饮食身份及文化探索者——许文英教授访谈录

王祖友

(河南理工大学,焦作,454150)

As her former doctoral student and a visiting scholar, I received her invitation to have dinner with her at her residence in a very sunny afternoon in March, 2013. Before the cooking of supper, I snatched an hour to get this long awaited interview done with her ready help.

WangZuyou: Hi, Wenying, I am very happy that you have found time for this interview. Since we know each other, let’s get down to business. Let’s start with your status as a Fulbright scholar, what does this mean to you?

XuWenying: The Fulbright Program was established in 1946 by then-Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas. It is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. With this goal as a starting point, the Fulbright Program has provided thousands upon thousands of participants with the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns. It was my great honor to be selected as a Fulbrighter to go back to my home country to teach. I felt my scholarship acknowledged and my love for my home country fulfilled, and I made my contribution to Sino-US cultural exchange in a small way. Being a Fulbright scholar made me realize what it meant to be an international scholar. It marked a significant stage in my life as well as in my academic career.

Wang: Your bookEatingIdentitiesis one of the best known work of literary criticism in Asian American studies, and the title is very interesting. Will you share with me your personal reasons for choosing this “eating” as a part of the title of your academic book?

Xu: Food studies have come into being for some time. It has gotten momentum recently. Yet there are not many scholars who pay attention to food in their studies of literature. In the past, we often thought of food as symbols or metaphors, but very few people have thought of food as having political relations with or implications for an individuals’ identity, particularly, political identity. There are several books on food in Shakespeare’s plays, in Chaucer’s tales, and in Italian literature as well. I have always been interested in food. As you know, I grew up in China, and for quite a long period of time, there was little food, so starvation is always at the back of my mind. I came to the United States in 1985 when Chinese people were still issued ration coupon for food, as there was scarcity of food, particularly meat, eggs, oil, etc. In the first week when I came to the United States, people took me to the supermarket, and I was totally surprised at the quantity and quality of food, particularly when I saw pet food for dogs and cats. So much canned food; I almost cried, because I thought, God is unfair！Why do Chinese have so limited food source and the Americans feed their dogs with food people can eat, such as fish, shrimp, chicken and beef. So food has always at the back of my mind. When I was writing and teaching Asian American literature, I saw a lot of food references in literature. I always wondered how to interpret food. So at the beginning of 2008, I began to do research, I read about other people’s works on food in relationship to Shakespeare, Chaucer, Russian writers. And I began to teach a graduate course on food and literature. So that’s how I began this book.

And I began to argue that our identity—who we are—has strong relationship with what we eat and how we eat. Class identity, ethnic, gender identity, and sexual identity have a lot to do with the way we relate to food. Asian American literature abounds in culinary metaphors and references, but few scholars have made sense of them in a meaningful way. For example, the Japanese Americans, during the Second World War, were interned, put into concentration camps, in the United States, because they were thought of as spies for Japan. Because of that experience, Japanese Americans, particularly the young Japanese Americans, had a very difficult relationship with Japanese food. Japanese food became a marker of their race, of their ethnicity. So young Japanese Americans would not eat sushi, would not eat rice, and refused to sleep on futon. Actually, anything related to Japan made them appear less American, less patriotic, even though many of them were born in America, did not know much about Japan, and had no relationship with the Japanese Emperor. So their relationship to food marks their relationship to Japan. Their relationship to food is often described in Japanese American literature. A young person’s relationship to her identity is expressed by her relationship to food. Refusal to eat Japanese food is a way to refuse being identified with the Japanese, for that identity was made by the mainstream American culture embarrassing and shameful. So she is trying to fill that identity void with something else. The hero suffers tremendously from racism and self-loathing and struggles with his identity. Until at the end of a novel, the character begins to recognize who he is, to begin to embrace his race. Usually the first act he does is to go and find the food his mother or grandmother used to cook. That is his first action to accept who he is. So similarly relationship to class, to gender, for me, is expressed through food and food references. That’s why French epicure and gastronome Brillat-Savarin declared, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” Food is very philosophical. Food is one of the few things that we incorporate into our body, because food becomes part of us. And it blurs the space between inside and outside, who I am inside and who I am outside. So food and medicine are the two things we ingest, digest, and assimilate. They become us. So what and how people eat separate people. Vegetarians have very different identity from omnivores, who eat all kinds of things.

Wang: I am a bit puzzled byEthicsandAestheticsofFreedominAmericanandChineseRealismfrom the very moment I looked at the title, because I did not expect freedom has anything to do with aesthetics. How shall I understand your choice of this part of the title?

(5)千年古村民居.华堂村的古民居均为四面房子、中间天井的四合院形式，有颇具特色的卵石路相通，均有百余年历史.不少古民居因住户外出打工、另建新房等原因，已没有人居住，也没有人维修、开发利用.调查中走访的一处华堂村内最大最有名的古民居“善庆堂”，整个建筑群只有一个80多岁的老人居住.据调查统计，华堂村有一半以上的古民居处于无人居住的闲置状态.

Xu: Freedom, in China, often means “negative freedom,” i.e.,freedomfrom, freedom from police, from government, from control, from ideology, from all sorts of instruction, directions and orders. That’s one kind of freedom. There is another kind of freedom, which is positive freedom,freedomtodo. Chinese used to say “don’t do this” to me, but not “I am free to do this or that.” You have to claim freedom to do things—you want freedom to write, you want freedom to speak up, you want freedom to create something beautiful, you want to have the freedom to raise the children the way you want. So that is the positive freedom and the practicing of positive freedom shapes your identity, and that has a lot to do with beauty, the kind of beauty that transcends the physical. Aesthetics is to give form, pleasing form, to something. So to shape one’s own identity is a practice of aesthetics, is how you conduct yourself, how you act in your relationship with other human beings, what is your relationship to your children, what is your relationship to your school, what is your relationship to your society, and what is your relationship to the world. These relationships are aesthetic choices; they involve styles. For a writer, writing is freedom, your freedom to write on subjects of your choice, your freedom to write about your views, so your views are freely expressed. So the shape, the form you give to your views is the form of fiction, or poetry, or drama. It is esthetic practice, like how women present themselves in clothing, in hairstyle. Like a woman’s self-fashioning, building her self-image, a writer expresses in words and builds a self-image with style and form, and his relationship with his readers in words.

Wang: You mentioned the French theorist Michel Foucault as a reference source or theoretical framework to your book. How does Michel Foucault’s theory bear on your book?

Xu: Michel Foucault was gay, so practicing freedom was central to his thinking. In his late years, he theorized on how to shape one’s identity, how to live as a free human being, and how to make one’s own life into a work of art. He found freedom in mini practices, small things that demonstrate self-discipline and resist society’s tendency to normalize people. Self-discipline does not mean I stop myself from doing things, but it means I do things that I am responsible for. I discipline myself in order to disrupt normalization, I exercise my freedom in a responsible way to me, to others and to the world. I will not abuse my freedom. For example, vegans have the same kind of notion of discipline, they seem to say: “I refuse to eat meat, egg, I refuse to drink milk, because my idea of a better world is not to slaughter animals, not to depend on protein coming from animals.” That is the notion of discipline that is related to a writer’s notion of freedom; how do you use art responsibly and how do you build yourself through art by self discipline. This kind of self discipline entails small things not big things. People think about revolution, think about transform society in a big way. You have to organize large movement, you have to mobilize a large group of people. Foucault says every great revolution becomes an ideological prison at the end. You have to conform, you have to believe in the movement. You cannot organize a movement if you differ from each other. So he thinks a real change comes from individuals. Only when each individual recognizes his or her social responsibility to others, and knows how to practice freedom in a responsible way can this world become a better one. He is right if you look at the revolutions in the human history. No matter it happened in Iran or Soviet Union, it does not necessarily bring about a better world. The world may be different, but the power relations remain the same, simply with the powerful and disempowered switching places. Fundamentally the world is not changed, in terms of national culture and politics of hierarchy.

Wang: Realism is not a new topic. What makes it merit your time and attention in discussing it in a book?

Xu: The topic of realism is the overall concern of my book. Realism has been one of the most debated and denounced terms in criticism since the middle of the 19th century. In official Communists ideologies and programs for the arts, the term has taken n a coercive and deadening weight, and in many avantgarte discourse of the West, the term has seemed to name a foolish goal of somehow eliminating the difference between art and life. For me, the term realism and the goals it points toward, are too important to sacrifice. So I set out to free the rigidities imposed upon it by both sides. Liu Binyan is especially useful to me here, for before his exile from China late in his career, he had worked for decades to keep alive a more flexible and responsive mission of writing about life as it really was, which meant in ways that differed from those of the official party canons of realism. This practical example comes late in the book, but from the beginning, I have sought to keep realism alive by understanding it in a pragmatic way, not as a metaphysical project of epistemological certainty, but rather as a manner of social conduct in the institution of art and in the service of life. My aim may be construed as “Rescuing Realism as an Artistic Form of Resistance to Injustice”.

By rescuing realism from fruitless philosophical debates about reference and truth, we can focus on the fruitfulness of realism as a form of political art in its American and Chinese versions. In China since the May Fourth Movement in 1909 and in the United States during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, literary realism carried a heavy burden of hope for social and cultural transformation. Realism in China has never failed to aspire to consciousness rising so as to motivate readers to seek changes in practices. In late nineteenth century America, realism was formulated to arouse common sympathy in readers in order to overcome social divisions, which (Howells believes) is one of the main causes for human suffering and for America’s failure to realize the potential of democratic life. Once rescued from its metaphysical and epistemological complication, literary realism can be understood in terms of what it attempts to achieve socially and politically. To borrow Adomo’s phrase, I take realism as a cultural movement set to “dismantle” social appearances that contribute to the maintenance of domination and corruption. Harry Levin has written that realistic “fiction approximates truth, not by concealing art but by exposing artifice.” By exposing the “artifice” which either the liberal capitalist system or the Chinese Communist Party puts up to blind people to “truths”, realism in these four writers is most usefully defined as a resistance movement.

Socially engaged realism in the West has undergone many attacks because of what it does and how it does it. The question we must ask is, “What do these attacks say about the relevance of realism for us in our age?” Has literary realism become merely a historical object appropriate only for intellectual study by scholars? This is how it is treated in the recent study of American realism by Michael Davitt Bell. Has realism exhausted its critical potential? Amy Kaplan thinks so. She writes:

The fate of realism in American literary history has undergone dramatic reversals on theoretical, political and historical grounds. From an objective reflection on contemporary social life, realism has become a fictional conceit, or deceit, packaging and naturalizing an official version of the ordinary. From a style valued for its plain-speaking vernacular, realism has adopted a rhetorical sophistication that now subverts its own claims to referentiality. From a progressive force exposing the conditions of industrial society, realism has turned into a conservative force whose very act of exposure reveals it complicity with structures of power...for critics in the forties and fifties, realism failed to represent contemporary society because of the absence of a dense social fabric [...]. For a more recent generation of critics, realism fails because of a linguistic absence which makes referentiality impossible.

On the strength of their radically different socio-economic contexts, American and Chinese realisms offer us a transcultural understanding of literary realism. My methodology is not so much that of comparative literature as that of interpositioning two models of realism with the agenda of affirming their value for resistance to domination. The guiding principle that negotiates cultural differences in this book, a negotiation that is conscious of and cautious about possible epistemic violence, is Foucault’s principle of minimizing non-consensuality. This principle allows me to study two sites of realism’s political efficacy without reproducing eurocentrism, even though the theoretical framework is Western. It is the attentiveness to the particular voices of these realist writers that prevents this book from sliding toward universalist tendencies masking eurocentrism.

Wang: The recent publication of theRouledgeHandbookofChineseDiasporahas focused on the Chinese all over the world. What is your contribution to this book?

Xu: Diaspora was a word first used by Jews. When the Jews were driven out of their homeland long ago from Middle East, they were dispersed and persecuted all over the world. And that’s why the word Diaspora was created to describe their situation. Now the Chinese have been dispersed all over the world too. One can find Chinese any where one goes in the world. So Chinese has become a diaspora all over the world. So this book has many chapters on the lives of Chinese overseas by historians, sociologists, literary people analyzing Chinese life outside of mainland China. I have a chapter discussing Chinese American literature and its relationship to American laws. U.S. racist laws targeted the Chinese beginning in 1870s, soon after they arrived in the United States. The Anti-Chinese legislation wasn’t lifted until after the World War Ⅱ.

Wang: I remember you mentioned this when you were teaching us in Xiamen University a Fulbright scholar. By the way, will you like to go back to teach Chinese students if you have time to go back to China?

Xu: I am very interested in teaching in China. Actually, I have been back several times, teaching here and there for a month or two. Last May, I went back to China and gave lectures in two universities. Yes, if time permits, I’d like to have this kind of experience again.

Wang: I look forward to being your host if you are back as a guest to China again. Since you were born in China, is there any significant reminiscence that you cherish especially？

Xu: I love China, though I left long time ago. I spent the better half of my life in the United States, but I don’t think I am fully Americanized. People in America treat me very nicely. I have not experienced much racism, because I live among university people, people who are more enlightened. Nevertheless, I am always feeling as an outsider in this country. So every time I go back to China, I feel at home, even though China is changing so much, and every time I go back, I get lost; whole streets disappear and bus routes change. Everything is changing fast in China, but I love China, and I think China is becoming powerful, economically and militarily. I am worried if China can use her power intelligently and responsibly, using power for global good. There have been talks about “China threat” for quite a long time in USA. There is talking about “China containment.” But Americans also know that they have to be friends with China, because America borrows trillions of Yuan. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been bankrolled by China, so I think China, with its wealth and power, is in a unique position to lead the world on important initiatives such as reversing the cause for global warming. China needs to play a leadership role, that is power and that is wealth. China needs to help solve the world’s problems, not just domestic problems. That is what I am looking forward to. I hope China will exercise more power in that fashion.

Wang: Will you please discuss the theme of your upcoming works?

Xu: My next book is going to be about nature and literature. Particularly, I want to focus on the value of the prehistoric religion of mother worship. If you look at religions, before Christianity, Buddhism, and Islamism, they were religions of goddesses. In Chinese mythology, Nvwa originated the earth. Nvwa’s image is half human and half snake. If you look at the other cultures, you find the same. In Aztac, you find female bodies with snake tails. In Indian culture, you find the similar image such as Kali. The image symbolizes life, death and healing, for snakes transform themselves by shedding their skin, giving birth to a new self. Thus death means rebirth. Snake standing for healing power is present today in the medical staff. Religions of mother worship are associated with snakes, illustrated in relics. There is a tribe in Yunan, China even now where the child knows only his mother not his father. The worship of mother was the earliest religion. When we worship mother, we worship nature. When Christianity came, it defeated earlier religions of goddesses. I don’t know if you have seen the film Beowulf, which is adapted from English literature. The king who believed in Christianity fought the female dragon monster, a symbol of Goddess in mother worship. When the king won the battle, he established a man’s world, with father worship. A male God was born. If you look at Greek mythology, you find Zeus the God, envious of female power. He would kill goddess or he would eat her up to give birth to their children through his body. You see this ancient literature dramatizes the conflict between male and female over the power of creation, the former is envious of the latter. So Zeus steals power from a goddess by killing her or eating her. So my next book is going to talk about the ancient religion of mother worshiping and why that culture needs to be revived in order to save Nature. We need to think of nature as part of us, which was the worldview of goddesses. Later religions present male gods who put human beings on earth to control and dominate nature. God created the universe so that humans have a place to live, have water to drink, and animals and plants to eat. Human beings were made lords of other lives. In Christianity, the domination of man over land was made clear from the very beginning. And that idea has to be changed for the world to be saved, for nature is so seriously damaged. So I think it is necessary to rescue the old religion at least partially to make people think of nature as life, as part of us.

Wang: I expect to read your book in the very near future. Thank you for your time for this interesting and enlightening interview.

Wenying Xu’s Critical Books:

2003.EthicsandAestheticsofFreedominAmericanandChineseRealism. New York: Edwin Mellen.

2008.EatingIdentities:ReadingFoodinAsianAmericanLiterature. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press.

2012.HistoricalDictionaryofAsianAmericanLiteratureandTheater. Leipzig, Germany: Scarecrow Press.