Abstract

Two contemporary Sinophone novels centering around the lives of chefs, The Knife and Words (Yi ba dao, qian ge zi 2021) by Wang Anyi and Food is Heaven (Yanshi ji, 2022) by Ge Liang, represent different ways of narrating war and trauma through food heritage in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Greater China. Respectively hailing from Jiangnan and Lingnan, the chefs have experienced seismic sociocultural transformations during their lifetimes: Chef Chen in Wang’s work in post-1949 mainland China and then the USA, and Chef Rong and his disciple Chef Chen in Ge’s work in Guangdong and Hong Kong from the 1920s onward. Their exiles and partly subconscious “search for mother” embody the tension between motherland and adopted home, between tradition and change in cultural heritage, and between rootedness and transcendence of identity. Ge enacts a premodern understanding of food heritage by privileging legends and traditions. The two chefs in his work achieve a sense of transcendence by acting as stewards of food heritage and the classical Chinese cultural traditions it invokes. In comparison, Wang validates ordinary living and casts food heritage as ever-evolving grass-roots experiences that sustain individuals in their struggle against inherited trauma. Ultimately, the two novels both bear out the life-affirming efficacy of food that defies national borders and ideological discourses. Depicting
how food enables individuals to practice care and self-care to counteract the “unbearable lightness of being” facing exiles in a strange land, the two works also usher in a new chapter in Chinese gastronomical literature by deploying food heritage as postmemory to navigate overwhelming historical and cultural traumas.

Keywords: Wang Anyi, Ge Liang, Chinese food, cultural heritage, postmemory