Fragment or Monument: Historical Representation of Chinese Diaspora Food Culture

This paper draws on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in a Chicago ethnic museum to explore how the Chinese diaspora preserves and presents their transitional experiences through institutional narratives on food culture. Worldwide, immigrants transplant their stories across places and generations to better unite their communities, using ethnic museums and oral legends to revive sweeping histories of enclave communities. Chicago has attracted Chinese immigrants since the 1850s, and the Chinese diaspora here has built a typical food culture. Public institutions exhibit specific chinoiseries of food culture, and family stories are told in every room. Through recreational, educational, and universal representations of food culture, the museum I studied holds special events and designs collections highlighting the Chinese diaspora's enigmatic, unvoiced, and contrapuntal past. The Chinese diaspora's form of life is diverse and gentrifying; diaspora food culture, however, has been upgraded to a hallmark feature to retrieve and revitalize the stories of long-term bittersweet adaptation. Chinese American narratives represent subtle forms of rebellion against the local mainstream and subtle distinctions vis-à-vis the homeland. They are writing their own stories grounded on a rich historical course. Therefore, we cannot regard diaspora food culture and its representation as simple adaption but as an issue of historical subjectivities in the globalized era.