I bought this book right around the time of its publication in 2008. I then schlepped it around in moving boxes as I moved over the years. This became one of the happy moments in my bibliophilic life when I rediscovered this book in one of those boxes in my basement and complimented myself on just how good my taste in potential reading material was sixteen years ago.
What had possessed me to first, buy this book; and second,
to not read it for such a long time? The answer to the first question is that
it was rare for Chinese cuisine, let alone Sichuan cuisine, to be the focus of
an English language book. As I delved into reading the book, I realized that the
book had multiple layers, which made my decision to buy it all the more
fortuitous. The book interleaves a travelogue of China during the initial broader
opening of the country to western visitors, a cultural exploration of China at
that time coming from the point of view of a young English woman’s perspective,
and a heart felt memoir of her own adventures in life in addition to the food
lore, recipes, and recipes. The second question is harder to answer as I had
come across the book amongst my boxes many times in the intervening years. I
believe there is a certain hubris involved in my thought process to avoid
diving wholeheartedly into the book. Hubris stemming from my pride in my
Chinese cultural heritage intertwined with
my chauvinist feelings against learning about China and its food from a big-nose,
or a foreign devil. There was a certain shame in that because even though I was
culturally Chinese, I also spent most of my life being acculturated to the
west, I had always felt inadequate about the depth and breadth of my
understanding of my culture, particularly since I fancied myself a foodie. I
had started reading about the Chinese diaspora throughout the world and their
contributions in spreading and evolving the Chinese cuisine a few years ago,
mainly Cheouk Kwan’s Have You Eaten Yet?
So here is my apology to Fuchsia Dunlop, for not having read
this enjoyable and thoroughly captivating memoir, Chinese cuisine resource,
travelogue, and personal exploration until now. I allowed my own prejudices to
get in the way.
Even though the book’s layout is relatively simple, each
chapter has multiple layers of nuances. First and foremost is the cultural
accounting of Chinese cuisine, how it came to be the way it is, the folklore
surrounding each region’s cuisine, and the reasons for each regions’ cuisine to
be unique and differentiated from the other regions. As with all good
anthropologists, Dunlop dove bravely into the China of the 1990’s, an exciting
and turbulent time to be in China. Her being a woman and foreigner where foreign
women were a rare sight made her travels around the country that much more
impressive. Her forays into the countryside and places where she is often the
first foreigner to visit in many years were not only bold but also be termed personally
courageous.
The core of the book is her description of the food, but not
only the description but how the food is prepared and how her experience in
overcoming the language difference, the unfamiliar cooking techniques,
utensils, and the massive mismatch of food traditions between her cultural
background and China’s helped her telling the story. She tells a nuanced story
of how she set her mind to overcome the differences and accomplish the feat of
making the Chinese cuisine that she is documenting approachable for the western reader.
As I followed her narrative, my previous hubris gave way to
happy acceptance that she knew much more than I did and more importantly, that
her knowledge of being Chinese is in many cases, far deeper than my own
knowledge. Even though my cultural pride took a beating from this acceptance, I
was happily learning about my cultural heritage and the food traditions that I
had taken for granted as a part of my cultural identity.
As with any sensitive and sharp-eyed writer, she also
observed the cultural changes that was happening at that time, as China began
to open herself up to welcome the west, she identified the potential fractures
within the well-preserved façade of China as a communist society versus what she
knew was to come. Her observations of her Chinese friends in China also opened
a window into what those friends were experiencing and feeling.
Finally, she bravely exposed her own vulnerabilities by
examining her own feeling about being a brave eater in China and what that
meant and how her intrepidness conflicted with her personal value systems and
how she was able to deal with the juxtaposition of conflicting values.
Each chapter ends with a recipe culled from her notes that
were collected during her travels and research. Even though I was quite
familiar with most of these dishes, I still learned from them: about how to
prepare the ingredients and how to actually make the dishes.
The overlaying of the different parts of Dunlop’s tales made
the reading experience multifaceted and variegated, as the narrative kept me
deeply interested. My mind was kept busy
while absorbing all the different layers and threads.
After having thoroughly enjoyed my trek into my own food
culture through the eyes and voice of Fuchsia Dunlop, I can truthfully state
that I have been happily educated by this English woman.
