Contained in:
Book Chapter

Eat to remember. Gastronomical reconfigurations of hunger and imprisonment in contemporary Chinese literature

  • Serena De Marchi

During the famine that befell China following the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, hunger was a major affliction for the individuals undergoing reform in the labor camps. Food – in terms of procurement, consumption, or just discursive recollection – was a central issue in the prisoners’ lives and, as a consequence, descriptions of meals and eating practices are a recurring presence in modern Chinese literary texts that revolve around carceral experiences. This contribution investigates three literary works that reconstruct personal experiences of imprisonment by way of eating: Wang Ruowang’s Hunger Trilogy (1980), Zhang Xianliang’s Mimosa (1984), and Yang Xianhui’s Chronicles of Jiabiangou (2003). In these texts, food becomes a privileged perspective through which look at how personal and collective memories are re-appropriated and re-elaborated, as well as to analyze how narratives of the past are consumed and produced.

  • Keywords:
  • Food,
  • memory,
  • prison,
  • laogai,
  • prison writing,
  • hunger,
  • contemporary Chinese literature,
+ Show More

Serena De Marchi

Stockholm University, Sweden - ORCID: 0000-0002-1355-9597

  1. Allen, John S. 2012. The Omnivorous Mind: Our Evolving Relationship with Food. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  2. Assmann, Aleida. 2008. “Canon and Archive.” In Media and Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 97-108. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  3. Assmann, Jan. 2008. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In Media and Cultural Memory, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, 109-118. Berlin: de Gruyter.
  4. Beltrame, Daniele. 2017. “La soggettività maschile e la ricerca di una nuova mascolinità nella letteratura cinese all’epoca delle riforme: il caso di Zhang Xianliang.” PhD diss. Università Ca’ Foscari: Venezia.
  5. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
  6. De Marchi, Serena. 2021. “Repugnant Bodies. An Analysis of the Disgust Aesthetics in Yang Xianhui’s Chronicles of Jiabiangou.” Humanities Bulletin 4 (1): 215-229. <https:journals.lapub.co.uk/index.php/HB/article/view/1987>
  7. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge.
  8. Dikötter, Frank. 2010. Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. London: Bloomsbury.
  9. Erll, Astrid. 2011. Memory in Culture. Translated by Sara B. Young. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
  10. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?”. National Interest 16: 3-18.
  11. Halbwachs, Maurice. (1925) 1992. On Collective Memory. Edited, translated, and with an Introduction by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  12. Han Xiaoting 韩晓婷. 2011. “Zhang Xianliang zizhuan xiaoshuo de shenceng xinli yishi tanxi – yi “Lühuashu” yu “Nanren de yiban shi nüren” wei li 张贤亮自传小说的深层心理意识探析——以《绿化树》与《男人的一半是女人》为例” (A probe into the depth of psychological consciousness of Zhang Xianliang’s autobiographical novels: A case study of Mimosa and Half of Man is Woman). Journal of Neijiang Normal University 26 (11): 80-82.
  13. Herman, Judith Lewis. 1992. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books.
  14. Holtzman, Jon D. 2006. “Food and Memory.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 361-378.
  15. Kinkley, Jeffrey C. 1991. “A Bettelheimian Interpretation of Chang Hsien-liang’s Concentration-Camp Novels.” Asia Major 4 (2): 83–113.
  16. Li, Qian 李倩. 1988. Teding shiqi de daqiang wenxue 特定时期的大墙文学 [Big Wall Literature of a certain period]. Shenyang: Liaoning daxue chubanshe.
  17. Lieberthal, Kenneth. (1987) 2008. “The Great Leap Forward and the split in the Yenan Leadership.” In The Cambridge History of China Vol. 14, edited by Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, 293-359. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  18. Lu, Sheldon. 2007. “When Mimosa Blossoms: Blockage of Male Desire in Yu Dafu and Zhang Xianliang.” In Chinese Modernity and Global Biopolitics: Studies in Literature and Visual Culture, edited by Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, 38-52. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
  19. Mo, Yan 莫言. 1997. “Wang bu liao chi 忘不了吃” [Can’t forget about eating]. Tianya 5: 92-6.
  20. Sutton, David. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts. An Anthropology of Food and Memory. New York: Berg Publishing.
  21. Sutton, David. 2008. “A Tale of Easter Ovens: Food and Collective Memory.” Social Research 75 (1): 157-180.
  22. Veg, Sebastian. 2014. "Testimony, History and Ethics: From the Memory of Jiabiangou Prison Camp to a Reappraisal of the Anti-Rightist Movement in Present-Day China." The China Quarterly 218: 514-539.
  23. Wang, David Der-wei. 2004. The Monster That is History: History, Violence and Fictional Writing in Twentieth Century China. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  24. Wang Ruowang 王若望. (1980) 1983. Ji’e sanbuqu 饥饿三部曲 [Hunger trilogy]. In Yan bu zhu de guangmang 掩不住的光芒 [The indistinguishable light], 78-222. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe.
  25. Wang Ruowang. 1991. Hunger Trilogy. Translated by Kyna Rubin with Ira Kasoff. Armonk, London: East Gate.
  26. Whitehead, Anne. 2004. Trauma Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
  27. Williams, Philip S., and Yenna Wu. 2004. The Great Wall of Confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp Through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  28. Wu Guo. 2014. “Recalling Bitterness: Historiography, Memory, and Myth in Maoist China.” Twentieth-Century China 39 (3): 245-268. DOI: 10.1353/tcc.2014.0021
  29. Wu, Harry, and Carolyn Wakeman. 1995. Bitter Winds: A Memoirs of My Years in China’s Gulag. Hoboken: Wiley.
  30. Wu, Yenna. 2011. “Surviving Traumatic Captivity, Arriving at Wisdom. An Aesthetics of Resistance in Chinese Prison Camp Memoir.” In Human Rights, Suffering and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature, edited by Yenna Wu and Simona Livescu, 47-86. Plymouth: Lexington Books.
  31. Yang Jisheng 杨继绳. 2008. Mubei. Zhongguo liushi niandai dajihuang jishi – shang pian 墓碑:中國六十年代大饑荒紀實 - 上篇 [Tombstone. China’s 1960s Great Famine – vol. 1]. Hong Kong: Tiandi tuanshu chubanshe.
  32. Yang Xianhui杨显惠. (2003) 2008. Jiabiangou jishi 夹边沟记事 [Chronicles of Jiabiangou]. Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe.
  33. Yang Xianhui. 2009. Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp. Translated by Wen Huang. New York: Pantheon Books.
  34. Yue, Gang 1999. The Mouth that Begs. Hunger, Cannibalism, and the Politics of Eating in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press.
  35. Zhang Xianliang 张贤亮. (1984) 1989. Lühuashu 绿化树 [The green tree]. In Ganqing de licheng 感情的历程 [The course of emotions], 24-199. Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe.
  36. Zhang Xianliang. 1985. Mimosa. Translated by Gladys Yang. Beijing: Panda Books.
PDF
  • Publication Year: 2021
  • Pages: 127-142
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2021 Author(s)

XML
  • Publication Year: 2021
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2021 Author(s)

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Eat to remember. Gastronomical reconfigurations of hunger and imprisonment in contemporary Chinese literature

Authors

Serena De Marchi

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-506-6.12

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2021

Copyright Information

© 2021 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Food issues 食事

Book Subtitle

Interdisciplinary Studies on Food in Modern and Contemporary East Asia

Editors

Miriam Castorina, Diego Cucinelli

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

202

Publication Year

2021

Copyright Information

© 2021 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/978-88-5518-506-6

ISBN Print

978-88-5518-505-9

eISBN (pdf)

978-88-5518-506-6

eISBN (epub)

978-88-5518-507-3

Series Title

Studi e saggi

Series ISSN

2704-6478

Series E-ISSN

2704-5919

287

Fulltext
downloads

226

Views

Export Citation

1,341

Open Access Books

in the Catalogue

2,191

Book Chapters

3,790,127

Fulltext
downloads

4,399

Authors

from 923 Research Institutions

of 65 Nations

64

scientific boards

from 348 Research Institutions

of 43 Nations

1,247

Referees

from 380 Research Institutions

of 38 Nations