FYI Research:
Book examines Chinese attitudes toward food, sex

What do food and sex have to do with history? In today's China, everything, says Judith Farquhar, professor and chair of anthropology. In her latest book, Appetites, Farquhar explores contemporary Chinese attitudes toward food and sex, and how those attitudes are linked to Chinese history.

"Chinese citizens who lived through the famine of the late 1950s and the rigors of the cultural revolution period, from 1966 to 1976, are very articulate on the historical meanings of food in particular," Farquhar says. "It is easy to elicit  — or overhear — middle-aged and elderly people's talk about all the historical reasons why food should not be wasted, and they are also happy to explain how various food habits reflect the inequalities of the present and the past."

Everyday life in China is still inhabited by the nation's Maoist past, Farquhar explains. She argues that the mundane practices and habits of Chinese who lived through 30 years of socialist construction under Mao Zedong — 1949 to 1978 — did show and still show evidence of Maoist projects and achievements.

After 1978, when Deng Xiaoping's rise to power brought reform, China's economy became increasingly privatized and adventurous. Farquhar says Chinese fiction of the period began to make almost a fetish of the concrete and mundane after decades of Maoist abstraction. In Appetites Farquhar examines The Gourmet, a novella written by Lu Wenfu in 1984 about a gluttonous, wealthy landlord named Zhu Ziye, who was "unwilling to lift a finger because he witlessly preferred to concentrate all his efforts on that stomach of his." Ziye's wife refers to him in the novella as "a gilded chamberpot." He does no work and is good for nothing but eating, which gets him "only the private ephemera of bodily pleasure," Farquhar says. Worse, he has no perception of, or concern for, the exploitation inherent in his love of eating.

However, author Lu Wenfu presents the narrator's contempt for the landlord even while evoking the reader's carnal identification with the kinds of hedonistic pleasures Zhu Ziye enjoys, Farquhar says. "Lu Wenfu succeeds in stimulating the senses while at the same time examining the politics of production and consumption in everyday life," she writes.

Yet even after China's rapid social and economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s, Maoist influence could still be felt in many ways, Farquhar says. Farquhar became part of a Chinese medical school work unit between 1982 and 1984, that she describes as more closely resembling the Chinese daily life of the 1970s than that of the later 1980s. "Everyone I knew attended 'political study' sessions on Thursday afternoons, every textbook was prefaced with paeans to the wisdom of China's laboring masses … and a public address system instructed residents of every corner of the campus, morning and evening, with ideologically correct news and public service announcements. … Everyone knew everyone else's business, and felt free to criticize it," she writes.

Farquhar says she tried to write her book in a way that stimulated appetites in the readers — "to generate experiences through reading that could produce a kind of carnal comradeship between readers and the Chinese subjects I was talking about."

Writing Appetites has been good for Farquhar's appetites, too. "Apart from all the wonderful eating I have done, and continue to do, in China, the most enjoyable part of writing the book was reading and translating the Chinese essays and films that are interpreted in the book," Farquhar says. "Now that the book is out, I find that the things I want to tell people about it all come from these primary sources. Clearly, they continue to inspire me and draw me back to Chinese popular culture."

Provided by Research and Economic Development.
Editor: Neil Caudle. Writer: Jason Smith.
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