Consuming the Nation: Food, Drink, and Diaspora in the American Missionary Memoir

Abstract

Scholars have long recognised the centrality of food in diasporic writing. As tangible symbols of belonging, dishes, drinks, and sundries serve to link the past to the present, bringing displaced communities into communion with homelands (both real and imagined) through the rituals of preparation and consumption. But while these ‘powerful semiotic devices,’ as Arjun Appadurai describes them, often function as sites of perceived continuity with historical forebears, they also expose anxieties of difference as changing appetites become representative of the estrangement that lies at the heart of the diasporic experience. In this paper, I examine the connection between food and diasporic American identity in two memoirs written by the former missionary and academic John Jenkins Espey (1913-2000). Born to Presbyterian missionaries based in pre-communist Shanghai, Espey’s first tastes of America were literal ones; and as he narrates in Minor Heresies (1945) and Strong Drink, Strong Language (1990), American fare assumes an almost mythic stature in his childhood imagination as a metonym for the “home” he has never seen. At the same time, the exoticism with which this food is portrayed marks his alienation from American tastes and ways of living, embodying the tensions between diasporic and mother cultures that underwrote missionary childhoods throughout the vast expanse of the American evangelist enterprise in the early twentieth century. Thus, by exploring these linkages between food and the youthful narrative self, this paper contributes to a wider discussion about the experiences of children as conflicted agents of American imperialism in East Asia.