During a recent interview, Leung Ping-kwan expressed admiration for certain non-Chinese poets he once translated in the following terms: »What I appreciate in their work is usually not a felicitous phrase or an appropriate comparison but rather the manner in which an entire horizon, an attitude so to speak, reveals itself amid the most quotidian observation and the most ordinary use of language. Their poetic works are like delicious food, which, after digestion, give me nourishment.«¹

Even the most casual reader of Leung's poetry will notice that this reference to food is one of the characteristic features of his writing. The most obvious culinary examples are of course those found in the poems that deal explicitly with food, such as the ones collected in Foodscape, with suggestive titles such as »Pun Choi on New Year's Eve,« »Breakfast in Soho,« »Salted Shrimp Paste,« »Soup with Dried Chinese Cabbage,« and so forth. In Leung's universe one that is made up of external as well as internal journeys the most common comestibles, such as tea and coffee, are often juxtaposed with exotic items such as those mentioned in the concluding lines of »At Bela Vista«: »bean stew Brazilian style, squids Mozambique in coconut juice,« followed by »a simple drink made from sugar cane«. But a closer look at Leung's other works reveals that he has, in fact, been consistently drawing on what can be eaten for his imaginative, multi-generic cartographies over the decades in the form of vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, milk, soft drinks, wine, soups, snacks, and much more. This repeated return to food raises the question: what exactly is the status of food and, by implication, of consumption, in his writing?

Eating is, of course, among the most frequently used allegories in modern and contemporary Chinese literary culture. In a tradition that is conventionally said to begin with Lu Xun, modern Chinese literature since the beginning of the twentieth century has held typically ambivalent attitudes towards the act of consumption. Despite the gusto which accompanies gluttony and the pride many Chinese take in Chinese cuisine, eating has, in the radical intellectual critique of Chinese culture since the May Fourth period, been metaphorized as terror, as the cannibalism of an immovable feudal civilization with its »chi ren de li jiao«, its »man-eating« rituals and conventions.² Alternatively, due to the long periods of famine and starvation in Chinese history, eating has also come to occupy a privileged, perhaps fetishized, status in the literary depiction of lack, be that lack physical hunger or sexual desire.³ The complex, collective mental and emotional investments in food means that, the decades of attempts by the Chinese Communist government to steer cultural work in the Marxist conceptual direction of production notwithstanding, it is consumption and the neuroses surrounding consumption which retain a fascinating hold on writers' and readers' imagination.

To mention lust a few examples, contemporary novels from the People's Republic such as Su Tong's »Mi« (Rice) and Yu Hua's »Huozhe« (To Live), and a memoir such as Guanlong Cao's »The Attic«, among others, all participate in the post-Cultural Revolution obsession with what it means to eat or not to eat in China.⁴ The recurrence of political turmoil, scarcity of material resources, and surveillance by others - features of mainland Chinese life during an extended period in the mid-twentieth century - converge to produce, in writin, a rugged masculinist approach to eating, whereby eating is habitually portrayed as cognate with aggression and conquest. To eat, from this approach, is to wage a successful war - to be able to find edibles when none seem to exist, to attack with impetuosity and devour without remorse (because it is often uncertain when and from where the next meal will come). Consumption, in other words, is unabashedly and inevitably a form of violence, a confrontation between man and the hostile world. It requires cold-blooded manipulation and mastery of that which is to be consumed.

From the corresponding feminine perspective, on the other hand, eating has often been handled with familial sentimentality. For instance, a casual perusal of Chinese cookbooks, a popular genre whose authors and readers are largely women rather than men, would indicate that the seemingly factographic, recipe writing about food preparation readily partakes of the mainstream sociological division of labour between men and women. Cooking, especially domestic cooking which is usually performed by wives and mothers, is thus rhetorically constructed around motifs of health (usually linked to the mysterious »essences« of the foodstuff being used), economics (both in terms of money and of time), entertainment (as a necessary part of socialization), age and sexual differences among consumers (especially in well-populated families), and so forth. All in all, these are, it is implied, motifs of physical and mental well-being that a shrewd and capable woman should take into account in her responsibility as nurturing household manager. This feminization of consumption continues - and intensifies when Chinese families move overseas. A film such as Wayne Wang's »The Joy Luck Club« (based on Amy Tan's novel of the same name), for instance, makes full use of eating and eating festivities to convey the sensational traumas of being »ethnic« (that is, Chinese American) in various moments of historical and/or psychic dislocation. Although the story is supposedly about four sets of mother-daughter relationships in the diasporic space of Chinese families in the United States, almost every episode revolves around food, and food quickly becomes a way of reading sexual and ethnic crises, be they over filial piety, chastity, marriage, betrayal, suicide, cross-generation misunderstanding, or memory.

There are, of course, countless other examples of the handling of food and consumption in relation to modern and contemporary Chinese culture. The point of this digression, however, is simply to foreground what I consider to be the unique feature of Leung's poetic writing, namely, his distinctive approach to consumption. Not only does Leung refuse the arrogant attitude that food is not the stuff that poetry is made of, but his faithful musings about food serve, ultimately, to open up a refreshing dimension to the entire question of what it means to consume, especially in the postcolonial, postmodern time and space of Hong Kong.

Unlike the masculinist violence and the domestic sentimentalism that are commonly found in the two major rhetorical styles of commodifying food I described above - novels and memoirs, we should remember, are as much commodities as cookbooks and films Leung's approach to eating is of a very different order. Not that he holds himself aloof from commodification; rather, it is that for him, food is always first and foremost an occasion for something other than itself, an occasion for a humane relationship. Even in the most vivid, concrete descriptions of ingredients, of colours, smells, and tastes, food is in Leung's writing food for thought, a manner of exploring the possibilities, the unnoticed dimensions lurking in what appear to be ordinary contacts or banal encounters between people and things.

For instance, gastronomical satisfaction aside, mussels in Brussels become an occasion for thinking about the vexed question of cultural identity specifically, about the untenability of universalist claims and the ineluctability of historical differences. Beginning with the light-hearted lines,

[i]All say mussels have no identity problems
Perhaps ... after all, here in Brussels
we still eat Canadian mussels
The sixth-generation director from China goes on and on
Art is pure! Art is universal![/i]

The poem ends on a somber note, a strong and unambiguous position on a messy issue:

[i]there are different kinds of mussels, always will be ...
... Chinese mussels strayed from home,
thousands of miles away, still taste of
the ponds and lakes that bred them. All mussels have their own history
There isn't a mussel thoroughly metaphysical.[/i]
»Mussels in Brussels«

Similarly, when far away from home, it is often the taste of something familiar that reminds us not only of what we have eaten before but also of who we are. To be sure, there is nothing extraordinary about such a revelation, but what is unusual is that it is consumption, normally considered a passive, unproductive activity, which serves as the agent of cultural difference, at a time when such difference is already in the process of being lost. Such, then, is the awareness brought about by the taste of cooked eggplant:

[i]With what mixed feelings, I wonder, your parents
had followed the flux of emigrants and crossed the wide seas
in time, hybrid fruit and new vegetables slipped into their vocabulary
their tongues slowly got used to foreign seasonings
Like many of their generation, people began to drift away

from a centre, their appearance changed
But now and then from shreds of something here and bits of
something elsewhere we discovered a vaguely familiar taste
like meat and skin cooked to a mush, gone apart
back together again: that taste of ourselves, extinct, distinct[/i]
»Eggplants«

Taste itself is not exactly being sentimentalized. Indeed, what seems intimate and unforgettable may also become dubious, unreliable, and confusing with the change of political climates. In a place such as Poland, where ordinary life has been torn asunder by political crises for sustained periods, the availability of food, indeed the taste of what ought to have been familiar, easily becomes unpredictable:

[i]Having seen swans and magnificent churches, we found
a small charming restaurant over at the square, it served
authentic goulash soup and fried potato pancakes that tasted so good,
but the next time we could not find it. In the government-owned restaurant
with its stately architecture, behind the heavy curtain that was about
to fall, it seemed the evil shadows of history were there
Can a change of government alter a soup's taste?[/i]
»A Restaurant in Poland«

The manner in which food becomes food-for-thought can perhaps be generalized to include all the material objects in Leung's poetry, objects which are often also occasions for surprising illuminations. The tenacity of Leung's closeness to these objects is especially thought-provoking from the standpoint of his hometown's stereotypical reception by an uncomprehending international public. Against the oft-repeated moralistic indictment that Hong Kong is a place driven exclusively by materialism and consumerism,⁵ Leung's work, through cohesively nuanced self-reflections, forges an alternative path to the materialist and consumerist world that the poet, like any other person, inhabits. It is as if, by steadfastly holding onto the theme of material consumption yet refusing to give up contemplating even the most lowly things in his environment, Leung is unwittingly returning the gaze of the indicting international public with one that is not only different in kind but also different in quality. Rather than modalities of glamour, excess, extravagance, and waste - modalities normally associated with (Hong Kong's) materialism ad consumerism - he teaches us ways of discovering treasures in the plain, the modest, and the prosaic.

Leung's unconventional thing-oriented preoccupation also alerts us to the fact that Hong Kong, as it seized world-wide media attention in recent years because of 1997, has itself been turned into an object of consumption especially by the West, which is ready as ever to play nostalgia-prone Orientalist, self-righteous Missionary, and bleeding-heart Saviour all at once. In this light, Leung's work over the decades can be seen as an ongoing intervention in the ruthless consumerism inherent in the grand narratives of global political as well as commercial cultures, which have alternately understood the former British colony simply as a part of China, lost and regained, or as a corrupt, shameless society irredeemably delivered into the evil hands of capitalism. Between the forces of British imperialism and international economism, and between the forces of mainland Chinese nationalism and Western »democratic« moralism, it is not an exaggeration to say that Hong Kong is often being discursively swallowed - slighted, brushed aside, and - despite its lived, tortuous history made to disappear without a trace down the hegemonic alimentary canals of the world's media.⁶ To this massive ravenous custom of eating Hong Kong live is recently added a slew of opportunistic academic writing by some who resort to theoretical sensationalism as a way to disguise, indeed to legitimize, a profound ignorance of and indifference to Hong Kong's own cultural productions, especially when such productions happen to be in Chinese. Against this brutal, cynical, and frequently condescending ambiance of what by the late 1990s has become the globalized fad of consuming Hong Kong as object - in particular by those who don't know and who don't care - Leung's work strikes a firm and dissonant chord.

From the dazzling array of objects in Leung's poems, it is possible to trace, steadily, the contours of a certain method of consumerism, of a distinctive kind of consumption at work. At the same time, these lyrical and at times cryptic writings also bear evocative clues as to how they themselves might and could be consumed.

Consumption thus takes on the significance of a liminal phenomenon, one in which reading crosses over to become, simultaneously, writing, and vice versa. As Leung often mentions, he has little enthusiasm for the grandsounding heroic tales, words, and phrases that are aimed at talizing history by leaving out precisely the kind of details and fragments in which he is interested. He typically begins, then, with an almost passing mention of the trivial, mundane things of daily life, be it an onion, a papaya, a potted plant, a rainy day, an old touristy street on which shops are being torn down and rebuilt, or a patch of colour in the sky at sunset. In this sensuous attention (involving sights, sounds, touch, smells, and tastes), we meanwhile come upon another quality, that of a tenderness that connects the things being described with the poet's language itself. It is as if the act of consuming has brought forth a special partnership, one that is characterized above all by the mutual transformation between the inside and the outside of the poet's consciousness. Remarkably, this mutual transformation does not lead exactly to a fusion between poet and thing, consumer and consumed. Instead, the poet remains ever in proximity, tending towards but never completely overshadowing or devouring his objects. The effect of attention and tenderness working together is a resilient tendency, a movement towards intimacy that nonetheless does not seek to destroy or annihilate the other.

If consumption is an inevitable relationship with our environment - who among us is not a consumer? - then what Leung offers is undoubtedly politics, indeed an ethics, of how to consume. He follows this ethics in the precise sense of an ethos, a mode of living that is also a mode of living with others, of letting others live. Thus, for him, even that which is merely something to be consumed, such as vegetables, has a language worth listening to:

[i]There is a politics in vegetables also. For the sake of »taste«, some people confer an identity upon green leaves, and divide snow pea leaves from pak choy by a class difference; [by the same logic,] those which have ornately rolled shapes are considered elegant and classy, while those that are plain and bland become vulgar. For the nationalists, everything except the roots must be chopped away; for the artistically avant-garde, only the tip of a leaf is visible ... Those who are immersed in a particular cultural tradition love to point to other people's cooking and say: »Can this be eaten? How can this kind of cooking be said to have any culture?« Food from Latin American countries is often made with corn or by pureeing beans; some cultures in Africa use peanuts for soups; in our own daily life, the simplest greens and tofu too [must be seen to] have their significance[/i]⁷.

And the point of writing - a sacred and inviolable event for some - may thus also be understood good-humouredly through the mundane manners of consuming an egg or a piece of bread:

[i]On the table is an egg or a piece of bread. Some touch the egg for just a second and withdraw their hands, or they pick it up, take a look, and say: »Hmm, this is an egg, I know.« Others, however, will caress it, touch it, feel its warmth, toss it around a bit and catch it again, draw a face on it and then erase it, punch a small hole to look inside it, and then crack it, fry it, and eat it. Similarly, when given a piece of bread, some people will take a small bite and put it down; other will feel its softness and fragrance, appreciate it, and eat even the crumbs; they will even lick their lips, pat their bellies, and praise how good it tastes.

I admire those who have a good appetite for life ... those who carefully savour all and every feeling, treating each as something delicious... [/i]⁸

To the readers who are ready to enjoy Leung's poems: Bon appetit!

 

 

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