Abstract
This chapter examines the relationship between eating and identity in Timothy Mo’s novels The Monkey King, Sour Sweet, and Renegade or Halo, drawing upon the critical work of Edward Said and Pheng Cheah and the sociological work of James L. Watson, H.D.R. Baker, and David Parker. Key topics addressed include diaspora, globalization, and the possibility (and difficulties) of comparing cultures. Other texts read alongside Mo’s fiction in this chapter include the travel writing of V.S. Naipaul, Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters, and Mo’s own non-fiction.
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29 September 2019
The original version of this chapter was published with one of the critics cited as Sally Chen. The correct name Sally Chan has been updated on pages 175, 181 and 182.
Notes
- 1.
Timothy Mo, ‘Fighting Their Writing: The Unholy Lingo of RLS and Kung Fu Tse’, in New Writing 5, ed. Christopher Hope and Peter Porter (London: Vintage in Association with the British Council, 1996), pp.299–318 (p.229).
- 2.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Shu Ming, ‘I Only Want to Travel: An Interview with Timothy Mo’, Unitas: A Literary Monthly, 7.12 (1991), 21–5. Translated from the Cantonese by Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Timothy Mo (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.125.
- 3.
Indeed, as Neil Lazarus notes , Mo provided one of the dust jacket encomia—‘this is one of those rare books which will shape the time as well as reflect them’—for the British edition of Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1988). Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.34. This chapter will argue that Mo’s fiction deals with questions of morality and of cultural relativism with considerably more nuance and subtlety than Mo’s non-fiction—or Huntington’s work.
- 4.
Timothy Mo, ‘They Will Not Apologise’, Daily Telegraph, 7 March 1998, Weekend Section, p.15 (p.15). Mo uses the terms ‘society’ and ‘culture’ as interchangeable throughout his non-fiction.
- 5.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Boyd Tonkin, ‘Postcards from the Edge’, Independent, 10 July 1999, Weekend Review, p.9 (p.9).
- 6.
John Lanchester, ‘Ng’, London Review of Books, 9 May 1991, pp.24–6 (both p.24).
- 7.
Hunter Davies, ‘Making the Chinese Scrutable’, Sunday Times, 23 January 1983, p.15 (p.15).
- 8.
Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp.26, 34.
- 9.
Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p.34. Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), pp.237–8.
- 10.
David Dabydeen, ‘West Indian Writers in Britain’, Pak’s Britannica, p.88.
- 11.
Hunter Davies, ‘Making the Chinese Scrutable’, Sunday Times, 23 January 1983, p.15 (p.15).
- 12.
Peter Lewis, ‘Hong Kong London’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 May 1982, p.502 (both p.502).
- 13.
Michael Neve, ‘The Hongkong Beat’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 July 1978, p.757 (p.757). Green Spot is an orange-flavoured soft drink popular in Hong Kong.
- 14.
Timothy Mo, The Monkey King (London: Abacus, 1984), pp.53, 91. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 15.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘In Conversation with Timothy Mo’, The Fiction Magazine, 1.4 (1982), 48–50 (p.50). Mo closely echoes Naipaul’s description of the ‘verisimilitude’ of A House for Mr Biswas as a ‘sleight-of-hand’ in ‘Speaking of Writing’, p.11.
- 16.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘A Singular Obsession: Timothy Mo’, Vogue, August 1986, pp.150–2, (p.150). Mo’s status as a ‘Brit’ has meant that his fiction has not attracted attention from the considerable body of criticism examining the role of food and eating in fictional depictions of Asian American life and novels by authors who identify as Asian American. See Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader, ed. Robert Ji-Song Ku, Martin F. Manalansan IV, and Anita Mannur (New York: New York University Press, 2013), Wenying Xu, Eating Identities: Reading Food in Asian-American Literature (Honolulu: University of Honolulu Press, 2007) and Sau-Ling Wong, Reading Asian-American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Examining novels including John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), Frank Chin’s Donald Duk (1991), and Monique Truong’s The Book of Salt (2003), Wenying Xu argues that meals, cooking, and eating in these novels avoid or reject ‘self-exoticism or food pornography’ in order to identify the kitchen, the dining table, and the restaurant as sites ‘of economic, cultural and political struggle’ (Wong, Eating Identities, p.14). While Mo’s non-fiction and interviews give no indication he has read the work of these authors, Mo’s own novel Sour Sweet is similarly interested in food as both a site of intercultural encounter and a source of cross-cultural misapprehension—and of the economic, cultural, and political conditions under which such encounters and misunderstandings take place.
- 17.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Christopher Tookey, ‘In the China-Shop’, Books and Bookmen, 367 (May 1986), 28–9, (p.29). We should, of course, be wary of taking such pronouncements at face value—and Mo’s insistence that he knows ‘nothing about Chinese culture’ does not prevent him elsewhere in his non-fiction and in other interviews making the most sweeping claims about it. His formulation ‘things Chinese’ invokes James Dyer Ball’s classic and hugely influential late-Victorian work of cultural exposition Things Chinese: Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with China (1892). As we shall see in my chapter ‘The Chutnification of History and the Limits of Gastronomic Pluralism: Food, Identity, and the Commodification of Culture in the Novels of Salman Rushdie’, Salman Rushdie has also used the work of Paul Scott (in not entirely flattering ways) in order to help define, differentiate, and position his own.
- 18.
Edward W. Said , Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p.83.
- 19.
Eric Partridge, Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p.32. Cited in Said, p.83.
- 20.
Said, Beginnings, p.83.
- 21.
Said, Beginnings, p.83.
- 22.
Said, Beginnings, both p.84.
- 23.
Said, Beginnings, p.84.
- 24.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Kazuo Ishiguro, p.48.
- 25.
Timothy Mo, ‘Fighting Their Writing’, p.305.
- 26.
Raymond Williams, Culture (Glasgow: Fontana Paperbacks, 1981), pp.11–2.
- 27.
Mo, ‘Fighting Their Writing’, p.305.
- 28.
Timothy Mo, ‘Fighting Their Writing’, p.305.
- 29.
Similarly, by describing himself as a ‘Brit’ who knows nothing about Chinese culture in some interviews but presenting himself as someone who feels confident in generalizing about its informing spirit and its limitations in others (and in his own non-fictional writings), Mo’s interviews and articles read in bulk complicate the seemingly straightforward claims Mo seems to be making in each individual interview or article—and anticipate the multiple ways in which Mo’s narrator Rey will position himself in Renegade or Halo2 .
- 30.
While Wallace possesses ‘the impeccable Cantonese of most of his compatriots’, he affects ‘not to understand that vulgar, braying dialect’ [3]. The characters in the novel converse in a Hong Kong dialect of English.
- 31.
This chapter has followed Mo’s novels in their transliteration of Cantonese words and names. Chan Wai Kwan includes an appendix describing the different ways in which Chinese names have been rendered in English in The Making of Hong Kong Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.223–6. It explains ‘The use of the “Ah” to precede a name is similar to the diminutive -ie or -y ending used in English names’ (p.224).
- 32.
Mo, ‘Fighting Their Writing’, p.305.
- 33.
Elaine Yee Lin Ho, ‘Of Laundries and Restaurants: Fictions of Ethnic Space’, Wasafiri, 21 (1995), 16–9 (p.16). Ho is critiquing such readings.
- 34.
Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Timothy Mo, p.29.
- 35.
Williams, Culture, p.13.
- 36.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Shu Ming, ‘An Interview with Timothy Mo’. Translated and discussed by Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Timothy Mo, p.10.
- 37.
Elaine Yee Lin Ho, p.32.
- 38.
James L. Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage: The Mans in Hong Kong and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p.9.
- 39.
Hugh D.R. Baker notes : ‘The area is occupied by two groups of people […] The larger group comprises the Cantonese-speaking Punti […] while the other group, the Hakkas, occupy much smaller areas of good land, and much higher, less fertile ground. They speak a language distinct from Cantonese.’ Hugh D.R. Baker, A Chinese Lineage Village: Sheng Shui (London: Cass, 1968) pp.2–3.
- 40.
Timothy Mo, ‘Why Can’t They Write Better Novels?’, Spectator, 6 January 1996, pp.23–4 (p.24).
- 41.
Timothy Mo, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard (London: Paddleless, 1995), p.3.
- 42.
James L. Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage : The Mans in Hong Kong and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p.200. He cites Baker among these observers.
- 43.
For the origins of the lineage village, see Baker, pp.47–98, and Watson, pp.22–5, 201–18.
- 44.
Baker, A Chinese Lineage Village, p.207.
- 45.
See Baker, A Chinese Lineage Village, pp.48, 51–2, 54, 65–8, 73, 115, 193, and Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage, pp.135–6, 145–6, 148.
- 46.
Laura Hall, ‘New Nations, New Selves: The Novels of Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro’, in Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction, ed. A. Robert Lee (London: Pluto, 1995), pp.90–110 (p.94).
- 47.
Baker, p.214.
- 48.
Peter Lewis, ‘Hong Kong London’, Times Literary Supplement, 7 May 1982, p.502 (p.502).
- 49.
Kazuo Ishiguro, ‘In Conversation with Timothy Mo’, The Fiction Magazine, 1.4 (Winter 1982), 48–50 (p.48). Mo also approvingly quotes Naipaul —‘He says, “Great themes are best illuminated by small dramas”’—and sympathetically discusses the difficulties that Naipaul, as a writer ‘from a colonial background’, had in finding his voice’ in a 2009 interview with Shirley Geok-Lin Lim. See Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, ‘A Conversation with Timothy Mo’, World Englishes, 29.4 (December 2010), 557–70 (pp.559).
- 50.
Homi Bhabha, ‘Representation and the Colonial Text’, pp.116–7.
- 51.
Baker, p.51.
- 52.
It remains questionable, however, whether this is an aspiration which The Monkey King wholly succeeds in fulfilling: For Elaine Yee Lin Ho, May Ling remains, in the novel, ‘entirely the function of woman in patriarchy’, wholly passive, having ‘no character to speak of’. Ho, Timothy Mo , p.41.
- 53.
Mo, ‘Why Can’t They Writer Better Novels?’, p.24.
- 54.
Said, Beginnings, p.83.
- 55.
While it is not certain that Mo has read this particular work, it will be argued later in this chapter that there is compelling internal textual evidence in Renegade or Halo2 that Mo has read at least some of Naipaul’s non-fiction and reacted to it strongly.
- 56.
Timothy Mo, ‘File Under Nuts’, Independent, 8 May 1993, p.29 (p.29).
- 57.
Elaine Yee Lin Ho, Timothy Mo, p.26.
- 58.
In making this claim, of course, I am reinvoking to the distinction suggested in the conclusion chapter on V.S. Naipaul (‘“Our Little Bastard World”: Food, History, and Identity in the Novels of V.S. Naipaul’) between the unsettling and complex ways in which food is used to interrogate claims about identity and community in some of Naipaul’s early fiction and the straightforwardly schematic ways in which food is deployed for rhetorical purposes in his later writings, those texts like A Bend in the River or In a Free State in which food when infrequently mentioned appears solely to illustrate some polemical point.
- 59.
Referred to, like Naipaul’s Mr Biswas, by his surname throughout the novel.
- 60.
Timothy Mo, Sour Sweet (London: Deutsch, 1982), p.1. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 61.
Lynn Pan, in Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The Story of the Overseas Chinese (London: Secker and Warburg, 1990), explains that ‘Tong Yan Gai, Cantonese for “the street of the people of T’ang”, [is] a universal Chinese synonym for “Chinatown”’ [307]. The name ‘Ho Ho’, we are told in Mo’s novel, translates as ‘Excellence’ [204]—although it seems possible there are additional, mildly comic resonances intended here for the reader to pick up on, just as the name of the takeaway the Chens subsequently establish, named the Dah Ling after Lily and her sister Mui’s ‘home village’, is soon known to its patrons as ‘the Darling restaurant’ and the sisters as ‘the two Darlings’, in a set of puns which it takes Mui several months to unravel [86].
- 62.
All three texts are included in Triad Societies: Western Accounts of the History, Sociology and Linguistics of Chinese Secret Societies, ed. Kingsley Bolton and Christopher Hutton, 5 vols (London: Routledge, 2000). Mo cites the first edition in his author’s note (see bibliography).
- 63.
Triad Societies: III: William Stanton, The Triad Society, in ‘Preface’
- 64.
Triad Societies: VI: W.P. Morgan, Triad Societies in Hong Kong, pp.3, xiii.
- 65.
Morgan, p.293.
- 66.
By 1970 there were 4000 Chinese eating establishments (of different types) spread throughout Britain, compared to The Good Food Guide 1955’s mention of just one each in Brighton, Liverpool and Manchester, Lynn Pan notes (p.326). For a fuller account of the spread of Chinese restaurants and takeaways across the UK during this period, see Sally Chan, ‘Sweet and Sour: The Chinese Experience of Food’, in Food in the Migrant Experience, ed. Anne J. Kershen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp.172–95 and J.A.G. Roberts, China to Chinatown: Chinese Food in the West (London: Reaktion, 2002), pp.155–75. Roberts refers directly to Sour Sweet in order to illustrate the typical Chinese takeaway menu of the 1970s (pp.175–7).
- 67.
Timothy Mo quoted in Ishiguro, pp.48–9.
- 68.
E.N. Anderson, The Food of China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p.70.
- 69.
Anderson, p.49.
- 70.
David Yip, ‘Introduction’, Sour Sweet, TextPlus edn, notes by Andrew Spicer (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990), pp.v–x (pp.vi, vii).
- 71.
John Sutherland, ‘Nationalities’, London Review of Books, 6 May 1982, pp., 18–9 (p.19).
- 72.
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p.183.
- 73.
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, pp.183–4, 184.
- 74.
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p.184.
- 75.
Baker, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage, p.69.
- 76.
John Sutherland, ‘Nationalities’, p.19.
- 77.
Sally Chan, ‘Sweet and Sour—The Chinese Experience of Food’, p.176. Such takeaways, Chen points out, ‘had tax advantages over restaurants because of their smaller size, which enabled former restaurant employees’—like Chen in Sour Sweet—‘to operate them as family run concerns and to make extensive use of family labour’, while also experiencing competitive advantages over ‘mainstream fish and chip shops’ because of the ‘wider range of products on offer, the cheap and readily available chop suey menus, their longer opening hours and’—once again—‘lower family labour costs’ (p.146).
- 78.
Sally Chan, ‘Sweet and Sour—The Chinese Experience of Food’, p.176.
- 79.
Sally Chan, ‘Sweet and Sour—The Chinese Experience of Food’, p.176.
- 80.
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, p.184.
- 81.
Watson, all p.21.
- 82.
Lizzie Collingham reminds us in The Hungry Empire that such silent reinventions of supposedly traditional dishes are not solely a product of migration, pointing out the ways in which ‘the Kikuyu porridge of paste known as irio, Kenya’s national dish’, has gone through a series of reinterpretations over the past century, changes which not only reflect the incorporation into a supposedly timeless and traditional dish ingredients such as kidney and lima beans (brought to Africa from South America in the seventeenth century by the Portuguese, promoted for local consumption by ‘colonial agricultural officers’ in the twentieth) but also ‘broader changes in the Kikuyu diet as a result of the pressures colonialism placed on indigenous agriculture’ (pp.240–1).
- 83.
Hugh D.R. Baker, The Chop Suey Connection : Hong Kong: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered on 8 December 1993 (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1994), p.6.
- 84.
Baker, The Chop Suey Connection, p.3. Both Lynn Pan (p.333) and E.N. Anderson (p.174) offer possible versions of the origins of the dish. See also Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
- 85.
Jennifer 8. Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2008), p.49. Quoted in Robert Ji-Song Ku, Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), p.74.
- 86.
On the differences between the food served in Chinese restaurants in the UK and the US, see David Y.H. Wu and Sidney C.H. Cheung, ‘Introduction: The Globalization of Chinese Food and Cuisine: Markers and Breakers of Cultural Barriers’, in The Globalization of Chinese Food, ed. Sidney Cheung and David Y.H. Wu (London: Routledge, 2014), pp.1–20 (pp.6–7).
- 87.
David Y.H. Wu, ‘Improvising Chinese Cuisine Overseas’, in The Globalization of Chinese Food, ed. Sidney Cheung and David Y.H. Wu (London: Routledge, 2014), pp.56–66 (p.56).
- 88.
David Y.H. Wu, ‘Improvising Chinese Cuisine Overseas’, p.56.
- 89.
David Parker, ‘The Chinese Takeaway and the Diasporic Habitus’, in Un/Settled Multiculturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, Transruptions, ed. Barnor Hesse (London: Zed Books, 2000), pp.73–95 (pp.73, 74). Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora , p.208.
- 90.
Robert Ji-Song Ku, Dubious Gastronomy, p.65.
- 91.
Arjun Appadurai, ‘On Culinary Authenticity’, Anthropology Today, 2.4 (1986), 25.
- 92.
Ku, Dubious Gastronomy, p.69. He is quoting E.N. Anderson, The Food of China, pp.170–2.
- 93.
Ku, Dubious Gastronomy, p.76.
- 94.
Ku, Dubious Gastronomy, p.76.
- 95.
Partridge, Origins, p.33.
- 96.
In this regard we might note how suggestive and parallel the concerns raised by a writer like E.N. Anderson about Cantonese food as it is consumed and understood in the US and Europe seem to offer to the concerns raised by a critic like Graham Huggan in The Postcolonial Exotic : Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001) about ‘the global commodification of cultural difference’—the ways in which certain types of postcolonial text (celebrated for their authenticity, treated as historically or sociological authoritative) have been consumed and understood and consumed in the US and Europe. This is a parallel or analogy, I shall be suggesting in chapter “The Chutnification of History and the Limits of Gastronomic Pluralism: Food, Identity, and the Commodification of Culture in the Novels of Salman Rushdie”, which the fiction of Salman Rushdie (in particular his novel Midnight’s Children) anticipates, tests the limits of, and riffs upon extensively.
- 97.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Ian Parker, ‘Mo’, Blitz (July 1987), 32–6 (p.34).
- 98.
Eric Korn, ‘A Practical Education’, Times Literary Supplement, 30 July 1999, p.21 (p.21).
- 99.
Timothy Mo, Renegade or Halo2 (London: Paddleless, 1999), p.10. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 100.
Robin Cohen makes a similar comparison in The New Helots: Migrants in the International Division of Labour (Avebury: Gower, 1987).
- 101.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Boyd Tonkin, ‘Postcards from the Edge’, Independent, 10 July 1999, p.9 (p.9).
- 102.
Timothy Mo, quoted in Maya Jaggi, ‘Mixtures like Candied Napalm’, p.11.
- 103.
Pheng Cheah, What is a World?, pp.324–5.
- 104.
Pheng Cheah, pushing the metaphor further, proposes that by implication it ‘suggests that demotic everyday social intercourse among members of the human species gives rise to an infinite creativity that undermines the oppressive exclusions of tribalism’. Pheng Cheah, What is a World ?, p.327. As shall be seen, Cheah’s reading of Renegade or Halo2 is rather more willing to take Rey’s claims to embody a fully emancipated post-tribal ethical consciousness at face value than is my own. It may also be worth noting that Rey’s chosen metaphor for such a post-tribal consciousness is in itself highly culturally specific, although as Rey himself notes the same sort of dessert can be found ‘under different names all over South Asia’ [11]. Furthermore Rey’s use of this analogy to describe himself begins in his childhood as a ‘not totally original’ joke on his part about his physical appearance—which may well recall to the reader Robert J.C. Young’s examination (in Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race) of Homi Bhabha’s celebratory treatment of cultural hybridity as something innately subversive of colonial authority in relation to the widespread earlier historical usages of the term ‘hybridity’ in relation to nineteenth-century theories of racial difference (in particular in relation to anxieties surrounding ‘miscegenation’), with Young expressing a concern that ‘even if, in its appropriation by black cultural theorists, hybridity has been deployed against the very culture that invented it in order to justify its divisive practices of slavery and colonial oppression’, from ‘the historical perspective’ it could be argued ‘that the identification […] of hybridity with carnivalisation and creolisation [in Bhabha’s work for instance] as a means of critical contestation of a dominant culture suggests the threat of degeneration and decay’ historically associated with the term hybridity ‘has not yet been fully redeployed and reinflected’. Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1994), p.23. In suggesting that Rey’s childhood self-identification as an ethnic ‘halo-halo’ is his way of reclaiming and making his own a ‘witticism’ on this topic he has already encountered, Mo’s novel may be suggesting that Rey’s own celebrations of the virtues of hybridity may likewise be haunted by more hostile and negative ways of deploying similar concepts and terminology.
- 105.
Elsa Paula Yap and Maria Victoria Bunye, Cebuano-Visayan Dictionary (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1971), p.255. Felipe Fernández-Armesto describes the cuisine of the Philippines as a ‘frontier cuisine’, combining ‘indigenous’ elements with influences from both Chinese and Spanish colonizers, in Food: A History (London: Pan, 2002), pp.161–2.
- 106.
Chester L. Hunt, ‘The Society and Its Environment’, in Philippines: A Country Study, ed. Ronald E Dolan, 4th edn (Washington, DC: Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, 1993), pp.65–116 (p.74).
- 107.
Barracuda, for instance, to which Rey refers on p.429, can be extremely poisonous unless it has been correctly prepared and tested before consumption.
- 108.
Timothy Mo, ‘Why Can’t They Write Better Novels?’, p.24.
- 109.
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora, pp.41–2.
- 110.
Pheng Cheah, What is a World?, pp.325, 326.
- 111.
‘di’, the short form of the particle ‘dili’, is a negative marker. ‘ba’ is a particle that marks an interrogation, in Cebuano-Visayan, according to Bunye and Yap’s Cebuano-Visayan Dictionary, ibid, pp.37, 147. Di ba: ‘No?’, ‘Not so?’, ‘N’est-ce pas?’
- 112.
Salman Rushdie, ‘Naipaul Among the Believers’, in Imaginary Homelands, pp.373–5 (p.374).
- 113.
Rob Nixon, London Calling: V.S. Naipaul: Postcolonial Mandarin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp.6, 17, 57.
- 114.
V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization, pp.101, 97, 102.
- 115.
Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Introduction: Locations of Culture’, in The Location of Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1994), pp.1–18 (p.4).
- 116.
Edward W Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p.119.
- 117.
Said, Orientalism, p.3.
- 118.
Said, Orientalism, p.322.
- 119.
Said, Orientalism, p.6.
- 120.
Said, Orientalism, p.119.
- 121.
Said, Orientalism, p.14.
- 122.
Said refers to ‘a complex array of “Oriental” ideas (Oriental despotism, Oriental splendour, cruelty, sensuality)’ in Orientalism, p.4.
- 123.
Said, Orientalism, p.22.
- 124.
John Hyland, ‘Reading between the “Posts”: Systemic Violence and the Trope of Hybridity in the Postcolonial Novel’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 49.1 (February 2013), 4–15 (p.4, 5).
- 125.
Hyland, ‘Reading between the “Posts”’, p.5.
- 126.
Hyland, ‘Reading between the “Posts”’, p.5. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 1998), p.179. See also Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies : A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004).
- 127.
John Hyland, ‘Reading between the “Posts”’, p.5.
- 128.
Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p.173. Hagedorn praises Punzalan’s ‘very interesting’ exploration of ‘the Philippines as an American construct’, as ‘thoughtful and provocative’ in Michael Collins, ‘“I’m Interested as a Writer in Less Exalted Persons”: An Interview with Jessica Hagedorn’, Callaloo, 31.4 (Fall 2008), 1217–28 (p.1222).
- 129.
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (London: Penguin, 1990), p.101. All subsequent page references are to this edition.
- 130.
As Robert Ji-Song Ku notes , however, in his thought-provoking chapter on ‘dogmeat’ in Dubious Gastronomy , ‘[d]og eating is such a vexatious subject’ in relation to race (particularly in the US) ‘that merely raising the issue is enough to elicit the ire of many Asian Americans’—as Jessica Hagedorn discovered on the publication of Dogeaters when ‘a small but vocal minority within the Filipino American community took the Philippines-born author to task for using such a derogatory term to refer to her Filipino characters’. Robert Ji-Song Ku, Dubious Gastronomy, p.135.
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Vlitos, P. (2018). Stereotypes, Family Values, and Chop Suey: Food, Authority, and Authenticity in the Novels of Timothy Mo. In: Eating and Identity in Postcolonial Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96442-3_4
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