Food, Family and Chineseness: Finding Belonging in Carrianne Leung’s The Wondrous Woo

Abstract

“Straddling what they often describe as two cultures,” second generation and 1.5 generation children of Chinese immigrants report feeling “never fully at home” in Canada (Kobayashi and Preston 236). Disconnected from their Chinese roots and rejected by the Canadian majority population, the Woo children struggle with this feeling of in-betweenness in the novel The Wondrous Woo. Carrianne Leung constructs a narrative of finding belonging through the different dishes that the Woo family creates, consumes, and encounters. Looking at food as a cultural marker and as a means of establishing identity and community, this presentation will examine the Woo children’s attempts to feel at home, including trying to efface their Chineseness to fit in to dominant Canadian society. From Ba’s summer barbeques to Miramar’s cooking when attending the University of Ottawa, the novel criticizes this problematic process of achieving belonging through assimilation. Instead, the narrative arrives at the solution of family and togetherness: the Chinese-Canadian diasporic community must establish its own place by reconnecting with Chinese culture, and “in food lies this hope” (Leung 97).