Women in British Chinese Writings: Subjectivity, Identity, and Hybridity

The Author
Dr Yun-Hua Hsiao is an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Childrens English and
Department of English, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan. She received her doctoral
degree in English Literature from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her current research
interests are in British Chinese writings, cultural studies, and minority women writers.
Readership
The primary markets for this book are the British Chinese and British people together with the
diasporic Chinese and readers concerned about the issue of race and culture. The book will also be
of interest to those members of the general public that are interested in the British Chinese world.
Contents
Women in british chinese writings: subjectivity, identity and hybridity
Women in British Chinese Writings: Subjectivity, Identity and Hybridity is an extended

study of Yun-Hua Hsiaos doctoral research on British Chinese literature. As noted in
Dr Hsiaos previous investigation of British Chinese writings, the existing literary works
remain a small number, compared to its American counterpart; however, since the
political, social and historical factors affecting this group of literature are unique, British
Chinese publications deserve close examination.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Matrilineage and the garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge
Power and Women in Timothy Mos Sour Sweet
Food and Identity in Helen Tses Sweet Mandarin
Conclusion
Bibliography
9 781909 287921
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Yun-Hua Hsiao
ISBN 978-1-909287-92-1
Yun-Hua Hsiao
Women in
british chinese
writings:
subjectivity, identity and hybridity
Women in British Chinese Writings:

Subjectivity, Identity and Hybridity
Women in British Chinese

Writings: Subjectivity,
Identity and Hybridity
Yun-Hua Hsiao
Chartridge Books Oxford

5 & 6 Steadys Lane
Stanton Harcourt
Witney
Oxford OX29 5RL, UK
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 882191
First published in 2014 by Chartridge Books Oxford
ISBN print: 978-1-909287-92-1
ISBN ebook: 978-1-909287-93-8
Yun-Hua Hsiao 2014.
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with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements
vii
Introduction
Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs

The Magpie Bridge
Background
Matrilineage
Power and subjectivity
12
The symbol of the mirror
18
Scent and the garden
20
Cultural influence and the metaphor of the bridge
26
29
Background
30
Sour Sweet and the Foucauldian power relations
34
The shifting power centre
35
Power struggles
36
Resistance and strategy
38
Power and knowledge
40
Collective female power
43
Women in British Chinese Writings
vi
Male powerlessness
45
Power and the yin-yang force
47
Cultural conflicts between the first and second generations
48
51
Background
52
Ethnic food and foodways
54
Food, cooking and the catering business in Sweet Mandarin
57
Food, tradition, female subjectivity and identity
60
Hybridity
67
Helping out
73
Towards a brighter future
77
Conclusion
79
Bibliography
83
Acknowledgements
I would like to first thank my colleague Professor Ping-yan Lai,

without whose encouragement this book would have been impossible.
I am also grateful for the help offered by Professor Linda Anderson,
Professor Shao-Kang Chu, Professor Hui-Zung Perng and Doctor
Chih-Chiao Yang. My foremost gratitude goes to my husband,
parents and parents-in-law, who support me selflessly so that I may
have time to read and write. This book is dedicated to my little boys,
Bo-Jiun and Hsu-Pei; their whole-hearted love for me makes me feel
so needed and loved. Through them, I understand what it means to
be a mother, and thanks to them, I am drawn very close to the
mothers discussed in this work.
1
Introduction
This research is an extended study of my doctoral research on British

Chinese literature. As I declared in my previous investigation of
British Chinese writings, the existing literary productions remain
small in number, compared to their American counterparts; however,
since the political, social and historical factors affecting this group
of literature are unique, British Chinese publications deserve a close
examination.
Since British Chinese immigration history was thoroughly surveyed
by Benton and Gomez in their work The Chinese in Britain,
1800-Present, the latest and most complete survey of British Chinese
history so far, I will omit a historical overview. Moreover, as I have
studied the tradition of British Chinese writings in my doctoral
research, I will also overlook this part. It is noteworthy, however,
that the research on British Chinese history and writers reveals the
heterogeneity among British Chinese people. The backgrounds of
British Chinese authors are diverse; their upbringings inevitably
affect their writings, which represent the hybridity of the British
Chinese.
According to Amar Acheraou, the term hybridity is closely
linked with postcolonial and cultural studies. For example, the wellknown cultural critic Homi Bhabha, in his The Location of Culture,
uses this term to discuss its colonial implications. Bhabha further
coined a phrase, third space, to argue for an in-between place for
racial negotiation. Hybridity, thus, is used as a strategy for the ethnic
minority to claim their subjectivity and identity. Stuart Hall thus

ponders over hybridity and identity: The diaspora experience as
I intend it here, is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the
recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a
conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite,
difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are
constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through
transformation and difference. To diasporic subjects, hybridity
enables them to re-define and re-create themselves.
In her famous essay Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian
American Differences, Lisa Lowe celebrates hybridity and challenges
the thought of homogenising Asian Americans. Across the Atlantic,
the British Chinese, like their American counterparts, are marked by
hybridity. Benton and Gomez suggest that British Chinese people are
divided by class, language, place of origin, period of arrival,
and reason for coming, as well as by physical segregation within
Britain. ... They lack common genealogies or symbols, boundary
markers of an ethnic community shared with identities. They lack
the bonds of a common religion, ... the community is heterogeneous
and individual identities are increasingly hybridised (4).
The heterogeneity of the British Chinese is significant; their origins
can be traced back to Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, other
British colonies and those diasporic Chinese in Southeast Asia. One
significant example is the poetess Meiling Jin, who moved to Britain
from the Caribbean. Hybridity is indeed an important characteristic
of the British Chinese.
Wai-ki E. Luk confirms that the British Chinese are by no means
a homogeneous ethnic group. It is instead a complex compound
group that shelters under a single umbrella census term of Chinese
(209). It is partial and questionable to generalise all the Chinese in
Britain; therefore, in this book, I have deliberately tried to highlight
their feature of hybridity by selecting works written by three British
Chinese authors with varied backgrounds to specify the different
issues relevant to dissimilar British Chinese communities. The first
author under review is Liu Hong, who previously lived in China
before enrolling in a British university to escape the Communist
regime. Her book The Magpie Bridge deals with matrilineage
Introduction
through the distinctive theme of the garden and is worth scrutnisation.

Timothy Mo is the second author in this book, who was born to an
English mother and a Chinese father. Mo travelled from the former
British colony of Hong Kong to the United Kingdom and several of
his works reflect the colonialisation. Sour Sweet will be discussed in
this study, as it is a highly acclaimed work, and most importantly, it
mirrors British Chinese society in the 1960s. The third writer, Helen
Tse, is a third-generation British Chinese woman. She grew up in her
parents take-away shop, but ends up establishing a Chinese
restaurant in Manchester. The degradation to the catering trade, as
mentioned by her British Chinese peers, is in fact a result of her
acknowledgement of the tradition handed down by her ancestors.
Sweet Mandarin recounts how Tse and her family came to settle
down in Britain, and this migration exemplifies British Chinese
immigration history.
Miri Song asserts that British Chinese people constitute the third
largest minority group in the United Kingdom (Crossing 99).
Nevertheless, the number of publications by and research on the
British Chinese is small. The invisibility of the Chinese in Britain
clouds the subjectivity of the individuals of this group, in which the
women occupy a more inferior status than men. According to Sau-ling
Cynthia Wong, Asian American Women are ultrafeminized because
they are oppressed in terms of both race and gender (Ethnicizing
Gender 112). Heidi Safia Mirza articulates a similar concern with
the addition of class: the invisibility of black women speaks of the
separate narrative constructions of race, gender and class: in a racial
discourse, where the subject is [white]; in a gendered discourse,
where the subject is [male]; and a class discourse, where race has no
place (3).
Ethnic minority women often face multiple disadvantages; hence,
this research is devoted to individualising the women of Chinese
origin in British Chinese writings to endow them with personality
and particularity. In this way, I hope to bring to light the voice of
British Chinese women; what they experience and how they feel.
Their selfhood needs to be manifested, and the literary works singled
out in this study make this happen.
Most of the women in the works selected for discussion experience

a sense of loss and their subjectivity is blurred. To illustrate, Orchid
in Magpie Bridge was intended to be forgotten by her daughter, who
assumed that she had eloped with her lover and deserted the family.
In this novel, the mother is a character who does not emerge as a
subject, but is described and imagined. It is only when she finally
writes back to her daughter at the end of the novel that the true story
of this woman is unmasked and she comes alive.
Another example is Mui in Sour Sweet, who confined herself in
her sisters house and would not step out to the outside world.
Likewise, Lily in Sweet Mandarin lost herself when she migrated to
England. Working as an amah, she led a solitary life in the
countryside; no one around her spoke the same language or shared
the same culture as her. For both of them, the loss of selfhood is a
consequence of the cultural and linguistic unfamiliarity.
How a woman recognises herself is relevant to her formation of
identity. The immigrant women in these three works, while
identifying with their Chinese cultural origin, experience cultural
conflicts when they are in Britain. On one hand, their home of origin
has changed during the years of their absence; on the other, they
constantly face cultural contradictions in their adopted country. In
addition, the British-born Chinese women in Sweet Mandarin
undergo a difficult time coming to terms with their cultural identity.
Straddling two worlds, they are trying hard to ascertain where they
belong. For the women in British Chinese writings, their hybridity is
notable, their subjectivity needs to be recognised, and their identity
is exposed to cultural confrontations and subject to transformation.
This book, therefore, aims to analyse Liu Hongs The Magpie
Bridge, Timothy Mos Sour Sweet and Helen Tses Sweet Mandarin
from the perspectives of subjectivity, identity and hybridity.
As stated earlier, three pieces have been chosen for this research,
and the following three chapters will focus on one work each. The
second chapter will lead to an interpretation of Liu Hongs
The Magpie Bridge. Different from other British Chinese female
immigrant writers who mainly write about stories taking place in
China, Liu Hong stands out because she not only sets her work in
China, but also includes scenes in Britain in her fiction The Magpie
Introduction
Bridge. This novel tells the story of a Chinese woman who moved to
England but is haunted by her late grandmother; her past memories
and present life interweave in a story of love and cultural exchange.
I will locate the matrilineage of the three generations involved in this
novel and investigate the text from a feminist and cultural point of
view. Moreover, as Liu has adopted the garden as a motif in this
novel, I will also examine the implications of the plants and design.
Through investigating the discourses on matrilineage and the garden,
I wish to locate the womens subjectivity, and through meditating on
the cultural confrontations, I would like to discover the issues
related to hybridity and identity in this work.
In Chapter Three, Timothy Mos work Sour Sweet will be
analysed. This novel is a story mainly about how a new immigrant
family endeavours to survive in an alien country. Because the parallel
of Chinese British immigration history is significant here, it is
necessary to outline the historical and cultural influences on this
novel. Following that, I will examine the text according to the
Foucauldian theory of power, as the women in this book have
strived, independently or cooperatively, to magnify their power and
enhance their subjectivity. To argue the case that the women in this
novel become powerful, I will explore the shifting centre of power,
the power struggles, the womens resistance and strategies, the
relationship between power and knowledge, the collective female
power and the concept of the Chinese yin-yang. The end of this
chapter leads the discussion on to the problems among the Britishborn Chinese, and between the first and the second generations,
which are consequences of cultural conflicts and misunderstandings.
Chapter Four explores the themes of Chinese food and cooking in
Helen Tses Sweet Mandarin. British Chinese people are often
associated with the catering trade, be it a Chinese restaurant or
takeaway. Most British-born Chinese would reject this stereotyping
and detest being connected with the catering businesses; however,
the Tse sisters move backward to set up their own restaurant
in Manchester. Their love of food and cooking backs up their
decision; what food and foodways signify in the writing is worth
investigating. The discussion of Chinese food and cooking involves
the traditions, subjectivity and identity of the women who play the
main roles in this work. Also highlighted is the hybridity discovered

in the text; as the Chinese immigrants carry their food and tradition
overseas, they have to adapt to a foreign environment, and hybridity
thus develops. The cultural conflict is especially apparent when the
second or the third generations are asked to help out in the familyrun businesses. This chapter contains an analysis of the idea of
helping out in a family business and the identity of the British-born
Chinese.
The conclusion to this book offers several ideas for future studies.
As mentioned previously, research into Chinese people in Britain is
still in its initial stages; considering its thriving counterpart in the
United States, the investigation of British Chinese people deserves
continued attention, and this research appears promising and
constructive in terms of offering a common ground for cultural
understanding.
2
Matrilineage and the Garden in
Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge
Born and raised in China, Liu Hong arrived in Britain in 1989, the
year when the notorious Tiananmen Massacre took place in Beijing.
She has published four works so far: Startling Moon (2001), The
Magpie Bridge (2003), The Touch (2003) and Wives of the East
Wind (2007). A woman of Chinese origin, with English as her
adopted language, extraordinarily she has never written in Chinese
but only narrates her stories in English. Explaining her reason of
language choice in the Authors note in The Magpie Bridge, Liu
indicates that English to her stands for a new-found future and
freedom: England is a garden This book is my fruit Imagine a
language that is musical to the ear, that is not (to the Chinese)
tarnished by imperial overtones, that your parents cannot understand,
in which you can totally immerse yourself and be free. That was
what English meant to me. I entered the garden and the view was
promising (245). Liu Hong utilises this language of freedom to tell
her Chinese stories in Startling Moon and Wives of the East Wind,
which are connected to the Communist regime in China. The novel
The Magpie Bridge is singled out for discussion, as it was in this
work that Liu began to include England in the background to her
writing. The writer sets half of her stories in England, rather than
solely in China. Chinese history and culture, nonetheless, play
important roles in this novel.
Background
As a Chinese immigrant, Liu Hongs writing conveys the history and
culture of her origin. The British and French exploitation of China
was described by Liu Hong through the destruction of the fabulous
Yuan Ming Yuan Imperial Gardens and the cruel slaughter which
took place; the author made the Englishman Ken express his feeling
of shame at his ancestors wrongdoings and another confide her guilt
in the text: As you can see, [the mirror was] taken from China at
the time of the opium wars, its a bit of an embarrassment (243).
The story of The Magpie Bridge is told by two female narrators,
namely, Jiao Mei and her grandmother Tie Mei. In the narrative by
Tie Meis mother, the opium houses were described as places which
had brought the downfall of the Chinese husband. The story also
involves the Japanese invasion of China, and Jiao Meis greatgrandmother was raped by a Japanese soldier. The journey back to
the ancestral home of Tie Meis in-laws in Sichuan reveals the
horrors of the Japanese invasion of China with the solders raping
and massacring along the way (110).
Liu chronicles Chinese history in her text by shifting the setting to
the Chinese Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists
and the subsequent Communist regime. Different from her other
two books, Startling Moon and Wives of the East Wind, which
describe people suffering at the hands of the Communist government,
Liu Hong fabricates a communist, Zhi Ying, who values women and
their worth. The man who Tie Mei fell in love with appreciated her
garden, gave her the book The One Thousand Elementary Words
for Women which he edited himself, sympathised with her bound
feet, and taught her to read and write. He made Tie Mei feel brave
and special, a female adult who went to school with young girls and
needed to breastfeed her baby boy between lessons. He saved a
woman who felt inferior and unlucky (141). Through the despised
and feared heroines in the books that Zhi Ying gave her, Tie Mei
learned to become a female warrior, powerful in herself and daring
to fight against injustice. The mans departure resulted in Tie Meis
devastation and was a result of the Communist-Nationalist war.
Subsequently, the background to the story of Jiao Meis parents was
Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge
set in Communist China, where at the time many innocent

intellectuals were criticised and tortured; Yuan Shui and Orchid
were two tragic examples of that turbulent period.
While China provides the setting for the stories of Jiao Meis
parents, grandparents and ancestors, England is where she now
lives; Liu describes English gardens and includes ordinary English
life such as shopping at Boots. Through the encounters of the two
narrators, the past memories of China and the present life in Britain
intersect and cultural confrontations are numerous.
Matrilineage
Tie Mei, a restless spirit and a wandering soul, introduces the readers
to the story. Answering her granddaughters call in a dream, Tie Mei
leaves her garden in Sichuan and goes to search for her granddaughter
Jiao Mei in London. She journeys from the distant Far East to
Britain to seek her granddaughter as she is pregnant by her English
boyfriend Ken. Taking on the familys reputation and feuds herself,
Tie Mei tells her granddaughter a series of true stories filled with
pain caused by Westerners and the Japanese. Jiao Mei, however, is
too close to the distasteful foreigners in her grandmothers eyes,
and in fact she had planned the pregnancy because her visa was
about to expire. At first Ken leaves the relationship on learning
about his girlfriends pregnancy but gradually accepts it and proposes
marriage. Another person Jiao Mei is intimate with is Barbara. She
lodges with Barbara, her deceased fathers lover back in China and
a librarian who spends much of her time painting. In the novel, Jiao
Mei also recalls the memory of her father Yuan Shui, who fell from
being a college lecturer to a gardener and lived like a hermit in a
shed, and her mother Orchid, who left her and her father for another
man when she was still a little girl.
In The Magpie Bridge, the relationship between the biological/
surrogate mothers and daughter is crucial; Jiao Mei and her mothers
make up the most significant parts of the novel while the men play
mostly supporting roles. This chapter thus emphasises the exploration
10
of matrilineage and then changes to show how the important theme

of the garden is represented in this work.
The renowned feminist Adrienne Rich suggested that the awareness
of writing about the mother-daughter relationships is scarce: The
loss of the daughter to the mother, the mother to the daughter, is the
essential female tragedy. We acknowledge Lear (father-daughter
split), Hamlet (son and mother), and Oedipus (son and mother) as
great embodiments of the human tragedy; but there is no presently
enduring recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture (237).
This negligence of mother-daughter writing has gradually received
more attention since Richs reminder, and mother-daughter works
and theory remain a significant field of female writing and criticism.
Marianne Hirsch is a literary critic who emphasises the significance
of matrileange. Inspired by Virginia Woolf, Hirsch, in her The
Mother/Daughter Plot, advocates the idea of thinking back through
our mothers developing a female genealogy is a strategy for
creating a space for women in a patriarchal society (95). Empowered
by their mothers stories, female writers gain in ability and strength.
The retrieval of matrilineage indicates an inscription of oneself in
history and an acknowledgment of who one is. The following
discussion will then concentrate on how the concept of matrilineage
works in The Magpie Bridge.
Deserted by her own mother when she was nearly five years old,
Jiao Mei often felt insecure and frequently dreamed about her
mother. Owing to her mothers remarriage, Jiao Mei was convinced
of the mothers aloofness towards her; however, being in England is
a turning point for Jiao Mei, where she confronts a different culture,
changes other people and is changed herself.
In a foreign land, Jiao Mei comments, I was between worlds
(63): She is between the English and Chinese, the present and past,
the modern and traditional worlds. Under the English influence, Jiao
Meis grandmother worries about her becoming foreign and through
the implication of the Handan story, in which a young man observed
a different culture and forgot his own, fears that she may lose her
own heritage. The protagonist herself is ambiguous about straddling
two worlds, the new and exotic country where she yearns to build
a new life and the traditional Chinese one which she aims to
11
forget: I should not think of the past so often (11). Lost and
confused, the woman goes through an identity crisis. Nevertheless,
the act of burning paper money on Qing Ming, the Chinese day of
the dead, suggests her acknowledgement of her Chinese legacy and
her determination to face the past. Later she finally recognises that
she has to delve into her memories to find her selfhood: how
heavily the past weighed on me. It was so much part of me even
this new life couldnt change that (97). The past here refers not only
the narrators old days in China, but also to the sagas of her ancestors.
Recalling the past stories of ones antecedents signifies the retrieval
of genealogy, and in Jiao Meis case, it is matrilineage that counts. In
this novel, Tie Mei, Tie Meis mother and great-grandmother are the
foremothers; all three suffered when they were alive and sought
revenge after they died. The story of Mei, an ancestor from the Qing
dynasty, took place when the English and French troops stormed
into Beijing and slaughtered the Chinese civilians; Meis familial
paradise was destroyed and her husband was killed. Mei was also
soon murdered by a Western soldier. Tie Meis mother was once an
exemplary widow for her behaviour and dress (67). After being
raped by a Japanese soldier, she lost her being: as if her soul had
gone from her body (69). She hanged herself for the sake of her
reputation as she found herself pregnant from her rapist. Tie Mei
was abused by her parents-in-law, forsaken by her extramarital lover
and then lost her baby daughter; she was thought mad by her
neighbours before she directed her affections towards Jiao Mei. The
agonies of her foremothers as well as her own burden Tie Mei with
the responsibility to retaliate and to correct the granddaughters
misbehaviour of being too intimate with the foreign devils, as they
were called by the ghost of her grandmother.
Justice is served only when the abovementioned women become
ghosts. With the assistance of a family heirloom, a bronze mirror
engraved with Mei flowers and a dancing dragon, justice is done. In
the mirror, Mei turns into a ghost and lures the murderer into
drowning himself; Tie Meis mother becomes a vengeful spirit
hunting for the rapist, and Tie Mei takes the form of a phantom and
finally tracks down and avenges her lover, who abandoned her when
danger was approaching.
12
The knowledge of her foremothers stories empowers Jiao Mei,

who is uncertain of herself: Sometimes I dont know who I am
(191), yet looking into the mirror belonging to her family, Jiao Mei
allows herself back into a retrieved matrilineage by tracing her
ancestors stories. In the mirror, she seems to glimpse her ancestors,
just as easily as she saw herself, commented Tie Mei (196). The
grandmother has awakened within the granddaughter a strong
sense of national shame and family pride (201).
The possession of family pride comes from the wisdom of family
history, which was irrevocable since the grandmother told too many
stories and too few truths (49). Tie Mei told her granddaughter true
stories in a foreign land; however, she was forced to do so by the
duty of passing down the family tradition. The mirror seemed heavy
in her hands. Could I trust her with it? (175) the implication of
this passage discloses Tie Meis doubt of Jiao Meis ability to carry
on the matrilineage, a task which, as the novel proceeds, the
granddaughter comes to accomplish. Nevertheless, it should be
noted that this achievement is not a smooth journey as Tie Mei is
bitter and vindictive, while Jiao Mei is perplexed and resistant.
Through their contact and the following impact, both manage to
understand each other and change their attitudes in the end. The
grandmother tells her granddaughter Chinese stories and the
granddaughter decides to tell stories back at the end of the novel to
reclaim her grandmother: She should keep me entertained by
reading me stories I had told her That way I would remember her
(237).
Power and subjectivity

The recovery of matrilineage individualises the womens subjectivities
and empowers them, as the knowledge of the mothers bravery
provides the daughter with encouragement and confidence, while
the daughters rebellion educates and transforms the mother. With
her feet bound, Tie Mei grew up in traditional China and was
illiterate until adulthood. Thus, she is enthusiastic for her
granddaughter to become a scholar and avoid being bullied:
13
Knowledge gives you power, and a woman needs that (120).

Encouraged and taught by Zhi Ying, her lover-to-be, Tie Mei learns
to read and write as an adult. Going to school for her is an escape
from her responsibilities and confinement, namely, housework and
motherhood; she feels like she has wings to fly (131).
The wings are broken as Tie Mei becomes pregnant by her lover
and is abandoned because of his potential political prosecution. Her
baby girl soon dies of chicken-pox and she loses her mind to a
degree. Until Jiao Mei is born Tie Mei pours the love reserved for her
daughter onto her. The pain in her life does not weaken her but
makes her stronger after death: In death I had become the woman
I should have been in life. Souls gathered around me: I was respected,
admired, even feared. I became a leader. I started to plot my revenge
(50). Cleansed by the hell fire, Tie Mei appears with a hardened
heart (50). Tie Mei compares herself to the Monkey King, who was
punished with burning fire yet made stronger by the penalty: she
proudly states, Do you remember the Monkey King? Thats who
Im like now, in my world. I was a rebel (50).
This nonconformist is a bitter soul and talks dominatingly to her
granddaughter. In England, she finds that Jiao Mei is no longer a
little girl crying on her lap but a grown-up woman calling her
directly by her name and addressing her as an equal. The
granddaughter can now hurt her where the devils in hell could not
and she wishes she had never come to London (65). The grandmother,
who constantly talks about family prestige, actually goes astray in
reality and commits adultery. She confesses: Reputation be damned!
It was the shift in her allegiance that hurt (65). Later, Tie Mei is
educated by her granddaughter to speak her own mind and
transform: Every time I was with her, I learned new things about
her, and came away with new tactics to win her back. There was
strength in her silence. In her reconciliation with the young devil she
had gained a confidence she lacked before (108).
Jiao Meis power is derived from a foreigner whom Tie Mei
openly despises, but eventually learns to accept. The grandmother
and granddaughter later become friends and giggle like two girls
(133). In the following section of the novel, Tie Mei is enlightened
by the truth that she is the one who requires help: I saw that it was
14
I who needed her, not the other way round (166). Jiao Mei has
educated her on the lesson of revenge: The mirror was back in our
hands. And, so far, no blood. A victory without battle. How easily I
seemed to accept it, although fighting had been the only way I knew
to get what I wanted. Now my granddaughter had shown me
another way, a path I trod gingerly (185). As a consequence, when
Jiao Mei learns about the betrayal of her fianc, Tie Mei advises her
to forgive, rather than retaliate for the wrongdoing, something that
the grandmother repeats all the time and impresses the granddaughter:
What had impressed me so deeply was how vividly and powerfully
Tie Mei had described the scene of revenge, as if she herself had been
the avenger. She would have done it (201). Affected by Jiao Mei, Tie
Mei becomes softer, and this is proved when she unearths her lover:
Death gave me power I had never had in life, and I wanted him to
pay. But this was not punishment: it was as though I had released
him (215). The reunion liberates Tie Mei as well; she discerns that
nobody could have released me from him except myself (215).
Tie Meis peaceful state comes from her contact with her
granddaughter and the ensuing transformation: All I had to speak
of was the past. So far she had listened patiently to my stories of loss,
but I had no idea how she would react to these tales of revenge. But
we needed to go through this together. Only then could I go in peace
(195). The correspondence is two-way, though. Jiao Mei also
benefits from the encounters.
For the granddaughter, the grandmother takes on the mothers
role: Nainai had been like a mother to me, narrated Jiao Mei (20).
However, she is fearful of her grandmother penetrating her inner
being: soon after Bills confrontation with Jiao Mei, Tie Mei spreads
dandelions in Bills garden to anger him as revenge: The way she
picked up my feelings and thoughts, like radar, was frightening
(194). Tie Mei turns up in England for a granddaughter who is
unprepared for her appearance: carrying icy coldness and suffocating
sweet fragrance, to Jiao Mei, the grandmother was like a blackand-white photo of a person, conjuring a vague impression of a
long-lost memory (7). This negative expression proposes an
unwelcoming message. For Jiao Mei, the English world is solid and
real, while the Chinese one appears disturbing and chimerical: This
15
was the dangerous time when I was on a threshold, when my English

world bordered on the Chinese, my world of night, of dreams. This
was the world of Tie Mei (139). Jiao Mei pondered over the
existence of her grandmothers spirit: No one else had seen her, and
though the fragrance seemed real enough, it was hardly proof of her
presence (140). Torn between fantasy and reality, Jiao Mei is unable
to share her vision of a ghost appearing as a fragrance with people
around her for fear of being thought mad. She regards herself as
having hallucinations and keeps on asking herself, Have I gone
mad? (183). Moreover, since the grandmother often tells stories
about ghosts, the granddaughter comments, Ghosts and my
grandmother were closely connected (17).
Jiao Mei recalls her grandmothers voice in the darkness when the
ghost stories were shared as an otherworldly sound that both
attracted and frightened the girl (17). Even though scared by these
tales and undecided about the importance of the stories need to be
told, Jiao Mei listens on: the fragrance drew me, powerful
beyond reason, appealing to the sense that was most alive in me. To
resist it was to resist living; to resist it was to resist being myself
(46). The more stories she learns, the more she comes to understand
herself and the women in her family: after listening to her
grandmothers true stories, Jiao Mei exclaimed, you are a heroine
(79). Different from the self-guarded granddaughter when the
grandmother first surfaced, Jiao Mei finally acknowledges the
courageous behaviour of Tie Mei and identifies with her matrilineage.
Besides her foremothers, in her present life Jiao Mei has two
mothers, one biological and the other a substitute one. Jiao Meis
biological mother, Orchid, intentionally severed the connection with
her daughter when she left her husband; she simply appears at his
funeral and at the airport to see her daughter off. In consequence,
the mother-daughter connection has been blocked. When Jiao Mei
writes her a letter to inform of the pregnancy, she puts on a detached
manner, as if addressing a distant aunt: But it was so hard to know
what tone to use to a mother I had not been close to for so long
(158). The letter was returned to the sender with a note saying Not
known here, which implies the dysfunctional mother-daughter
relationship. It is when Orchid writes back that the bond is
16
re-established. When Jiao Mei herself is expecting a child, she

becomes even more enthusiastic about the mother-daughter link:
Somehow, as the birth approached, my need for her to reply became
more urgent (187).
In Orchids letter, which finally reaches Jiao Mei, she describes her
daring to steal the milk meant for a tiger cub for baby Jiao Mei. The
disclosure of truth and love supplies the mother-to-be with strength
and courage: How could I not be brave? She was the tigress. I had
been loved, so fiercely loved, from the very beginning. Id always
known it (218). Orchid sacrifices her happiness to marry a man
who she does not love so that her husband will be able to end his
exile in an empty land and her daughter will avoid being classified
into a lower social class; she has performed as a traditional Chinese
loving wife and mother. This expression of love is different from that
of Jiao Meis substitute mother, the English one, Barbara.
Barbara was Jiao Meis sworn enemy because of the English
womans closeness to her father (41), but she manages to win the
girls heart in China: Shes like a mother to me (93). Barbara brings
Jiao Mei to England after her father passes away and pays for her
living expenses and studies. At the beginning of the novel, Jiao Mei
feels awkward with Barbara despite her gratitude: I didnt know how
to return her affection. I wouldnt dare to kiss her. Such a strange,
foreign custom (9). Jiao Mei is unable to show her affection: The
Chinese in me wanted us to be closer, and the English in her pushed
us apart (60). The cultural barrier hampers the relationship between
this pair, and Jiao Mei cannot even disclose to Barbara her dislike of
cheese sandwiches offered by the hostess and meant for her lunch.
This cultural difference makes Jiao Mei sometimes unable to
confide her true feelings to Barbara; it is much later on a picnic, and
after being openly welcomed by her hostess about her extended stay
in England that Jiao Mei finally divulges her hatred of cheese
sandwiches: I knew now that in her heart she wanted me to stay, but
I still needed her to spell it out, to save my Chinese face (126). In
the absence of her original mother, Jiao Mei projects her longing
onto Barbara: I had been looking for a mother, and in Barbara Id
found one. I had resented her for not fulfilling the role of a
substitute mother (191).
17
Barbara does in fact play the role her mother. Later, when Jiao
Meis due date is approaching, Barbara helps her with the preparation
for the arrival of the baby; Jiao Mei notes, These were things any
mother would have done for her daughter (194). The motherdaughter connection is reinforced when Barbara takes Jiao Mei to
her brothers house for a weekend away and shares her childhood
with her; Jiao Mei sleeps in the room once belonging to Barbara:
On that bed, I felt Barbara and I were inextricably linked on a path
that would take us both to our destiny (212). Their fate is
interwoven with that of Tie Mei, and Barbaras shared ability with
Jiao Mei of seeing Tie Meis ghost implies the inclusion of Barbara
in the family.
The aforementioned female characters form a substantial
matrilineage for Jiao Mei: Tie Mei, my mother and Barbara: my
family of passionate women. For all their failings, they had accepted
their responsibilities. Tie Mei, for my ancestors honour; my mother,
for protecting my father and me; and Barbara, whose love embraced
not just my fathers vanity but my insecurity (224). Living in a
foreign country increases her sense of insecurity: Somehow I didnt
feel so safe here with my thoughts (24). This diffidence is exemplified
when Jiao Mei wants Barbara to decide her future for her.
Jiao Mei becomes more caring, compassionate and confident in
herself because of her own motherhood and the mothers before her.
Jiao Mei is independent, bold but uncertain of her selfhood; it is
pregnancy that helps establish her subjectivity: I think it has to do
with being a mother. I am not afraid for myself any more (109). In
dating an English man, Jiao Mei is more rebellious than other
Chinese students according to Liu Hongs description. The deliberate
act of becoming pregnant is a powerful step; I did not act the role
of the pretty Chinese doll, says Jiao Mei (105). Contrary to her
great-grandmother, who was raped and became pregnant, Jiao Mei
manipulates her way into having a baby sown in her womb.
Moreover, with the mirror, Jiao Mei uses her power by helping
Barbara to reclaim her sense of smell and wonders if she should, by
using her power, avenge Ken when she learns about his betrayal of
sleeping with another woman after their quarrel. She gives up this
malicious idea and forgives Ken, however. Her forgiveness does not
18
mean weakness or surrender, but a wise strategy for a better

situation: He would protect me with his body, if need be, I thought
proudly. Power could be a wonderful thing. It depended on how you
used it (203). The strategic manipulation of power thus enables a
person to obtain what he or she desperately desires.
Jiao Mei inherits her power from her mothers and foremothers,
and the genealogy resumes not in China, but in England, with Jiao
Meis baby boy and Kens mother Daisy as grandmother: What a
perfect granny shed make, thinks Jiao Mei (174). Jiao Mei herself
is optimistic about motherhood: I would be a good mum (202).
The past is uncovered, cherished and now replaced with hope for
the future: My photograph had been replaced by pictures of the
baby Already it was a homely room (230). Jiao Mei begins to see
things differently after her son Thomas is born: This new life has
changed me. How had I got it so wrong before? (228). The
doubtful girl inside herself is gone and Jiao Mei has lost the childish
look (229). According to Wendy Ho, who researches Chinese
American mother-daughter stories, via both Amy Tans and Maxine
Hong Kingstons:
various narratives of a self-in-process, the Chinese American
mothers and daughters learn to name and to compassionately
understand their differences as well as similarities as women and
to gradually extend this critical political practice to an
understanding of men, family and community. It can therefore
be empowering and heroic for women to tell their diverse stories
and attend to one another. (23)
The matrilineage and motherhood have granted Jiao Mei selfassurance, compassion and the power to face the future.
The symbol of the mirror

It is worth noting that in the interpretation of matrilineage in
The Magpie Bridge, the symbol of the family heirloom, the bronze
mirror, plays a significant role. The freedom of Tie Mei would not
19
have occurred without the return of the heirloom, a mission

completed by Jiao Mei. The mirror means both a curse and a
blessing for the women in Tie Meis family, and the search for the
mirror symbolises the retaining of family tradition and quest for
matrilineage. Tie Meis mother asks her daughter to find the mirror;
otherwise she will not be able to rest in peace.
The mirror has become a part of the womens lives in Tie Meis
family; hence, when they lose it they are deprived of a part of
themselves: It was why we had fought tooth and nail to get it back.
It represented so much of what my family meant to me: their genius
and honour (176). In Hirschs analysis, the mirror image stimulates
ones self-creation and initiates change. The mirror to Tie Mei is a
powerful weapon: I smelt it like a warrior caressing his sword after
a long, hard battle. For a moment I was transported back to those
days of freedom and power: my rebellion in the underworld. Bound
neither by the rules of hell nor by the shackles of shame, I had never
felt more alive (175). Here, the mirror is compared to a sword, a
weapon Tie Mei carries for revenge.
It was through the agency of this mirror that Tie Mei used to tell
the stories of her ancestors to Jiao Mei. In the magic mirror, both Tie
Meis mother and great-grandmother become ghosts that avenge the
men who caused their deaths. Through the mirror, Tie Mei finds her
lover and killed the old man in him (213). Despite the return of the
mirror to their family, Tie Mei feels empty and afraid, rather than
delighted and satisfied: There was no sense of conclusion: it felt as
though things had just begun (177). Will the curse resume since Jiao
Mei is aware of Kens betrayal? The answer seems to be negative, as
Jiao Mei decides to forgive.
Jiao Meis request for the mirror indicates her respect for her
family heritage, and her donation of the mirror to the British
museum suggests a cross-cultural reconciliation. Two souls to
console. Only magic will heal them. I owed them both so much. But
how do you help one so bitter and another so oblivious of her own
pain? (181). Using the mirror as a medium, Jiao Mei prays to the
Moon Goddess: You must help them both, for if you cant help
Nainai, if she cannot learn to forgive, Barbara will never be cured
and I will never be free (183). It is miraculous that after the prayer,
20
Barbara regains her lost sense of smell. Nevertheless, the ability to

smell lilies again makes Barbara withdraw into her own world,
missing both China and her deceased lover. This result indicates that
the use of the mirror can be both beneficial and harmful.
Scent and the garden

In addition to matrilineage and subjectivity, scent and the garden are
the dominant motifs in The Magpie Bridge. Edith Toegel declares
that gardening provided the pure joy of physical and mental
renewal. the physical activity provided a parallel outlet for
creativity and imagination (268). Besides pleasure, gardens are
where gardeners ingenuity is presented. In her work In Search of
Our Mothers Gardens, the African American female writer Alice
Walker observes the pain and violence imposed on black American
women, who are her foremothers, and dubs her mother a creative
artist:
Whatever she planted grew as if by magic whatever rocky soil
she landed on, she turned into a garden. A garden so brilliant
with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and
creativity I notice that it is only when my mother is working
in her flowers that she is radiant, almost to the point of being
invisible except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in
work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of
her personal conception of Beauty. (241)
In her garden, the mother is a designer, a magician and a creator.
Through gardening, the mothers subjectivity is unveiled and her
power is omnipotent.
Gardening is not only the representation of artistry and originality
but also the performance of power. Walker recalls how her mothers
garden had enriched her life: Because of her creativity with her
flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of
blooms (241). Through gardens and gardening, the mothers and
daughters are empowered and enlightened. In The Magpie Bridge,
21
the gardening skills also suggest artistry and creativity, while the
gardens mostly symbolise happiness. Furthermore, the scent carries
several different implications, while the plants convey multiple
metaphors.
At the beginning of the novel, it is Jiao Meis scent that guides her
grandmother to unearth her: Im coming, Jiaojiao, your scent alone
guides me (3). In addition, the Meis fragrance is the embodiment of
Tie Mei, and after Tie Mei begins to appear in England, Barbaras
Mei tree first blossoms. Shelley Saguaro points out that analogies
with aspects of gardening, with terms such as cultivation,
nurture, growth, flowering and fruition are commonplace
and are even familiarly extended to aspects of developments of
selfhood (x). The flowering of the Mei tree foretells that the
subjectivity of the women in The Magpie Bridge will become clear
as the story proceeds; the bloom also indicates both revival and
propagation Tie Mei is re-born as a ghost and Jiao Mei is pregnant
with a child. As Jiao Mei inhales the fragrance of Mei petals, a
strong sensation flowed through her and brought her back a longlost fragrance, which she is now familiar with because of her
grandmothers presence (22). Jiao Mei is fond of the scented flowers
and does not forget smell easily (13), and Kens failure to bring her
a fragrant bouquet implies the instability of the early stages of their
relationship: He had brought tulips, not my favourite: a flower
without scent is a fake, a song without a turn. I signed secretly: he
doesnt know me yet (43).
Another implication of the scent is from Barbaras loss of smell.
Barbara, who once had a nose sharper than a dogs (10), is unable
to smell anything, even her favourite lilies. The pain of missing
China and her deceased Chinese lover, Jiao Meis father Yuan Shui,
engenders Barbaras eccentricity and illness. While Jiao Mei desires
to stay in the present to hope for the future, Barbara dwells in
memories of the past. The recovery of smell, as wished by Jiao Mei,
does not heal Barbara but results in a poorer health condition. The
aroma of lilies takes her back to her days in China, where she
fervidly loved a Chinese man. The memories of the past reinforce
Barbaras idiosyncrasy to the point that she locks herself in her
studio to paint lilies.
22
Besides scent, Liu purposefully uses the symbols of plants, and the
Mei tree is a fine example. Jiao Meis foremothers were named Mei and
Tie Mei; all three possess the name taken from the Mei tree. In Chinese
culture, the Mei tree symbolises purity, bravery and resilience, and is
how Tie Mei received her name: This is the tree Im named after; it is
what I am about (4). Suffering in her life, Tie Mei refuses to drink the
Soup of Confusing the Souls when she dies in order to keep her
memory, which signifies her being a rebel against Chinese traditional
values and her strong persistence in keeping her familial heritage.
The Mei tree in Barbaras garden represents Tie Mei, who
abandoned the garden of her one true happiness in China and felt
the tree sad and lonely due to its displacement in England (4); she
was even doubtful of her influence on her granddaughter: I was
unsure of my self: a mere fragrance, a ghost from her past (36).
According to Reinaldo Silva, who studies the ethnic garden in
Portuguese-American writing, indicates that the very act of gardening
has been a means through which Portuguese Americans have
asserted their identity and national origin (192). In The Magpie
Bridge, the Mei tree especially symbolises the origin and identity of
Tie Mei and Jiao Mei. Tie Mei began as an intangible spirit, but later
was embodied as a Mei tree to survive in a foreign land: I have to
be here because my root is here (241). Tie Mei, who loathes and
disdains the foreign devils, at the end of the novel is incarnated as
a Mei tree in England. To be a plant, you would need to know your
place and be happy with it (130). Jiao Mei was also named after the
Mei tree, through which it is suggested that Jiao Miei is more aware
of her matrilineage and the strength of her ancestors: Its blossom
braved the cold. I knew how much endurance its beauty required
(225). Moreover, it is interesting to consider that Bill, somewhat
hostile towards Jiao Mei, saved the Mei tree from dying. An
unfriendly English man is actually a rescuer; a ceasefire and harmony
are indeed possible.
Jiao Mei, Tie Mei and Tie Meis great-great-grandmother living in
the Qing dynasty all take the name of Mei; Jiao Meis mother is
called Orchid, also a floral name. The orchid often symbolises
righteousness, elegance and chastity in Chinese literature. Even
though Jiao Meis mother had remarried, her intention was to
23
protect her former husband Yuan Shui and her daughter; therefore,
the author adopts the orchid flower to imply her virtue. For Barbara,
the floral symbol is the lily. Back in China, Jiao Mei used the lily as
a token to show her acceptance of Barbara as her fathers lover. In
Britain, Barbara recalls the memory in China and becomes eccentric
at the sight of lilies. To Christopher McIntosh, lilies are connected
with purity and death (175). Barbaras pure love for Jiao Meis
father leads to her death at the end of the novel.
Like the scent and plants, gardens are an important theme in
The Magpie Bridge. Tie Meis great-great-grandmothers story was
set initially in Suchou, the garden city of China. Later the backdrop
switched to Yuan Ming Yuan, the Garden of Divinity and Brightness,
which was the most glorious and gigantic garden, full of surprises
and grandeur, in China. As a craftswoman, Mei lived in the garden
and decorated the garden with her carvings; on the other hand, her
husband Wubao was a gardener who established their home inside
Yuan Ming Yuan, and hence formed a garden inside a garden,
beauty within beauty (33). Along with Yuan Ming Yuan, which was
burned down by English and French troops in 1860, their paradise
was demolished. Liu Hongs depiction of the spectacular Chinese
imperial garden and Meis joyous dwelling place greatly contrasts
with the hell of plunder and murder under the Western forces. Thus,
the theme of the garden is especially powerful.
Plants and gardens are also inseparable in Yuan Shui and Orchids
lives, but they are the reason why their family was ruined. As a
botanist teaching at an agricultural college, Yuan Shui was denounced
by his own students and then labelled as a rightist, an enemy of the
people at that time in China, due to his appreciation and nurture of
flowers instead of edible plants. His favourite plant, the orchid, was
deemed a bourgeois flower by the Communists and caused his
downfall. Later, he built a shed in a park back in his homeland in
Chengdu and tended a mobile garden of orchids so that he could
avoid trouble. The portable garden was rootless, however, which
shows that his pride was wounded, so Jiao Mei, contemplating his
fall, comments, No wonder he had lacked faith in himself (212).
The damage to Yuan Shuis esteem causes Barbara pain and she has
to dig in her garden for comfort.
24
For Tie Mei, her garden is a source of happiness; on her in-laws

land, she turns a desolate place into a beautiful garden with roses
and Mei blossoms. In it, she can daydream. This luxury indulges her
with fragrances and delight. Just like Alice Walkers mother, despite
physical and mental toil, Tie Mei will not surrender to hardships and
resorts to her garden for artistry and pleasure. Saguaro, in
interpreting the Garden of Eden, thus notes, On the one hand,
gardens can signify a pre-lapsarian and harmonic bliss; on the other,
the inevitable failure and Fall (x). Tie Mei falls in love with her
teacher in her big wild garden (121); this extramarital affair also
involves Tie Meis aspiration for knowledge, and hence corresponds
to Eve being seduced to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of
Eden. Eve was banished from the garden, and Tie Meis once
flourishing garden becomes a ruin after her illegitimate baby
daughter perishes; it is even haunted. In Steven Bendings study of
women and gardens, he declares that gardens are a source of
melancholy if they appear as ruins. Tie Meis garden is deserted and
becomes a place of grief; however, Barbara revives it.
Barbara finds the spot which used to be Tie Meis garden, which
had gone wild after she left it, and transforms it into her own garden
in China. Barbaras secret garden in China is a small paradise for the
couple and Jiao Mei, who all enjoy the closeness and excitement
brought about by the secrecy. Nevertheless, Tie Mei loathes the idea
of a foreign woman working in her garden. Afterwards, as Tie Mei
discovers the Flower of Phoenix Fairies, which she used to paint her
fingernails with, she exclaims, What a surprise to find them there!
They were well tended. How careful the Englishwoman was. I was
falling in love with her garden, in spite of myself. People are
different, but plants do not change (145). It was because of her
garden that Barbara gradually wins Tie Meis heart: I was surprised
by how acceptable, even pleasant at times, her scent was to me
(153). Tie Mei comes to reconcile with Barbara: How extraordinary
that she should have made a garden on my land, and that I should
find this [Mei] tree on hers (169). She even calls the English woman
a fellow gardener and acknowledges her ownership of the garden
in China (225). Looking at the Mei blossom in Barbaras garden, Tie
Mei narrates, It was like I was returning home (215).
25
The negotiation of culture between people who were enemies

takes place in Barbaras garden in Hampstead. Barbaras garden
becomes Chinese with the Mei tree, the pavilion and the pond filled
with water lilies and goldfish; the garden to her is an artistic creation
and she has built a bit of China in it (84). The sense of displacement
of plants and architecture associated with China recurs in The
Magpie Bridge: The pavilion looked out of place, contrived, the new
wood and the stumpy bamboo an awkward attempt to recall China
(24). This awkwardness, nevertheless, enables dialogue. Harmony
emerges from dischord, and the achievement of peace is verified by
Tie Meis decision to make Barbaras garden her home, while
Barbara the Englishwoman goes back to her garden in China.
Gardening skills are essential in cultivating ones garden. For Bill,
gardening is a responsibility. You cant do whatever you fancy (86).
This point of view is contrary to the female gardeners in The Magpie
Bridge, who transform their gardens spontaneously. Besides her
garden, Tie Meis creativity is demonstrated in her embroidery and
sewing: I was good at sewing too, mending socks, trousers, shirts
bruised knees and broken hearts. In that life I was a mender (109).
For Barbara, the artistry, even power, is also illustrated in her
painting: by portraying Yuan Shui, she displays her power over him
(88). Her originality is derived from this spontaneous flow. Her
studio, to Jiao Mei, is like another kitchen. Once Barbara even
smears chocolate on her painting and licks off the extra. Jiao Mei
observes, Her life had no boundaries: art did not end where life
began, nor dreams cease where reality set in. The studio and her
garden were her real world, not the big house she shared with me
and Bill (159).
The women in the novel, including Tie Mei, Jiao Mei and Barbara,
are thought to be mad to a certain extent: Tie Mei, because of
her pursuit of her baby daughters ghost, and Jiao Mei, because of
her seeing her grandmothers ghost, and Barbara, because of her
imagination. In Liu Hongs creation, two men serve as pragmatists,
namely, Ken and Bill. Ken believes that Jiao Mei is having hallucinations
and suggests that she sees a therapist or counsellor if the illusions
persist. Even though Jiao Mei is disappointed at his disbelief in her
visual perception, she thus remarks about Ken: I liked his ability to
26
separate real life from things that were less tangible. I needed a
sceptic like him, I needed him, solid and trustworthy, like water and
rice, to sustain me (138). As for Bill, he is convinced that Barbara
was suffering delusions and had asked her again to see someone
but is refused (199). Barbara argues, You said I imagine things, but
Im an artist, thats what I do (199). Before Barbaras death, she sees
her secret garden in China. The vision eases her sorrow and brings
her back to visualise the buds that she had left too early to witness
flowering in full bloom. Joan Bassin proposes that the garden
symbolises a place of safety and protection (31), and a natural
order is achieved through the balance of fantasy and reality. Barbara,
in her illusion, reaches transcendental harmony.
Barbara bequeaths Jiao Mei her garden and the studio, which
implies a generational transmission. I enjoyed the work in the
garden more as my pregnancy advanced (150) does not this
announcement imply both the continuation of generation and the
ongoing relationship with gardening? Walker states, Guided by my
heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength in search of
my mothers garden, I found my own (243). Jiao Mei is attached to
the garden herself: I thought affectionately of the plants. The garden
rested my restless heart (157), yet she is dubious of her ability to
take care of a garden. She is made to try, nonetheless. In Bills
postcard sent from Spain to Jiao Mei, it reads, Be a gardener. You
know thats what shed have wanted (244). Jiao Mei is to remove
the weeds of pain and plant flowers of pleasure.
The interpretation of The Magpie Bridge with the themes of
matrilineage and the garden affirm womens collective power; on the
other hand, as individuals, each of them display strength and
subjectivity.
Cultural influence and the metaphor of the bridge

Besides the motifs of matrilineage and garden, the bridge is another
one connecting the Chinese and English worlds in this novel. The
influence of Chinese culture in The Magpie Bridge is strong.
A Chinese poem in calligraphy is presented before the story develops;
27
the Chinese myth of the Milky Way and the story of the Magpie
Bridge are mentioned, and the author has deliberately entitled her
chapters according to the the twenty-four days in each year around
which the peasants based their cycle of planting and harvesting,
following the traditional calendar (20), which starts from Rainwater
through to Spring Begins, and spans a whole year. The fortnightly
intervals between these significant days are also conformed with in
the novel. Some of the chapter titles even correspond to the content;
for example, Chapter Four Qing Ming Clear and Bright depicts
Jiao Meis observation of the Chinese ritual on the Day of the Dead
and her confession to Ken about her planning her pregnancy. In
Chapter Seven Xiao Man Wheat Seeds Begin to Grow, the author
ends with the first encounter between Tie Mei and her lover.
Moreover, Chapter Sixteen, Han Lu Cold Dew, contains Bills
aggressive confrontation with Jiao Mei, and the chapter labelled
Dong Zhi Winter Solstice, is about Barbaras death and Tie Meis
message of her departure.
The Chinese influence is also shown through the observation of
Chinese rituals: Jiao Mei burns paper money on Qing Ming for her
grandmother, and at the Mid-Autumn Festival, she eats moon cakes
and writes a poem for the Moon Goddess. Liu tells of the Chinese
myth of the Moon Goddess Chang Er and her lover Hou Yi, who
were segregated into two different worlds, one mortal and the other
celestial, because the lady swallowed the mans hidden pill of
immortality and flew to the moon. The feeling of straddling two
worlds recurrently surfaces in Jiao Meis mind.
After arriving in England, Jiao Mei begins to ponder the cultural
differences, such as dining etiquette, the issue of treading on the grass
and outings in the rain. About food, for example, to Jiao Mei, Barbaras
abundance of milk in her mushroom soup is so alien to a Chinese
stomach (15). Jiao Mei pines for Chinese food, which indicates her
nostalgia for the country of her birth; however, she puzzles over the
location of her home: Should it be the shared dormitory in Beijing or
the torn-down shed built by her late father in Chengdu? Jiao Meis
homesickness cannot be cured by a trip to the Chinatown in London
as it is populated by Cantonese people, whose language sounds
different and is hard to understand for Mandarin ears.
28
Liu recounts British Chinese life by noting down that Jiao Meis
friend Xiao Lin works at a Chinese restaurant like a robot (82). She
also notices the racial stereotypes forced on Chinese women and
suggests that they can take advantage of the fixed images: Englishmen
expected Chinese girls to behave in a certain way and you soon
learned to manipulate it (83). Despite her ambivalence about living
in England, Jiao Mei views the new world around her with interest.
When Ken introduces the architectural styles of buildings in London
to Jiao Mei, she thinks, I look at everything with the new eyes of the
converted. It was as different a world from mine as could be and my
incomprehension was part of its attraction (114). In the end, she
learns to be more comfortable with the world where she has now
settled down, My hosts left me alone I was used to this now: it
was the English way, apparently (207).
As Jiao Meis boyfriend, Ken initiates his design of a Chinese
bridge in a British park in the Midlands, and ends up as a husband
and brings his English mother, Chinese wife and mixed-race child to
witness the birth of the bridge. Parminder Bakshi-Hamm proposes
that the garden represents a racialised space, enclosed within
boundaries in terms of both what is let in and what is kept out (1).
By placing a Chinese bridge into an English garden, the racial
barrier is demolished. Describing their intimacy, Jiao Mei narrates,
I directed, and he responded. We are two interwining bridges.
My desire came from inside me now: in the past he had aroused it
(159). The interaction between the two enables negotiation,
communication and the accomplishment of mutual understanding.
Jiao Mei, musing on Kens bridge, recounts, While I had been
making the baby, he had made a bridge (235), and it is a magpie
bridge arising from a Chinese legend. The magpies, the happiness
birds, reunited the lovers and allowed them to cross between their
worlds (106). Ken explains to Jiao Mei, the architectural term
tolerance, which is needed when building a bridge so that it can
withstand impact; he relates this term to the relationship between
human beings and associates it with understanding between people.
Through the awareness of different cultures, various races are thus
able to coexist on the one globe which human beings inhabit.
3
Power and Women in
Timothy Mos Sour Sweet
Timothy Mo, presumably the most well-known British Chinese

writer, was born to a British mother and a father from Hong Kong.
Leaving Hong Kong and arriving in Britain at the age of ten, Mo
studied history at Oxford University but later chose to become a
writer. The majority of Mos writing is relevant to British-Chinese
relationship and colonialisation, and his name is often associated
with the other two established ethnic British authors, Salmon
Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro. Mos published works include The
Monkey King (1978), Sour Sweet (1982), An Insular Possession
(1986), The Redundancy of Courage (1991), Brownout on
Breadfruit Boulevard (1995), Renegade or Halo2 (1999) and
Pure (2012). The author expressed his attraction towards
marginalised subjects in a conversation with the Asian American
author and critic Shirley-Geok-lin Lim: I have an interest in the
marginal (561), and out of these writings, Sour Sweet is most
related to the British Chinese community. Mo, talking to Lim, thus
asserts, When I wrote Sour Sweet, there was nothing like it before,
theres been nothing like it since (562).
Mo was right, and Sour Sweet is very likely the first book-length
novel addressing the subject matter of British Chinese immigrants.
This chapter, therefore, will focus on this work and discuss how it
has mirrored British Chinese immigration history and the living
30
conditions during the early period of their immigration. I will also

examine the power struggles in the novel with special attention to
the female characters and with the assistance of Foucauldian theories
of power. The analysis, however, will begin with how Sour Sweet is
related to British Chinese immigration history since it offers the
background to the novel.
Background
In Sour Sweet, the Chens are a new immigrant family who had
stayed in Britain for just four years. Corresponding to the fact that
most contemporary immigrants originated from Hong Kong, Chen
also came from this former British colony. As numerous Chinese
immigrants set foot in Britain through kinship ties, likewise, Chens
boss, a restaurateur from the New Territories, recruited his fellow
countrymen from his hometown, offering them work permits, flight
tickets and housing.
Parallels to British Chinese immigration history in Sour Sweet are
frequent. For example, it was because of the economic recession
caused by the competition of cheap Thai rice in the 1960s that the
Chen family needed to financially depend on Chens monthly salary
from Britain. After Chen settled down in his new country, due to a
need for companionship and familial responsibility, he decided to go
back to his ancestral land to seek a bride, and took her back to make
a family. The marriage was not a product of romance but out of
practicality and convenience: In any case marrying parentless Lily
eliminated the need to pay bride-price (9). The act of returning to
the Far East for marriage was a consequence of emigrating to
Britain. Conceivably due to the impossibility of finding a British wife
and his preference for a Chinese woman, Chen had to travel a long
distance for a bride.
A significant part of the novel is set in the Soho area in London,
and the Ho Ho restaurant, where Chen works, is just off Gerrard
Street in Chinatown. The food sold at the Chens take-away is not
authentic Chinese cuisine and is simple to cook as the dishes were
invented by the Chinese seamen who had jumped ship or retired in
31
East London a generation ago (111). This explication partially

explains the popularity of the catering business among British
Chinese immigrants since it requires low entry skills. Mo also
recounts the Chinese waiters prejudices towards their customers
with different ethnicities, and as stereotyped, the Ho Ho restaurant
employees enjoy going to casinos, which are run by the Triad society
in London.
The Triad society is also a part of British Chinese history. The
Chinese gangster society in Sour Sweet, the Wo, is closely connected
with their Hong Kong headquarters. Their main activities as
recounted in the story involve drug trafficking and shoot-outs.
However, due to their ancestral links, the Triad society gives a
certain degree of protection to British Chinese immigrants: for
instance, two widowed Chinese women disturbed by drunken sailors
sought help from members of the society, who advised them to put
up with it and offered them a gift of money. One leader of the
society, White Paper Fan, thus put it, Chinese people here will not
betray us. We are part of their heritage. It was well said: the officials
have the law, the people the secret societies (269).
A considerable number of British Chinese people are engaged in
the catering business, and the connection between the catering trade
and the British Chinese is confirmed in this novel. The occupation
which Chen takes up happens to be busy and long-hours Chineserestaurant work as he is running his own take-away: He worked
seventy-two hours (5). The working conditions of British Chinese
catering workers is notorious, and it is like hell for Chen: poor Chen
was working his fingers to the bone, and he needs to tend several
sizzling and steaming woks and pots simultaneously: There were
times when it seemed more like an alchemists magic laboratory than
a kitchen (145). However, even though the descriptions of the harsh
and dirty condition in the kitchens of Chinese restaurants are
numerous, the Ho Ho kitchen is depicted as a clean and cool place
to work in.
Founding their own business, the Chens still adopt catering, a takeaway, as their mode of earning a living. Nevertheless, it should be
noted that Mos work introduces a different category of Hong Kong
immigrants: Mrs Law is a wealthy widow, who left Hong Kong for
32
Britain not because of financial difficulties but because of boredom

and unhappiness. Just as the native British possess stereotypes
towards British Chinese immigrants, and vice versa, in the novel, it is
mentioned that the British are nonchalant towards other people, and
phlegmatic regularity is characteristic of the English (163). The
stereotypes reinforce Lilys superiority as someone of Chinese
descent: How strange the English were, how indifferent, how
careless of the consequences of their deeds! And as for their attitude
to their old people it was nothing less than shameful neglect, a
national disgrace (91). The Chinese respect for the old is deeply
rooted in Lily, who heartily welcomes the coming of Grandpa Chen
and repeatedly associates the inferiority of the British with their lack
of concern for the elderly: The English tastebuds must be as degraded
as their care of their parents (111). Another time Lily smiles at a
young English girl, but is met with a cold face; the adolescents
arrogance makes Lily ponder the British tendency of early pregnancy
and further consolidates her sense of superiority over the British.
According to Mos depiction, Lily is ignorant of the Westerners
and their culture; she does not trust them either. For example, when
British government officials ask for information about her family,
Lily is uncooperative and provides false data. When a social worker
comes to visit, Lily is convinced that she is a spy from the Ministry
of Transport (173). As for the taxman, Lily feels insulted by him:
She and husband were on the customer side of the counter. How
humiliating! (171). Worse of all, Lily dismisses the thought of
reporting her husband going missing to the police. The disbelief and
rift were a result of mis-communication: Chinese dont talk to the
devils. They meet silence when they ask their foolish questions, (41)
and thus, No Tang person talks to a devil official here (42). The
misunderstanding engenders the fear of the Chinese mind as well:
The English were peppery, thus thought Chen (88). Filled with
dread and resentment, Chen is careful of English workmen. Chens
awe of the British brings negative consequences; one example is that
the garage owner Mr Constantinides takes advantage of the family
in the form of a five percent commission fee from their take-away
business, but Chen agrees in order not to provoke the native British.
33
The inability to fit into British society was shared by many British
Chinese immigrants, and Chen is one of them. He feels like an
interloper and is displaced in Britain, land of promise (5). The
ethnic gaze troubles him: Chen supposed the English wives stared at
him because he was Chinese. ... There was a reassuring anonymity
about his foreigness. Chen understood: a lot Westerners looked the
same to him too (13). In his workplace, Chen is also an outsider, for
he is neither the owners relative nor a new recruit from Kowloon or
Hong Kong island. Mo portrays the god on the Chens altar, whose
resemblance to the head of the family amazes Lily and Mui, a deity
in exile (128). While his wife is starting to make England home,
turning the smells of their house local and English, Chen felt at
home and yet not at home. He had been more comfortable rootless
(141). Despite his sense of rootedlessness, Chen, like other Chinese
immigrants who viewed themselves as sojourners, wants to return to
China. Chen thus tells his son Man Kee: It is the ship that will take
us all back home when we are finished here. It will take you to your
homeland, Son, which you have never seen (162). It is ironic that
the son is expected to visit his homeland, where he has never been
in his life. The sense of displacement is further exemplified by
Grandpa Chen, whose primary concern after his arrival in London
is his return air-ticket to Hong Kong and whose profound fear is that
he should die lonely on foreign soil without a proper burial.
The mixture of British and Chinese cultures is found in the daily
lives of the Chen family. Sour Sweet, as the title itself suggests, is a
flavour which is a fusion of two flavours, as is the Chens life. In the
family garden, both Chinese and English broccoli are planted,
signifying the mingling of two cultures. Nevertheless, Lily readily
comments, At home in the New Territories vegetable growing was
an ignominious mode of agriculture, practised by refugees and
immigrants. It was fitting he should grow them here in alien soil
(175). Another example of cultural blending is when Lily cooks a
turkey in Beggar-Chicken style for a Christmas celebration, but the
meat is half-cooked and tastes bitter and tough. These two instances
signify that many British Chinese immigrants find their new lives
harsh and debasing.
34
Mo also describes the loneliness of single Chinese men; for

instance, Lo becomes ill and lies alone in bed without any care or
medication. This solitude also applies to poorly educated Chinese
women in a foreign country. Before the arrival of her son Man Kee
and her sister Mui, Lily was unable to speak English and was
unemployed, left in the house to do trivial chores and wait for her
husband to come home after his long working hours. Life was
stagnant, and she lost count of weeks, couldnt remember what she
had been doing two days ago (45). To her, this period is simply a
blank in her memory. As the plot proceeds, Lily, along with other
female characters, changes her submissive role though. The following
part of the chapter will focus on how the women in Sour Sweet are
empowered in an alien country.
Sour Sweet and the Foucauldian power relations

Michel Foucault is an important figure in the study of power, and his
concepts of power relations are especially relevant to the struggles in
Sour Sweet. For Foucault, there are three types of power struggle:
against forms of communal domination, against forms of exploitation
and against individual subjection. In this chapter, I will focus on the
last form of resistance, that is, the power struggles between
individuals. Individuals, according to this critical thinker, are not
passive recipients of power, and to turn individuals into subjects
demonstrates a form of power.
Foucault claims that a new economy of power relations consists
of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as
a starting point (The Subject and the Power 211). Sara Mills
explains Foucaults notion of power as something that is performed,
something more like a strategy than a possession. Power should be
seen as a verb than a noun, something that does something (35). To
Foucault, The exercise of power is not simply a relationship between
partners, individuals or collective ... Power exists only when it is put
into action (The Subject and the Power 219). Therefore, one who takes
action acquires power, and in Sour Sweet, the actions are mainly
performed by the females, Lily and Mui. To understand the power
35
relations in Sour Sweet, it is essential to first recognise where the

centre of power centre is located in the Chen family.
The shifting power centre

The centre of power in the Chens is obviously the husband when there
is only one couple in the family. Lily depends on Chen, but after
acquiring her female companion, Mui, and having a son, Man Kee, she
changes: Then he had been the focus of her day ... Now she was using
Chen (45). The husband takes on a passive role and is marginalised. In
addition, the way in which Lily addresses Chen suggests the distance she
wishes for; while Husband infers respect and recognition, Ah Chen
implies detachment and individuality. Chen was formerly the nucleus of
the household; however, Man Kee replaces his fathers role. On a trip to
a seaside amusement arcade, the family pass a set of mirrors and in the
reflections Man Kee appears as a mantis-legged giant, looming tall over
the rest of them (164). His height implies his importance and the real
centre of power in the family. The girls, while looking after Man Kee,
start to regard Chen as a greedy little boy and confuse the man with
the child. Lily and Mui start to change along with the shift in the centre
of the family: There was a novel layer to the girls abstinence which had
become self-aggrandising, an exercise in controlling and developing the
self rather than the tribute of natural respect (46).
Another example is when the husband agrees to send the boy to
Chinese classes, Lily wants to pat Chens head and tell him he was
a good boy (243). It is interesting to find that Lilys power weakens
when Man Kee is involved. She is afraid of her role as mother being
replaced and has to surrender to Man Kees wishes. To illustrate this,
despite feeling hurt about Man Kees embarrassment about their old
van, she pulls the vehicle over before reaching the school gates to
spare him the shame. The centre of the family switches to Grandpa
Chen, as Lily is eager to fulfill her duties as a daughter-in-law and
hence tries to please the old man in every possible way. In the novel,
the power struggles involving Man Kee and Grandpa Chen are much
less apparent than those between the couple and the sisters, which
will be the focus of this research.
36
Power struggles
The conflict between Chen and Lily lies in the traditional expectations
of different gender roles. The sisters, especially Lily, are loyal to
Chen, even in adversity. To them, the man signifies a powerful god.
One time Lily buys a Chinese household god, and both the sisters are
surprised to find a resemblance to Chen; Mui exclaims, Youre the
god of us all, Brother-in-law! (98). After the family purchases a van,
Chen is the first one to have the privilege of driving it as the girls
did not want to trespass on what was so obviously a male
prerogative (154). When Lily masters driving, the women have to
keep this secret from Chen in case he disapproves and feels
humiliated by being unable to drive.
Chen regards females as being inferior and submissive, and his
discriminatory attitude towards women is confirmed when he is
exasperated by Lilys criticism of a Chinese boxing demonstration in
Chinatown: she was only a woman, thought the husband (128). A
woman is meant to be quiet and docile to Chen, and female
superiority is intolerable to him. Lilys open expression of her ideas
disturbs Chen, who never thinks his wife is beautiful, mostly due to
her frequent smiles and showing her character in her face; even
though affected by the Westerners interest in Lily, he cannot see her
beauty with new eyes (21). Chen wishes to retain his male pride,
which is seriously hurt in England. When rejecting Lilys order to
return to the house for her specially-made Chinese medicine, Chen
believes that he is displaying his masculine firmness (136) and
resolves to be more vertebrate with his wife (135). The husband
also feels uncomfortable about his wifes ability to sacrifice
immediate gratification and defer it for future providential uses as a
tough woman would trouble him. He is also annoyed by the secrecy
behind his back: Life had been going on behind his back; life of a
gay, irresponsible, female kind (114). Even so, he refuses to learn
about the new regions of female psyche lying open before him (90).
Assuming his powerful male role, Chen is protective of his women
during an outing, but discovers their indifference when they
witness the incident of a hot liquid spilling on an English workmans
37
private parts. This discovery induces Chens masculine solidarity

and his determination to lessen the females influence on his son (89).
The superiority of the husband and the stubbornness of the wife
lead to a power struggle between the couple. Lily ostentatiously
takes the submissive role and performs her wifely duties by preparing
her husbands snack every night, but in reality she is an overseer,
watching him closely from the sofa and dares to give her husband
reproachful eyes if he does not finish his soup (6). Chen is convinced
that Lily concealed a steely will behind her demure exterior (6) and
considers her obstinate (83). Beneath a mask of compliance, Lily is
actually unyielding and rebellious.
Another significant power struggle in the novel lies in the
relationship between the sisters. The sisterly power struggle is partly
a product of their different personalities and upbringings. Lilys
energetic manner and Muis natural diffidence helped give a wrong
impression that Lily is older than her elder sister (13). Lily is active,
if not aggressive, while Mui is passive. Their upbringings by their
father differed tremendously from childhood as he wanted Lily to be
a boy. Mui was taught to be uncomplaining and obedient to males
while Lily was trained rigorously with siu lum style boxing. The
kung fu training started when Lily was five and ended when she
turned ten and went through puberty; she was expected to take on
a protective male role, and Mui a nurturing female one: Lily was
charged to escorting Mui through the dark streets but once home the
positions were reversed and Mui would help the amah put her to
bed (18).
In England, however, the sisters transform. Times changed, now
[Lily] did the equivalent of escorting and fussing (132). Still, their
personalities remain the same. Lily treats Mui like a younger sister,
feeling superior and dominating her behaviour; Lily is tough while
Mui is soft. In a turkey-killing scene, Lily plays the role of the killer,
while Mui tries to feed the turkey brandy to make it fall unconscious.
Lily deems Mui nothing more than a tearful silent bundle on the
sofa and of an extremely tiresome personality (53). Mui refuses to
leave the house even after living in Britain for almost two years, and
her brother-in-law wonders if the shock of descending into an
Underground station has disabled her (85). Looking down at her
38
sister, Lily is later proved wrong when Mui finds a van at a good
price for them. Lilys contemptuous attitude towards her sister
resumes, though; on learning of Muis illegitimate pregnancy, Lily
suspects that Mui is working as a prostitute. She also prizes her
ability to produce a son instead of a girl like Mui. The sisterly
struggle had begun at a young age as Lily was physically abused by
her father and Mui suffered paternal neglect. The conflict continues
in the new country when Mui steps outside the small flat and starts
to immerse herself in the British world.
Resistance and strategy

Foucault suggests the term conduct in dealing with power relations
as the exercise of power involves actions to be implemented.
Moreover, he notes that power relations are rooted deep in the
social nexus, not reconstituted above society as a supplementary
structure (The Subject and the Power 222). Power is unstable and
subject to resistance, and Mills points out that power needs to be
seen as something which has to be constantly performed rather than
being achieved (35). Foucault proposes that one can interpret the
mechanisms brought into play in power relations in terms of
strategies (The Subject and the Power 225). Power is fluid and bends
with resistance. In England, Lily begins to feel discontented for the
first time in her life and starts to dream. Lily saves money through
self-denial (66) for a vague future dream; on the contrary, Chen has
no dreams for the future. Lily never asks for extra housekeeping
money from her husband; she eats frugally with her sister but feeds
the males in the family, Chen and her child Man Kee, extravagantly.
The saved money contributes towards Muis airplane fare to Britain,
and later even serves as a fund to establish the Chens own business;
Lily, who is an unemployed housewife, is thus empowered by her
ability to endure hardships and abstinence: Lily had never once
complained, surrendered, or felt a moments twinge of self-pity (11).
Her power is also derived from motherly love; for example, maternal
love drives Lily to defy Chens claims about his sons big head and
to throw him a furious look. Besides, due to her wish of offering a
39
better future for her son, Lily resolves that Man Kee would have the
opportunities from which she had been excluded herself because of
her sex and ill-fortune (11).
Physically, Lily seems stronger than her husband as she is taller
than Chen and healthier, never going to a doctor since her arrival in
Britain. The wife also has a stronger personality than the man, who
is passive and stolid. Lily is creative, making her own Chinese
medicine to cure her husbands flu (12). This creativity increases
when she advances into the outside world. After her visit to the ill
Lo, she shares the story with Mui and Mrs Law with her own
falsification (52). Her rich imagination is also illustrated by her
story about the previous occupiers of their new house. She is later
proclaimed as a talented story teller by her female companions. Lily
is confident and wants to become a businesswoman (129). In fact,
Lily is the person who runs the take-away and keeps track of her
flourishing business (215; emphasis added). In Mos portrayal, Lily
sits on a stool at the take-away counter, looking down at her
customers, implying the womans power over others and her
distinguishable subjectivity.
Lily adopts various strategies to achieve her power. One of them
is the make-believe strategy, which is shown in her use of flat slippers
to disguise her height and to show her inferiority. Another strategy
the wife uses is to keep silent in front of her husband, but to secretly
enact her true will. Once, Chen asks Lily to stop sending remittances
to the old Chens; she does not voice her disapproval, but in her mind
decides not to obey him. The move of starting a family business
demonstrates another strategy used by Lily. Chen had previously
poured volumes of masculine pragmatic cold water (83) onto Lilys
idea of setting up their own business, but changes his mind after
being pressured by the Triad gang. While Chen waits for the
opportunity to agree with Lilys idea, his wife uses a strategy of
inactivity to counteract male insensitivity and plain stupidity (85).
Lily is careful not to offend her husbands self-esteem; one
example is that she refuses to dine with Mrs Law at the restaurant
where Chen works in case he would have to wait on her. Another
example is related to what Foucault termed bio-power. Foucault
observed how power was enacted on the site of the body, and
40
analysing his concept of bio-power, Lois McNay suggests that

Power and sexuality are not ontologically distinct, rather sexuality
is the result of a productive biopower which focuses on human
bodies, inciting and extorting effects (29). Lily is an initiator,
physically bold in bed, although she makes Chen believe that he is
the dominator:
Chen felt ... proud of her in a way that a barbarian conqueror of
a highly civilised people might draw an avuncular glow from the
collective attainments of an apparently subjugated race, unaware
all the time that the one who was being absorbed, subverted,
changed, was himself. ... the conqueror never knew it was he
who was truly the conquered. (20)
This passage further implies Mos concept of the subversive power
of the colonialised subjects; the colonisers might have seized the
political power, but they were subject to change by their surrenders.
Power and knowledge

Lily is not the only woman who acts on her will to achieve power.
Mui is another example, but she adopts a different strategy from
Lily, which is through the acquisition of knowledge. Foucault thus
states, Power and knowledge directly implied one another; ... there
is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of
knowledge, now any knowledge that does not presuppose
and constitute at the same time power relations (Discipline and
Punish 27). Foucault confirms the close inter-relationship between
power and knowledge: It is not possible for power to be exercised
without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender
power (Prison Talk 52).
The link between knowledge and power is exemplified by Mui.
Mui would not consider leaving the Chens flat during the early part
of her stay in Britain; however, through her indulgence for television
programmes, Mui learns to detect different English newscasters and
develops preferences towards them; she even gives nicknames to
41
different characters in soap operas like Crossroads and Coronation

Street. Naming is a powerful act, as it indicates ones ability to
discern the self from others. It is saving Man Kees life from falling
that awakens Mui from her inertia and gives her confidence in the
new country. In this incident, the female gains power through the
rescue of a male who is little and helpless.
It should be noted that the power play is affected by culture and
language. When the take-away is in its early stages, Mui is afraid of
taking charge of the counter work despite her good English, but she
gradually builds up her confidence and makes friends with British
lorry-drivers. Her English soon improves and Lily even suggests that
she writes poetry (119). Muis self-assurance increases along with
her English; to defend her idea of advertising their take-away, Mui
is able to stand up for her opinion by meekly but levelly meeting her
brother-in-laws eyes.
On the contrary, for Lily, English is a language hard to master:
Her voice, so expressive and alive in her native Cantonese, became
shrill, peremptory, and strangely lifeless in it level pitching when she
spoke English (141). There is no personal exchange between Lily
and her British customers: She and the customers ignored each
other; they couldnt even look one another in the eyes. Each regarded
the other as a non-person. They might have been machines (142).
In contrast, the knowledge of English culture and the language
empowers Mui. Lily is unable to keep up with the conversation
between Mui and the lorry-driver and Mui has to apologise for her
sisters inability to identify lemonade or coke. Different from her
sisters ignorance of the British world, Mui seems able to adapt to
the alien society. One example concerns Grandpa Chens immigration;
when Lily proposes inviting Old Chen to come and then hiding him
later, Mui tries to get government permission for the old man.
Muis intelligence increases the profits of their take-away business.
Mui isnt as stupid as she looks, concedes Lily (110). Mui
deliberately dresses poorly when she serves her customers at the
garage and is then tipped generously. Later, Mui even manages to
make money by dealing with the lorry drivers and inventing a
popular dish of chips with sweet and sour sauce. Her encounters
with English customers, as well as her knowledge of various
42
currencies, and her ability to tell different occidental faces apart and
to build business connections, all extend Muis world and build up
her confidence. Unlike Chen and Lily, who share the difficulty of
distinguishing between Westerners and call them foreign devils, Mui
displays a genuine respect for them and even profits from her
connection with them. Lily disdains the culture which she is involved
with and is unable to perceive her sisters capabilities, convinced of
her own assumption that Mui recognises the customers faces
because of financial incentives and through memorising number
plates. Later, calling her a traitor, Lily blames Mui for not standing
on her side against the British.
Being a mother, Mui is able to detach herself from her baby
daughter by giving her to Mrs Law so that the girl can have a better
life as there is no place for a girl at the Chens (210). Mui, as a
mother is less self-effacing and keeps herself away from Lilys
control and manipulation; her refusal to take Man Kee to his
Chinese classes is one example of this. Equipped with the knowledge
of her adopted country, Mui is occasionally viewed by Lily as a
madwoman, who comes up with incomprehensible ideas (256).
Feminists have argued that women who rebel against traditional
values are mentally ill; the eminent critic Elaine Showalter, for
instance, in her The Female Malady has researched the close
connection between women and madness. It is interesting to think
that in feminist discourses, women are often considered mad by
men; here, in Sour Sweet, it is a man-like younger sister who
contemplates her elder sisters craziness.
Besides Mui, Grass Sandal from the Wo gangster society also
illustrates the relationship between power and knowledge. Living in a
gangster society mainly made up of by men, Grass Sandal uses a subtle
way to keep her position and to seek a way to survive. She bowed her
head humbly when her flaws are openly criticised (41) and laughs the
loudest at the leader Red Cudgels joke. It is after a careful observation
of the male leaders exchange of opinions that she finally puts forward
her suggestion which is then ratified: Red Cudgel accepted the female
432 officers mediation (42). She is bold enough to steal drugs from
the gangster society which she is part of and sell them for her own
profit. As a good businesswoman, (60) Grass Sandal serves the
43
leading men in her society with tea and snacks like a hostess: She
knew the men felt more comfortable with her than with some of the
hard-faced harridans who held office in Hong Kong. Such knowledge
is power (79). She uses her power to work for herself, and at an
appropriate time makes suggestions that benefit herself. Grass Sandal
only reveals her true self and looks Red Cudgel full in the eye when
he is hospitalised and has lost his power (269). She is cold and cruel
when talking about human lives; she is nonchalant when pondering
the necessary death of Chen. All she cares about is her business and
financial profit. The name Grass Sandal came from the origins of the
Triad society; it was a tool for the societys founding members to
escape from life. Nevertheless, the woman herself is lethal with her
power deriving from her knowledge of men and business.
Collective female power

In Sour Sweet, the women individually show their ability to survive
in a foreign country; grouping together, they display a collective
female power. This sisterly support for each other is shown when
Chen decides to move to a rundown district. Lily and Mui squeeze
each others hands and silently sustain each other. On the other
hand, Chen is alone on the long journey to their new home; while
the girls play with Man Kee, he has to stand by insecurely (93). Due
to their disappointment at Chen leading them to a rundown place to
live, the sisters grab the double mattress, taking Man Kee with them
along with most of the blankets, leaving the man to rest on a single
mattress without enough covers. Later, irritated by Chens comment
about the shabby appearance of their van, the sisters refute him
simultaneously and the man is taken aback.
The women help each other in adversity in spite of their different
values on life and morality. Although feeling ashamed of her sisters
misbehaviour, Lily helps Mui when she is pregnant and arranges for
her to move into Mrs Laws. In reality, the sisters differ considerably
in build, but in a mirror reflection, Chen is surprised to discover the
similarity between the sisters. This discovery reveals the closeness of
Lily and Mui, regardless of their occasional quarrels. The sisters then
44
collectively build their own world, and their shared experience

makes Chen uncomfortable, who feels that they are out of his reach.
When he was working at the Ho Ho restaurant, Chen was often
unaware of what the girls were doing during the day and seemed
uninterested, even after their visit to his own colleague, Lo. When
the take-away business is set up, the girls begin to sing together and
become child-like. In the spring, Lily throws open every window of
her house and wanted to shout sing, such was her exuberance
(140). Lily is not afraid of opening her mind, and neither is Mui. The
act of singing implies the representation of power; the womens
suggestion to expand the business irritates Chen, and he has to take
the boy out of the house while the females are singing.
Despite their intimacy, there is secrecy between the sisters: Mui
conceals her discovery of the English customers version of the name
of their take-away and keeps her amusement to herself when Lily
tells her that Man Kee is imitating the British pronouncing the term.
Moreover, Lily is jealous of Man Kees favour towards his aunt. It is
when Mui is on maternal leave that Lily is able to see her sister in a
different light and reckons that Mui is developing a new personality
with her new social life. The sisters become equals only when they
are physically separated, as Lily stops viewing Mui as an inferior and
an enemy who has stolen her sons love: Now there could be the
beginnings of comradeship (285).
It is worth noting that the character of Mrs Law functions as a
caring matron, supporting the girls and giving them power. As a good
listener, Mrs Law drew Mui out, who later even became garrulous
with her (49). Lily, after being complimented by the old lady about
her kung fu movements, practises the skill after going back home. The
senior lady symbolises the inspiration for the sisters and encourages
them to step outside their narrow world. The weekly visit to Mrs Law
is a secret from Chen, and again, the man is excluded from the female
sphere. Furthermore, Mrs Law is insightful enough to perceive that
Chen is burdened by some mystery and worried about the girls. The
women in Sour Sweet repeatedly demonstrate their wisdom,
knowledge, capability and flexibility, which help them to survive in a
new land, but the leading male character, Chen, disappears after he
becomes the gangsters runner at the end of the story.
45
Male powerlessness
In Sour Sweet, the men are usually inactive and passive, being
receivers instead of performers of actions. The men are also
alienated, instead of being closely bonded. The men are phlegmatic
towards each other in Sour Sweet. One example is after Lilys visit
to the sick single man, Lo, Chen and this only friend of his have no
conversation about it. Another example is the father-son relationship
between Chen and Man Kee; Chen works long hours at the Ho Ho
restaurant and scarcely sees his son awake. The father-son relationship
is further illustrated by Grandpa Chen and his son. The awkwardness
between them is only bridged through Lilys bossiness and female
fussing (234). After receiving financial help from the gangsters,
Chen becomes more estranged and invisible: He became increasingly
on edge and abstracted. ... his colleagues ... drew a little apart from
him. His naturally blurred features ... became even more wooden
(80). The alienation from people aggravates him and Chen wants to
find a deserted place to establish his own shop, where Lily is
delegated to the face-to-face counter work and Chen buries himself
in the kitchen. Chen is self-absorbed and diffident, while he perceives
that Mui is growing much more confident in the foreign country
(86). At the beginning of the novel, Chen rarely mentions his work,
but at the end, he shares a business with his wife and sister-in-law.
Chen allows Mui and Lily to keep their tips from the take-away; he
was giving his women the status of colleagues in the new enterprise
(111). Even though Chen starts to change, the speed of his
transformation is too slow to prevent his downfall.
This male passiveness causes powerlessness; nevertheless, Grandpa
Chen is portrayed as an unusual character in the novel. Staying
under the take-away counter to avoid vertigo upstairs, the new
immigrant Grandpa Chen is filled with illusions and finds it difficult
to adapt to English life at first. His eccentricity reaches a peak on the
occasion of his showing his own hand-made coffin to the other
patients he meets on a visit to the hospital. In spite of his odd
behaviour, the old man actually enjoys his adventures around England
and is not homesick. He even develops a way of amusing himself by
wearing two watches in order to live the life like his friends back in
46
the East. Speaking no English, Old Chen makes friends with Mr

Constantinides. Moreover, assuming other elderly patients to be his
friends, Grandpa Chen finds his own way of surviving in a foreign
country, where he does not speak the language.
Old Chen was an unsuccessful businessman back home, but in
Britain, he was turning out sharp as the girls, thinks Chen (253).
Not only his brain, but his movements are nimble. Compared to the
other old British patients who go to the hospital with him, Grandpa
Chen appears much more lively and is able to act like an elderly,
agile monkey (254). Mo appears to be attracted to the Chinese literary
classic The Journey to the West, in which the powerful hero the
Monkey King is able to perform seventy-two shape transformations.
Mo published his first work with the title The Monkey King, and
in Sour Sweet the author also adopts the implication of this hero.
The connotation of Old Chen being a monkey infers his ability to
change. Furthermore, the pronunciation of the little boy Man Kee is
similar to monkey; while it is certain that he is powerful, his being a
child and the impossibility of placing himself into the paternal
genealogy suppresses it. Despite his liveliness, Old Chen fails to
transmit his vigour to the next generation. Old Chen is at loss
himself, and Man Kee is cut out of from the genealogical tradition.
Gardening is a means for the three male generations to join
themselves together. Chen teaches his son to observe the world and
how to cultivate plants in the garden. Once a carpenter, Grandpa
Chen is at first content sitting and watching his son and grandson
gardening, but later starts his carpentry in the garden. Nevertheless,
after Man Kee tells his mother that he wants to be a gardener in the
future, Lily angrily uproots his mango plant, which is later burned
along with Grandpas handmade coffin. The mother is unable to
understand the meaning of the mango tree for the boy, but clearly
the father can sympathise with the child and holds a funeral for the
plant with him. This incident implies a connection between the three
males, but which has now been broken by a female force.
Furthermore, when the father vanishes, the garden is left deserted,
which indicates the loss of genealogy and paternal tradition.
47
Power and the yin-yang force

This investigation of the power relations in Sour Sweet will not be
complete without a discussion about the Chinese yin-yang force,
which repeatedly appears in the novel. For example, Mo refers to a
mans penis as a yang (126). Moreover, to avoid the possible
advance of the gangsters, Chen proposes to his boss about
transferring to the kitchen; the boss wonders if Chen is unbalanced
for him to come up with this unwise idea (81). Lily, influenced by
her boxer father, persists with the whole balance of the dualistic or
female and male principles, yin and yang (6). Nevertheless, the
group of Chen, Lily and Mui is in fact unbalanced and eccentric: on
their way to view premises for their future business, Chen is wearing
a hat which does not go with his clothes; Lily and Mui are wearing
Chens baggy cardigans and Muis size-three feet have three pairs of
socks on to fit into Chens size-seven shoes. Like Lily, Chen is
concerned about the yin-yang force. Chen deems childcare to be a
female responsibility (173), while Lily expects her husband to
discipline the child. It is because of his anxiety about the strong
female influence on his boy Man Kee that he determines to spend
more time with the child and let yang balance yin (115).
In Sour Sweet, Chen is feminine and passive, but Lily is manly and
active. For instance, Lily attacks a molester at the airport but Chen
decides to hide his fear of the gangsters and remains quiet. In
addition, it is Lily who manned the till (252); the word man not
only refers to the job of operating the till but also to male power. In
managing to control the till, Lily seizes power. Neither one of the
couple is balanced from the yin/yang perspective. For Lily, a large
part of her strong confidence derives from her fulfilled female roles,
that is, loyal wife, caring mother and dutiful daughter-in-law. The
wifely role seems impossible after Chen dies. To Lily, the disappearence
of Chen has moulded him into a paragon which perfectly integrates
the yin and yang virtues; she glorifies him as a secular saint, a
household deity to rival god (282).
When Chen vanishes, even though Lily does not lose her male side
directly and blew her nose in a yang-ish way, (274) she shows her
soft side and allows herself to be shepherded to bed by Mui. Lily
48
soon collects herself and demonstrates her strength by declining

Muis offer to live with her family: She [Mui] was in Lilys family,
not the other way around (284). Despite her male qualities, Lily
actually finds her life balance by yin cancelling yang through
veering to the extremes and then finding the still point of
equilibrium (286).
To Man Kee, Lily stresses the importance of the yin-yang balance.
She has the boy play with his girl cousin and asks Lo to become Man
Kees mans example when Chen disappears. The mother advocates
that yin must have its excessive tendencies corrected by yang and
vice versa (285). Lily is persistent in her Chinese values, fails to
understand British ways and considers foreign ideas inappropriate
for her son. To illustrate this, with a profound paternal influence,
Lily often keeps her fathers teachings in mind and teaches her son
how to fight, but is highly confused by the mischievous outcome.
Mui, however, seems to attain a harmony between these two sides,
and at the end of the novel intends to take British citizenship. It is
also Mui who acts as a bridge connecting Lily and Chen; unlike her
earlier withdrawal from society, she takes the initiative to start
searching for a proper location for her own business. Inside Mui, yin
and yang reach a balance, and Mui becomes a powerful woman at
the end of the novel.
The shifting centre of power in Sour Sweet opens up a space
for the women to empower themselves. Through their power
struggles, the women resist and adopt strategies to rebel against
submitting to the men. The men in the novel are depicted as a
powerless breed, and the women are intelligent enough to ally with
each other for collective strength. Nonetheless, it should be noted
that the Chinese yin-yang philosophy teaches both men and women
the importance of balance; only through understanding gender
differences will harmony be achieved.
Cultural conflicts between the first and second generations

The discussion of the power relations in Sour Sweet entails the
struggle, although not a subject of focus by Mo in his novel, between
49
the first and second-generation British Chinese subjects. The authors

introduction of the character Man Kee discloses issues relevant to
the second generation. Growing up in a Chinese take-away, Man
Kee is deeply influenced by the catering culture and builds an
unusual vocabulary relevant to the family business such as the names
of the dishes on the menu. Moreover, the child has to help out
behind the counter, even when he is doing homework. The imposed
responsibility of sharing the labour resulting from the family
business is a recurrent theme of second-generation writing, which
will be explored in the following chapter. The different attitudes
towards the adopted culture and misunderstandings are also factors
leading to the generation gap. When Man Kee goes to a British
school and learns English, his mother feels excluded from her sons
life. This divide between two cultures is exemplified by Lilys singing
to Man Kee a Kwangsi cradle song while the son sings along in
English about a teapot.
The sense of exclusion is also a result of Lilys mistrust of British
people and misinterpretation of British culture. For instance, the
mother considers it polite to reject the schools invitation to a parentteacher meeting. Another time, when several English girls are
stroking her son, Lily is infuriated by their actions. This cultural
suspicion leads to Lilys doubt of her son; she does not, to illustrate
this, believe that her son role-plays the buying-selling process at
school. The generational conflict is also an outcome of disparate
values. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong applied two contrary terms necessity
and extravagance to analyse The Woman Warrior, written by the
famous Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston. The critic
argues that the immigrant mothers behaviour results from the force
of necessity, while the Americanised daughter pursues extravagance
in her life. The situation is similar in Sour Sweet. For economic
reasons, the adults in the Chen family turn down Man Kees idea of
keeping a turkey, a gift from a lorry-driver, as a pet and decide to kill
and cook it. After being chased by a decapitated turkey, Man Kee
refuses to eat meat, even if it is prepared by his favourite aunt. The
mother is unable to understand her sons desire and fears about that
animal, but is happy to welcome Man Kees appetite for her own
cuisine.
50
In spite of the conflicts between the generations, the immigrants

and their family strive to live in Britain. At the beginning of the
novel, Man Kee walks unsteadily but he later succeeds, which
implies that he has grown to survive in an alien world. Lily gives her
son an old Mango stone to plant, which the child probably throws
away, but it manages to push its way through the soil and grows into
a sapling. The transplanted tropical fruit tree survives in a cold land,
and so do the Chinese immigrants and their offspring. Mo remarks,
Man Kee, happy child, was getting a fresh start. He had no history,
no heritage to live up to, no goal to fulfil, no ancient burden to carry.
Not one his father imposed, anyway (116). The following generations
of the immigrants will find their way in the promised land.
The title of the book Sour Sweet was probably derived from the
staple which Chinese take-aways sell, sweet and sour pork; it also
denotes the lives of British Chinese subjects. Opening their takeaway in an unwanted place, the Chens attract shops and people into
a deserted area. The Chinese people in Britain have contributed to
society by enhancing its prosperity and continue to thrive by
demonstrating their endurance and strength.
4
Food and Identity in Helen Tses
Sweet Mandarin
Sweet Mandarin, the name of both Helen Tses debut book and
restaurant in Manchester, is a biographical story of three Chinese
generations in the United Kingdom. Tse was a Cambridge graduate
and worked as lawyer in London; the decision to establish her own
restaurant with her two professional sisters, had at one time
disappointed their parents and grandmother, who had come a long
way to enable their offspring to study at British universities and
leave the catering trade. Why did the third-generation British
Chinese women finally choose to return to the hot and labourconsuming kitchen which their peers were desperate to avoid? It had
to go back to the beginning of their family saga and their love for
food and cooking.
Tses story is inseparable from Chinese food and foodways, which
are important themes found in many ethnic Chinese writings. Wellknown examples are Eat a Bowl of Tea (1961) by Louis Chu and
The Woman Warrior (1976) by Maxine Hong Kingston. Sharing a
passion for food with their previous generations, the characters in
Sweet Mandarin embark on their own journeys towards success in
England.
52
Background
Before a study of food and culinary practices in Sweet Mandarin, it
is crucial to examine the background to this work as it provides the
setting of the stories.
One of the protagonists of the novel, the author-narrators
grandmother-in-law, Lily, grew up in China and Hong Kong during
the early twentieth century, both of which were in chaos because of
war, including the Japanese invasion of China and Hong Kong, the
Second World War, and the post-war troubles. The story begins in
the rural area of Guangdong province in China, where the peasants
lived in poverty. The migration of the author-narrators ancestors to
Hong Kong introduced the readers to the British colony, with a
sharp class contrast between poor Chinese people living in the foul
slums and rich Westerners living in luxurious mansions and having
Chinese servants. Working as an amah for the Western families, Lily
later dreams about providing a better life for her children in Britain.
She does achieve this goal. In addition, the authors grandfather once
worked at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong, and when
the family returns to the Far East after decades in England, they are
able to stay at this high-priced hotel: It had taken barely a generation
for our family to get from the kitchens to the swanky five-star rooms
upstairs, and it made us all a little proud (245).
According to Tses portrayal, most of the British are generous and
friendly, unlike many other ethnic Chinese literary depictions, which
often treat the nationals of their adopted country bitterly. Lily feels
the Woodman family offer her a second home since they were
sincere in seeing her as one of the family (172). It is Mrs Woodman
senior who contributes to Lilys migration to Britain, and one of the
reasons why the Woodmans decide to move back to Britain is being
ashamed of the privileges which the Westerners enjoy in colonial
Hong Kong. In the midst of Lilys misery and desperation caused by
a disloyal and alcoholic husband, the job which the Woodman
family offers is the only hope which their amah can cling to. To Lily,
Mrs Woodman senior represents her angel on earth (147); when
the old lady passes away, Lily feels that:
53
she had lost a surrogate mother, the one who took a real interest
in her as a person, and not just as a nanny. Mrs Woodman had
saved Lily from poverty and an abusive husband. She had given
her a roof over her head, money to feed herself and now a chance
to begin her life all over again in England. (171)
Even in death Mrs Woodman still has Lily to consider and leaves her
a substantial bequest to reunite with her children and start a new life
in England. The Woodmans invited her over to the other side of
the boat to Southampton, symbolising the act of class-crossing. Lily
is introduced to England and the world by the Woodman family as
well.
Since the book deals with immigration, the Chinese diaspora is
unavoidably mentioned. The writer also remarks on the silence of
the British Chinese: Being Chinese in Britain in not problematic.
Were seen as hard-working, law-abiding, quiet people who just get
on with our lives and pay our taxes (240). Even though the author
optimistically declares that the Chinese are the model minority, the
hidden message implies the invisibility of the British Chinese.
Moreover, since Tses primary interest is in food and the catering
business, she also records the history of this trade and the problems
caused by the burgeoning business, one of which is the casinos: Just
as restaurants had sprung up to cater for the growing Chinese
population, and been joined by boarding houses and wholesalers, so
casinos had made the trip over, trailing the diaspora, always ready
to relieve them of a little of their hard-earned cash (219). The
casinos, usually run by the Triads, are largely targeted to serve the
restaurant and take-away workers and only open their doors when
the food shops are closed. Lily and her son-in-law Eric are seriously
obsessed with gambling; Tse thus describes her father: He stood in
the kitchen like a zombie, waiting to come alive again in the casino
(223). The book also mentions the loan sharks: Usually they were
Chinese themselves, and that made them no more merciful about
exploiting their fellow immigrants (224).
The above-mentioned background of the novel altogether offers a
tapestry for the setting of the story across four generations, spanning
decades in terms of time and half the earth in space.
54
Ethnic food and foodways

In order to discuss food, cooking and the catering businesses in
Sweet Mandarin, it is important to understand the connotations of
ethnic food and foodways first. According to Francine Halvorsen,
Food culture is the basis of Chinese civilization (7) and The food
and cooking of China is one of the oldest continuous culinary
traditions in the world (3). K. C. Chang suggests that The Chinese
are probably among the peoples of the world most preoccupied with
eating (13). The connection between Chinese people and food is
extremely close; when they emigrate, they bring Chinese food culture
with them to various countries.
The origins and development of the Chinese catering trade have
been extensively discussed by Benton and Gomez in their book The
Chinese in Britain, 1800-Present and by Wai-ki E. Luk in his work
Chinatown in Britain. Therefore, the history of the Chinese catering
business in Britain will not be recorded here. It should be noted,
however, that the wide dispersal of Chinese restaurants and takeaways has caused the association of the British Chinese with the
catering trade, a stereotype especially displeases British-born Chinese,
a large number of whom aspire to avoid the food business. Food,
however, is a product of cultural development; even though the
British-born Chinese may have left the catering trade, most of them
still live with Chinese food.
To Chinese people, food does not simply perform an alimentary
function. Halvorsen thus states: Food its selection, preparation,
and consumption is a cause of harmony for the mind as well as for
the senses. Decisions about a dishs ingredients depend on taste and
texture, size and shape, and color and aroma, usually with an idea
of balance or harmony (3). To be a good chef requires a profound
knowledge of how to blend a variety of ingredients and the ability
to bring a dish together. In addition, the concept of balance is not
just linked with nutrition, but is even augmented to a medical level.
Elizabeth Chong indicates that to Chinese people, many ingredients
are ascribed curative powers on their own. So it is that the
Chinese have known for centuries what the West has only recently
embraced: You are what you eat (14). Claude Fischler confirms,
55
Food not only nourishes but also signifies (276). For K. C. Chang,
People of the same culture share the same food habits, that is, they
share the same assemblages of food variables, and vice versa (3).
What food an individual consumes reveals ones health, and on a
psychological level, ones identity. Besides, not only food but also the
preparation of food has cultural connotations; hence, Lve-Strauss
advocates the cooking being a cultural transformation of the raw
(478).
Anita Mannur argues that connotations of food and foodways
have been widely explored, but literary research on food has been
color-blind, namely, negligent of the racial implications (57).
Mannurs notion is partially true as ethnic food is gaining attention
in the field of minority literary studies. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong reads
food as an ethnic sign in Reading Asian American Literature (65),
and Xu in Eating Identities affirms, Food operates one of the key
cultural signs that structure peoples identities and their concepts of
others (2). Food represents inclusion and exclusion, and ethnic food
struggles between assimilation or alienation. In Food and Cultural
Studies, Ashley and others thus put the relationship between food
and British identity: The distancing of self from those others who
eat curry or spaghetti specifically, or in general from consumers of
foreign muck, has contributed significantly to the definition of
Britishness (83). Therefore, to Xu, homogenizing immigrants and
minorities foodways was part and parcel of the project of
assimilation (5).
David Y. H. Wu notes that Chinese cuisine, particularly in
restaurants, displays re-creation, invention and representation of
cooking (56). To him, immigrants who are self-taught cooks who
improvise both cooking materials and how they present dishes, to
satisfy the imagination of a Chinese eating culture comprising both
Chinese migrants and host (non-Chinese) populations (56). Ethnic
food, therefore, serves the functions of both fulfilment of providing
exotica and assimilation into the mainstream culture through the
creative adaption of flavours and ingredients. Xu further argues,
I must insist that food and eating occupy a significant place in
the formation of Asian American subjectivity. First, the
56
racialization of Asian Americans has been achieved prominently

through the mainstreams representation and appropriation of
Asian foodways. Second, in Asian American history, food and
eating do not simply fulfill necessities; rather they serve as an
index to a material history of survival, adaptation, ingenuity,
and hybridization a triumphant history of overcoming
adversities. (8)
Through food and foodways, the ethnic Chinese display their
strength to survive in a foreign country where they may encounter
hostility; with Chinese food as their medium, the minority culture
permeates into the mainstream. Nevertheless, it comes with a price:
ethnic food becomes a label for the immigrants and their offspring,
who are particularly eager to be free from the stereotype.
Since foodways involve daily practices, it is assumed that literary
publications include this theme. Xu reports, For Asian American
writers to succeed in attracting the interest of mainstream readers,
they must scatter in their writings interesting if not exotic cultural
details, among which food practices are most popular (13).
Moreover, in her analysis of the film version of The Joy Luck Club
written by the well-known Chinese American female writer Amy
Tan, Rey Chow observes that the director Wayne Wang makes full
use of eating and eating festivities to convey the traumas of being
branded ethnic (that is, Chinese American) in various moments of
historical and/or psychic dislocation (137).
In Sweet Mandarin, even though the narrators male ancestors
had been working with food, it is the women who cook that this
work emphasises. According to Andrea Adolph, The connections
between food and women are emphasized through representations
of serving and providing as they are through consuming (10).
Adophs major concern is with the mothers and wives; however, in
Sweet Mandarin, the womens connection with food is not limited to
the private; in the public sphere, they are Chinese restaurant or takeaway owners.
Miri Song, a sociologist who does research on ethnic Chinese
women and children in Britain, notices that Chinese women work in
family businesses, and especially take-aways, in a paper published in
57
1995. The samples of her study showed a particular tendency

towards women who spoke no English and were economically
dependent on their husbands; hence, in her paper, Chinese immigrant
mothers in Britain were subordinated and lonely. Again, very
differently, Lily the female immigrant in Sweet Mandarin possesses
her own business; she is financially independent and even befriends
the local residents through running a Chinese restaurant. The
women in Sweet Mandarin demonstrate a close link with food and
the food business; they perform not only the expected domestic roles
as mothers and wives but also the adventurous work of business
managers.
Food, cooking and the catering business in

Sweet Mandarin
From the first page of this book, the author indicates that she and
her siblings were immersed from birth in the Chinese catering
business the fourth of [their] family to make a living from food
(1). To Tse, food is the family heirloom (4).
In the 1920s, the authors great-grandfather-in-law Leung started
his own food business by building his own soy-sauce factory in
Guangzhou, China. During a trip to Hong Kong, Leung was
reassured that the Chinese loved to eat and the catering business
would flourish no matter how the times changed. He was right, and
his soy-sauce business thrived. Tses ancestors on the paternal side
had also worked with food. Tses grandfather originated from a clan
dependent on the income from manufacturing a sweet and sour
sauce. He later moved to Hong Kong and worked as a chef at the
expensive Mandarin Oriental Hotel. In addition, the narrators
grandfather-in-law Kwok Chan came from a family who ran a
restaurant where his father was reputed to be a supreme host and
bon viveur (108). Tses grandmother Lily served as an amah from
her teens in Western families in Hong Kong and had to shop for food
and cook for them; she later emigrated to England and opened her
own restaurant and take-aways. Later, the writer-narrators father
Eric and mother Mabel set up their own take-away. Tse and her
58
predecessors grew up with food, worked with food and shared their
love of food.
In Sweet Mandarin, the readers are sure to discover the Tse
familys passion for food: Everyone in my family loves to eat (50).
Tse spends pages portraying food from Leungs soy-sauce tasting
lesson, Tai Po and Lilys knack for picking the finest groceries,
familial celebrations accompanied by a sumptuous spread of food
and the transmission of knowledge of preparing food. The smells of
spices and food emanate warmth and taste from the pages.
Food and the catering business also contribute to the background
of Sweet Mandarin. To illustrate this, after a detailed description of
Kwok Chan and a senior Triad members feast, the author continues
to describe the shutting down of food stalls and the partial closure
of restaurants to set the atmosphere for a criminal scene. Food and
the catering business are recurrent themes in Sweet Mandarin. For
example, Tse depicts the blooming catering business in 1920s Hong
Kong and Leungs method of soy-sauce production. Moreover, it is
because Lily has to purchase fresh seafood at the fish market that she
saves and meets her future husband.
Food is also a strong trope in Sweet Mandarin. On one hand, food
represents a culture shock to Lily when she first encounters Western
food in Hong Kong: How could meals made with meat and
vegetables on the same island taste so alien? (84). On the other,
Chinese food, a symbol of cultural difference to readers from the
Western world, is often referred to and explained in Sweet Mandarin.
One example is that Lily is made to down a brew of pigs trotters
and eggs soaked in vinegar so that the temperament of her newborn baby can be foretold. Then Mabel is fed lotus seed and baby
mice wine to put a stop to her tantrums (200). To Lily, soy sauce
suggests both ambition and avarice as her father Leung leads the
family to prosperity with his soy-sauce business but is murdered due
to his success. Furthermore, up to the present day, the catering
business in Britain symbolises sacrifice to many Chinese restaurant
workers: Money made in Chinese restaurants in far-off Britain was
sent home to feed the relatives and children left behind and great
sacrifices were made for the sake of family (55).
59
Chinese food soothes Mabel. England has failed little Mabels

imaginings of a promised land due to its damp and cold weather,
ordinary houses and unfriendly locals. She had no choice about the
upheaval and was forced to leave her old life, friends and Tai Po, the
grandmother she regarded as her mother. She arrives in a land where
she is not understood and discriminated against. The outlet for her
stressful school life is the lunchtime break, when she is excused to
return to her mothers restaurant. The author thus describes her
mother: My mother still finds the smells and sounds of a Chinese
kitchen comforting. As Lily rewarded her with a big plate of
steamed vegetables, shed be transported back to Wan Chai, and
shed pick up her chopsticks with relish (203). Mabel feels secure
with her mothers food and at her mothers restaurant, where she is
loved like a daughter by the customers (209).
To the Tse sisters, their mothers claypot chicken is their comfort
food: We cook it now too as comfort food and for special family
meals, sopping up the sauce with jasmine rice. It makes me hungry
just to write about it (208). Sarah Sceats relates food to the mother:
For many people the connection of food with love centres on the
mother, as a rule the most important figure in an infants world, able
to give or withhold everything that sustains, nourishes, fulfils,
completes (11). Nurtured by her mothers food, Tse asserts that her
restaurant is a product of love: Weve drawn a kind of comfort and
confidence in our Chineseness through food, and Sweet Mandarin is
the expression of all this, a true labour of love (240). Besides love
and comfort, food stands for pride for Tses family. When describing
her grandmothers special chicken curry, Tse concludes, I see my
mother smile with quiet satisfaction every time she hears a customer
order it (208).
To the author, food is also for thought. For instance, food makes
the author ponder cultural confrontations. During her visit to Hong
Kong, the narrator wonders if Western ways were making some
inroads into Chinas food culture and how the people let that
happen (258). After her reflections on the Chinese attitude towards
Western culture, the author turns to food for an answer: When it
comes to food, the old China still reigns (261). Through these
meditations on food and the motivation that the Tse sisters receive
60
in Hong Kong, they decided to open their own their restaurant. The
restaurant is not only a testimony of their love of food but also a
fruit of their family tradition.
Food, tradition, female subjectivity and identity

In Sweet Mandarin, even though the tradition of cooking and
alimentary consumption can be traced back to the generation of
their great-grandfather, Tse chiefly focuses her work on the female
side. One example is their ability to choose the finest quality
groceries as know-how passed down through the female generations
from Tai Po, Tses great-grandmother. Lily continues this skill, and
Mabel teaches her girls how to shop for ingredients for cooking.
Food and the catering trade signify the Chinese cooking tradition
and knowledge handed down from former generations. The depiction
of the cooking tradition chiefly falls on the three generations of
British Chinese women. Lily learned to cook when she worked as an
amah in wealthy Western families in Hong Kong. She teaches her
daughter Mabel how to make her famous Chicken Curry, a dish
handed down to the third generation when Mabel becomes a mother
herself. Besides this dish, the Tse sisters are capable of cooking
through the entire menu at the takeaway by the age of 11 and
often preferred cooking to playing outside (264).
Cooking is not only related to their skills, but is also linked to
female subjectivity and identity. Among the Chinese traditional ideas
of the four virtues of women, culinary skills are included. Women
are demanded to cook for their family and to fail at this meant a
female was deemed irresponsible. When meditating on women,
power and food, Sceats claims, Literature, like life, is full of mothers
faced with relentless demands for food, the cost of which may be an
engrossment in her domestic role that leaves the mother without a
self (118). Contrarily, the women find themselves through food and
cooking in Sweet Mandarin. Rey Chow indicates that cooking,
especially domestic cooking usually performed by mothers, wives,
and daughters is relevant to health, economics, entertainment,
consideration of age and sexual differences among consumers, and
61
so forth; therefore, only a shrewd and capable woman can be a

successful household manager (136). Being in charge of cooking, a
woman is empowered. To illustrate, Tai Po found her freedom and
independence in food (40) when she is forced to live in her uncle-inlaws hut.
Chow affirms that the feminization of consumption continues
and often intensifies when Chinese families move overseas, yet to
Lily, it is a different story. Born in a traditional Chinese family, Lily
was most likely to have been taught how to serve her husband and
family by her mother, but when she opens her own restaurant in
Britain, she makes her cooking skills work for herself and transforms
the domestic into the public. This victorious change does not happen
overnight; it takes Lily years to develop her subjectivity from a rural
girl reliant on her family, a teenager who lost her father and needed
to work as an amah, a woman who ran away from an alcoholic and
disloyal husband, to an independent restaurateur in Britain.
Lilys earliest experience of a sense of loss was at the age of seven
when she saw the dazzling scenes of metropolitan Hong Kong for
the first time through the eyes of a country girl. As she accompanies
her father to sell soy sauce, she finds the restaurant similar to a
theatre: She had never seen a restaurant before she came to Hong
Kong, and to her they were fascinating and theatrical. Everything
was a drama (44). Lily the country girl is lost in the big city; it is
difficult to locate and define herself. Gradually, she adapts to city life
and even begins to laugh at other country bumpkins who first arrive
in Hong Kong. This identification with the city makes her forget her
origins; she is soon scolded and reminded by her father.
Losing her father at the age of twelve and having to make a living
for the family, Lily feels lost again, straddling the worlds of an
insecure life in Hong Kong and the rural village of her past. This
sense of loss vanishes when Lily starts to work as an amah in
Westerners households; her entry into a foreign world inevitably
causes Lily a culture shock. When she has become accustomed to her
working environment, the subsequent move with the Woodman
family to England puts Lily at a loss once more.
Setting foot on British soil, Lily experiences another cultural
confrontation. Along with her new friend Auntie Lily, who she meets
62
on the boat to Britain, they imagine that the streets were paved with
gold and that opportunities for wealth lay thick on the ground,
waiting for them to apply a little hard work (160). Lily is deeply
disappointed by her first sight of the motionless English land under
a gloomy sky, yet she soon learns that this is the place where she can
have a better life: In England everything she knew was turned
upside-down, English people could be servants and Chinese ride in
state in a motor car. This was not a world she knew, and she started
to get the first inklings of just how she could change the course of
her life (165). Sitting next to the Woodmans on the train to their
manor house in the Somerset countryside, Lily is raised to a status
parallel to that of her master. In Britain, she was going to change her
role from being a servant to a restaurant owner; however, her dream
could not be fulfilled without sufficient capital.
Lilys first three years in England are described as a gilded cage
by her granddaughter. Lily is homesick, lonely and depressed. There
were no Chinese women in the market town, let alone amahs. People
looked at her strangely. The town was picturesque but stagnant, and
Lily was viewed as an exotic oddity by the locals (168). She has no
local knowledge and has to depend on the Woodmans: She was
reliant on them to explain the simplest things about the new country
(169). The longest period of time Lily is separated from her children
lasts for three years. Lily is finally financially independent because of
Mrs Woodmans generous bequest, and she decides to stay in the
United Kingdom since there was more opportunity there for a
woman working on her own (174). In England, she proves that a
tough woman like herself can triumph in the male-dominated
catering business.
Tses grandmother adopted the English name Lily because this
type of flower still shows its beauty in a strong current. She deserves
this name as she is a tough woman who refuses to succumb to the
adversities that life has brought her. Lily was strong and determined
from birth, confounding the midwife whod predicted that she must
be a boy because she had kicked so hard in the womb (1). She learns
early on that the English language will earn her a ticket to a higher
class and therefore resolutely converts to Catholicism so that she can
have the opportunity to learn this new language. Another example
63
of her persistence is her endeavour to become an amah in the

luxurious British households in Hong Kong.
Being an amah, Lily acts as a surrogate mother to the children she
looks after, while at the same time, losing her own role as a mother
(136). Moreover, she relinquishes the right to see her children grow
up in Hong Kong and chooses to work in England so that her
children will live a better life: Her children would have grown and
changed by the time she saw them in England (149). This sacrifice
supports her family financially but is not appreciated by her
unemployed husband, Kwok Chan, who feels humiliated looking
after the children in his mother-in-laws house. He then turns to
Chinese alcohol, gambling, opium and an extramarital relationship
for comfort. Chan squanders all of Lilys money; she is forced to
send her third child away as she is broke and has to beg on the street:
She was a traitor to her own flesh and blood (142). Unfortunately,
Lilys role as a woman at that time in China did not allow her to
leave her husband and live alone with her children. Her only way
out is to leave for Britain on her own.
The discord within the family is shown in the photo taken before
Lilys departure and her first two children to England: Even in a
posed snapshot the family appears unused to each others company
(176). To Lilys children, Arthur and Mabel, the mother is a stranger
due to the three-year separation, and to Ah Bing, the daughter who
was given away, Lily is a completely unknown person. The father is
present but estranged from the others because of his dereliction of
his paternal duties, but the mother is sincerely delighted about her
achievement: The most striking person the photo is my grandmother,
beaming from ear to ear. This photograph marks the beginning of
our story in England. It is a testimony to Lilys bravery and strength
in overcoming her past and her drive for success in England (177).
Lily sets up a restaurant and names it Lung Fung in Middleton, a
working-class town near Manchester, with no help from her family
and has to face suspicion from the locals: At first she was often
mistaken for a Japanese immigrant, and got the brunt of the antiJapanese feelings that still ran high during the post-war 1950s
(181). The environment around her is unwelcoming and harsh when
she embarks on her venture of setting up a Chinese restaurant: Lily
64
stuck out as a Buddhist Chinese woman without a husband to look

after her. Her English was still poor and the locals often wouldnt
respond if she spoke to them in the street. When she entered a shop
they stopped talking and stared (182). The grandmother is
courageous despite being the only Chinese woman in Middleton in
1959; the cultural differences at that time were unbridgeable and
she had to be an ambassador of sorts (183). The practical difficulties
of running a Chinese restaurant went side by side with the
management of interpersonal relationships, and Lily solves the
problem of shopping for genuine Chinese groceries by teaching
herself to drive. Lilys courage, if not boldness, is demonstrated
another time when she tries to catch a thief. The author calls her the
fierce dragon lady and compares her to a Han warrior and a
cowboy (190).
Lily is not only a brave woman but also a shrewd restaurant owner:
She was sensible enough to recognise that it would take a while for
British people whod been raised on plain stews and boiled vegetables
to venture a helping of spicy Chinese food, so she made special offers
of the more adventurous dishes and kept on smiling (185).
Lilys strategy works well, and she finally successfully starts
running her restaurant in Middleton. She even attracts other Chinese
people to move to this town: Eventually, by the late 1960s some
other families arrived in the town, inspired by her success, and a
small community was born (182). Her accomplishment serves as an
inspiration to her granddaughters as well: When my sisters and I sat
down to plan Sweet Mandarin we had the restaurant in Middleton
in mind (184).
Tse does not forget to portray the hard labour required in the
catering trade:
In that first year Lung Fung meant nothing but hard work and
isolation for my grandmother. She had a lunchtime and evening
service to produce, raw ingredients to source, prepare and cook,
tables to lay and clear, dishes to wash and a dining-room and
kitchen to clean. The hours were long, and the cycle repeated
itself day in and day out. she worked largely alone, six days
a week for fourteen hours at a time. (187)
65
Her hard work pays off, though. The locals gradually come to
respect her and make her their friend. Over time Lily became an
agony aunt, a peacemaker, a matchmaker, spy and all-round
shoulder to cry on (187). Later, Lily keeps her restaurant open until
three oclock on Friday and Saturday morning; the long working
hours bring further success to her business as celebrities drop by for
late-night snacks.
Lilys restaurant in Middleton is at first her means of making a
living, but later it becomes a community social club. Her cooking
skills serve the locals and bring them enjoyment, which in return
raises her feelings of self-esteem and self-worth:
She realised that Britain had given her an opportunity not just to
climb the social ladder but to really make a difference to her
adopted home. She may not have altogether integrated in the
British society, but she had found her place and she could use her
restaurant to bring joy to its people. She knew that Mrs
Woodman would have been proud of her. (197)
By cooking and serving her food, Lily makes others feel contented,
Chinese or British. Once she is invited to hold a banquet for some
female factory workers; she more than willingly undertakes this task
and feels gratified by the womens delight.
Mrs Woodman senior would have been disappointed at Lilys
addiction to gambling though. At first, Lily feels the weight of
decades of slaving away start to lift (221); later, she becomes
arrogant about winning her bets. Her adventurous nature ruins her
this time as she keeps on upping her ante and loses more money. She
then turns to loan sharks, and in the end loses the restaurant that she
worked so hard to set up and operate All Lilys savings were gone,
every sacrifice shed made had come to nothing (226). Lily once
reigned over her food empire and her home like a matriarch, but the
restaurant Lung Fung has to be sold. Her son had left Middleton
earlier to explore the outside world and now her daughter has to go
away with her husband to run their own business. Lily has to start
all over again in a rundown area where she is unable to keep a
garden in the back yard: The entire yard had been concreted over;
66
nothing would grow there (227). This barrenness symbolises the

state of Lily at that time: she is broke and all alone.
Lily works hard to regain her honour, and the locals do not forget
her friendliness and delicious Chinese food: My grandmother had
built up a huge amount of goodwill in the community, and
generations of Middletonians were addicted to her famous chicken
curry (230). The customers she had earned even benefit Mabel and
Eric: The big hearted loyalty shed earned now passed to her
daughter and her son-in-law (230).
Food and the culinary skills also signify a bridge connecting the
three generations of British Chinese women. Through this bridge,
matrilineage is completed and a female identity is formed. I was
taught a great deal of what it is to be a Chinese woman in the
kitchen at my mother and grandmothers sides. Cooking is at the
heart of the Chinese family and for a Chinese woman it is at the very
core of her identity (269). To the author, the kitchen is a place where
identity is formed, and her strongest childhood memories are of the
kitchen while schoolwork and a thousand little frustrations and
missed Friday night parties evaporated as we sat down to eat (269).
Tse thus proudly declared:
This is my inheritance, the living part of our family tree, the
traditional cooking that my grandmother brought from the
homeland and passed down through the generations to me and
my sisters. My mother taught us the basics as out birthright.
Mabel always said that a meal in a restaurant opens the tastebuds, but a mothers cuisine widens all the senses. (269)
In the afterword of Sweet Mandarin, Tse recounts a burglary which
takes place in the restaurant. Seeing the grandmother shedding tears
along with them, Tse exclaims, What a collection of strong
women we were! (275) and bursts into laughter with her sisters.
Furthermore, the mothers smiles ensure the daughters of hope in the
future. Mabel and Lily teach the girls to move on with their lives,
accept their misfortunes, and stay optimistic. The solution which the
mother and grandmother suggest for this destructive incident goes
directly back to food: Cook food and feed your customers!
67
Hybridity
Hybridity is an important characteristic found in Sweet Mandarin,
and food often signifies it. Under the rule of Britain, Hong Kong had
become an intersection of the West and East, and its food was thus
hybridised. For example, Tses grandfather learned to cook a
westernised oriental cuisine at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel (211),
and being an amah in Western families, Lily learned to cook Chinese
food in all its forms and delicacies all over the world (87).
On the liner to Southampton with the Woodmans, Lily has a sixweek holiday and has the opportunity to immerse herself in a variety
of cooking ingredients from the different countries along her journey.
Her family was part of the scattered diaspora of Chinese people
What pricked her interest most was the food and the markets, and
in the course of her journey she dipped in and out of kitchens across
the world, looked and learned (157). At the same time, she had a
chance to create her famous dish Chicken Curry: My grandmother
began to experiment with the new techniques and ingredients she
found on her journey, and it was here that the dish that made her
name as a restaurateur came to fruition: Lily Kwoks Chicken Curry
(158). This dish is international and heterogeneous because Lily
combines her Chinese cooking skills, the Singaporean method of
adding a coconut base to her cooking, and a mixture of Indian
spices.
The hybridity within Lily is not only shown through food but also
her identity. She starts her Anglicisation by working for the
Woodman family. She took so well to the English way of life that
she is dubbed the English with a Chinese heart (96). Interestingly,
her boss is called the Chinese Englishman by his servants. In
colonial Hong Kong, hybridity can be found easily. Lilys return to
Hong Kong after some forty years living in Britain demands that she
examines her identity. Lily, astonished by the tremendous changes in
Hong Kong, states that I feel more British than Chinese (30). In
Hong Kong, Lily is finally able to make good on old promises and
put to rest some demons (245). One of the demons is the trauma
caused by her husband Chan. The estranged husband manages to
travel to Middleton shortly before his death; on burying him, Lily
68
locks away her memories of the man who had hurt her the most in
her life. Lily refuses to mention Chan to her granddaughter before
she grows up and is still reluctant to confide her secrets. Her stay
with Ah Bing, whom she had forsaken, partly reconciles Lilys
ambivalence towards her husband. To her present, the past is like a
dream, and she is comfortable with her cultural identity, feeling at
home in both Hong Kong and Britain.
For Mabel, nevertheless, cultural identity is tricky. Her daughter
describes her in this way: My mother had a foot in both camps
(209) and Sometimes I think she has never settled here in Britain
(205). Like her mother, Mabel has two names: Its very common for
people from Hong Kong to have two first names, one English and
one Chinese. Sometimes its a practical choice Chinese names
dont trip off English tongues easily (136). This duality represents
her hybridity, even though after years of education and practising at
the restaurant, Mabel doesnt have a trace of a Chinese accent, and
she sounds 100 per cent British on the telephone (209).
It is with Eric, her future husband, that Mabel begins to feel
comfortable with her identity: they found their own way to ride two
horses at once, Chinese and English. My sisters and I grew up in that
one-family melting-pot (215). Mabel agrees with Erics argument
that someone can carry his or her cultural identity around and freely
use or drop it. Mabel and Eric are products of hybridity, a
consequence of the mixture of cultures and languages: They spoke
about being Chinese and what it meant in Britain, whether the old
Chinese rituals needed to be continued in the West, and swapped
stupid mistakes and puns theyd made by fudging Chinese and
English words (214). At their daughters Cambridge graduation
ceremony, the narrator comments that the couple looked out of
place among the spires and gargoyles in the college courtyards
(240). Furthermore, the visit to Hong Kong after decades have
passed makes the family all feel displaced and lost. The trip also
shows rural China to the British-born author, who again feels a sense
of displacement. The underprivileged children wear only their
underwear, while the British Chinese tourists feel as if they are dressed
in space suits (252). The trip puts across to the Tse family that even
though they were ethically Chinese and to some extent understood
69
the language and food, to the native Hong Kong Chinese, they
were dressed and looked totally different (246). Moreover, the
parents dream of returning to Hong Kong after their retirement is
dashed as they discover that they are no longer used to the climate
there.
Food acts as a bridge traversing time and space again. The gap
between the British Chinese family and their remote rural Chinese
relatives is filled through food and cooking: As Mui [Lilys sister]
began to cook, Lily stepped up to the wok to help her and now they
prepared the dish as if they were dancing together, each knowing
perfectly the others movements as surely as if they had cooked the
dish together only yesterday (256). The dish acts an ice-breaker for
the family as the long separation had caused a degree of alienation
between them. It was the act of cooking that broke down the
barriers between them. Cooking was a language that spanned all the
years when they had been apart, The wok united them (257).
The trip to Hong Kong is a revelation to the narrator: It also
introduced me to my mother and my grandmother all over again and
opened up a bridge between us that crossed East and West, uniting
the present and the past (3). Tse is finally able to picture the past
lives of her ancestors and in their hearts a representation of the
generation that she belongs to. The search for matrilineage and
cultural roots gives the author a chance to explore her identity and
prompts her to write down the story of her family:
Lily and my mother, Mable, inspired and shaped much of what
I have done with my life: my success at school and in business;
my return to the catering trade; my journey back to China to
rediscover my roots, and in doing so, discovering her [Lilys]
roots too. Her story is my story, and its the story of Sweet
Mandarin. (1)
The stay in Hong Kong also makes the narrator grateful to her
previous generations for the hardships and efforts which they had to
endure and which have now brought a better life for their offspring:
Being there helped me to understand what kind of energy it had
taken for my great-grandfather to lift himself and his family of the
70
village near Guangzhou and slog around the streets of Hong Kong
in the 1920s (49).
In Sweet Mandarin, Tse pays tribute to her previous generations
for the life that she now enjoys; being a girl of Chinese ancestry in
Britain nonetheless entails cultural confrontations. The narrator
wants to assimilate into British society while holding onto Chinese
values. However, along with her sisters, she finds herself living
between two worlds and rootless: We had no real roots to hold us
to China or to Britain, leaving us hovering somewhere in between.
Unlike our parents, we dont feel drawn to return to China or
Hong Kong (240). They come to the conclusion that they should
view themselves a unique group, British-born Chinese.
As a member of the third British-Chinese generation, the narrator
is integrated into British culture and society. We were happy to be
English children (235). My sisters and I grew up speaking English,
and we were barely aware of ourselves as different to our white
schoolmates. We were born here and share all kinds of culture with
our friends (209). Tses reply to the question of her origin is
Manchester, an answer which does not meet some strangers
expectations (38). Their skin colour inevitably influences peoples
judgement: Being Chinese caught up with us though, and we learned
that we were different the hard way (235). One example is little
brother Jimmy being cornered and called a chink. Another example
is the traditional Chinese values related to gender: My brothers
birth was a true education in Chinese culture (231-32). A boy is
usually much more treasured than a girl in traditional Chinese
beliefs, and Tse herself has experienced it: When Jimmy came along
he became my parents pride and joy simply because he was a boy.
He would carry on the family name, and that was all that mattered
(232). Nevertheless, the British Chinese parents Eric and Mabel
encourage their girls achievements: They never told me I shouldnt
aim high, even if I was a girl (239). This somewhat demonstrates
that when a culture is carried overseas, transformations occur and
hybridity follows.
The mixture of the use of language is another example of hybridity.
Tse, along with her siblings, grew up under a traditional and
disciplinary Chinese father, who regarded child rearing and education
71
a mothers responsibility and an Anglicised mother who communicated

with them in English and asked them to think English. We felt
as though we were living with a Chinese father and an English
mother he regimented and formal, she kind and caring (233).
When the father used Chinese to tell his children about the values of
Chinese culture and traditions, they disappointed him by replying in
English.
The most notable heterogeneous aspect of the British-born
Chinese generation in Sweet Mandarin is inevitably food and the
catering business again. Tse uses the cuisine which the family
prepared for Christmas, one a British-style turkey and the other
Chinese, to signify that she is at ease with her hybrid identity:
Both were delicious. I no longer wish that my nose was straight
or that I was born Caucasian. there is a new Chinese identity
here in Great Britain, founded on the efforts of immigrants like
my grandmother. Her generation came here for better times and
their dream has been validated by the lives of their children
and grandchildren, who can move freely in their adopted society
and take advantage of all it has to offer. (271)
Tse confesses that she does not eat Chinese food everyday, but she
feels hungry if she does not eat rice. We all find a place of balance
and I can choose how Chinese or how British I want to be. The
amount I use of each changes from day to day (270).
Tse moves agilely through her dual heritages, and as an adult,
finds it easy to cope with different cultures. During her stay in Hong
Kong, Tse and her sisters are astonished to witness the local cuisine
of snakes and other animals, yet she concludes, After all, the
Chinese have enjoyed 5000 years of civilisation they have an
amazing cuisine who am I to criticise their taste in protein?
I reckon they know what theyre doing, but all the same I bought a
pineapple fritter for myself, and felt very English (261).
Another example is the Tse sisters fear of Lilys chicken-feet dish
and soup made of fungus and seaweed; nevertheless, they know how
to appreciate them when they become adults. According to
Julia Kristeva, Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and
72
most archaic form of abjection (3); Xu further suggests, As we

often express our intolerance of other cultures by our repugnance
toward their food practices Eating is indeed inseparable from
personhood (4). Their ability to relish the once repulsive Chinese
food implies that the Tse sisters now thoroughly embrace their
ethnic origin.
We can look to Lilys cooking tradition and we can embrace our
familys new world too Unlike some of my contemporaries,
I dont try to push my heritage away. China for them is something
from the past, something they often find incomprehensible and
embarrassing, but I feel that it is my Chinese roots that define
me. (270)
After seeing the sophisticated and modern restaurants in Hong
Kong, the Tse sisters are motivated to make their restaurant a
combination of the old and the new wed build on my parents and
my grandmothers groundwork, and that of the first great wave to
Chinese restaurateurs in Britain. They gave us a chance to be far
more ambitious than they could ever have dreamed of being (265).
The new things that Helen Tse and her sisters do include locating
their restaurant outside Manchesters Chinatown, performing
creative activities like the naming of the restaurant, and decorating
the restaurant with a trendy interior design. On the other hand, they
observe Chinese feng shui and follow their grandmothers and parents
creed that the locals should be taken good care of. The Tse sisters
picked the name Sweet Mandarin for their restaurant: Sweet
is Manchester slang for good or cool there was our British
side and Mandarin summed up the traditional, Chinese side (268).
To express her gratitude to her ancestors, the author hopes that
she and her sibling do not fail the dream of the previous generations:
Lily wanted to among the Europeans as a financial, social and
intellectual equal. As my sisters, brother and as I passed through
university, I believe Lily, Mabel and Eric saw us doing just that
(241). In opening a Chinese restaurant, the narrator reckons that the
grandmother must be proud of her granddaughters and of her own
legacy.
73
Last but not least, another feature of hybridity in this work is the
interweaving of English and Chinese elements. In her English text,
Tse borrows the Chinese legend about a man who was determined
to move a mountain so that a road could be built. His success in this
tale inspires Lily and then her granddaughter Helen, both of whom
resolve to demolish their own mountains of being female, and dare
to go into business, which is held to be a male world. Lilys ultimate
mountain is in England, where she has to work for years before
bringing her children to the faraway land. She has to begin her task
of moving a mountain when she loses her restaurant due to gambling.
At the end of the book, Tse announces that the mountain that
Leung set out to move in the village outside Guangzhou in the 1920s
was gone (241) and the road to prosperity built (271). It is now
time for the Tse sisters to meet their challenges and move their own
mountains.
Helping out
One of the most significant tasks on the path to adulthood for the
children in Sweet Mandarin is to help out in the family-run
businesses. Helping out is a legacy from Tses family, since all of the
previous generations mentioned in Sweet Mandarin worked or still
serve in the catering business. Boys or girls, we grew up in the
family business like our mother, our father and their parents before
them it was a way of life we lived over the shop, ate from the
shop and worked in the shop. There was nothing else (232).
The children are forced to grow up quickly. When Mabel is nine
years old and Arthur eleven, they are brought to England from Hong
Kong by their mother. Not only do they need to cope with the
language difference, cultural confrontation and worst of all, racist
bullying, they have to sacrifice their childhood by working in the
restaurant: The two children had to grow up fast they were in a
new, foreign country and they were flung head first into the frantic
atmosphere of the restaurant where their mother worked long hours
(199). When Mabel becomes a mother herself, the racial discrimination
continues, and this time her children suffer as well. Being Chinese
74
and running a take-away, the Tse family are open to racial abuse. On
one occasion, the mother Mabel is knocked out and the father is
often attacked verbally. The children, who sleep upstairs in the shop,
feel insecure, especially on Friday and Saturday nights as the drunk
and unruly crowds flock into their takeaway for food: We children
were expected to help out in the shop till 10 p.m. then were packed
off to bed before the pubs emptied out, but we couldnt sleep easily
knowing out parents were so vulnerable (237). The narrator and
her sister Lisa would be fully dressed so that they could jump to their
parents aid.
Helping out means child labour without the obligation of
payment, which contradicts British values and prevents the British
Chinese children from attending social activities with their friends.
Benton and Gomez share their observation of British Chinese young
people helping out in their family-run businesses: Many come to
hate as demeaning the catering niche that confers on them their
racialised identity and offers little ground for self-esteem. Interaction
across the counter prevents the fluid interpenetration of the cultural
realms necessary for the generation of new identities (341). This
situation is exemplified by the author-narrator: My friends partied
and went to discos on Friday nights, and I stayed home and scrubbed
potatoes. I felt like I was English and Chinese, but was missing
the best bits of both (293).
The demanding take-away work forces the Tse sisters to sacrifice
their school holidays and social life to help out in the family-run
business; they are still expected to go home and help even when they
grow up and have their own careers. We were expected to give up
our evenings and weekends to help out behind the counter or in the
kitchen (12). Although their mother Mabel had experienced a
similar predicament and comments that she lost her childhood
innocence the day she arrived in England and was made to work
like an adult when she was still a child, (199) she makes her children
work in their chip shop. To Lily, the children helping out in the
family business stands to reason as it was a familys duty to work
together and you were never too young to do your bit (200).
There was no question of our not working in the shop It might
sound tough for a child to do an adults job, but we saw it as no
75
more than a chore like making your bed in the morning (238). Tse
comments that business and family are inseparable in Chinese
culture.
Helping out is not, according to the author, completely
unfavourable. The author views helping out in a positive light by
increasing her popularity with her friends as the chips were free. The
intimacy between Lily and Mabel is partially because the daughter
shares the labour in the restaurant: My mother and grandmother
are very close, and that mutual warmth is rooted in these decades of
shared hardship (202). Moreover, the business itself provides not
only bread for the family, but also a foundation for the future
generations to achieve more. Helping out provides the children with
knowledge and the ability to start their own catering business. To
illustrate this, Eric teaches his children how to cook when their work
in the kitchen is done. Likewise, Lily accompanied her father to sell
his soy sauce when she was little; spending long hours on the street
broadened her view of the world and increased her strength and
independence.
The writer declares that the book Sweet Mandarin originates from
her visit to Hong Kong with her family. It was the time my sisters
and I started to understand truly the long, tough road that led to the
chip shop that we all resented so much. We pieced together that
family stories and rumours, and found out the way that culinary
skill and a love of food ran through it all (245).
The author comes to respect the hard work and strength of her
previous generations; she is encouraged to make them proud of her.
She then decides to establish her own catering business, just like her
parents and grandmother, with her sisters. The Tse sisters choice is
unusual; in Miri Songs study of the second-generation British
Chinese who help out in family take-aways, none of the subjects in
this research intended to stay in the catering trade.
Some of Tses family are also eager to leave the family-owned
business. Back in China, when Kwok Chan was young and
had to help out at his fathers restaurant, he felt chained to
the family and the restaurant and found work in the restaurant
torturous (109). The wish to leave the catering business then led the
young Chan to gamble and join the Triads. Likewise, Mabels older
76
brother Arthur talked incessantly about getting out of the restaurant

and getting away from Middleton (210); Arthurs aspiration backs
up Benton and Gomezs assertion: British-born and British-raised
Chinese viewed the business sectors formed by Chinese immigrants
as degrading and oppressive (358). However, Mabel prefers to stay
put. It is only when she meets her husband Eric that she decides to
leave her mother and set up her own business. The parents are both
very proud of their shop and the family they built there, (229) but
they cannot know more about the hard work required to run their
own shop.
The parents and grandmother are at first disappointed at the Tse
sisters decision to fall back into the catering trade: Our parents
and grandmother werent pleased at first. Why had they done such
back-breaking work for so long? (265). The children of Chinese
immigrants in Britain, according to Benton and Gomez, are
generally upwardly mobile and lost to the family business, and this
corresponds to the wishes of the parents (59). In Sweet Mandarin,
the first and second generation worked hard so that the next
generation could pursue higher education and find respectable and
well-paid jobs. The choice to give up their professional careers and
return to the catering trade by the privileged third generation
undoubtedly fails the expectations of the previous generations, who
were also sceptical of the Tse sisters durability.
The sisters know the task they are undertaking, though.
We determined that we had to create a restaurant which
expressed what we were British-born Chinese in the twentyfirst century and where wed come from. We were passionate
about the food that was our culture and our family inheritance,
and we wanted to do it justice. We wanted people to look at it
with fresh eyes and taste it with a fresh palate. (264)
The author points out that Chinese food in Britain is connected with
cheap take-aways, monosodium glutamate or instant supermarket
stir-fries; in order to pay tribute to the women who established the
foundations of their business, the Tse sisters decide to serve
the famous dishes passed down by their mother and grandmother.
77
The Tse sisters are ambivalent towards helping out in the takeaway,
but they enjoy helping their mother cook at home; the author even
compares the wrapping of won tons to choreography, a kind of art.
Abandoning their unpleasant childhood memories of helping out in
the take-away, the Tse sisters happily embrace their love of food and
cooking.
Towards a brighter future

Tse dedicated the book Sweet Mandarin and the restaurant under
the same name to her mother Mabel and grandmother Lily. This
book, along with the restaurant of the same name, tells the story of
three generations of British Chinese women; in presenting their love
of food and cooking, the author also highlights the womens
subjectivity, identity and hybridity. Moreover, through their love of
food and cooking, the writer bridges different immigrant generations
and justifies the value of Chinese food and the cultural meanings
that it conveys:
I remember old Chinese the bosses of the established Chinatown
restaurants and supermarkets smiling on us with respect. It
was an acknowledgement that we were carrying the flickering,
dimming torch for a new generation, and they wished their own
sons and daughters would do the same, keeping the community
alive and handing down traditional recipes and family business
know-how to their own children. (3)
In his work, The Chinese in Britain, Anthony Shang asserts that the
British Chinese are stereotyped as a minority working in the catering
trade, despite the actual wide variety of occupations which they
take. The Tse sisters are not troubled by this stereotype; they identify
with Chinese food and are determined to work with it. These
British-born Chinese women have found their place in Britain and
will, hopefully, as they have inherited from their predecessors, lead
future generations to attain their own pride and honour in the
country where they have built their homes.
5
Conclusion
The analysis of the three works under review in this research

has demonstrated the development of the women in the writings.
In The Magpie Bridge, Tie Mei begins as a troubled and wrathful
Chinese spirit, but at the end is transformed into a graceful Mei tree
in a British garden. Jiao Mei was a Chinese girl at a loss; however,
she later becomes a contented mother with a mixed-race child.
In Sour Sweet, Lily and Mui are first depicted as subordinated
Chinese women who wait at home for their male master to come
back from work. They gradually seize power over the household and
present their individuality. In Sweet Mandarin, Lily starts out as a
rural Chinese girl who wants to work as a maid for Western families;
her persistence and hard work reward her with a Chinese restaurant
in Britain. Tse the author-narrator is ambivalent towards her origins,
but comes to embrace her ancestral roots and runs a Chinese
restaurant with her sisters.
The women in these three works are different in terms of their
origins: some of them come from Mainland China or the former
British colony of Hong Kong; some were born in Britain. Their
diverse backgrounds result in various degrees of assimilation into
British society. Their cultural identity is thus dissimilar. Wai-ki E.
Luk reminds his readers of the hybridity in the recent wave of
Chinese immigrants: Chinese came from mainland China, Taiwan,
and a whole host of Southeast Asian countries including Thailand
and the Philippines. These origins are places which have no specific
80
historical or colonial links with Britain, contrasting with those

of earlier waves of postwar immigrants from Hong Kong and
Malaysia (279).
The Chinese in Britain may share a similar cultural tradition, but
they are by no means identical. For example, the Chinese on
mainland China and Taiwan are different, to name but a few, in their
political stances, their usage of Mandarin Chinese and their adoption
of written languages, namely, Simplified Chinese and Traditional
Chinese. The Chinese who migrated to Britain from various
Southeast Asian countries are also disparate because of their assorted
upbringings in various cultures. Furthermore, as mentioned in the
Introduction, Meiling Jin is a woman writer from the Caribbean, her
poetry and short stories deal with her growing up as a ChineseGuyanese-British girl.
According to Diana Yeh, In comparison to Asian Americans,
black Britons or British Asians, the Chinese in Britain are a relatively
young community and have yet to consolidate a distinct BritishChinese identity (83). For those who were born in Britain, Benton
and Gomez indicate that a collective identity for the younger
generation is impossible due to the wide dispersal of the population:
Dispersed across the country in takeaways and restaurants, young
Chinese lack grounds for a strong collective self. Their lifestyles are
segmented and hard to mix (341).
Publications by British writers of Chinese origin are often
neglected, other than the three famous authors, Timothy Mo, Chang
Jung, the author of Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991),
and the emerging writer Tash Aw of Chinese-Malaysian ancestry,
whose Harmony Silk Factory (2005) and Five Star Billionaire (2013)
were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The study of British
Chinese writings remains incomplete and promising. For example,
researchers may wish to explore the themes of class and illegal
Chinese immigrants in Britain in Hsiao-Hung Pais Chinese Whispers:
The True Story Behind Britains Hidden Army of Labour (2008).
There are also British Chinese playwrights, such as Hsiung Shih-I
and Benjamin Yeoh, for theatre studies. In addition, scholars
specialising in translation studies may be interested in Xinran Xues
writings, as she uses many Chinese sources in her English texts.
Conclusion
81
It is noteworthy that besides the immigrant generations mentioned

above, the British-born Chinese have started to write. A fine example
is Helen Tse, a member of the third generation, whose mother is a
woman of Chinese descent born in Britain. With the appearance of
the rising British Chinese population, more British Chinese writings
can be anticipated. Nevertheless, a thorough anthology of British
Chinese literature is still absent. My doctoral survey, finished in
2007, of the British Chinese writing tradition needs to be updated;
Benton and Gomez offer a brief portrayal of British Chinese writers,
but it is incomplete. Future research is strongly encouraged to
undertake a comprehensive investigation of British Chinese literature.
This research has focused on women in British Chinese writings,
as they are usually the minority of the minority. Although most of
the women in this discussion have stepped outside their invisibility
and dependency, it should be noted that there are still numerous
women of Chinese origin in Britain who are confined in their solitary
lives and submissive status. Researchers are invited to look into this
status quo, and even more constructively, offer methods to solve
these womens predicaments.
This study has highlighted the strength of the women in selected
works, who have successfully found their selfhood and acknowledged
the power and persistence within themselves. Hybridity, strategically
used as a term to call for a consideration of differences, bestows each
person with a sense of individuality, regardless of his or her gender,
class or race. In this globalised world, where diverse people
frequently interact, it is especially important to understand that
every human being is distinct and deserves the respect of being
treated as a separate individual.
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The Author
Dr Yun-Hua Hsiao is an assistant professor at the Graduate Institute of Childrens English and
Department of English, National Changhua University of Education, Taiwan. She received her doctoral
degree in English Literature from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her current research
interests are in British Chinese writings, cultural studies, and minority women writers.
Readership
The primary markets for this book are the British Chinese and British people together with the
diasporic Chinese and readers concerned about the issue of race and culture. The book will also be
of interest to those members of the general public that are interested in the British Chinese world.
Contents
Women in british chinese writings: subjectivity, identity and hybridity
Women in British Chinese Writings: Subjectivity, Identity and Hybridity is an extended

study of Yun-Hua Hsiaos doctoral research on British Chinese literature. As noted in
Dr Hsiaos previous investigation of British Chinese writings, the existing literary works
remain a small number, compared to its American counterpart; however, since the
political, social and historical factors affecting this group of literature are unique, British
Chinese publications deserve close examination.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Matrilineage and the garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge
Conclusion
Bibliography
9 781909 287921
For a full listing of Chartridge Books Oxfords titles, please contact us:
Chartridge Books Oxford, 5 & 6 Steadys Lane,
Stanton Harcourt, Oxford OX29 5RL, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 1865 882191
Yun-Hua Hsiao
ISBN 978-1-909287-92-1
Yun-Hua Hsiao
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Women in british chinese writings: subjectivity, identity and hybridity

Women in British Chinese Writings: Subjectivity, Identity and Hybridity is an extended

Women in British Chinese Writings:

Women in British Chinese

Chartridge Books Oxford

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs

Power and subjectivity

The symbol of the mirror

Scent and the garden

Cultural influence and the metaphor of the bridge

Power and Women in Timothy Mos Sour Sweet

Sour Sweet and the Foucauldian power relations

The shifting power centre

Resistance and strategy

Power and knowledge

Collective female power

Women in British Chinese Writings

Power and the yin-yang force

Cultural conflicts between the first and second generations

Food and Identity in Helen Tses Sweet Mandarin

Ethnic food and foodways

Food, cooking and the catering business in Sweet Mandarin

Food, tradition, female subjectivity and identity

Towards a brighter future

I would like to first thank my colleague Professor Ping-yan Lai,

This research is an extended study of my doctoral research on British

Women in British Chinese Writings

minority to claim their subjectivity and identity. Stuart Hall thus

through the distinctive theme of the garden and is worth scrutnisation.

Women in British Chinese Writings

Most of the women in the works selected for discussion experience

Women in British Chinese Writings

main roles in this work. Also highlighted is the hybridity discovered

Women in British Chinese Writings

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

set in Communist China, where at the time many innocent

Women in British Chinese Writings

of matrilineage and then changes to show how the important theme

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

Women in British Chinese Writings

The knowledge of her foremothers stories empowers Jiao Mei,

Power and subjectivity

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

Knowledge gives you power, and a woman needs that (120).

Women in British Chinese Writings

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

was the dangerous time when I was on a threshold, when my English

Women in British Chinese Writings

re-established. When Jiao Mei herself is expecting a child, she

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

Women in British Chinese Writings

mean weakness or surrender, but a wise strategy for a better

The symbol of the mirror

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

have occurred without the return of the heirloom, a mission

Women in British Chinese Writings

Barbara regains her lost sense of smell. Nevertheless, the ability to

Scent and the garden

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

Women in British Chinese Writings

Matrilineage and the Garden in Liu Hongs The Magpie Bridge

Women in British Chinese Writings

For Tie Mei, her garden is a source of happiness; on her in-laws