Research Paper Question with Food and Eating

Floating food: Eating ‘Asia’ in kitchens of the diaspora

Jean Duruz*

School of Communication, International Studies and Languages, University of South Australia, GPO 2471, Adelaide SA 5001, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

Article history: Received 2 March 2009 Received in revised form 17 August 2009 Accepted 18 August 2009

Keywords: Food Memory Identity Transnational Cosmopolitan Place-making Asia

a b s t r a c t

This article borrows fragments of memory to chart a drifting course towards an imagined ‘other’ of ‘Asia’, produced and consumed in the kitchens of the west and available for diasporic digestion. Specifically, the argument focuses on micro-narratives of ‘Asian’ food, with these emerging here during an interview on food and transnationalism, conducted while the interviewer and household members eat together in the intimacy of a North London kitchen. Specifically, the analysis reflects on these narratives, tracing some of their curious and disturbing nuances. The ‘oddness’ of such stories (identity’s capacity to ‘float’ while ‘grounded’), in turn, is used to question the figure of the consuming cosmopolitan (and its necessary ‘other’) that haunts cultural and culinary analyses. Meanwhile, everyday practices of ‘eating back’ at ‘Asia’ in order to feel ‘at home’ become resonant resources not only for identity’s place-making but also for imagining a different politics of eating. Furthermore, the narrative richness of everyday interactions between strangers and familiars in the kitchen points to less usual, and perhaps more productive, ways of understanding the complexities of diasporic place-making.

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1. London, winter, 2000

This is the worst English winter I can rememberdtrain derailments, floods, a weak Australian dollar; threats of BSE, foot and mouth, salmonella. Eating in Indian or Turkish restaurants to escape the less palatable aspects of English cooking, I’m still homesick for familiar smells and sounds of cooking, for the taste of hokkien noodles and steamed dumplings.

2. Sydney, summer, 1960

We eat at Chopsticks Chinese Restaurant on Sydney’s North Shore. Here, as an extended family, we can celebrate special occa- sions quite cheaply, though with the sense of abundance that a banquet offers. Fortunately, there are knives and forks on hand. The food is delicious – much more ‘‘exotic’’ than the usual Sunday roast, though the presence of sweet-and-sour pork and fried rice is always reassuring.

3. Adelaide, South Australia, probably autumn, and probably early 1980s

After a union meeting, lunch at the Asian Gourmet in the Central Market. We all choose the Straits Chinese dish, laksa. I have never

tasted it before – the heat of chilli, the crunchiness of bean sprouts and the softness of the bean curd and coconut milk. I struggle with chopsticks and stain the front of my dress. It is a moment of epiphany.

This article is concerned with fragments of memory. Beginning with a few of my own above, the article charts a drifting course towards an imagined ‘‘other’’ of ‘‘Asia.’’ This is a culinary land- scape produced and consumed in the kitchens of the west and available for diasporic and touristic digestion. The personal narrative threading through these fragments is one shaped by movement through time, through space, and by multiple posi- tions for remembering. As well, in its cultural politics, this is a narrative that embodies both a sense of curiosity for the unfamiliardunusual tastes and texturesdand traces of yearning for the homelydfor the comforting reassurance of close rela- tionships and familiar spaces. As such, it meshes well with cultural anthropologist Jeannie Martin’s account of her fascina- tion, in the 1950s, with a local Chinese restaurant in her home- town of Wellington, New Zealand. Commenting on her furtive patrol of the restaurant as a twelve-year-old’s initiation into difference, Martin (1998: 228) concludes:

Orientalist perhaps, but it did push me to the limits of my world, allow me to reflect on the enormous variability of human culture, the relativity of my own, the undecideability of meaning, and the oddness of human condition so richly captured in the symbolic layering of food practices (1998: 228).

* Tel.: !61 8 8302 4492; fax: !61 2 8302 4745. E-mail address: [email protected]

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Emotion, Space and Society 3 (2010) 45–49

My article intends to continue with the project that Martin eloquently has begun here, described by her as using ‘‘otherness to work through my own cultural position’’ (228; see also Huggan, 2001: 32). Here, awareness of ‘‘oddness’’ and reflections on differ- ence together become means of disruptiondreverberations of the unexpected in everyday practices as speculative ways of ‘‘answering back’’ dominant theoretical and political assumptions.

Specifically, I want to focus on narratives of the ‘‘taste’’ of ‘‘home’’, told by a British, university educated student in the com- forting familiarity of his collective household’s kitchen in North London, and to reflect on their disturbing nuances (Highmore, 2002: 1–16). And, in the process, I hope to question the mythic figure of the cosmopolitan (and its necessary ‘‘other’’) haunting these culinary landscapesdto give these ghostly figures themselves a scare (Duruz, 1999: 309–310; Hage, 1997: 118). In other words, I want to question assumptions (both popular and scholarly) in which the ‘‘cosmopolitan’’ and ‘‘migrant’’ are positioned as fixed, opposing categories. I also want to unravel the potential of intimate exchanges for doing thisdeven between people with less familiar, more casual, acquaintanceship.

4. Exchanging beans for otak-otak

At the time of our kitchen conversation, British-born James Maitland is in his early twenties.1 Describing himself as middle- class, James works as a planner with a local environmental agency, and shares a flat in North London with Eda, a design student from Istanbul, and Henri, a French-born friend from university days. As Eda prepares a meal for us all, James declares himself to be a lazy and indifferent cook. His narrative of cooking arrangements in households when he ‘‘shared with . a bunch of blokes’’ is the stuff of legend: this is domesticity of expedience, structured by a ready supply of English or American-style convenience foods, or, in James’ words, ‘‘we’d usually . stick a pizza in the oven for our individual selves or, you know, make some beans on toast or something ridiculous like that (Transcript, 5; see also 3, 8).’’

These ‘‘ridiculous’’ attempts at cooking are hardly surprising, given trends in using semi-prepared foods or in eating out (Ashley et al., 2004: 134; Duruz, 2001: 23; Warde and Martens, 2000: 40– 41, 83–84). We could also speculate that these heat-and-eat culinary moments are the direct inheritance of James’ time in university halls of residence when, he remembers, it was ‘‘full-on British food every day . fried foods . like a mass-produced sort of stuff (Transcript, 28).’’ Perhaps, this is the myth of ‘‘bad’’ British food, endlessly recycled, though one that is not without foundation in everyday life? After all, this is the ‘‘flavourless stodge’’ which Roger Scruton (2000: 51), in his elegy to a disappearing England, claims is at the very heart of Englishness. Emerging from traditions of puritanism and repression, ‘‘English’’ food, according to Scruton, was ritually ‘‘served up in all those institutionsdpublic schools, Oxford and Cambridge colleges, gentlemen’s clubsdwhich had the reproduction of Englishness as their tacit goal (51).’’ More recently, Nigel Slater (2007: 3), in his paean to English food, says of the much-loved stew as a national dish: ‘[o]urs is the unmistakable air of culinary poverty. . Ours is the colour of washing-up water and smells of old people.’’ However, just as we are settling into forms of ritual storytelling of ‘‘blokes’’ in the kitchen ‘‘sticking’’ beans in

a pot or pizza in the oven, and perhaps sighing for the ‘‘nursery food’’ of childhood, memories of otak-otak intrude.

James’ parents now live in Singapore. Charting a map of remembered culinary pleasures associated with ‘‘Asia’’ (and imagined ones attached to future visits), James says:

[T]here’s a local dish out there which is a Malay dish called otak- otak and it’s a sort of omeletty kind of mixture of onion, eggs, any sort of seafood they can find and it’s all chucked in there and sort of pan fried and stuff . and it’s actually wonderful. . And I often get it when I go out there and you just can’t get it anywhere else. Jean: Yes, yes. So it’s kind of a particular taste that . James: Absolutely. [They e]ven use different oil to over here. .You just couldn’t reproduce it over here I don’t think (Tran- script, 28).

Through such remembering, James’ kitchen identity should be recast from British ‘‘bloke’’ to global traveller: sophisticated, knowledgeable, at ease with the ‘‘exotic.’’ Although traces of that ‘‘bloke’’ intrude in his cooking instructions, James speaks with the authority of having been ‘‘out there’’ on a regular basis, and having developed a degree of expertise in describing Singaporean food and its ingredients. At the same time, back in London, remembering and relishing the distinctive flavours of otak-otak, James is well aware of the value of this dish as an exclusive commodity. ‘‘You just can’t get it anywhere else . You just couldn’t reproduce it over here’’ becomes his mantra for re-inscribing ‘‘Singapore’’, for his audience, as a culinary imaginary of the unusual, the ‘‘different.’’

So, while the re-appearance of otak-otak from ‘‘out there’’ of expatriate belongings complicates Britishness and ‘‘blokey’’ mas- culinity, simultaneously, these fragments of memory reproduce the disquieting figure of the nostalgic cosmopolitan. Here, we could speculate that the virtual absence of ‘‘proper’’ otak-otak in Britain provides a classic example of Bourdieu’s ‘‘distinction’’: consump- tion of particular goods, positioned in symbolic hierarchies of worth, shapes the identities of their consuming class fractions, ‘‘distinguishing’’ these identities from those of other class groups. These material processes of differentiation (‘‘distinction’’) then become a measure of ‘‘taste, (Thomas, 2000: 201–217)’’ or in Bourdieu’s own words in relation to food: ‘‘Taste, a class culture turned into nature, that is, embodied, helps to shape the class body (1986: 190, original emphasis).’’

Otak-otak, a ubiquitous presence in Singapore’s hawker food, has now become a lamented absence in central London for the classed (also read gendered, ethnicised) body of the ‘‘Anglo’- cosmopolitan eating subject (Hage, 1997: 118).’’ At the same time, such nostalgic remembering, with its storehouse of differentiating experiences and knowledges, actually produces this subject. Or, perhaps, drifting in a slightly different (but complementary) theoretical direction, we could see James’ quest for otak-otak as an example of consumer cannibalismda desire to literally consume difference through appropriating others’ food and traditions as ‘‘exotic’’ (Cook et al., 1999: 230–231; Hage, 1997: 139–146; Huntley, 2008: 122–123; Probyn, 2000: 82)? This, according to bell hooks (1992: 21; see also 31), is a form of symbolic consumption in which ethnicity, losing its own legitimacy, simply ‘‘becomes spice . [for] mainstream white culture.’’ Furthermore, argues Heldke (2003: 9), drawing on bell hooks to map the food adventurer’s ‘‘quest for novelty,’’ we need to be critical of the ‘‘absoluteness with which Euroamerican adventurers presume our right to explore whatever we want, and the concomitant belief that others have no legitimate right to deny our access (59, original emphasis).’’

For such adventuring, however, it is not the case that any spice will do. Mandy Thomas (2000: 201–213) (drawing principally on Bourdieu’s work on ‘‘distinction,’’ but also substantially on Hage’s

1 All quotations attributed to James are from the transcript of an interview conducted by the author with James and other members of his household in late 2000. To preserve confidentiality, real names of those interviewed have not been used here. The interview forms part of an ethnographic project on food, Britishness, Anglo-celtic identity and multiculturalism in Haringey, London and Newtown, Sydney. The project was supported by funding from the University of South Australia. Interview transcripts are in the author’s possession.

J. Duruz / Emotion, Space and Society 3 (2010) 45–4946

analysis of ‘‘cosmo-multiculturalism’’) (Bourdieu, 1986; Hage, 1997: 118–134) examines the circulation of Asian-produced goods in Australiadthe ‘‘stylish’’ take-up of ‘‘Asian’’ food, homewares, fashion and very specific, class-based forms of popular culture (such as art house films, Japanese anime). In Thomas’ analysis, ‘‘Asian’’ is emptied of its specificities to become homogenised, decontextualisedda discourse signifying sophistication, a cosmo- politan house style. Thomas concludes: ‘‘Rather than being involved with Australia in an entanglement which expresses an interruptive hybridity, Asia is continually viewed as an object of consumption (217).’’

So returning to James (happily eating his dinner, prepared by Eda), we might simply cast him as a nostalgic cosmopolitan. However, there is something that still nags in his memories of otak- otak. A comment from food writer and radio journalist, Alan Saunders might be helpful here. Saunders, British-born but a long- term resident of Australia, says: ‘‘for me, comfort food is fish and chips when I’m feeling English and congee when I’m feeling cosmopolitan (Saunders, 2001: 57; see also Duruz, 2001: 24–27; Probyn, 2000: 24–25).’’ So, for Saunders, comfort and nostalgia for ‘‘homely’’ foods are aligned, while congee is the code for their oppositedthat ‘‘other,’’ more adventurous self. For James, on the other hand, the comfort/cosmopolitan identity divide is not such a sharp one and, contradictorily, meanings of otak-otak can drift between those of the ‘‘homely’’ and of the ‘‘exotic.’’

Otak-otak is indeed an ‘‘entangled object’’ (Crang, 1996 cited in Law, 2001: 276). Its nuances of class, ethnicity, gender and sensory embodiment produce a memorable moment for identity, of ‘‘floating’’ and dreaming, of entanglement and constraintda moment shaped by specific convergences of power in time and place. Here, the identity of the consuming cosmopolitan cannot simply be placed in opposition to that of the ‘‘authentic’’ figure from ‘‘lived’’ migrant cultures. Although James’ mantra of ‘‘just can’t get it anywhere else’’ re-makes otak-otak as symbol of ‘‘style,’’ this mantra also echoes a complicated personal geography of belonging that includes movement, memory, sensory inhabitance, dreaming and loss . as well as undeniable structures of privilege. The position James occupies is a much more ambivalent one than we originally might have assumed. And in these spaces of the ‘‘third space’’ and ‘‘in-between’’ (Bhabha, 1990: 211; McDowell, 1999: 215) that complicate such binaries as ‘‘homely’’/‘‘exotic,’’ ‘‘style’’/ ’’embodiment,’’ ‘‘British’’/’’Asian,’’ it is possible to glimpse shades of identity’s mobility and potential for multiple place attachments – indeed, multiple meanings of, and shifting locations for, ‘‘home’’ (Massey, 1994: 167–172). And in those moments of intimate storytelling too (or, at least, hospitable moments of eating together and convivial conversation), it is possible to trace the power of food for imagining different ways of living. In James’ longing for his ‘‘Asian’’ home we see the power of food to cross boundaries, and to carry with it narratives of the modern self – meanings of complex, hybridized belongings. We also find that in James’ yearning (posi- tioned against normative intimations of masculinity, Britishness and cosmopolitanism) the intimate stories and identities of the ‘‘real’’ are more complex than their mythic figurings allow.

5. The smell of cooking everywhere

Although born in Britain, James spent his childhood and adolescence in Hong Kong, returning to England only when he became a university student. His memories, then, are laced by a double diaspora of sortsdmemories of that ex-patriate British child growing up in pre-handover Hong Kong, together with the longings of a re-patriated British adult, nostalgic for the tastes and smells of his (in some ways, irretrievable) ‘‘Asian’’ past:

Jean: [W]hat kind of cooking smell would you associate with home? James: The smell of . outdoor cooking on sort of hawker stores that you get in Asia. .You smell the peanut oil . [in] the streets, whereas most of it over here [in England] is based in the kitchens, inside restaurants, you know . I notice even just walking down the streets [there] you can smell cooking everywhere. Jean: Yeah. James: And I’ve also noticed in these flats . here have a lot of sort of Asian cooking [smells coming] . out of the windows and ventilation . So it’s always a nice smell when I come down the stairs (Transcript, 29–30).

Drawing on Appadurai (1996: 48–52), we notice that, here, the ethnoscapes of ‘‘home’’ are thick with remembered aromas of peanut oil and hawker food. However, for James, these aromas unexpectedly re-appear in the here and now, as products of dia- sporic/migrants’ kitchens. Subversively, these ‘‘nice smells’’ permeate the very structures of buildings and the air itself, intro- ducing to the seemingly less homely, more sanitised streets of North London (Edensor, 1998: 215), sensory traces of ‘‘other’’ cooking, with ‘‘Asia’’ as its culinary imaginary.

Much has been written about these sensory landscapes of ‘‘home’’dbodily inscriptions of food, memory, imagination, place, attachment, movement and identity (Choo, 2004; Hage, 1997: 104–111; Law, 2001: 273–274, 276, 280–281; Sutton, 2001: 91–101; Thomas, 1999: 53–54, 61–62). Another significant reference point for our argument is writing with a focus on images of ghosts and their haunting, not only in ‘real’ places but in worlds of memory, emotion and virtuality (Buse and Stott, 1998: 14; de Certeau, 1984: 108; Wilken, 2007: 54–57). Images of ghosts and of ghostly traces are useful ways for conceptualizing people’s remembering – the piecing together of fragmentary recollections from everyday life; the layering of meanings associated with past and present experi- ences, and dreams for the future. All of this literature has much to offer when we are examining the imaginative processes of place- making. Lisa Law’s (2001: 273,274) analysis of the weekly ritual of Filipino domestic workers meeting together in Central, Hong Kong and of so-called Little Manila’s ‘‘olfactory politics,’’ for example, has obvious parallels with Hong Kong as a waft of hot peanut oil on a North London stairwell.

‘‘Home’’ then, for James, is not the Britain of ex-patriate dreaming, but rather the reversedthe ‘‘Asia’’ of ex-patriate belonging. Perhaps, this is simply to re-visit that territory of colo- nial encounters, where the ‘‘other’’ is served up anew for the col- oniser’s nostalgic ingestion? However, James’ account refuses to slide neatly into such arguments. Instead, the belongingness of embodied remembering, with its geographies of tastes, smells, colours and textures (however privileged this landscape is, and dogged by the ambivalences of colonialism) ‘‘answers back,’’ chal- lenging the sharp outlines of the powerful, consuming ‘‘self’’ and the appropriated, consumed ‘‘other’’ through the instabilities inherent in both of these identities.

‘‘Home’’ then becomes a moveable feast. If Hong Kong can be smelt in the streets of London, stories of travel and migration stories have strong possibilities for happy endingsdfor re-writing ‘‘home’’ on new countries, across oceans; for drawing fresh nuances from ‘‘alien’’ landscapes as resources for memory and dreaming. Furthermore, if we accept Linda McDowell’s argument (1999: 215), in which all identities are ‘‘a fluid amalgam of memories of places and origins,’’ the landscape of the ‘‘in-between’’ of hybriditydis the domain of everyone, along with its resources for creative place- making. This becomes no longer a story of migration and settle- ment, diaspora and dispersal. It is a story for everyday life itself. And

J. Duruz / Emotion, Space and Society 3 (2010) 45–49 47

central to this story is food and its travels – a waft of peanut oil, a first taste of laksa – as an imaginary of exchange within and between cultures, as a challenge (however partial, imperfect) to the rigidity of boundaries and the fixity of identities (Duruz, 2007).

6. Mobile food

In Clara Law’s film, Floating Life (Ikin and Law, 1996), first daughter Yen, living in Germany with her German husband and German-speaking daughter says, ‘‘Where is my home? I only know that my roots are with my parents.’’ Meanwhile, Yen’s parents, prompted by the Hong Kong handover, have moved with their two younger sons to Australia, joining second daughter Bing and her husband in western Sydney. Perhaps this seems like a typical migration narrative, with the Chan family’s efforts at home-making in a new country a triumph for multiculturalist discourse and policy? Of course, it is more complicated than this.

Discussing the film, Clara Law comments:

[E]verywhere I went, the question remained the same: is my identity about where I’m from or where I might some day find I belong? . Floating Life . [is] addressed to the state of the human condition nowadays. Alienation and dislocation are rampant. . We’re like professional tourists moving through life . (quoted in Mitchell 2000: 113).

This is the dark side of the dream for journalist Pico Iyer’s (2000)‘‘global soul,’’ that demi-monde in which personal and collective histories are dispersed, and place-attachments fraught with difficulty.

Nevertheless, while referencing Clara Law’s ‘‘floating’’ image for transnational cultures of disembodiment, of detachment, this article has set out to document, in Dean Chan’s (2000: 56) words , examples of ‘‘more comfortable, less traumatic’’ identity journeys. In these contexts, ‘‘floating’’ food, as the mobility of memory and imagination for charting foodscapes of belonging and intimacy, allows new places for temporary anchorage and, perhaps, different forms of identity re-alignment (memories of the smells of ‘‘Asian cooking’’ on the stairs, for example). Even so, these journeysdthese movements of drifting, connectingdcontain undercurrents of disquiet.

One of the primary tasks of this article has been to address some of these undercurrentsdto use food as a central motif to trouble conventional identity categories and their place-attachments. And here, I have been particularly concerned with troubling the cate- gory of mainstream identity, on the assumption that its natural- isation obfuscates its power. Carol Johnson (2002a: 182) elaborates on the conceptual and political imperatives of doing this:

There is good reason for many groups of people, including the more powerful, to feel insecure and fragile in the modern world. . The problem is that, precisely because of their privileged position, mainstream [British, English or Anglo-Celtic] identities do not have to be articulated explicitly. They were often the implicit ‘‘universal’’ that others were meant to aspire to and be assimilated into. . The question then arises as to whether politicians can encourage a positive sense of identity for powerful groups that is not constituted of concepts of racial/ ethnic superiority?

So, as meanings of home and identity become globalised, western identity itself is under challenge. Through James’ story, traditional cultures of British masculinity, British food and homely attachments undergo some disruption. Although I do not want to argue that James is, after all, a migrant (as well as an imperial figure), certainly his return to Britain where he is meant to feel ‘‘at

home’’ produces palpable longings for that ‘‘alien’’ home. Signifi- cantly, these longings occur at a time when political and economic relationships with Hong Kong and Singapore have been, and continue to be, re-worked, and western identity is losing some of its former privilege. Such attachments do not fit neatly with those of the ghostly figure of the consuming, western cosmopolitan or the ex-patriate British son, secure in his colonial power. Instead, they sit more comfortably with diasporic identities negotiating the ‘‘in- between’’ of everyday hybridity – identities with a sense of ‘‘home’’ as the ‘‘ever-shifting geography of social relations past and present (Massey, 1994: 172).’’

This returns me to the beginning of this article and my own longing for the taste of dumplings in the streets of London. If ‘‘Asian’’ tastes have become more homely to me than Anglo-Celtic ones, it seems that a critical shift has taken place in my own Anglo- culinary imaginary. In other words, this could be described as a shift, perhaps, from Jeannie Martin’s remembered fascination with the Chinese restaurant of her New Zealand childhood of the 1950s and my own normalisation of ‘‘Asian’’ food (and furthermore, a ‘‘queering’’ of ‘‘English’’ food) some fifty years later. This is not to overstate the case, however, as recent events in Australia in regard to the refugee ‘‘crisis’’ indicate, with government emphasis on more stringent border protection appearing as calculated attempts to shore up anxious mainstream, particularly Anglo-Celtic, identities (Johnson, 2002b: 33–36). Instead, I am simply suggesting that, through a series of gradual, accumulating changes in everyday cultures (that includes, here, a ‘‘local’’ shaped by migration; changing political relationships within the region; global distri- bution of food products; generations of Australians travelling through Asia), the ethnoscapes of ‘‘home’’ have incorporated different colours, sounds, smells, tastes and textures. In the process, the mainstream itself might acquire different imaginative attach- ments, or, at least, its traditional commitments might come under question. So, visiting the markets, food shops and restaurants of London, I certainly perform as one of Hage’s (1997: 118)‘‘cosmo- multiculturalists ’’ – in the sense of my belonging to the ‘‘classy’’ cosmopolitan sector of the mainstream. (This, says Hage, is a sector that might be regarded as perpetually on the hunt for diverse culinary adventures, based on collecting tastes of food rather than seeking moments of exchange with its migrant producers) (1997: 118). However I also perform as a shopper alienated, to some extent, from an exclusively Anglo-Celtic culinary heritage and, hence, eager to remember entanglements elsewhere.

This blurring of identity boundaries in migrant/diasporic kitchens of Australia and Britain does not assume, however, that cooks are equally well placed (or, for that matter, that the concept of diaspora itself, with its overtones of ‘‘essential’’ bonds of ethnicity, is not unproblematic) (Ang, 2001: 11–13, 92). The journey of a young, male, British ex-patriate, returning from Hong Kong to Britain to complete university studies, is a very different one from, for example, Filipina domestic workers ritually re-making ‘‘home’’ in Hong Kong. Such differences are obviously significant, despite some shared experience of hybrid identities shaped by a history of British colonialism. While this article has set out to show these identities’ instability and imaginative potentialdtheir capacity to ‘‘float’’dat the same time, it should be remembered that these are identities anchored in very specific locations of power, requiring different ‘‘tactics’’ (de Certeau, 1984: xviii–xx) of ‘‘eating back’’ at remembered ‘‘Asia’’ in order to feel ‘‘at home.’’ And it is in the detail of these ‘‘tactics,’’ with their power to shift the focus of engage- ment, and, significantly, their emergence from distinct global-local exigencies, we might begin to see beyond romantic figures of privilege and deprivation. This might be to remember and imagine different politics of eating and different ‘‘entangled’’ cartographies of transnational belonging.

J. Duruz / Emotion, Space and Society 3 (2010) 45–4948

This also returns me to the intimacy of the kitchen table and, as well as to its pleasures, to the analytical potential of ‘‘table talk’’ (Duruz, 2008), especially during those embodied moments of eating together and of remembering. In these spacesdif not of friendship, at least of amiable acquaintance and trustdstories rich in nuance and ones unexpectedly messy, sometimes quirky, might emerge. Here, the dynamic of storytelling itselfdnot only what is told, but how this is told as an exercise in continual meaning- makingdprovides a geography of places, emotions and hauntings.

In North London on that particular night, we eat, we talk, we listen and we remember, all within relations of some connection (we all like food and conversation; some of us share the apartment; some of us are friends or friends of friends; all, in a sense, are away from ‘‘home’’) while negotiating obvious differences (of age, gender, ethnicity, household membership, employment and so on). While James’ story has been privileged for this discussion, it is not the only ‘‘ghost’’ present at the table. Everyone has his or her own set of stories to tell, own memories to contribute and own ghostly figures to confront. After all, says de Certeau (1984: 108), ‘‘Haunted places are the only ones people can live in.’’ Reflecting on ‘‘floating food,’’ we all chart the uneven, contradictory ways we float through life, bumping into each other and sometimes, through intimate yearning, reaching places of temporary anchorage.

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