H ONG C HEN

Local Foods, Public Markets:

Cultural and Ecological Implications
in and around the Works of Chi Li1

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Foods that are so very central to Wuhan2 culture find expression in
the works of Chi Li, one of the China's most accomplished and
popular contemporary writers, in ways that have substantial implica-
tions for current discussions of ecological crises. Increasingly entering
the global economy as fodder for a growing national and interna-
tional appetite for “local foods,” Wuhan's culinary delights highlight
inevitable conflicts that are developing between cultural promotion,
commercial expansion, and the environment. This paper examines
the relationship between local foods and aspects of globalization by
looking at the works of Chi whose concern about the culture of
Wuhan has earned her the status of spokeswoman of the city. In fact,
ever since her first publication in 1979, Chi has written almost exclu-
sively about Wuhan. Her fame as one of the China's best regional
writers is built mostly on her award-winning novellas, including
“Frustrating Life,” “To and Fro,” and “Life Show,” the last of which
is the central text in the following discussion.

Culture and the Environment

One may easily understand that, just as any aspect of the environ-
ment surely produces its effect on the way people live their lives, any
lifestyle shared by a large number of people in an area, which we
take as part of the culture of the place, will inevitably have its
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 19.4 (Autumn 2012)
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692 I S L E

environmental or ecological implications, decided by the degree and

the manner of people's involvement with the environment. To
achieve such a complex knowledge about one's local place as a biore-
gion with its own ecology and culture, and to nurture a deep feeling
for the place for all its goods and despite all its evils, is to have a
what is called “place-based sensibility” (Thomashow 121). It is a sen-
sibility that belongs to what Kirkpatrick Sale calls “dwellers in the
land,” who not only know the place intimately as a specific natural
environment and understand its limits and capacities, but also appre-
ciate “the cultures of the people, … the human social and economic
arrangements shaped by and adapted to the geomorphic ones” (42).
This kind of sensibility is definitely possessed by Chi, who has tried
to put it into her writings more and more since the late 1990s. In

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reading and discussing her Wuhan novellas, we can see how place-
based sensibility functions in Chi, offering the city as a bioregion that
requires both ecological and cultural affiliations, and showing the
effect of translocal forces on this bioregion and its culture.
The writer's attention to the weather of Wuhan, for example,
shows her understanding of the weather as an important aspect of
the natural environment that gives rise to the peculiar way of living
of the local people. In the novella “Cold or Hot, Being Alive Is
Good,” Chi gives a meticulous description of the local custom of
sleeping on bamboo beds in the street during the summer nights, pre-
senting it as a daily activity carried out by almost all the families in
the neighboring area. Though usually conducted privately and
indoors, sleeping becomes an outdoor social activity under the heat
of the summer nights. Under Chi's pen, summer nights become quite
enjoyable occasions for the community despite the hardly enjoyable
weather. The long, hot nights also show the wisdom of people trying
to get along with the environment, perhaps not without grudge but
certainly without much intervention from modern technology such
as air-conditioning. With her attention to the local Wuhanese who
have evolved ways “to ensure long-term occupancy” of the city by
acknowledging the “links between human lives, other living things,
and the processes of the planet – seasons, weather, water cycles – as
revealed by the place itself,” Chi reveals herself as one who under-
stands the wisdom of “living-in-place” (Berg and Dasmann 35).
Food in Chi's novellas is another site where one observes the inte-
gration of the writer's ecological and cultural affiliation to the city she
loves. The writer's detailed description in the novella “Cold or Hot,
Being Alive Is Good” of the dishes set on the bamboo bed of one of
the families offers the idea of “eat[ing] what the season provides,” an
ancient Chinese belief that Chi obviously shares with her characters.
 Local Foods, Public Markets 693

All the seasonal vegetables mentioned, such as lotus roots, bitter

gourd, towel gourd and green beans, plus fresh-water fish, are meant
to help the body cool down in the hot weather while giving it
enough energy. This ancient Chinese wisdom concerning foods and
eating is echoed by the current idea of sustainability in bioregional-
ism, which proposes a more prudent, local, and self-sufficient use of
natural resources so as to minimize the environmental damage
caused by transporting far-away, out-of-season foods. The characters
in Chi's novellas who follow seasonal food availability patterns
reveal a strong connection between people who dwell in the land and
the land itself.
In the above-mentioned novella, the characters express a great
delight in seasonal and homemade foods, believing that foods

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grown naturally and cooked simply can ensure a kind of natural and
healthy life. In another novella, “Pupa Transformed into Butterfly,”
Chi provides a deeper insight into the issue by presenting such foods
as not only good for one's body but also for one's emotional and spi-
ritual state. The protagonist of the story, Xiao Ding, has experienced a
profound transformation of his character and life, from being a poor
orphan with a deep sense of inferiority to a successful entrepreneur
with a confident grasp of his own life. This change is presented in the
story as a parallel to the change in the environment in which he lives,
where food production plays an important role. In the latter part of
the story, when Xiao Ding has become a rich businessman and phi-
lanthropist, he takes over the orphanage where he had spent an
unhappy childhood, and he moves it to the suburbs where “there
were hills, pools, and woods, all primitive and disordered, wild and
authentic” (38). He then begins to farm together with the children,
growing vegetables, breeding fish, and raising birds and animals.
The orphanage becomes a paradise and place of freedom for him and
the children, and they produce enough to feed themselves and also a
little bit extra to sell to foreign companies in the area. The connection
between the unpolluted environment of the farm and the purified
souls of Xiao Ding and the children is clearly implied in the writer's
poetic description of Xiao Ding's grateful contentment at the end of
the story (39).
The above-mentioned novella “Pupa Transformed into Butterfly”
is one of Chi's most recent works. Scholars such as Yu Kexun observe
in it “a nature-worshipping trend” that runs throughout Chi's
writing career (qtd. in Jia C03). It begins in her work from 1980s and
then develops into attitudes of “contentment,” “endurance,” and “a
willingness to follow the natural way” in much of her later work
(qtd. in Jia C03). Yu also remarks on the need to control human
694 I S L E

desires implied in such attitudes (qtd. in Jia C03). Yet, Chi has shown
in her works something that is more than simply an abstract ecologi-
cal attitude. Her realistic concern about the effect of the physical
environment on people's daily lives or vice versa is evident in a
number of her novellas, including “From Cocoon to Butterfly,”
“Wheat-watching Ladies,” and “Life Show.” Whereas the first two
novellas only touch briefly on the issue, the last one deals with it
extensively. But unlike the other novellas where local foods always
appear in good relations with the environment, foods in “Life Show”
become the source of environmental problems.
The environmental issue in “Life Show” concerns a real street in
Wuhan—Jiqing Street—and is presented in the form of conflicts
between various forces, such as between the heroine Lai Shuangyang

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and her younger sister, a news reporter for a local TV studio. “Life
Show” unrolls a story in which food plays the most prominent role in
all important aspects. The heroine has been living all her life in Jiqing
Street, a busy night market full of restaurants and food stalls. She
herself earns her livelihood by selling snack food there such as deep-
fried smelly bean curd and stewed duck's neck. When the story
begins, Shuangyang's younger sister, whose name is Shuangyuan, is
planning an action for the “Hot Social Issues” program on a local TV
channel to expose the environmental problems caused by Jiqing
Street, such as smoke and smells from the restaurants, paths being
occupied or blocked by the outdoor businesses, and noise from the
performers and diners throughout the night (Chi 237–38). The narra-
tor does not describe the street directly, but presents it mainly
through the eyes of Shuangyang, whose livelihood wholly depends
on the existence of the street. The matter-of-fact attitude of this
woman allows her to admit all its problems and even sympathize
with the residents of the neighborhood while at the same time insist-
ing on her right to survive. The fact that her younger sister is often
ridiculed, subtly or explicitly, by both the narrator and Shuangyang,
tells us that the writer's attitude towards the problem of the street is
not a simplistic one either. Several times in the story, when blaming
Shuangyang for her nocturnal lifestyle and her being one of the
vulgar, petty townspeople of the street, the younger sister is criticized
instead for “knowing nothing about reality” (237) or “having only
subjective ideas and no objective thoughts” (240).3
The conflict we observe here is far more than one between indi-
viduals, or even one between the interests of different groups of
people. In a larger sense, it is a conflict between cultural tradition
and environmental protection. In the case of Jiqing Street, the street
itself where people gather every night for food, music, and
 Local Foods, Public Markets 695

“whatever” represents the local culture of Wuhan, while the govern-

ment turns out to be the opposing force by determining to clean up
the street (247). The nearly thirty-year history of Jiqing Street as a
night market that has been closed by the government but reopened
again and again best explains what the dilemma is about. Here we
may turn to the description of one of the closing actions in the
novella for possible clues. In describing the action, the writer drama-
tizes the conflict between the government and the street. On the one
side, there are “government officials, members of army-civilian
defense with armbands, armed police in camouflage battledress, and
water cannons of the fire brigade.” On the other side, there are those
“entertainers, shoe-brushing women, young girls of suspicious iden-
tities, … and cooks without license,” who could do nothing better

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than flee from the place of trouble (245). Everybody in the street is
involved except one—Lai Shuangyang, as the writer describes: “Lai
Shuangyang never opposed the closing action directly. She stayed at
home, sat on the nearly one hundred year old balcony and, while
cracking sunflower seeds, looked down from the second floor at the
confusion below her” (245).
Set in contrast against the fuss made by the government, the
woman's calmness at this moment obviously contains within it a
scornful attitude. Moreover, her calm reaction to the chaos contrib-
utes further to the legendary image of the woman, which the writer
has taken pains to establish throughout her narration despite the fact
that she writes the novella in the “neo-realistic” vein.4
If Shuangyang's position against the government is easy to under-
stand, how do we explain the writer's attitude which she expresses
indirectly in the following explanation of the narrator about the situa-
tion of the street after the closing actions?
“The night market of Jiqing Street is just like wild grass, which is
not to be burnt out by the wild fire and is to return to life immedi-
ately at the touch of spring wind. Again and again, it would revive
every time after it was closed down. The closing actions themselves
were advertisements” (246–247). Here, by presenting the serious
closing action in an almost comic way, the writer ridicules the crude
and inconsiderate moves of the government while at the same time
asserting the practical needs of people, such as the need to sell food
for a living or the need to enjoy good food. To the writer, the govern-
ment's failure to close the market lies exactly in its unwillingness to
respect such important, though apparently mundane, needs. Her atti-
tude towards the case is obvious in the short and simple sentence:
“This is the people's Jiqing Street” (247).
696 I S L E

But who are “the people” referred to in the above quotation?

Aren't there different needs for different groups of people in the case
of the environmental problems of Jiqing Street? By taking another
look at the context from which the quotation comes, a context that
clearly expresses the free and casual atmosphere in which everybody
can enjoy the night market, we may come to an understanding of the
word “people” as a concretized expression for the often abstract idea
of cultural tradition; for isn't it true that when a certain way of behav-
ior goes deep enough among the majority of people of a certain
place, it may sometimes acquire a respectable position equal to that
of the benefits of the people? Lai Shuangyang is certainly one of the
people, and the legendary status she holds in the street is a clear sign
of the writer's respect for the life struggles put up by her and her

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likes. By siding with Shuangyang and the people she represents, Chi
is also asserting the importance of the cultural tradition that ordinary
people are trying to uphold so as to keep whatever they need for a
good and normal life.
But the irony here is that the supposedly ecologically friendly
local foods of Wuhan and the culturally attractive eating habit of the
Wuhannese are linked to environmental detriment in the case of
Jiqing Street because of the various kinds of pollution produced in
the night market. What's more, despite all her cultural and ecological
sensitivities, the writer seems to give priority to cultural rather than
ecological considerations in this case. To explain this choice, we need
to understand first of all the emphasis Chi always puts on the mun-
daneness of life from her neo-realistic point of view. What appears in
her novellas simply as frustrating trivialities and pressures of life or
as the pettiness of people's concerns and sentiments are something
entirely more elevated. According to Jinhua Dai, Chi's novellas high-
light mundaneness as a state that “almost implies something holy
and pure” (54). What Dai has noticed in Chi is actually the inviolable
position of the ordinary and everyday life of people as a reality that
demands our deepest respect. The mundane culture of Wuhan,
which arises directly from and is characterized by a delightful atti-
tude towards the mundane nature of life, has thus acquired a respect-
able position as well, as we have come to see in the story of “Life
Show,” both in the writer's mystification of a woman as low and ordi-
nary as Shuangyang and in that of the street as a place with its own
peculiar feeling that can make whoever comes relax. What we might
have failed to see is that Chi's respect for the realities of Jiqing Street
contains within it a bioregionalist sensitivity that enables her to
understand fully the deep roots of the dilemma faced by people of
 Local Foods, Public Markets 697

the street and to expect a better solution to the environmental prob-

lems than those attempted by the local government.
When stepping out from the fictional Jiqing Street into the real
one, one finds that the local government itself obviously did not
reach a consensus on the matter of the street. When Mr. Yuan
Guoxiong, the former Director of Wuhan Tourism Bureau, expressed
in 2002 his opposition to moving the market indoors,5 he recognized
the cultural significance of local customs that were not much different
from Chi's. Yet, considering his official position, there seems to be
another, unexplained reason that makes him vote against environ-
mental concerns. It is income from the street as a tourist attraction
that, in this case, is also part of the larger culture industry.

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Local Culture, Market Expansion, and Ecological Challenge
Jiqing Street has almost become the trademark of the indigenous
culture of Wuhan, owing largely, if not solely, to the popularity of
Chi's novella and that of a TV play and a movie adapted from the
novella. As the street attracts more and more tourists from all over
the country and world, certain foods that were once only available in
the street (such as the kind of duck's neck sold by Lai Shuangyang
in the story) begin to find a larger market. If Jiqing Street is an
example of successful business marketing by way of cultural promo-
tion, Hubu Alley, a breakfast street with a history of over one hundred
years, also wins the market because of its unique cultural features.
The fact is, as the latter keeps opening chain stores in the city at the
rate of three to four new stores every year, the local enterprise is
growing rapidly and showing already the possibility of seemingly
limitless expansion in the future.
Culturally, the prospective nationwide or even global expansion of
Hubu Alley may not be a totally negative thing if observed from the
perspective of cultural plurality. Ecologically, however, the growth of
a small local food business such as Hubu Alley into a national or
multi-national one is never desirable since it puts heavy burdens on
the environment. Problems such as resource and energy consumption
and pollution may arise from various aspects of a translocal economic
activity. Take packaging, for example. The plastic packaging for hot
and dry noodles or duck's neck of various brands produces pollution
of different kinds at different stages: resource consumption as a
material-use pollution in the first stage, water and air pollution in the
manufacturing process in the second stage, and the packaging as
waste pollution in the last stage.6 In his article “A Study of the
Economic and Ecological Impact of Commodity Packaging,” Jinhe
698 I S L E

Zhang compares the different packaging needed for local and non-
local markets, and the obvious conclusion he comes to by examining
food packaging is that the longer distance the food travels, the longer
the time it is supposed to stay fresh, and hence the more cost as well
as more pollution will result from the elaborate packaging (138).
Compared with packaging, other aspects such as large-scale produc-
tion, which often involves manufacturing with machines instead of
by hand, and long-distance transportation pose no less of a challenge
to already vulnerable ecologies. In contrast, traditional local food
culture, represented by the original Jiqing Street and Hubu Alley,
poses a limited ecological impact as a result of its very localness.
What we've observed above in the market expansion of local
foods is the potential danger of the loss of localness as well as

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unavoidable ecological challenges. In the novella “Don't Talk to
Strangers,” Chi regrets the loss of local culture through the female
protagonist. Having lived in the downtown area of Hankou7 for
more than forty years, the woman observes the disappearance of the
leisurely life of the locals and that of the traditional mode of business.
The small specialized stores that the locals loved to visit in the past
are now replaced by big department stores where goods of different
types and nature and from different places are all put together, one
effect of which is to diminish the distinction between cultures
attached to the goods and places of production. While the characters'
concerns in the story are mainly cultural, we as readers who are
aware of the change of the local scene by the entrance of national or
multi-national forces won't fail to realize that the loss may also be
ecological. As Mick Smith points out, “The ‘globalization’ of modern-
ity means subsuming all difference, all ‘places,’ within an instrumen-
tal economy of the Same” (209). And the effect of such a reduction is
that “the geophysical environment is undergoing an alarming dimin-
ishing of its ‘depth of field’,” and this, in Paul Virilio's view, is
“degrading man's relationship with his environment” (22).
The sense of loss could be even more obvious with foods, since
they often relate to a set of special and unreproducible eating habits
and customs. But before we go on to blame economic globalization
for destroying the cultural tradition of places such as Jiqing Street
and Hubu Alley, we need to think about what we mean by the word
“tradition.” When we use the word to refer to the local culture of a
certain place, do we expect it to adhere forever to the place itself so as
to transcend the flow of time? The answer, as anyone who is aware of
the problem of cultural determinism, is surely “No.” In fact, all tradi-
tions, including those concerning the particular culture of a particular
place, however distinct that culture might be or isolated the place is,
 Local Foods, Public Markets 699

are exposed to changes. It is not difficult to imagine the countless

changes that a big metropolitan city such as Wuhan has gone
through in its long history of industrialization and urbanization. Take
the night food markets of Wuhan, for example. They first started
when bamboo beds were still common to see on summer nights. As
people often had their dinners outside around the beds, some placed
their cooking utensils by the bed and cooked right there. At first, it
was only for the family itself, but changes came when some began to
sell self-made dishes to passers-by. Soon it became a means of life for
many laid-off workers and the markets sprang up one after another
all over the city. Now there are about seventy such markets of
varying sizes in the city, of which Jiqing Street is the most widely
known.

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What we see in the above example is actually a case of an older
tradition being replaced by a new one; for whereas the former prac-
tice of sleeping out on the bamboo bed disappeared, the habit of
eating out at roadside restaurants has formed and taken root among
the locals. Observed from the perspective of localness, the local
culture seems to have suffered a loss when part of it represented by
the impressive array of bamboo beds disappeared. However, the fact
that the lively night markets where foods and eating have become
such a strong local feature as to be no less than that of what they
have replaced clearly shows the great potentialities of the local
culture for enriching itself in the course of continual changes.
So, how do we evaluate the recent changes of Jiqing Street and
Hubu Alley? Do we regard them as cases of the loss of localness or
transformation of traditional local culture? What are the losses and
gains in the process of change?
When Hubu Alley moves into supermarkets and begins to
produce standardized foods, it is perhaps not much different from
other fast food chains. The joy of having breakfast from a good
choice of separate stalls or bars in the familiar neighborhood, a joy
which Cook Wang in “Cold or Hot, Being Alive Is Good” has and
appreciates, is gone for many locals when roadside breakfast stalls
disappear for lack of competitiveness with the rapidly growing Hubu
Alley Culture Investment Co. Ltd. On the other hand, the multi-
located Hubu Alley makes the breakfast a quick and convenient
matter for those who prefer the efficiency of the service and the
comfort of the supermarket space. What happens here sounds like a
familiar story, a story that Smith relates in his book about how
modern roads make all life on the road “functional in the narrowest
sense” by reducing possibilities and routes (161). Here in the case of
the chain stores of Hubu Alley, what becomes functional is the eating
700 I S L E

of breakfast, changed from a once leisurely and quasi-social activity

to a mere stomach-filling business.
Luckily, this is not the whole story about Hubu Alley. At the same
time as the Hubu Alley Culture Investment Co. Ltd. keeps proliferat-
ing, the original Hubu Alley still remains where it has been for
decades, being changed through not only its improved sanitary con-
dition and better layout of the street, but also in an on-going expan-
sion of the market as more and more snack bars move in. Actually,
the Alley has become a sort of sanctuary for quite a number of “old
brands” of traditional Wuhan snacks. The significance of the “old
brands” to the local people is observable in Grandma Wang's account
of the famous snacks in “Cold or Hot, Being Alive Is Good,” where
each of the food names is attached to the name of a restaurant most

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famous for such food, such as “dou pi of Lao Tong Cheng” or “hot
and dry noodles of Cai Lin Ji” (Chi 13). In this combination of the
food with its best place of production, which together makes up the
particular brand, there is a strong sense of localness as well as of tra-
dition. But since the early 1990s, the old brands have gone through
great changes, some perishing and some thriving and expanding
their business by, for example, selling their manufactured products to
big restaurants and supermarkets. As the fame of Hubu Alley rises,
the old brands all gather together here for survival as well as for
retaining old traditions. Brands which have found more efficient pro-
duction methods and broader markets manage to keep their Hubu
branch as the last reserved place for the traditional or whatever is
“authentic,” which means that much of the process of food making
or cooking is still by hand. Besides, whereas the old luxury of going
to different and often scattered restaurants for the best possible foods
is no longer available as many of those restaurants have closed, there
appears in its place the new advantage of enjoying many different
kinds of traditional and handmade food in one location.
When it comes to Jiqing Street, the situation is rather different.
Due to the severe air and noise pollution that was never really
solved, the local government undertook a big project in 2009 to move
the whole street to a huge shopping mall, the construction of which
was finished at the end of 2011. As part of a modern business area,
the new Jiqing Street is expected by the local government to represent
both the traditional and the fashionable. Despite the fact that the new
street keeps some of the old companies that sell traditional snack
foods, the whole space lacks the kind of earthiness and casualness
that belongs to the original street, and most of the restaurants
provide expensive foods from other parts of the country or the world.
Because all the dining areas are placed indoors, the ambience is
 Local Foods, Public Markets 701

totally different. Moreover, while most of the performances are done

by professionals either on a raised stage in the open square or in the
newly constructed Jiqing Theatre, the amateur musicians who used
to entertain the diners by wandering from table to table are not
allowed to work in the new street. With all these notable transforma-
tions, the old Jin Qing Street seems destined to disappear, and what
disappears together with it is something unique, a part of the night-
life of Wuhan that seems doomed to extinction.
Compared with Hubu Alley, which is developing in two different
directions, toward cultural preservation and toward business effi-
ciency and profit, Jiqing Street is facing another, seemingly irresolv-
able dilemma: either we keep the old street and its environmental
problems, or we get rid of the problems along with the cultural tradi-

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tions attached to the place. The choice that the local government
made is a reluctant but understandable one. The government's choice
is quite different from Chi's choice, one she expresses through the
narrator of “Life Show.” However, if we understand Chi Li's general
position as a realistic one, then we may also see that, despite her
deep attachment to the local culture, she is able to realize the inevita-
ble change it has to go through and to respect the outcome as part of
a new reality.
As Doreen Massey first pointed out in Space, Place, and Gender and
Lawrence Buell emphasized again in The Future of Environmental
Criticism, “Local attachment . . . can express itself either as a vision of
ties to a particular bounded spot, or of how a metropolitan district
can be shaped and reshaped by global demographic and capital
flows and still maintain a distinct, albeit malleable, sense of place”
(Buell 77).
In other words, one shows a deep sense of place not only by
being faithful to the place and its traditions but also by seeing the
necessity of continuously adapting the place to changed situations.
Anything or any place in today's rapidly changing world can only
survive by finding a way between maintaining its own distinct fea-
tures and keeping up with the new developments of the surrounding
world. When Hubu Alley manages to achieve a balance between tra-
ditional local culture featured by small-scale handiwork and the
modern economy backed up with translocal marketing and mass pro-
duction, it may begin to move towards what is defined by Buell as
“sustainable development.”8
In some sense, Jiqing Street is also attempting a balance between
local traditions and imported fashions, being itself placed among a
postmodern multifunctional space of mixed styles. What makes it
differ from Hubu Alley, however, is that much of the local culture
702 I S L E

attached to the old street, especially its mundane features that are
considered vulgar by the fashionable young, seems destined to be
assimilated by the global culture that obviously dominates its present
space; and yet changes as such do not come abruptly or alone with
the newly constructed space. The novella “To and Fro” offers some
perspective here. When Kang Weiye and Shi Yupeng, a rich business
man and a beautiful girl, order dishes from Jiqing Street as they dine
in a luxurious international hotel, the episode provides a telling
example of how local food may come to a compromise with the
encompassing global culture. If one realizes that the part of Wuhan
where the old Jiqing Street was situated had been colonized by
Western powers between 1861 and 1927 and that many of the build-
ings from that period are now preserved as part of the city's history

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as well as tradition, one may arrive at a better evaluation of the “loss
of localness” involved in the reformation of Jiqing Street.
Is it possible to avoid being totally assimilated by the global
culture? Gary Snyder in his 1990 essay “Bioregional Perspectives”
seems to have seen a possibility in any effort that “seek[s] the balance
between cosmopolitan pluralism and deep local consciousness” (20).
Chi provides a somewhat different answer in her novella “Salute to
Endless Years.” When the female narrator, who is a famous middle-
aged doctor by the end of the story, takes her school-time friend to
her suburban house, she makes the point that it is an ordinary farm
house and that everything in it is plain and ordinary. Yet it is the only
place where she feels the pulse of life itself, or in her own words, “the
struggle of life” (553). To the narrator of the story, and presumably to
the writer as well (since the novella is often taken to be a rare case of
semi-autobiographical writing of Chi), living in a busy and noisy
metropolitan city at the turn of the twentieth century is not easy;
therefore, the narrator keeps going back to the kind of simple and
plain life which she grew up with in order to get enough energy to
move on. More importantly, it is a life rooted in the specific city of
Wuhan which she knows very well and attaches herself to. When
having an inner dialogue with her friend who tried to persuade her
to leave the “hateful” Wuhan and join him in some better place, the
narrator reflects:

I'm not a persuasive person…. But I trust my instinct.

I cannot live without whatever I instinctively need. This
is neither something that can be explained rationally,
nor something that bad weather and poor humanist
environment have power enough to stand against.
 Local Foods, Public Markets 703

The need of an individual life can defeat anything at

such critical moment! I trust it! (542–43)

The ecological implication of this attitude toward life shared by the

narrator of the story and the writer is worth attention. It is what Sale
thinks bioregionalism would require of people as individuals: to lib-
erate the self by taking off “the constraints on personal freedom and
choice from without” and by living closer to the land, the commun-
ity, the communitarian values, and all things that would help to
“enhance individual development” (47). So, when Chi proposes
through her character a simple life and a sincere love and gratitude
for the land, she is emphasizing the importance of keeping an inner
place for the traditional and the local amid all the changes, moves,

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and expansion of the surrounding world.
But if one is to conclude that Chi is all against modernization due
to her preference for a simple and traditional way of life, one would
be seriously wrong. In fact, Chi Li has expressed clearly elsewhere,
for example in her essay “Twenty-seven Topics about Wuhan,” her
hope for a modernized future of Wuhan. In saying that “Wuhan is
certainly changing, and I am confident about that,” Chi shows
herself to be expecting the city to catch up with the more developed
areas in China and to resume the leading position it once occupied
before the era of reform (165). Taking this alternate attitude of Chi
into consideration, we may come to a different interpretation of Yu
Kexun's remark about Chi Li's “willingness to follow the natural
way” (qtd. in Jia C03). The word “natural” refers not only to what is
allowed by the natural law but also to whatever is required by reality.
The remark, therefore, is an acknowledgment of the writer's ecologi-
cal consciousness as well as her inclination to do what life or reality
requires her to do, the latter of which is evident in her approving atti-
tude towards the mundane culture of Wuhan. Chi's attitude as
described in Yu's remark actually lends us a good perspective on the
compatibility between ecological concerns and cultural or economic
concerns, even though such concerns often appear to be irreconcil-
able with each other in the reality both inside and outside Chi's
works.
With her Wuhan novellas, Chi has inspired a great deal of
thought about the way we relate to the land we live in, to its environ-
ment and culture, and to its past and future. One conclusion we may
come to is that while we keep changing and developing in the
increasingly globalized world, we should always allow some space
for the traditional and the local because, by doing so, we are not only
704 I S L E

saving our individual freedom but also, and more importantly,

saving the planet by minimizing our impact on the earth.

NOTES

1. In writing the article, I have benefited enormously from suggestions by

Simon C. Estok, who read several versions of this paper at different stages of
its composition. I have also gotten valuable help from my assistant Liu Ya,
who provided me with abundant written materials and online information
on various topics relevant to this paper.
2. Wuhan is the center of industry, commerce, and education as well as
the largest city in central China.

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3. The combination of the narrator's and Shuangyang's viewpoints is
often achieved through the use of free indirect thought (FIT) in the story. The
following is a complete version of one of the above quotations in the sen-
tence, which exemplifies the use of FIT: “What can Lai Shuangyang say in
response to [her] younger sister's challenges? All of Lai Shuangyuan's chal-
lenges have only subjective ideas and no objective considerations. [She] has
had none of her questions really figured out in her mind, and yet [she] has a
strong desire to instruct others. [She is] such a trouble for Lai Shuangyang”
(Li 240).
4. It is a generally accepted view among Chinese critics that Chi Li has
entered a new stage of her writing career since the publication of the story
“Frustrating Life” in 1987. Her writings afterwards are seen to be marked
with a style that borders between realism and naturalism, which they
describe as “neo-realism.”
5. In summarizing the features of Jiqing Street as “cheap foods and flexi-
ble management” and in warning against the attempt to move the business
inside into a regular dining space, Mr. Yuan emphasized the importance of
keeping the local features in future reformation (http://www.cnhubei.com/aa/
ca148868.htm accessed on September 8, 2009).
6. The types and stages of pollution from packaging are summarized by
Zhiqiang Qiao (269).
7. The city of Wuhan composes three separate parts divided by Yangtze
River and its branch Han Shui, and Hankou used to be the business center
among the three.
8. Buell defines “sustainable development” as a way of “striking a
balance between ecological responsibility and economic interests” (162).

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