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Cet article analyse le partage intergénérational de recettes de soupes familiales chez les Sino-Américains à partir d’enregistement audio et video de séances de cuisine. Trois thèmes principaux ressortent: 1) la construction de l’hygiène au cours de la préparation des repas, 2) l’interrogation de l’authenticité et de la “chinoisité” dans les pratiques d’alimentation, et, 3) la revendication du capital culturel comme élement identitaire d’un groupe marginal aux Etats-Unis à travers les connaissances intergénérationnelles de l’alimentation. Considérés ensemble, ces thèmes montrent comment les Sino-Américains sont aux prises avec une longue histoire de discrimination et, en même temps, repoussent les tendances à l’assimilation grâce à la préservation positive de leur affinité culturelle et dessinent des espaces pour les nouvelles générations. This paper examines Chinese Americans’ intergenerational sharing of important family soup recipes in audio/video-recorded cooking sessions. Three main themes emerged: 1) Construction of hygiene around Chinese meal preparation; 2) questioning the authenticity and Chineseness of particular food practices; and 3) claiming cultural capital as part of a marginalized identity group in the U.S. through intergenerational food knowledge. Taken together, these themes demonstrate how Chinese Americans wrestle with a long history of discrimination while simultaneously pushing back against assimiliationist tendencies through preserving positive cultural affinity and carving out spaces for newer generations.

Throughout Asian American literature, the acts of eating and cooking have been productive metaphors for the poetic process. These acts associated with food reveal a complex and sometimes contradictory cultural economy that links identity politics to the production of labor and the exchange of commodities for social values. Implicit in the roles of the cook and the eater is their embodiment of cultural enterprise: they are not only symbolic bodies that assign meaning and value to their work, they also bear information for developing personal and communal identities. For Asian Pacific Americans who have been historically deprived of the symbolic value of their history and their subjectivity, constructing meaningful labor as identity represents a popular avenue for seeking self-affirmation. For example, many Asian Pacific American texts incorporate the metaphor of culinary activity as positive social work that produces a cultural nationalist vision of an Asian American subjectivity. However, the affinity between eating and ethnic subject formation, noted by Asian American literary scholar Sau-Ling Wong, elicits other concerns about gender, class, and sexuality. “Eating is one of the most biologically determin-istic and, at the same time, socially adaptable human acts” (18) through which cultural and sexual agendas are repeatedly inscribed. Frank Chin’s Donald Duk offers some of the most lucid material for exploring the problematics of constructing a cultural hero through the language of cooking and eating. Chin’s story, a bildungsroman of a Chinese American boy learning about his ethnicity through his father’s participation in food preparation, festivity, and storytelling in San Francisco’s Chinatown, is explicit in the author’s intent to create a positive masculine identity. In his narrative, Chin manipulates cultural signs of culinary productivity to define a cultural nationalist hero who, consequently, also signifies a “rebirth” of an Asian American masculinity. While I sympathize with Chin’s frustration and understand the urgency to assert Chinese American visibility, I am concerned about his chosen avenue for reaching his goal: why is his project inflated within a capitalistic economy which animates a consumerist desire where one’s gain is exchanged for another’s loss?