Diasporic foodways and intersectionality in Chenta Tsai Tseng’s Arroz tres delicias

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Chenta Tsai Tseng engages with Chinese diasporic foodways to construct their identity as a racialized migrant subject. Tsai’s memoir, Arroz tres delicias, uses the iconic Chinese dish as a metaphor for those who have had to survive by being creative, versatile and adaptable in limiting and oppressive diasporic conditions. Tsai also delves into how the popular dish was improvised rather than replicating a traditional recipe, providing a strategy to disidentify with and challenge Asian stereotypes. Tsai notes that Chinese culinary references are often used to racialize this minority community, whether to provoke social anxiety against them or to fetishize them. In the memoir, Tsai’s reflections on their own experience of romantic relationships corroborates how their Asian race conditions their sexual objectification, which makes their identity intersectional. Tsai shifts the debate regarding the identity of Spaniards of Chinese descent from nation-states to transnational alliances, and from binaries to infinite, situational potentials. In contrast, Chinese Spanish cultural productions before Tsai, including Susana Ye’s documentary Chiñoles y bananas and Quan Zhou Wu’s graphic novel Gazpacho agridulce, have defied the Spanish xenophobia and discrimination against Asians by emphasizing the cultural differences between generations. Tsai’s turn to intersectionality opens up the possibility of envisioning identity through an alternative history and a sense of belonging. At the same time, it presents a model for antiracist activism in solidarity with other oppressed groups. Both as a theory and praxis, intersectionality underpins ethical and affective affiliations in Tsai’s identity, art and activism.

KEYWORDS:

• Chenta Tsai Tseng
• Arroz tres delicias
• intersectionality
• diasporic foodways
• chiñoles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Several scholars, including Beltrán Antolín (2016), Donovan (2017a, 2017b), Collado (2020) and Nieto (2007), have written about anti-Chinese sentiments in Spain, rooted in cultural and economic anxieties. As Senra (2021) indicates, more blatant racist media representations against the Chinese surfaced in the first few months after the 2019 coronavirus outbreak. The frequent references to the pandemic and contagion and the metaphors of disease associated with the Chinese have spurred Spanish artists and educators of Chinese descent like Chenta Tsai, Quan Zhou Wu and Antonio Liu Yang to respond through their activism.

2 Shaowei, one of the interviewees, defines the term as referring to Spanish-born Chinese who have not been to China. But as the film progresses, other Chinese interviewees widen its definition by sharing their sentiments about feeling they exist in between Spanish and Chinese cultures, being bicultural or a “chino banana” that is “amarillo por fuera y blanco por dentro”. The documentary includes cases of Chinese-born Spaniards who migrated as children, making the category ambivalent.

3 To reflect Tsai’s nonbinary identity, I use they/them pronouns throughout the article.

4 In Orientalism (1978), Said saw the East as an ideological fabrication of the West. In Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms, Lowe adds more details to Said’s theorization by examining how the representation of the East as barbaric in eighteenth-century travel narratives served to legitimize “the European world as knowing, stable, and powerful” (1991, 30).

5 Tsai points out that many children’s songs like “Chinita de amol”, “El chinito Chun-Chun-Fa” and “Soy el chino capuchino” have racialized the Chinese by mocking their accents.

6 For more details, see Soennichsen (2011).

7 The need for an intersectional alliance is an idea Tsai touches upon in chapter 10, “Has nacido para esto”, when they demystify how Asians came to be seen as a model minority. They note that this social discourse emerged in the US to divide minority groups during the Civil Rights Movement (2019, 63–64).

8 This echoes Crenshaw’s explanation of intersectionality as a mediating force between recognition of differences and political urgencies: “Yet intersectionality might be more broadly useful as a way of mediating the tension between assertions of multiple identities and the ongoing necessity of group politics” (1991, 1296).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yeon-Soo Kim

Yeon-Soo Kim is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, where she teaches courses on contemporary Iberian literature and culture. Her research interests include diaspora, social movements and food studies. She is the author of The Family Album: Histories, Subjectivities, and Immigration in Contemporary Spanish Culture and has coedited a special section on “Claiming a Space for Spanish Asian Studies” in the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a book project on Asian Spanish artists’ antiracist strategies. Email: [email protected]