Food and body as markers of identity in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet

Abstract

Timothy Mo's Sour Sweet is a novel about an immigrant Cantonese family who run a food counler in England. Their food and body become the markers of their immigrant identity that moves away from the national identity that they are expected to represent. The food they serve in their food counter becomes not only a means of financial well-being but also a means of cultural communication, translation and transformation. The gentle traditional body of a Chinese lady functions as the centre of sexual attention because of its form outside her own cultural constructs. Therefore, food and body in Sour Sweet are equally represented as the subjects that determine the cultural identity of immigrants. Culture identity is a constructed phenomenon by the transformed ingredients of food and un-traditional body of the female protagonist of the story in Sour Sweet. Thus, this paper attempts to analyse in terms of its uses of the concepts of food and body as the notions ihat consruct cultural identity of the immigrants. It wilt also question whether or not the cuitural identity turns into a oommodity in a globalized setting.