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Food has been used as a universal element in art always but Nina Powles put a different spin on it in her book, driving us back home.
This literary non-fiction book, found in the cookery section, takes us on a journey with Nina trying to find her home and return to it from different locations of the world, through food. Nina is a half Malaysian-Chinese girl who grew up in New Zealand and later moved to Shanghai. The book travels in time, passing through seasons starting from Winter, with every chapter dedicated to one a particular season and Chinese dish, having strong relevance in the life and memories of the protagonist and most other young adults sharing her ethnicity. The recipes are detailed in actions of the sequence like a film, to give a feel of the eating experience instead of just the taste. These are often accompanied by an illustration of the dish being talked about.
The anecdotal and often poetic writing style, filled with metaphors, juxtapositions, and references from other literature, focuses on the concept of home in the lives of immigrants. Essentially pointing at how these are not physical and are rather genetic or ancestral. Another focal point of the book is the importance of languages – their evolution and codeswitching - in the lives of these people. There is a pattern of flashbacks to compare the present moment with childhood memories, creating nostalgia.
It opens with building the two most universal connections in literature – food and family, or how one’s traditional cuisines have an emotional role in providing belongingness amidst any surrounding. The book swiftly moves from childhood to adulthood, from Nina’s rebellious anger bursts at the dinner table to her revisiting passed-down family recipes in college, exploring her half Chinese culture that she had been away from.
The diligent detailing of each scene that amplify the surroundings, like, “ten pairs of flip-flops piled up by the front door” to denote the family strength, makes the reading experience heavily immersive. There is tremendous use of sounds along with multilingualism – cooking scenes within the house and on the streets, Chinese words and pronunciations to reveal authentic names and not English translations of them, special names given to people and their actions within Nina’s family home. The author makes sure to provide history of these words and languages to season their connection with the readers. The use of smells is predominantly used to create familiarity, both for food and non-food objects. These act as instant transporters to a previously visited and loved environment in the life of the protagonist and is one of the most relatable emotions explored in the book.
The cookery book does not simply focus on a recipe, but on the story of the protagonist’s introduction, connection and revisitation to each of the dishes – their origin, market, ingredients, essence, preparation, serving, and importance. Every meal of the day is exaggerated and looked into deeply. It reveals essential observations about the Chinese culture of care and support as a foundation of humanity, like when Chen Ayi, a street vendor, felt sorry for the protagonist living alone and packed triple the food ordered for her to take home. We find out about particularity and specificity of festival snacks for Lunar New Year, Tomb-Sweeping Festival, Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, among many others.
There is mention of the privileges of whiteness in different countries and how it prevents racial discrimination of being ‘yellow’. This shows the disconnect from culture by generalisation of appearance. Through localization of the book, it provides education on varied Chinese communities and their origins, practices, and beliefs.
The starvation and distance from one’s own mother tongue that immigrants face, is displayed well through the life instances of Nina, like, her learning to pronounce her Chinese middle name, ‘Mingya’, at the age of seventeen. Language barriers that arise when one grows up away from one’s elderly family members, is highlighted when Nina’s mother acts as a translator between her and her grandmother. However, Nina made sure to not starve herself of her traditional food, after all she believes, ‘food doesn’t need language to be understood’. And that keeps her tangled to her roots in China, even though she had grown more closer to her family in Malaysia, learning Malay and English instead of Hakka, even while eating Cantonese dishes prepared by her grandmother. Later, we see her realising that tone matters over content in understanding unknown languages. On the other hand, the similarity between Asian cultures and migration of languages across borders is hinted at as well. There is further globalization and exploration in terms of mixing cuisines through interchanging ingredients in dishes as per availability in the immediate location, which somehow end up providing a hometown environment.
Other issues tackled in the book include the perception and prejudice that society holds of women – that they are expected to eat with control instead of satisfaction. It discusses how female hunger is associated with shame and madness, particularly educating the reader about certain lesser-known paradigms of these societies. Food, for these women, then becomes a love affair they fight for.
Early on, Nina learned that the medium to put herself back together, to relearn, remember, recover; was through cooking and eating with her hands, that provided her with calmness and oneness with food. She describes the impact of these dishes on her, in the moment and later on in life. There is a mention of craving for familiarity, belongingness, self, home, while she roams through cities and stalls. These are then sought through food from childhood by deriving their recipes through multiple attempts. There are other elements that play a part in this growth – the complete experiences of living in Shanghai with its views, people, streets and of buying and eating dumplings, zongzi, wantons, from particular places in typical surroundings, like next to dorm buildings while batting away mosquitos and cicadas.
To conclude, the book places food as a provider of safety, shelter and home away from it, or as Nina says, while she’s “half here half elsewhere”.
Here's how the book looks:
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