Abstract
While immigrating to the United States of America, ethnically Chinese immigrants faced many challenges. However, many found the best way to America's heart is through her stomach, creating American-style Chinese food. Learning about such cross-cultural cuisine exposes CSL students to their own culture and the colorful tapestry of Chinese food culture. This chapter will delve into the origins and development of Chop Suey (雜碎), General Tso's Chicken (左宗棠鷄), and Gua Bao (刈包), along with food's relation to cultural identity in The Search for General Tso (2015) and Fresh Off the Boat (2014-present). By exploring the cross-cultural link between Taiwanese, Chinese, and American dish variations, CSL teachers could gain insight on teaching with media and designing food culture lesson plans for American CSL classrooms.
TopLiterature Review
In The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication, Ingrid Piller (2012) discusses that while lecturing to her class at the University of Sydney, she would pose the question, “What is your culture?” Her students were most likely to interpret this question as “What is your nationality?” or “What is your heritage?” Culture is a concept that is difficult to define, with anthropologists, sociologists, etc., all offering their own definitions. To the average layman, however, culture is most often attributed to be one’s nationality or ethnic heritage. Culture in the real world, however, manifests in many forms, not just the concrete examples most instructors introduce in foreign language classrooms, such as traditional clothing or holidays, but also through abstract cultural phenomena such as customs, beauty standards, values, etc. Such phenomena derive from the influence of so-called “big culture,” the cultures of nation states or the majority group of a nation, as well as “small culture,” or communities with the ability to establish their own unique traditions and values which differentiate themselves from the “big culture.” According to Piller:
There is clear evidence that culture is widely understood as nation and/or ethnicity, even if the readers I have just mentioned, along with most other textbooks in the field, also tend to include, albeit to a much smaller degree, cultures that are not nation-nor ethnicity based, such as faith-based cultures, gender-based cultures or sexuality based-cultures. Whether culture is viewed as nation, as ethnicity, as faith, as gender, or as sexuality, all these ‘cultures’ have one thing in common: they are imagined communities. (Piller, 2012, p. 5)
Key Terms in this Chapter
Chinese Diaspora: Refers to individuals who share a cultural and/or ethnic link to Chinese culture (????), but have emigrated away from areas of Chinese cultural origin (i.e. Mainland China/Taiwan/Hong Kong).
Multisensory Stimulation: A teaching method which includes utilizing two or more of the primary senses, namely hearing, sight, taste, smell, and touch.
Subculture: A group/community which have distinctive traits, causing them to be distinguishable from the mainstream or dominant culture of their local surroundings.
Cultural Adaptation: The process of adjusting to new cultural surroundings and learning to adjust one’s actions and communication methods to better communicate with those who belong to the target culture.
Post-Modern Culinary Movement: A movement of culinary experimentation, often including the fusion of two (or more) cultural dishes/techniques to produce new dishes.
Cultural Reproduction: The act of reproducing existing cultural forms—such as cultural values, customs, norms, etc.—by transmitting culture from generation to generation, thereby sustaining the continuity of cultural experience through time and even in new cultural surroundings (i.e., immigrants reproducing their culture in their new country).
Cultural identity: The concept of identifying with the culture of a community of people, including ethnic, religious, social class, generational, local, etc. communities.