AHA Session 90
Chinese Historians in the United States 2
Chinese Historians in the United States 2
Friday, January 5, 2024: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Powell II (Parc 55, Third)
Chair:
Yiqun Zhou, Stanford University
Papers:
Comment:
Yiqun Zhou, Stanford University
Session Abstract
To drink/eat, or not to drink/eat, that is a question of great significance, because the consumption pattern crystalizes transcultural contacts and conflicts within different institutional environments in China, the United States, and Europe. Dan Du examines Americans’ consumption of Chinese tea from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Americans initially maintained the colonial habit of drinking black tea after their trade with China unfolded in 1784. However, nineteenth-century U.S. consumers cultivated a peculiar taste for Chinese green tea—particularly Young Hyson—Oolongs, and English Breakfast Tea. The British dominance in the black tea market for half a century prompted the shift in Americans’ preferences to green and Oolong teas, and the products from English colonies in Asia altered the ingredients of English Breakfast tea at the turn of the twentieth century. Therefore, the power dynamics between Americans and Britons in China still shaped the U.S. tea consumption after the American Revolution. Haoran Ni explores Chinese intellectuals’ changing perceptions of the U.S. drink, Coca-Cola, during the 1920s-1940s. Since the introduction of Coca-Cola into China around the second half of the nineteenth century, urban intellectuals regarded it as sanitary and healthy, because it was a machine-made beverage from America. However, after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s, the rise of nationalism led intellectuals to criticize the American drink as unclean and to promote sour plum soup, the hand-made domestic cold refreshment, as healthy, even though the sanitary inspection of sour plum soup conflicted with their fantasy of hand-made nationalistic drinks. The cleanliness of the beverages, thus, was conditioned by their national identities and the political environment in China. Bridging the Chinese and Western cultural borders, Meng Zhang’s research unpacks the Chinese and Europeans’ simultaneous encounter with, but divergent interpretations of, edible bird’s nests in the early modern era. Made from the hardened saliva of a rare species of cave-nesting swiftlets in Southeast Asia, edible bird’s nests were a Chinese delicacy, a signifier of wealth and cultural sophistication in China, and a symbol of the “Chinese” taste in global imagination. However, Europeans viewed it simply as a commodity for their intra-Asian trade with no essential value and a representation of the unscrupulous stomach, and morality, of the Chinese. Hence, the social act of eating (and not eating) illuminates the construction of cultural hierarchies within and across boundaries. Shifting from the global to the local context, Dewen Zhang explains how rice wine brewed cultural communications and gender distinctions within Hakka lineage communities during the twentieth century. Among the Hakkas in western Fujian, rice wine was used in ceremonial and ritual occasions, other than an alcoholic beverage for social gatherings. Moreover, Hakka women and men played distinctive roles in their rice wine culture and their communities. Women make and prepare wine, while men dominate the ceremonies and interpret Hakka lineage rituals. The ever-evolving rice wine culture reconfigured and reconfirmed Hakka’s gender roles, thus reconstructing the lineage community along with regional and national political, social and economic transformations.
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