Reinventing the Traditional Guangzhou Teahouse: Caterers
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Reinventing the Traditional Guangzhou Teahouse: Caterers, Customers and Cooks in Post-Socialist Urban South China Jakob Akiba Klein School of Oriental and African Studies University of London Ph.D. Social Anthropology 2004 ProQuest Number: 10673050 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10673050 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 4 8 1 0 6 - 1346 ABSTRACT This thesis, based on ten months of field research and archival studies in Guangzhou (Canton), centres on an ethnographic portrait of a 120-year old teahouse, a state enterprise which combines the functions of teahouse and restaurant in a single establishment with the help of 180 staff. I approach the teahouse as a complex, shifting social space embedded in wider discourses and historical processes, and use the ethnographic portrait as a basis for exploration into several themes in the anthropology of urban China. The first chapter provides an historical background and deals with the rise, fall and revival of teahouse culture in the changing uses of urban space in the twentieth century. Chapter two discusses sociability among teahouse regulars, and explores the teahouse as a site for the forging of social ties and the negotiation of class, neighbourhood and gender identities. In chapter three I examine the role of the state sector of the catering industry in recent discourses of nostalgia and tradition. The fourth chapter reveals the shifting nature of Cantonese cuisine within the contexts of globalisation and discourses of modernity. Chapter five considers the significance of gender, native place and age for structuring opportunities in the teahouse workforce. Chapter six looks at cooks' reactions to the ongoing reforms of the state enterprise, and situates these within the contexts of kitchen work and cooks' occupational identities. The underlying argument in the thesis is that social identifications and cultural discourses in contemporary urban China must be understood not only as grounded in the present, but also within complex histories of continuities, ruptures and reinventions. In particular, I argue that there is scope for rethinking Maoism as being not only destructive but also productive of cultural traditions. 2 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1. Teahouse culture in twentieth-century Guangzhou 15 Chapter 2. Fashioning the teahouse: cohesion and difference among customers at the Glorious China 50 Chapter 3. Culinary nostalgia, tradition and the catering trade 84 Chapter 4. Rewriting the Cantonese menu: Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Cantonese nouvelie cuisine 125 Chapter 5. Gender, native place and the teahouse workforce 158 Chapter 6. The "nucleus of the restaurant": cooks at the Glorious China 182 Conclusion 210 Notes 214 Bibliography 226 3 List of illustrations: Figure 1. Teahouse gangsters 22 Figure 2. The Glorious China in 1999 55 Figure 3. The entrance hall at Chinese New Year 58 Figure 4. An antique-style snackshop 116 Figure 5. Traditional snacks 120 Figure 6. General Manager Cui draws the winning number 175 Figure 7. The author with A-Hui, one of the cleaners 175 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would particularly like to thank the following people: Managers, staff and customers at the Glorious China; my two host families in Guangzhou: Bao Guangrong, Lu Shanwei and Bao Kaidi, and David and Susan Wall; my supervisors, Kevin Latham and Stuart Thompson; my wife, Maria af Sandeberg. The writing of this thesis has been partially supported by a "fees only" Research Studentship from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). 5 INTRODUCTION This thesis is an ethnographic portrait of the Glorious China, a 120-year old teahouse in one of the older parts of Guangzhou (Canton), a city of over six million inhabitants in southern China. While Guangzhou was replete with teahouses and other similar establishments, the Glorious China was special in that it was one of the oldest and in that it was one of only around twenty state-run teahouses remaining in the city. "Teahouse" is perhaps a confusing term. Unlike in most parts of China, Cantonese teahouses ( chalou) were more or less indistinguishable from many large "restaurants" (jiulou). Both tended to serve meals with rice and dishes at midday and in the evening, and tea with snacks (dimsum) in the mornings, afternoons and evenings. The Glorious China was multistoried and could serve up to 600 customers. Though certainly not a small teahouse by local standards, it was far from being one of the biggest. Going out to a teahouse or restaurant for tea and dimsum was locally known as yamchah (Mandarin: yincha), literally "to drink tea". This extremely popular form of consumption and social interaction in the Cantonese speaking world (and nowadays even beyond) has rarely been the focus of anthropological research, and never on Mainland China. (One notable exception is the work of Siumi Maria Tam , who has studied yamchah as a locus for the construction of cultural identities in Hong Kong (1997) and among Hong Kong immigrants in Australia (2002).) While preparing for fieldwork, yamchah had seemed to me to be an excellent medium for studying sociability and consumption in Mainland China. Research was to focus on the relationship between consumption practices in teahouses and wider social categories and distinctions. (This theme has remained important 6 in the thesis, particularly in chapters one and two.) After arriving in Guangzhou I was given the opportunity to do research inside an establishment (see below, p. 10), and decided then that I would also try to look into the role of cooks as producers of culinary culture. On my first visit to the Glorious China I was accompanied by my friend and host in Guangzhou (Canton), Mr. Bao, and his former middle school classmate, Mr. Yu, who was now an official at the Liwan District Association of Industry and Commerce ( Liwan Qu Gongshangye Lianhehui). Mr. Yu had been instrumental in setting up my research at the teahouse. While we were walking from his office to the teahouse, Mr. Yu explained to me that he had contacted the most “traditional” ( chuantong) establishments in Liwan, those which had been founded before 1949 and therefore classified by the state as “old names in business” ( laozihao ). Liwan District, he pointed out, was particularly famous for its “old names teahouses”, and since these were the “most representative" (zui you daibiaoxing) of Guangzhou’s “food culture” (yinshi wenhua), he had felt that they would be the most suitable for my research. It struck me later on that I had never mentioned anything to him about wanting to study Guangzhou's "food culture", let alone the most "traditional" and "representative" teahouses. Instead, in the research proposal I had sent to him I had outlined a sociological study of restaurant work. I had assumed that this kind of research would seem most acceptable and sensible to the local bureaucratic gatekeepers. Mr. Yu's assumptions were revealing in themselves. Clearly, teahouses in Guangzhou were in many ways preinterpreted for me. They were already implicated in discourses which defined "the teahouse" as a site of tradition and articulated this tradition with specific localities (the district and the city). An ethnographic study of teahouses in Guangzhou would have to take these discourses into account. 7 Indeed, Guangzhou's teahouses, and in particular the practice of yamchah, were frequently articulated with ideas of Guangzhou and "Cantoneseness". For example, the local Guangzhou food writer, Shen Hongfei (2000), insists that yamchah is at the very centre of “Cantonese people's identities” (Guangdongren de shen fen rentong), because the teahouse plays such a vital role in their social networks. He writes: A person is the sum total of his social relations; the social relations of a Cantonese are summed up inside a teapot, brewed with boiling water and sealed with a lid (Shen 2000: 220). Another example is from a sociological survey of the city written in the 1980s: For Guangzhou people, morning tea, popularly called 'a bowl of tea and two snacks' (yi zhong Hang jian) or 'savouring tea' (C. taamchah), is a way of enjoying life. Rich in local colour, it is one of the main distinguishing characteristics of the Guangzhou people's lifestyle (Deng 1988: 186). What is perhaps most striking about these accounts is their timeless nature, the way they conveniently forget the Maoist years, a time when, as one elderly acquaintance in the city put it to me, "there was not much teahouse culture to speak of." How could teahouse going be so readily defined as something "traditional"? Was this a traditional cultural form that had simply survived the Mao years (Potter and Potter 1990: 251-269)? Or was teahouse culture being reinvented or "recycled" (Siu 1989; 1990) in response to changing social and political circumstances? Was there in fact scope for both continuity and reinvention here? These questions are central to the thesis, 8 and are discussed at greater length in chapters one, three and four. However, "tradition" was only one of many abstract concepts that were articulated within the teahouse. In the thesis I approach the teahouse as a complex, shifting social space embedded in several wider discourses and historical processes. Each of the six substantive chapters in the thesis contributes to my ethnographic construction of the teahouse from specific thematic and theoretical perspectives, and each deals with a specific theme or themes in the anthropology of urban China.