In Which We Regain Our Taste Later On

Alive and Cooking

by KAROLLE RABARISON

Eat Drink Man Woman
dir. Ang Lee
124 min

Ang Lee's Eat Drink Man Woman follows master chef Mr. Chu and his three daughters in a story that marries a portrait of food as art with commentary on the struggle to parent adult children. The film seems predictable at the start. Here is a father. Here are his unmarried daughters. One by one, each daughter will find a man to marry and carry on elsewhere in the city.

Thankfully, things do not play out in such a hackneyed way. Lee presents characters complex enough to hold our attention without getting so dramatic or overtly sentimental that scenes feel forced. There are exceptions, of course. When one daughter lowers her voice amidst an argument to ask her sister, "And what do you know of my heart?" - a line director Lee recycles for Elinor in Sense and Sensibility. But for the most part, Lee balances heaviness with humor to construct a story of the feel-good variety, and the attention paid to food alone warrants multiple viewings.

Although Chu is famous and well respected throughout Taipei for his culinary skills, within his own home he feels neither affection nor respect. This disconnect exists partly because of the family's inability to communicate and partly because of the gap wherein the younger generation's quest for independence clashes with the elder's attempts to keep the family grounded. Chu mandates family dinner each Sunday and labors for hours to prepare what seems like at least a dozen dishes. Emotions he may misunderstand or repress, but food he knows well - or did before he lost his sense of taste. Now that the aging Chu cannot sample what he prepares, his cooking is subpar and fails to communicate the love that food is meant to represent.

The daughters attend dinner neither for food nor company, but out of obligation. Instead of seeing these dinners as treasured family tradition, they consider them a chore - an outdated ritual. In fact, they call it the "Sunday dinner torture ritual" and take advantage of the setting to announce their plans to finally move out. Yet as much as they want to be on their own, they also feel guilty that the long widowed Chu would be left alone, and they agree that he should find company, a woman his own age perhaps.

Jia-Jen, the eldest, is a sexually repressed chemistry teacher who wallows in a college heartbreak nine years past. She finds comfort only in her religion. When the new volleyball coach tries to get her attention after school, it is only appropriate that he goes unnoticed for an awkward minute while she is too distracted listening to hymns on her cassette player. She uses religious devotion to hide from relationships, but even the church community is not a perfect security blanket. Actually it is yet another set of people who feel entitled to pester her for not being married.

To be a single woman her age is curious enough. To be single by choice, clinging to that status as much as she clings to her faith, makes her an anomaly. The pressure is on. Find a man! Settle down! When a church friend frets over Jia-Jen's empty love life, I roll my eyes at the screen. How archaic of these 1990s fools to nag a gal for being single, right? Of course I quickly realize that nagging remains familiar today. In any case, Jia-Jen secretly wants to be on the prowl, but she thinks romance conflicts with her obligation as the self-designated mother figure to her younger sisters and as caretaker to her father.

Unlike Jia-Jen, middle daughter Jia-Chien is casual with sex and maintains a friends with benefits relationship with her ex-boyfriend. While Jia-Jen is trapped in a thankless job teaching inattentive teenagers, Jia-Chien is an airline executive with an impending promotion that, if accepted, would transfer her to Amsterdam. Jia-Chien embodies modern mobility, not only as a woman blazing her way through the male-dominated business world, but also as the daughter whose allegiance to family and tradition does not tug so much that she would not consider moving West.

He knows his daughter is just as stubborn as he is. If he protests, Jia-Chien would take it as attempt to control her personal life, but in not protesting, Jia-Chien mistakes his silence for disinterest, lack of love even. Later on, Jia- Chien responds in a similar fashion when one of Chu's colleagues asks her to convince the chef not to retire. She simply declares the decision is his and walks away. They may not be explicit about it, but it is evident the two feel mutual respect and affection after all. It is fitting then that in the closing scene, sampling the soup Jia-Chen prepared is how Chu finally regains his taste.

Then there is college student Jia-Ning. Either she is flimsy as a character because she gets the least screen time, or she gets the least screen time because she is a flimsy character. The most interesting thing about her is that while her father is a master of traditional cuisine, she mans the counter at Wendy's. Like everyone else, she makes her big announcement at a Sunday dinner: she is in love with a boy and his parents like her and they want to live together and, oh by the way, it is because she is pregnant. Turns out then that Jia-Ning, the youngest, is the first to move out.

Lao Wen: Lao Chu, don't get upset. Girls eventually leave home. It was bound to happen.

Chu: I'm not upset. Once they leave, I'll have a quiet life.

Lao Wen: Quiet life? I know you. What you want, you can't get. What you don't want, you can't get rid of. You're as repressed as a turtle. That old maid of yours, Jia-Jen, will stick to you for life unless you marry her off!

Chu: Marry who? Since she lost her asshole college boyfriend she has never looked at another man. You know that.

Lao Wen: And now she has the perfect boyfriend: Jesus Christ.

Why then have I watched it at least a dozen times? For visual stimuli - for the cityscape and especially for the food. In the instances that a scene grows stale from the family drama, director Lee compensates with an intimate look at the fancywork behind the cooking process, or with a souped-up display of everything from hot pot to crab dumplings to stir-fried clams. Food might as well be on the cast list.

One of two things happens every time I reach the closing credits. Either I get in daydream mode and scan the internet for flights to a city out East, or I re-watch the opening scene then proceed to turn the kitchen into a veritable chemistry lab. Eat Drink Man Woman has not inspired me to start a food blog à la Julie Powell. It is, however, responsible for multiple occasions when I have been awake at 3 a.m. cooking everything I could find in the fridge and pantry until dawn finds me surrounded by a haphazard menu - lentil stew, grapefruit yoghurt, roasted carrots with ginger, and so on - that I can't possibly consume in one day. I'm no artist, but the process, the hands' labor, is enough. Fancy or not, I'll take the food for company.

Karolle Rabarison is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in the Carolinas. She last wrote in these pages about Tibet. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

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In Which We Anticipate A Western Breakfast

Elsewhere

by KAROLLE RABARISON

Yak butter in my hair, yak butter on my skin. Not the actual thing but the smell of it. Sweet then sour then sweet then pungent. We were back in Lhasa for the evening with dinner as our first stop. A buffet in two lines: one labeled "Tibetan food" and the other "Chinese food" which, as far as I could tell, were the same bold dishes consumed in Sichuan the week prior. I opted for the former and assembled a humble plate of curried potatoes and tsampa porridge before collapsing into a seat. There was more to this fatigue than sore feet.

Even as a kid I fantasized of elsewhere. Do you know that place? Daydreams of some grand journey to some undetermined locale that guarantees some life-altering experience. My brother and I drummed up adventure games and explored the neighborhood as if we didn't know each alley's crooked lines and every kink on the sidewalks already. We didn't invent treasure to seek, only that we were seeking, and spent afternoons tramping about collecting clues. Riddles on notebook paper and keys long separated from their respective locks. Yes, the same clues we ourselves hid.

This fantasizing, it's a hard habit to break. It isn't unhappiness with a place, a home, but knowledge of other places with potential to be other homes. When we weren't outside running along like video game characters, we conjured plots of running away to places learned from books and color-coded maps. I am sure Tibet was one of them. Little did I know that years later I would make it there.

En route to Samye Monastery one morning, my eyes lingered on every scene as if they'd go blind at the trip's end. Prayer flags and khatags like cobwebs clinging to mountain passes. Riverside, the rolling hills faded into more rolling hills that weren’t rolling hills. In villages visible from the road, families emerged from flat-roofed dwellings to begin their day. A pair laundered linens in a basin; another gathered on small stools with morning bowls. A few miles further a girl biked through dirt, glancing back every two seconds or so at the older girl chasing her. When the older girl caught up, I thought I heard the two giggle — impossible through the bus window.

I drank yak butter tea in slow sips to delay the second round, one I knew to be gesture of hospitality yet wished to dodge anyway. What if I hid the cup under the table between my knees and out of reach? I aborted the idea by the fourth sip and replaced the cup on the table instead. Another pour, a quiet thanks.

In Lhasa's Barkhor a shopkeeper pulled me aside to ask where I was from. The Barkhor, the area that encloses the Jokhang Temple, is a pilgrimage site where Buddhist devotees from all over Tibet come to perform the kora — or circumambulations. It also includes a cat's cradle of a marketplace crowded with vendors shouting prices for thangkas (paintings), knock-off North Face jackets and other mishmash.

"The U.S.," I answered. She had judged that my skin tone meant I was visiting from South or Southeast Asia and hesitated before continuing.

"Oh. Oh, your face reminded me of a school friend. Long ago."

"Really? Here?"

"No, no, no, in India. My father sent me to India. When I was 11 but I returned soon after my schooling." A pause before she added, "To the family's disappointment. Ever been to India, miss?"

I shook my head no. "Why weren't they happy to see you? Why did you come back?"

We were chatting but she did most of it, and always in this tone like she was sharing secret wisdom. To interrupt is to go hungry.

“They say the city has lost its soul. Or, that only greedy ghosts turn its prayer wheels.”

Then: "But why wouldn't I come back? This is my home. This Lhasa, it's different. Bigger. Louder. More people like you, less faces like mine. But this is my home."

And this: “There is no place or fortune that could tempt me to leave again. Not even your America, you see.”

A man then approached the stoop to wave trinkets and incense at my face. "Special price just for you! Special for you!" This I took as cue to leave, and the woman and I exchanged last words over the vendor's various discounts. Be well, take care, tashi delek.

Growing up in Antananarivo I was used to tourist encounters. We lived in the neighborhood perched just below the Queen's Palace, the city's highest point, so it was common for backpack-laden Europeans to interrupt our play asking for directions. Tiny, eager fingers pointed upwards as if granting novel information, as if there were anywhere else for them to go but up and up, and now I imagine we must have mocked their worried faces for thinking themselves lost. On one such occasion, a couple asked to take our picture. We were surprised, confused even, but agreed anyway. We posed on steps leading up to the pink house that overlooked a small convenience store. Smiled. Months later my mother would recognize that house on a postcard while at the market and would bring home a copy for us to see.

Alas, how strange to think of my own image mass-produced to collect tourist moneys. At special prices! Just for you! Stranger still to grow up to be a backpack-bearing tourist, elsewhere, taking pictures of every little thing while children eyed me out of mockery or curiosity or both. The last evening in Lhasa, I went back to the Barkhor for a stack of postcards and chose the ones of landscape or architecture only, none of faces. The latter made me uneasy.

In letters and phone calls, I never mentioned that uneasiness or this fatigue — head weary, heart rootless. And I didn’t confess feeling guilty over stints that allowed only a scrape of a place. Paint chips, really. Instead I wrote of sleeping mountains and red geraniums in window planters and butter tea. Instead I described — what was that sound? — the clack of wooden planks against stone as pilgrims kowtowed again and again.

A Western breakfast prepared us for the trek back to the east coast: scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee aplenty. Anytime I was in transit, whether in flight or chasing trains or as bus cargo disconnected from the landscape, I took advantage of the limbo to update the mental list of Things Experienced I Might Write Home About. The list for Tibet was handwritten in a notebook and started off like this: 

We adapt familiar words to describe familiar things.

We collect code words for everything including toilets.

"western" - it flushes; available only at the hotel.

"tree stop" - a roadside scramble for trees.

"the roof" - two toilets on the roof of a restaurant (on the roof of the world).

"deep pit" - exactly what it sounds like and the only facilities at the Potala. "Only in an emergency," the guide said, meaning only if you can't wait till the group left the grounds. Some of us couldn't wait.

Within 12 hours we were in Shanghai, another two and in Suzhou. I didn't know Suzhou's streets well then, but they were familiar enough that I could tell when the shuttle was within 15 minutes of campus. We, luggage and snacks and all, made it into the dorm lobby just in time for the 11 p.m. curfew. The concierge secured chain locks around the door handles. I hauled 70 lbs up five floors to my newest homebase.

Karolle Rabarison is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in the Carolinas. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here and twitters here.

Photographs by the author.

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