• A revised version of this paper has been published in Lawrence C. Rubin (ed.), Food for Thought: Essays on Eating and Culture (Miami: McFarland, 2008), pp.225-236.

 Food for Thought:

Cultural Representation of Taste in Ang Lee’s Eat, Drink, Man, Woman

Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley

Introduction: Food, Culture and Films

As K. C. Chang, author of Food in Chinese Culture, has observed Chinese people are very “food oriented”.[1] Among all the human senses the Chinese privilege “taste” the most. Chinese people believe that a truly fabulous feast should be appealing to most, if not all, the senses: the presentation must be pleasing to the eye (“se”, literally meaning “colourful”), the aroma must be enticing to the nose (“xiang”, literally “fragrant”), the flavour must be satisfying to the tongue (“wei”, that is “tasty”), and the surrounding atmosphere must also contribute to the enjoyment of the experience. Chinese restaurants across the world are usually incredibly noisy because, for the Chinese, noises of human activities (“re-nao”, ie. “hot and noisy”) encourage lively and joyous feelings and thus contribute to one’s complete enjoyment of the dining experience. Therefore the focus of this chapter is not on the definition of “taste”, but on the experience that the sense of taste constitutes and its symbolic meanings to us as human beings situated within a particular cultural context.

What do I mean by “symbolic meanings”? Take a common Chinese saying for example, “Life is a combination of hundreds of taste that is made of various degrees of sourness, sweetness, bitterness and chilli (suan, tian, ku, la, bai wei ju quan)”. In English, “taste” is also used in many abstract ways, such as taste of “success” or “happiness”. Various “taste” words, such as “bitter”, “sour”, “sweet”, are often used to describe an experience or one’s personality. Careful attention to cultural references and social behaviours demonstrates how different cultures all use taste, food and drink to translate human emotions, experiences and personalities into something that others can easily identify and relate to. It is no surprise that filmmakers consciously or unconsciously frequently use taste, food and drink as “symbols of life and sensuality”[2] to communicate important aspects of their characters’ internal journeys, along with their personal and cultural identities.[3] Food, being such a basic part of everyday life for human beings, becomes an essential element that “the audience experiences rather than understands”.[4]

The title of Taiwan director Ang Lee’s comedy film, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman (1994), is an ancient phrase from one of the Confucian classics, Record of Rites (Li Ji), where one is told that “eat and drink, man and woman – the greatest human desires reside in them (yin shi nan nü, ren zhi da yu)”. There is also an ancient Chinese saying, “food and sex – the basic nature of human beings (shi se xing ye)”.[5] Such ancient Chinese commentaries suggest that eating and drinking has not only been an important part of life in Chinese societies, but also Chinese people have discovered great delight in food and drink for well over two thousand years. Through the development and evolution of two millennia, food culture in China has become rich and diverse in taste, ingredients, rituals, varieties of culinary styles and methods of cooking, as well as its cultural representations in literature and art.[6]

From the title of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, even those who have not seen the movie will realise food is a central theme. The story centres on a widower, Mr Chu, who is the master chef working in one of the top hotels, the Grand Hotel, in modern Taipei, Taiwan. The film recounts the complicated relationships between the chef and each of his three daughters, the daughters’ relationships with their boyfriends, and Mr Chu’s relationships with his friends and neighbours. As C. K. Chang has pointed out, Chinese people frequently “use food – of which there are countless variations, many more subtle and more expressive than the tongue can convey – to help speak the language that constitutes a part of every social interaction”.[7] This chapter will examine how these relationships are represented by food, cooking and taste in the movie.

Enjoyment of Taste: Chef Chu

We often see on screen that Chef Chu spends his day-off on Sundays preparing elaborate dinners for his daughters. It is apparent to the audience that Chef Chu enjoys cooking – it symbolises both his professional identity and his identity as a father. When we see him, under the urgent request of the hotel manager, rush to the kitchen of Grand Hotel on his day-off in order to transform an originally ruined dish of fake shark fins into a magnificent plateful that is served at the wedding banquet for a general’s son, we see how much pride, joy and respect he has gained from his skills and knowledge in Chinese kitchens.

However, cooking is different from eating. While Chef Chu has enjoyed cooking for his three grown-up daughters, neither Chu nor any of his children particularly enjoys eating their Sunday feast together as they grow increasingly distant from each other. Chef Chu’s taste buds are deteriorating and so he can no longer enjoy foods as much as he is used to. Moreover, each time he wants to convey something important about himself at the dinner table, he is always interrupted by one of his daughters (though not always deliberately) either by complaining about the food or by saying something she considers more important than whatever her father has to say. While the dinners Chef Chu prepares for his family look so delicious on the screen, Chef Chu himself can not get any pleasure from eating them: He has no sense of taste, and his relationship with his daughters is increasingly bitter.

The first time we see Chef Chu enjoy eating is when he eats and drinks with his old friend, Chef Wen. There is no grand setting, they eat on a worktop in a kitchen; they enjoy no particularly refined menu, just some left over dishes from the wedding banquet that they just cooked. But Chu and Wen chat non-stop until both are drunk, suggesting this is certainly a much more satisfying meal to Chu than his well prepared Sunday dinner with daughters.

The second time Chef Chu seems to enjoy a meal is when he tackles a lunch box prepared by his neighbour, Ching-Rong, a divorcee, for her eight-year-old daughter. As a single mother busy with work, Ching-Rong cannot take as good care of her daughter as she would like to. Moreover, she is a lousy cook. Feeling sorry for the child, Chef Chu begins preparing proper (some may say luxurious) lunches for the girl (and later her classmates) and eats the girl’s lunch boxes in case her mother finds out and scolds her. But the mother does find out – she tells Chef Chu that the spare ribs she cooks are so tough that nobody has ever finished eating them. Hence she becomes suspicious when her daughter brings home a cleared lunch box every day. Chef Chu replies that flavour is not important to him any more as he is losing his sense of taste. He enjoys the lunch boxes because he knows that she spends a lot of effort and pours all her love of the child into preparing them.

In other words, Chef Chu prefers left over dishes and tough spare ribs to his own exquisite creations. Why? As David Knechtges has articulated, one “did not have to eat at a grand banquet to attain satisfaction, and often it was the simplest foods that provided the most pleasure and enjoyment”.[8] Similarly sense of taste is not simply confined to the tongue and the pleasure of eating does not just come from food and drink. This, in fact, is the message that the character, Chef Wen, communicates to the audience several times in the film. For example, he once compares chefs with musicians, saying a good chef (such as Mr Chu) does not rely on his tongue for cooking because good taste is not in the mouth just as an excellent musician (such as Beethoven) does not rely on his hearing for composing because good music is not in ears.

(Dae Jang Geum poster, taken from Dae Jang Geum Wallpaper)

Comparable ideas are represented elsewhere. For example, one of the most popular Korean television dramas throughout East and Southeast Asia in recent years, Dae Jang Geum (or “The Great Jang Geum”, 2003), conveyed almost the same message about taste. The central character, Jang Geum, the royal chef and the only female imperial physician for the Korean emperor in the early 1500s, temporarily damages her taste buds. Only then does she realise that the real sense of taste is not derived from mouth and tongue, but from a variety of sources such as touching, imagining, smelling, feeling and more. Jang Geum, like Chef Chu of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, continues to invent and cook delicious cuisines despite not being able to taste the dishes herself.

Food and Identities: The Three Daughters

In Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Chef Chu’s eldest daughter, Chia-Chen, seems to treat “living” purely as a form of “duty”. She tried to step into a mother’s role when her mother died young. Since then, she begins going through life dutifully without much enjoyment and feels that this is what others expect of her. The audience can reach this conclusion about Chia-Chen’s character not only from the dialogue and acting, but also from most of her scenes associated with food as “it is possible to ‘say’ things with food – resentment, love, compensation, anger, rebellion, withdrawal. This makes it a perfect conveyor of subtext; messages which are often implicit rather than explicit, but surprisingly varied, strong and sometimes violent or subversive.’[9] In Chia-Chen’s case, there are few vibrant food scenes devoted to her; she is seen only eating, washing up and dealing with left over dishes as housekeeping chores. In other words, we see food and drink for her only means mundane matters and she clearly gets increasingly resentful about it.

As Chia-Chen tells her sisters, she thinks she understands her parents, especially her father, more than everybody else simply because she is the eldest. She also thinks she knows what the Sunday gatherings mean to her father and secretly worries about how much longer the family tradition will last. But it turns out that she is too wrapped up in her own internal world that she often misinterprets other people’s feelings. The most telling example is when she complains bitterly to her neighbour, Ching-Rong, that she anticipates her father will become her life-long burden, her father is at the same time sighing heavily to his friend, Chef Wen, that Chia-Chen will rely on him for the rest of his life unless he can marry her off. More ironically, after hearing Chia-Chen’s complaints, Ching-Rong hints subtly to Chia-Chen that the scenario she imagines for her father and herself is not really what Chef Chu wants. But Chia-Chen ignores Ching-Rong’s advice completely until the revelation at the end of the film that Ching-Rong and Chef Chu have in fact developed romantic feelings for each other and plan to set up their own family if their relationship can be accepted by the people they love.

Throughout the film, Chia-Chen does not find comfort in ordinary daily routines such as eating and drinking; she seeks spiritual guidance from religion. But eventually she finds liberty and happiness in love.

Chef Chu’s youngest daughter, Chia-Ning, is a university student. A rather under-stated character, she wears plain and simple clothes, eats cheap street food and works part-time in McDonald’s Restaurant just as many others in need of part-time jobs have since the late 1980s in Taiwan. The filmmaker did not make the contrast between Western fast food and traditional Chinese cuisine an issue in the movie. The Grand Hotel, traditional family meals, street snack stalls and the McDonald’s simply co-exist. As Katarzyna Cwiertka of Leiden University has stated, “because dietary patterns and attitudes toward food are integral components of local cultures, introduced foreign foods, catering technologies, and consumption practices tend to become indigenised, resisting the homogenising power of global forces.”[10] The appearance of McDonald’s does not seem intrusive in the film. It seems more like a truthful reflection of the major culinary trend of the 1990s in Taiwan and some regions of Asia.[11]

Since Chia-Ning has been portrayed in the film as such a happy-go-lucky, worry-free, smart and nice girl, it comes as a shock (both to her family and the audience) when she announces out of blue during one of their Sunday dinners that she is pregnant and plans to move in with her boyfriend who has not yet met the family. I do not argue that the filmmaker meant to judge the “McDonaldization”[12] of modern courtship, but there is an element of comparison between fast-food restaurants and shot-gun weddings because of Chia-Ning’s story line. Indeed, fast food and speedy relationships are today prevailing cultural and social phenomena in traditional Confucius societies such as Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China. Audiences, like the Chu family, may be surprised by the situation at times, but the best strategy, as Director Ang Lee seems to suggest in Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, is simply to accept, adapt and move on as McDonald’s will continue to co-exist with traditional family meals and local restaurants, as well as to influence and be influenced by indigenous cultures while family structures will continue to evolve into many new forms.[13] In fact, Ang Lee has admitted that the real theme of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is about the transformation of family life in a rapidly modernised world and how family members struggle and learn to adjust to new social structures and personal relationships when old traditions have faced a series of internal and external challenges.[14]

The second daughter, Chia-Chian, is a more complex character than her sisters in the film. On the surface, she enjoys a successful managerial career in an airline and is expected by everyone else to embark on a jet-set life style, all signs of a high achiever. But deep down her passion is in cooking for which she has received strong discouragement from her father. The audience do not know the reason of his disapproval for sure; perhaps he wants to save her from hardship due to his understanding of the profession, perhaps because he believes that the kitchen is too confined and limited as a career choice for modern women, or perhaps because he thinks only man can be a distinguished master chef. Dissuaded by her father, Chia-Chian not only stopped pursuing professional cooking, but also ceased cooking at home altogether in order to avoid her father’s criticism. Nevertheless, Chia-Chian dreams of cooking freely in her own place one day. When she is promised promotion in the company, she decides to cook a sumptuous spread in her lover’s apartment as a way of celebration. It is obvious to the audience that Chia-Chian cooks for her own enjoyment and achievement, but her lover thinks she is actually cooking for him because she loves him and wants to capture his heart by satisfying his stomach.

(Ang Lee, taken from indieWire)

It seems to me that Ang Lee is pointing out an irony – it is commonly believed that feminism has liberated modern women from the kitchen. Hence if a woman wishes to return to the kitchen, it might be seen as a backwards step as if home cooking can never sit comfortably with a modern woman’s ambition and career path. Yet research has shown that “domesticity” and “activism” were not necessarily mutually exclusive even at the end of the 19^th Century.[15] For example, Janet Theophano has revealed that the founder of the Woman Suffrage Society of Philadelphia, Jane Campbell, wrote many recipes on the backs of her speeches arguing for greater women’s rights.[16] In other words, it possible for a woman to enjoy domestic chores while she embraces advanced ideologies and acts on them. There does not have to be contradictions between cooking and progress or women’s rights.

Chia-Chian, like her father, is an expert cook. But just as they have different opinions about ways of living their lives, they have different taste in food. They often quarrel and criticise each other’s behaviour and cooking. However, when they finally reach an understanding and accept their differences, they realise that they are indeed most alike. As it turns out, when the youngest daughter, followed by the eldest daughter, moves out of the family home to set up their own families, it is Chia-Chian, the person that everyone (including the characters in the film and the viewers) thought would have fled the house the earliest, who stays and keeps their father company. More surprisingly, Chef Chu himself finds love and gets re-married. When he decides to sell their old family home in order to move to a modern but smaller flat and establish a new family with his young wife and step-daughter, it is Chia-Chian who buys the old house and holds the whole family together. Chia-Chian’s cooking defines her as a perfectionist – she enjoys exquisite taste in food and drink, pursues a successful professional career, searches for true love, and treasures family relationships, even though it means a lot of heartache, hard work and struggle to achieve all of these and she sometimes loses her way.

Filmmaker, Dining Table and Cultural Commentaries

The above discussion has echoed an analysis made by Anne Bower, editor of an excellent book on cinema and food, Reel Food. She said, “the consumption of food can stand for consumption of any aspect of culture – whether cultural traditions, cultural hybridity … or some aspect of gender conflict or definition”.[17] Bower went on to argue that “food in films can allow filmmakers to comment on the very role of the filmmaker as a creator of culture”, [18] a point with which I agree. Hence this section will explore Eat, Drink, Man, Woman further in order to examine how filmmaker Lee’s views on cultural formation and transformation has been manifested in the film, even though my reading of the director’s cultural commentaries in the movie differ slightly from Bower’s interpretations.[19]

As a filmmaker, Ang Lee has a complex and interesting cultural background: his father escaped the Communist Mainland to Nationalist Taiwan in 1950;[20] Lee was born in Southern Taiwan in 1954 and has been regarded as a “second-generation Mainlander” in Taiwan throughout his life. He went to New York to study theatre and cinema at the end of the 1970s and has remained in America as a “Chinese filmmaker working in Hollywood” ever since. Lee’s fascination and understanding of Chinese cultural heritage has had a very strong influence on almost all of his films, including apparent Western productions such as Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Ice Storm (1997).[21] However, when he travels to Mainland China, he has been received as a “Taiwan compatriot”.[22] So Lee has experienced the coexistence of multiple identities, many readjustments and perhaps to a certain degree, transformations of fluid cultural identities in relation to the “other”, and has witnessed countless local, regional, and global cultural flows, interactions and changes.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is Lee’s third full-length feature film[23] made and set in 1994 when Taiwan was facing dramatic cultural, social and political transition and democratic consolidation.[24] As Lee has commented, he wanted to reflect the contradiction and continuity of Chinese traditional culture in modern Taiwan, as well as modern man and woman’s constant (re-)negotiation and search of self-identities in an ever changing world. He has been always interested in the gatherings and breaking-ups of human relations and decided to use food and the dining table to symbolise the deconstruction of a family as suggested by a common Chinese saying, “all banquets come to an end”.[25] In this regard, Lee’s artistic expression and the metaphor he chose to adopt seems to fit Anne Bower’s understanding that “movie viewers respond so readily to food imagery because of food’s primacy in our lives; it is a primacy that precedes literacy but then becomes part of our symbol-making, symbol-decoding capacity”.[26] 

Throughout Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, Chef Chu and his three daughters cannot enjoy their meals together when they force themselves to stay as a traditional family unit and perform typical family roles that they feel others, but sometimes themselves, imposed on them. While they drift apart, their family is gradually dissolved – reflected on screen, we have never seen a happy scene associated with their family dining table, but witnessed more and more family members missing from the same table as time progresses. Nevertheless Lee is ultimately an optimist. When the Chu family finally accepts the reality and leaves home individually to find their own happiness, they become closer again even though they do not live under the same roof any longer. In other words, although the old family unit breaks up, a new family unit with more members is formed where each person is allowed to be truthful to their individual desires and to pursue their own new identities.

At the end of the film the second daughter, Chia-Chian, purchases her father’s house and becomes the new centre of the Chu family. It is a different type of “centre” compared when Chef Chu was in charge not only in terms of gender and generational role, but also in terms of presence. Chia-Chian takes up the job promotion offered by the airline. She has to be stationed in Amsterdam, but she travels back home once very few months and so her presence in the family is more symbolic and casual than her father’s used to be. She decides to keep up their Sunday dinner rituals whenever she is in Taipei by taking the trouble to prepare a banquet for every family member. But it seems so apparent to the audience that Chia-Chian does not feel cooking a family meal “trouble” at all because she enjoys it. She does it because she wants to, not because she has to as her father used to feel.

In the final sequences, none of the family members except Chef Chu can go to the Sunday dinner Chia-Chian prepares because of other commitments. They ring Chia-Chian to apologise and have a warm and frank conversation with her instead of forcing themselves to attend the gathering. Contrasted with the first segments of the film when all sisters feel they must rush home for dinner when none of them actually feel like it, the interactions and exchanges between the family members are much more loving and relaxed than before.

Chef Chu comes from his new apartment to the old house. Instead of barging in, he knocks on the door, which shows his respect for Chia-Chian’s independence as he knows it is now her house not his. Chia-Chian receives her father and he comes in to sit down next to her in front of the dining table. He tries a spoonful of Chia-Chian’s soup, says it is delicious, and then criticises it for containing too much ginger. While they begin arguing fiercely about cooking and flavouring, it suddenly dawns on Chef Chu that he is actually “tasting” Chia-Chian’s dishes! The father and the daughter are both overwhelmed by the sudden realisation and become speechless while they hold each other’s hands tightly. We do not know if Chef Chu’s sense of taste is magically restored temporarily or permanently perhaps because of Chia-Chian’s cooking or due to his ability to be finally rid of unnecessary guilt in order to enjoy a content life with his young family. But one thing the audience can be certain of is that Chef Chu will definitely enjoy this meal with his daughter because dining is most enjoyable when all the right conditions are in place – delicious food and drink, warm and pleasant company, comfortable settings and eaters themselves being in good health and having a joyous mood. This is when eating becomes “more than simply a biological or ceremonial function, but rather a source of pleasure that can even be spiritually uplifting”.[27]

Ang Lee’s representation in Eat, Drink, Man, Woman is very much about treasuring traditional family values and honouring Chinese culture as depicted in Chef Chu’s beautiful culinary arts. But the film is also very much about breaking cultural stereotypes (for example, Chia-Chen transforms herself from a boring school teacher to a sexy woman; Chia-Ning leaps from a university student to a wife and a mother; Chef Chu stops being simply a tired old father to three grown-up daughters and becomes a husband to a much younger bride pregnant with his baby), facing up to challenges and adapting to changes. In Lee’s eyes, new cultural balances and multiple identities are not impossible to achieve as we see Chia-Chian has finally got it all – a career abroad, cooking freely at home, and the respect and love of her extended family. Although the audience is not informed of how long this new-found happiness and family balance will last as we are unsure if Chef Chu’s sense of taste is completely restored, constant changes of a modern society are implied through long shots of traffic moving through wide streets and busy intersections. Individuals will need to constantly reposition and redefine themselves, just as culture will need to continuously embrace challenges and reformations in order to thrive.[28]

Conclusion

“Food has been part of film since films began, yet only recently have we given extended attention to the many and sometimes startling ways that food functions in movies”, said Anne Bower. [29] To summarise, from the depiction of Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, we have discovered that food imageries and the sense of taste can be used to perform at least three functions effectively. This symbolic imagery is not unique to film as it is present in other art forms throughout history.[30]

Firstly, food is used to enrich the portrayal of personalities and add depth to characters. A familiar slogan has been invented in recent years, “you are what you eat”, in order to alert people to watch their diet. Although the slogan comes from a physical and health point of view, we find food can be used as an effective communicative element in movies to define who the characters are, construct their economic and social aspirations, as well as their cultural and personal identities.

Secondly, activities concerning food, such as eating and cooking, symbolise power relations between characters. For example, when Chef Chu is in the kitchen, we know he is in charge. When the food is brought onto the dining table and his daughters begin talking over him all the time, we know Chef Chu is losing control. When Chia-Chian is cooking in her lover’s kitchen, she is happy to be the centre of the attention. But when her lover sees himself as the focus of the elaborate meal instead of giving Chia-Chian the appreciation and validation of her cooking that she craves, they quarrel bitterly. The viewers are drawn into the subtle changes of relationships between different characters simply by looking at who is cooking and who is eating.

And finally, Ang Lee’s treatment of Chinese cookery is a filmmaker’s method of glorifying indigenous cultures. From the very long shots of how one meal is prepared – a chicken captured from the back yard, fish caught alive, frogs trying to escape from cooking vessels, display of colourful ingredients and sauces, vegetables, cutlery, and so on – we realise that food on screen is much more than food. It is traditional Chinese culture itself which has evolved and been evolving for several thousands of years that is on display. Even though social and cultural changes are implied through the obstacles presented by modern life, the Chinese love of food will endure.

References:

Bower, Anne L. ed. Reel Food: Essays on Food and Film. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Chang, K. C. ed. Food in Chinese Culture. New Harven and London: Yale University Press, 1977

Cwiertka, Katarzyna and Walraven, Boudewijn eds., Asian Food: The Global and the Local. Surrey: Curzon Press, 2002.

Fell, D. et al. eds. What has Changed? Taiwan before and after the Change in Ruling Parties. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006.

Ferry, Jane F. Food in Film: A Culinary Performance of Communication. New York: Routledge, 2003.

Hsiao, Pi-Li. “Food imagery in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife”, Feng Chia Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 1 (November 2000): 205–27.

Knechtges, David R. “Gradually Entering the Realm of Delight: Food and Drink in Early Medieval China’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 117.2 (1997): 229–239.

LeBlanc, Ronald D. “Love and Death and Food: Woody Allen’s Comic Use of Gastronomy”, in Perspectives on Woody Allen, ed. Renee Curry. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.

Lem, Ellyn. “Book Review”, review of Eat My Words, by Janet Theophano. The Journal of Popular Culture 38.4 (2005): 777–79.

Poole, Gaye. Reel Meals, Set Meals: Food in Film and Theatre. Sydney: Currency Press, 1999.

Rawnsley, Gary and Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh. Critical Security, Democratisation and Television in Taiwan. London: Ashgate Press, 2001.

Rawnsley, Gary and Rawnsley, Ming-Yeh eds. Political Communications in Greater China: The Construction and Reflection of Identity. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003.

Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society. California: Pine Forge Press, 1991.

Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002.

Watson, James L. ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford:  Stanford University Press, 1997.

Zhang, Jing-Bei. A Cinema Dream of Ten Years: Biography of Ang Lee. Taipei: China Times Cultural Press, 2002 (in Complex Chinese).