [End Page 231] The Book of Salt (2003) offers a sample of Vietnamese American writing, another important subset, namely South Asian American literature, is not included in this study. In acknowledging this omission, Xu helpfully points to Anita Mannur’s Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture (a work in progress at the time that was finally published in 2010). The organizational scheme of Eating Identities features two chapters that pair two books on a closely related theme and three chapters that deal with the works of single authors.

Chapter One studies two texts, John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), that examine Japanese American and Japanese Canadian internment experiences. Although the two novels share a common thematic concern about racial subjugation during and after World War II, Xu zeroes in on the different workings of the Kristevan concept of the maternal in these works. For Xu, the maternal represents a psychosocial space in which food and rituals play a critical role in constituting one’s racial and ethnic consciousness. In other words, embracing or rejecting ethnic food, which is analyzed through the Lacanian concept of jouissance (i.e. Zizek’s “enjoyment”), is seen as the key to the formation of the protagonists’ ethnic identity.

The next three chapters analyze three Chinese American authors (though a case might be made that Li-Young Lee, the subject of Chapter Four, is Chinese/Indonesian American) who make ethnic foodways a central trope for racial and ethnic identification. Chapter Two considers Frank Chin’s novel Donald Duk (1991) along with his short story “The Eat and Run Midnight People” (1988). Noting its divergence from Chin’s earlier work, which was characterized by its combative masculine stance toward white racism, Xu affirms Chin’s softened, humorous recasting of Asian American masculinity. Still...

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