Stakes of Authentic Culinary Experience: Food Writing of Tang Lusun and Wang Zengqi

Stakes of Authentic Culinary Experience: Food Writing of Tang Lusun and Wang Zengqi

Tang Lusun (唐魯孫, 1908-1985) and Wang Zengqi (汪曾祺, 1920-1997) produced their food writing in the form of familiar essays, respectively, in the late martial law period of Taiwan (the 1970s and 1980s) and the early reform era of China (the 1980s and 1990s). This article examines their essays, especially those on Republican Beijing (Beiping) and wartime Kunming, to explore how narratives of autobiographical, individual culinary experience can develop into sharable or comparable social experience addressing the historical rupture of 1949. Shifting the focus of the theoretical notion of authenticity from the self to the individual's phenomenal perception and the contested arena of social communication concerning historical memory, this article shows that literary practices such as the generic feature of the I-narrator in the familiar essay, the textual construction of chronotopes of food, and (re)publications across the Taiwan Strait have shaped and reshaped ''authentic culinary experience'' in their texts in response to changing power structures, social interests, and affective needs of the reader.