Sour Sweet Conquests of Exile-Displacement and Cultural Identity
in Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet
Lector Angela STĂNESCU
Universitatea Valahia Târgovişte
Timothy Mo is one of the most powerful authorial voices among the post colonial novelists
of the last decades, whose fiction investigates the effects of imperialism and colonial rule in terms
of their impact on the construction of cultural identity by members of the colonized community in
the homeland or as immigrants in the imperial metropolis.
Belonging to the same literary generation as Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, Mo
shares their concern with representations of migrancy, displacement and biculturalism, as well as an
acute awareness of historical and social processes that influence individual destinies caught in the
web of public and private history. Like them, he is also an apt and insightful analyst of the
psychology and idiosyncracies of displaced individuals who, having made the voyage from the
colonial periphery to the imperial centre, are confronted with the traumas of exile, cultural shock
and eventual adaptation, achieved by assuming their biculturality, through a distillation of their
inherited Easternness and emerging Britishness into a lucid acceptance of their in-betweenness and
hybridity.
A displaced individual himself, Mo was born in Hong Kong and came to Britain at the age
of ten. For him, displacement took the milder form of the less directly engaging experience of
family relocation. Educated in Hong Kong and Britain, he graduated at Oxford, where he read
history. He has taken up a career in journalism, which still offers him an alternative professional
routine apart from novel writing. Despite his upbringing in a predominantly British environment, he
confesses to a marked biculturality and an ineluctable sense of hybridity no less ascribable to his
mixed-race Anglo-Chinese parentage and background. It is thus little wonder that displacement and
redefinition of cultural identity, ethnicity and minority behaviour patterns and adjustment models
should become quintessential themes of his fiction.
His most celebrated fictional exploration of these issues is Sour Sweet, his award-winning
second novel of 1982 (Hawthornden Prize), also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is a heart
rending, if detachedly scrutinizing dramatization of the cultural transplantation to Britain in the
early 1960s of a Chinese family of Hong Kong and Cantonese extraction. In a deeply enquiring and
revealing narrative, Mo blends realistic observation, sociological expertise and psychological
insight with a sympathetic, yet objective portrayal of his rounded and dynamic characters evolving
between social comedy and personal drama.
Set in London’s Chinatown of the 1960s, the story traces the migrant experience of the
Chens
(Chen, his wife Lily and their baby son Man Kee), a nuclear family at the beginning of
the novel, subsequently extended through the arrival of Lily’s sister Mui and of Chen’s widowed
old father. The novel opens with a brief and somewhat abrupt introduction to the family’s situation,
in an objective third person narrative voice reminiscent of the factual conciseness of a sociological
profile and of the stark realism of a journalistic discourse all too familiar to the author. ‘The Chens
had been living in the U.K. for four years, which was long enough to have lost their place in the
society from which they had emigrated but not long enough to feel comfortable in the new. They
were no longer missed; Lily had no living relatives anyway, apart from her sister Mui, and Chen
had lost his claim to clan land in his ancestral village. He was remembered there in the shape of the
money order he remitted to his father every month, and would truly have been remembered only if
that order had failed to arrive’(1). Chen seems aware of his being suspended between two
worlds,the one he left behind and the ‘land of promise’ he has come to in order to escape his
unpromising economic prospects and to seek his fortune in glamorous London, working in the
booming food industry of Chinese restaurants in the Soho area. Chen realizes that in the course of
these four years his ties with his homeland and family have loosened, that he is drifting apart from
the familiar notion of home and from his native and filial bonds. At the same time, he cannot bring
himself to feel at ease in the host country, being unable to shake off the pervasive sense of his own
alienness and of the foreignness of the place and its people among whom he remains irremediably
self- conscious and insecure. ‘Chen was still an interloper. He regarded himself as such. He had no
tangible reason to feel like this. No one had yet assaulted, insulted, so much as looked twice at him.
But Chen knew, felt it in his bones, could sense it between his shoulder blades…in an unspoken
complicity between himself and others like him, not necessarily of his race. A huge West Indian bus
conductor undercharged him on his morning journey to work .He knew because the English one
charged him threepence more. Chen was sure the black man’s mistake was deliberate’ (1).
From Mo’s psychoanalytically minute but empathetic and grasping recording of these visceral
sensations it is obvious that Chen has yet to get over the crisis phase, which M.Winkelman
associates with ‘increasing disappointments, frustrations, impatience and tension [which] may lead
to depression isolation, anger or hostility’ (123). Four years away from the initial cultural shock, the
adjustment process is far from being completed, as Chen’s inborn sense of belonging has waned
without giving way to a new and comfortable relationship with his chosen space. He has not yet
succeeded in reconstructing a new meaning of home, in spite of the comfort of the satisfying
accommodation provided by the council flat which, as close it might be to a family haven, is far
from inducing the genuine feeling of homeliness of his native ethnic environment: ‘True, he paid
reasonable rent to Brent Council for warm and comfortable accommodation, quarters which were
positively palatial compared to those which his wife Lily had known in Hong Kong. That English
people had competed for the flat he now occupied made Chen feel more rather than less of a
foreigner; it made him feel like a gatecrasher who had stayed too long and been identified’ (1). On
the surface, Chen might appear content with his achievements: ‘he wasn’t complaining; the wages
were spectacularly good, even forgetting the tips’ (1). However, this apparent self-sufficiency is a
symptom of what Freud calls displaced psychology, engendered by the defense mechanisms of the
psyche which tend to divert attention from painful or distressing issues- in this case recognition of
failure. The mere objectless discomfort Chen feels is an epitome of a frustrating standstill in the
process of cultural transplantation and adjustment. An even subconsciously perceived sense of
failure can mark the peak of the adaptation crisis. The presentiment of a critical point looming large
ahead insinuates itself from the very first pages depicting Chen’s vagaries in the limbo of nonbelonging and homelessness. For an immigrant, failure can assume many faces. At this moment in
Chen’s life it can be the failure to carry out his initial plan of returning to Hong Kong after having
saved enough money to secure a better life for his family back home. As the remittance money for
his parents prove a strain on his income, he has to postpone his return indefinitely, and this blurring
of immediate goals engenders a loss of focus and an estrangement from both homeland and present
surroundings. Conscious that his stay in Britain is likely to be longer than initially projected, Chen
has the inspiration of making a constructive move-starting a family-and thus alleviating the anxiety
of his incompleteness and growing loneliness, as he feels that twenty-seven is ‘an advanced age to
have reached without acquiring a wife, not to say children’ (5). So he pays a visit to his native
village in order to find a Chinese wife to take back to Britain, a priority rendered even more urgent
by the Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962 and the subsequent ‘ beat the ban rush’. But the
soothing presence of Lily and their young son does not help much in Chen’s process of settling in
and his slipping into an alienated passivity or stolidity, as Lily diagnoses it, will further his gradual
and ultimately fatal estrangement not only from the new culture, but also from his old one,
including his family environment. His alienation can be equated with his failure to adapt and
culminates symbolically with his mysterious disappearance, a drama enacted as the consequence of
a senseless, futile and utterly undeserved retaliation act of the Chinese mafia rackets of the Triad
society he falls victim to. His destiny becomes a metaphor for the misfit who dissolves not only into
nonentity, but also into non-existence-ironically, at the hands of his own kind.
Mo proves an informed and perceptive analyst of this processes and behaviours, which he
anatomizes with a touching combination of psychological insight, sociological acumen and
sympathetic feeling. He aptly identifies different patterns of response to the challenges of immigrant
life, which he illustrates via his characters, tracing their progress or regression towards success or
failure in cultural adaptation. Success is seen to rely on the positive potential to assume one’s
emerging hybridity or biculturality, interpreted as the ability to negotiate and compromise between
one’s perceptions of ethnicity and otherness, to operate with flexibility and balance in social and
intercultural interaction and to develop cross-cultural communication and problem solving skills. In
Sour Sweet, it is Lily who typifies this model of successful balancing and reconciliation between the
two cultures, and her gradual advancement towards understanding, learning, change and growth
becomes the author’s main focus. Through Chen, Mo exemplifies the other extreme, that of the
downfall due to inability to become tuned in and respond effectively to complex situations and to
refine one’s survival skills so as to surmount adjustment problems. Mo’s enactment of his
characters’ quest for equilibrium in a hybridized sense of their identity and the probing depiction of
their psychology is in keeping with the intimations provided by post-colonial theory and
sociological studies, in that he highlights gender differences in overcoming adaptation crises,
namely that women prove more poised and malleable in negotiating cross-cultural issues and thus
more likely to forge ahead towards biculturalism. He appears equally grasping in identifying and
illustrating the main factors that can hinder or promote successful adaptation, and the key stages
involved in the process- the initial cultural shock, the immediate or delayed crisis phase, the
adjustment or negotiating phase and the resolution of the crisis. All the characters in the novel are
seen to traverse these stages in their different ways, gravitating more or less around the binary
models provided by Chen and Lily. Although their evolution (or involution) may lend itself to an
antithetic gendered analysis, their individual reactions often overlap, so an examination based on
general behaviour patterns might be a useful frame of reference in anatomizing their idiosyncracies
through the above- mentioned phases of the adjustment process.
Symptoms of the crises phase and adjustment strategies
According to Winkelman’s observations, the cultural shock or crisis phase is a natural immigrant
experience, varying in terms of timing (upon arrival or delayed), or manifestation (“a full-blown
crisis or a series of escalating problems, negative experiences and reactions”). In spite of individual
variations, the phase evinces some typical features: ‘Things start to go wrong, minor issues become
major problems, and cultural differences become irritating. One experiences increasing
disappointments, frustrations, impatience and tension. Life does not make sense and one may feel
helpless, confused, disliked by others or treated like a child. A sense of lack of control of one’s life
may lead to depression, isolation, anger or hostility’ (123). Consequently, the defense mechanisms
intervening in this phase entail typical behaviours and strategies meant to protect the individual
from the sense of menace he/she has to cope with. In Wengle’s terms, they develop ‘maintenance
and reparative behaviours designed to help reestablish one’s familiar habitual patterns of behaviour
to provide insulation from the foreign culture’. Mo’s characters provide a coherent, if highly
individualized illustration of these behaviours, which will be examined further on.
Community anchorage and isolation
Irrespective of their individual propensity for accepting or rejecting change, for progress or
stagnation, all the characters in the novel have to cope with the utterly disturbing existential
discontinuities pertaining to cultural relocation and to reinvent their conception of home and
belonging .A common response to their predicament is a tendency to construe the new meaning of
home as the haven offered by the restricted ethnic community or by the even narrower space of the
family. It amounts to a compulsive refuge into the ethnic enclaves of the group of co-nationals or
other marginal groups, and an indulgence into tradition and native cultural practices which
aggravate their status of outsidedness. For Chen, community anchorage extends beyond the
confines of the family flat on account of his active role as breadwinner and provider for the family.
However, the Chinese restaurant where he works seventy-two hours a week is no more than another
closed space encapsulating the familiarity of intra-ethnic relationships and limiting his contact with
English people to the distanced observation of anonymous customers. Chen’s refuge into islets of
ethnicity takes the more severe form of an unrealistic and almost utopian longing to return home,
despite all foreseeable prospects pointing to the contrary. During the first and only family adventure
outside the home- an outing to the seaside on a weekend’s holiday, he symbolically scans the
horizon and spies a ship in which he sees a metaphor of his escape to the homeland and which he
interprets for his son in a tonality of profound lyricism: ‘Do you see the ship, Son? It is a special
little ship for people like us, Son. It is very little and very old but that is only what strangers see. We
know better, don’t we, Son, the ship that will take us back home when we are finished here. It will
take you to your homeland, Son, which you have never seen’ (155). Throughout the novel, he will
remain at this critical stage of detachment from the host society and culture, retreating into
loneliness and passivity even on the home front. His sparse rapport with the outside world will grow
more and more tenuous and increasingly mediated by the other family members. For him the crisis
does not melt into the adjustment stage, but spirals into greater alienation. His only friend, Mr. Lo,
is no better than him, being an encapsulated figure, ‘quiet, withdrawn to the point of moodiness’
(28), trying to survive alone in an alien country. The ascetic room he inhabits is expressive of his
seclusion. ‘Lo’s room contained his iron bed and one chair. In a corner of the floor was a gas ring, a
kettle and a single glass’ (46). As for Chen’s father, isolation takes the form of a dark cubby-hole
under the take-away counter-a highly suggestive spatial metaphor.
Lily shares to a certain extent the others’ inclination for isolation from the alien culture. At least at
the beginning, she rarely leaves the house as she concentrates on her housekeeping duties or her
protective roles as a wife and mother, and later as a sister and daughter-in-law with a dedication that
verges on fussiness. However, hers is a short-term isolation as she assumes new tasks that get her
out of the house or require mingling with the natives – her shopping trips, her waiting on the
customers at their take-away counter, her driver’s exploits or contacts with Man Kee’s school.
The short lived but violent crisis phase of her sister Mui is somewhat different at a superficial level,
but it displays the same reluctance to venture into the host culture. Her initial isolation is spatially
manifested by her self-confinement to the kitchen, a space she may associate either with her
traditional feminine role, deeply inculcated by her upbringing, or with her marginal cultural status.
‘Her back to the window and courtyard below’ (9) is symbolic of her impulse to shut out the outside
world, as is her reluctance to enter the sitting room. ‘It wasn’t easy to find out what was wrong with
Mui. Mui herself didn’t seem to know. She had worked for a foreigner before. Perhaps it was the
concentration of them here she found so disturbing’ (9). Once lured into the sitting-room by the
magic eye of the television offering her a vantage point from which to spy on the English world, she
moves into another kind of retreat. She begins to use the make-believe surrogate world of soap
operas as a substitute for real life, regressing into further alienation despite the obvious advantage of
gleaning information about the host culture-first of all because her first impressions are
unfavourable: ‘The composite picture she was able to glean of the British population was an
alarming one. More than ever, Mui was reluctant to leave the flat (10). Later on, however, she will
be able to turn to good account this experience of one-way communication at the receiving end, and
function as a cultural mediator for the family, on account of her being the best acquainted with the
host culture, which she tends nevertheless to interpret in terms of the often idealized image
promoted by the television. Hence her naïve fascination for a system she is just beginning to learn
about, which forces Lily to remind her that ‘life is not a TV programme’ and in real life policemen
can be bribed, in contradiction with their fictionalized image as ‘the finest in the world’. Mui’s later
remarkably developed managerial, linguistic and problem-solving skills will be a direct result of her
TV addiction period.
2. Criticism of the host culture
‘As cultural differences become irritating’, most immigrants enter a phase of hostility towards the
new culture, expressed via often indiscriminate criticism of foreigners and their values. Chen proves
unsparing in his observations about the English, which he shares with the other waiters. Lily herself
finds ‘reasons to dislike and criticize the culture’ of the ‘foreign devils’ or ‘Westerners’ as she
derogatorily calls them: ‘how strange the English were, how indifferent, how careless of the
consequences of their own deeds! And as for their attitude to their old people, it was nothing less
than shameful neglect, a national disgrace’ (85-86). Her dislike increases as she gets to observe
them more closely from behind her counter: ‘young people lounged against the wall. This explained
the uneven line of grease smudges at the head height along the three walls. Lily felt like asking
them to stand up straight. How would you like it if I leant on your wall with my head, Mr. Pink
Face White Devil?’ (135). She harshly reflects on their habits and lifestyles: ‘She was frightened of
the rowdies who came in the worse for drink after the public houses shut. Only once-thank god-has
a group run out without paying. Terrible, shocking. How could they have such a degraded sense of
their responsibilities? What possible sense of decency and family honour could those reckless girls
have? All running round together until a scandalous hour. No wonder they were always getting
themselves pregnant’ (136). Repulsed by the corrupt ways of the English, Lily cannot but conclude:
‘Really there was no question how superior the Chinese people were to the foreign devils’ (137).
She is equally disappointed with the English school and the instruction her son is getting, which she
considers pointless, unstructured and too lax. But Lily’s irritations will give way to a more
sympathetic view, including an eventual appreciation of Man Kee’s teapot song or of the National
Health Service after Grandpa’s hip fracture.
During her escapist television addiction, Mui is equally disapproving of the English. Her perception
of the human samples she sees in her soaps is indiscriminately stereotyping, and she divides them
into broad categories as ‘Boy, Hair-net, Drinker, Cripple, Crafty, Bad Girl’. This is particularly
meaningful as it reflects our tendency to regard members of an alien culture as an indiscriminate
and amorphous mass. It is undeniably the way in which the colonizers see the colonized and viceversa, by virtue of the mutual contempt that is their only emotional bond. Not even a fictional
encounter can put them in a more favourable light in Mui’s eyes or grant them any claim to
individuality. The label of ‘foreign devils’ has the function of denoting them as a stereotyped block,
not to mention the connotation of the satanic foe perceived through the distorting lenses of the
notion of demonic otherness.
3. Consumption of ethnic media and popular culture
Dependence on icons of home as a cure for homesickness signals the same reluctance to cross
cultural frontiers characteristic of the crisis phase. Images of home in the form of outdated Hong
Kong newspapers and modern Cantonese dramas at the cinema club function as another cocoon for
Chen and Mr. Lo. Seeing Hong Kong movies is not merely a casual pastime, but a link to the
popular culture of the homeland, limiting their social life to their own ethno-cultural milieu and
entailing a perpetuation of unilateral encapsulation. Though Mui provides the opposite case of
overexposure to English media, she is by no means atypical in her reactions, which illustrate the
other extreme of the norm- that of relying solely on the media in her exploration of the foreign
culture, which amounts to an alternative form of escapism whose effects are to a certain extent the
same- preventing real interaction with her environment and marking a retreat into a familiar but
illusory world.
4. Clinging to traditionalism and cultural authenticity
The fear of the unknown and the prevailing sense of threat from the outside world are
counterbalanced by a rejection of any change or cultural novelty, seen as contamination of one’s
identity that can undermine one’s sense of stability and anchoring. Obstinate, even obsessive
preservation of cultural purity becomes not only an expression of the contempt for the new culture
and of a sense of superiority, but also a main manifestation of the individual’s claim to control of
one’s life, a self-asserting strategy and a smoke screen emanated by one’s defense mechanisms.
Protecting his Chineseness is a matter of pride for Chen, by far the most resistant to change of all
protagonists in the novel. His commentary on the issue of change acquires the gravity of a key
moral concept or life motto: ‘Stick to what has been tried and don’t adopt new ways just for the
sake of them’ (123). He will fall into the familiar tracks of his native culture in every aspect of
everyday life. Apart from his preference for Chinese media and entertainment he, will discover new
pastimes that function as an umbilical cord to his homeland. If his carpentry episode is dictated
more by practical imperatives rather than by going in for parental heritage- manufacturing wooden
benches and tables for their take-away venture, he is sure to derive from it both pleasure and a
reassuring feeling of home. His gardening, nevertheless, is not dictated by any immediate survival
demands, and this return to a familiar way of life functions as a link between his London life and his
past, ‘an expression of his peasant roots’, in Lim’s opinion (97). Chen establishes a symbolic
correspondence between vegetable growing and his marginal status, derived from inherited patterns
of thought: ‘At home in the New Territories vegetable growing was an ignominious mode of
agriculture, practiced by refugees and immigrants. It was only fitting he should grow them here in
alien soil’ (168). This revival of his skills as a farmer is but another reminder of his Chineseness
and alienness. Winning Man Kee over for this hobby works as a bridge and silent channel of
communication between father and son, but it signals primarily Chen’s desire to hand over to him
the traditional values, as ‘Chen resolved to bring up Son his own way’ (155). In his social dealings,
Chen remains limited to an automatic fulfillment of his traditional roles dictated by the Chinese
code. He will carry out his filial duties, as ‘Chen was still conscientious about sending money to his
father. He was a dutiful son’ (60). As a father, he displays a typical reaction of Chinese fathers who,
when ashamed at their sons, are concerned with ‘losing face’ in society and turn their shame into
deliberate self-irony in order not to ‘lose face’-which explains his constant teasing of Man Kee
about the size of his head, especially in public situations, as ‘shame arises from the father’s
traditional concern with ‘face’ in society’, as Chin explains (93). ‘Chen was rather matter of fact
about his son’s progress, further annoying Lily by repeating his usual comments about the
disproportionate size of Man Kee’s head compared to his body’ (17). Chen’s preoccupation with
appearances and materialistic notions of success and pride are also apparent in his dreams for his
son’s future business success, another source of ‘face’ in public: ‘he would grow up to own many
restaurants, gaining experience in all aspects of the trade on the way’ (155). His patriarchal claims
as a husband are emphasized by the capitalization of the word, indicative of his statutory male
authority he is invested with by the pre-requisites of the pre-ordained relationships between the
spouses. In this light, despite his gradual and covert loss of his prerogatives as decision maker in
favour of his wife, he cannot help enacting his mere formal part with hollow male rhetoric: ‘Who is
head in our family? Do you think wife tells Husband what to do?’ (107). He needs no answer to
that, as he is aware that he has long handed over to Lily his position as family head. His failure is
rendered more tragic, as, instead of advancing into a new enriched identity he loses any claims to
his old one, slowly dissolving in the sham of tradition mimicry.
Preserving the purity of her beliefs and practices appears equally important to Lily. She proves the
most genuine and profound retainer of Chinese philosophy, of which she is a profound practitioner.
Her stern observance of the crucial principle of the Yin and Yang balancing principle guides her in
all her preoccupations, be they about major issues or trivial things-like her care not to give Chen
sweets after a meal of sour soup, in order not to upset this balance, in spite of the metaphorical
significance of harmonious duality transparent in the novel’s title. Paradoxically enough, it will be
this essentially Chinese outlook that would help her balance her eventual adjusment into salutary
hybridity, though Lily’s displaced logic dictates that flexibility is a purely Chinese trait, and the
more adaptable she becomes, the more Chinese she will be. But Lily’s fervour in practising her
culture is most apparent in her absolute fulfillment of her family duties. A dedicated wife, she is
keen on the ritual of serving Chen his soup on his return home after he has already dined at work.
Her forms of address to him remain within the norms of the Chinese code of deference owed to the
head of the household. The capitalized Husband points at her dedication to and idealization of him
as the ultimate, archetypal male authority. The slightly more familiar and intimate Ah Chen is no
less deferential. Though considered by Lily an adequate term ‘to look upon him as an individual’,
she aptly perceives it as an equally distancing term, being based on his family name. As she never
uses his first name, Chen never acquires a truly personal identity, which is emblematic for the
allegorical intentions of the author as representing inadaptable Chen as a nonentity, fading into
anonymousness. Lily’s self-assumed and carefully constructed wifely exemplariness extends to her
efforts and camouflage tactics of indirectness meant to keep the appearances of Chen’s simulacrum
authority as she acquires an increasingly dominant role. She tentatively avoids even the slightest
suggestion or implication of the Chen’s mutely accepted subordinated position, and will go at any
lengths to offer reassurance of his status quo. The tactfulness and diplomacy of her dissimulating
tactics are particularly efficient in realizing her dream of their own take away restaurant, and her
shrewd strategies of indirectness will covertly break Chen’s opposition and lead to her envisaged
results without causing him to ‘lose face’ before his wife. As Laura Hall remarks, Lily’s attitude
shows how typically ‘Mo’s female characters subvert the patriarchal intent of the family life while
maintaining its form’ (96). A sham of the power game and a simulacrum of tradition it may be, but
it is enacted for the sake of tradition. Lily’s living up to ancestral Chinese precepts is further
highlighted by her dutifulness in remitting the money to Chen’s parents herself and enclosing a
message in his name, to dispel the feeling of impersonality of the formal money order. Her smooth
naturalization in Chen’s family is a token of her eagerness to comply with tradition, and her
steadfastness in acquitting herself of these duties make her oppose fiercely Chen’s decision to cease
remittances on account of obscure financial straits. In her treatment of Grandpa Chen she shows the
same allegiance to the ancient code of ancestor worship, as she takes it upon herself to honour him
at the airport and to provide him with the best possible care, as demonstrated by her feverish
preparations to accommodate him and her preoccupation of his being fed the choicest menus in the
house, previously reserved for her son, another capitalized male she truly worships.
Due to his age and theoretical immunity to change, Grandpa Chen demonstrates the same loyalty to
his old ways, illustrated by his abandoning ‘the chamber which had been prepared in his honour,
[which] he had found draughty, alien and unpropitious’ in order to sleep under the counter, as ‘he
had never in his life slept anywhere except on a ground floor, near the earth, as a man was meant to
sleep’. His resuming his carpentry is another way in which he attempts to replicate the security of
his lost home.
4.1. Food
Food constitutes a key metaphor in the novel, as readily apparent in the title allusion to sweet and
sour pork, a gastronomic emblem of Chineseness and a symbol of the harmonious duality and
hybridity advocated by the author as the only key to survival. The care not to spoil their eating
habits is however one of the main means the characters employ to insulate their cultural identity.
But gastronomic purity is preserved only for themselves. For public use, they are ready to make
concessions, take liberties and pervert recipes out a perverse pleasure to sabotage the increasing
exotic taste of the English for the real thing, translated as the proliferation of Chinese cuisine and
the growing popularity of sweet and sour pork. For once in their lives, they assume the position of
the cultural imperialist, the covert exploiter miming a positive imposition of imported values. It
becomes a perverted form of reverse colonialism, a counter-invasion and belated revenge on the
imperial metropolis, where the ‘Empire cooks back’ and strikes back by this rather innocent boycott
act. They scorn the food they sell not because it necessarily tastes bad or lacks nutritious value, but
because it is not properly Chinese: ‘the food they served from the tourist menu was rubbish, total
lupsup, fit only for foreign devils’ (17); Lily, too, ‘didn’t mind serving lupsup food but she drew the
line at mass-poisoning their customers. Mui’s other brainwave was chips, potato, not bamboo with
sweet and sour sauce’ (142); or elsewhere we find that ‘the food they sold, certainly wholesome,
nutritious, colourful, even tasty in its way, had been researched by Chen. It bore no resemblance at
all to Chinese cuisine. They served from a stereotyped menu, similar to those outside countless
other establishments in the UK. The food was, if nothing else, thought Lily, provenly successful:
English tastebuds must be degraded as their care of their parents; It could, of course be a part of a
scheme of cosmic repercussion’…’Sweet and sour pork was their staple, naturally: batter musket
balls encasing a tiny core of meat, laced with a scarlet sauce that had an interesting effect on the
urine of the customer the next day. All to be packed at the rectangular silver boxes, food coffins, to
be removed and consumed statutorily off premises’ (105-6). The image of the silver food coffins
stands for a symbolic death of tradition and a revival in the form of the hybridised product of the
standardized Western consumer-oriented strategies of modern fast food industry. In their own way,
the Chens have advanced into the globalising melting pot of world culture. Their ultimate yielding
to hybridity is symbolized gastronomically by the aborted Christmas turkey Lily experiments with
and which clearly resists Chinese cooking. Cross-cooking, ‘this alien cooking’ in Lily’s terms,
proves less efficient than Her cookery translations from Chinese, and the result is a grotesque
failure: ‘a giant half-raw turkey…the meat tasted vile, too, bitter and tough as if the bird’s spirit still
lingered in its cells’ (178). A bitter glossing over the attempt to borrow and pervert national spirit,
but a positive step forward in the Chens’ exploration of their new culture. Food seems to provide
quick access to cultural integration, as they ‘developed a taste for chips themselves, minus sauce, of
course’ (142) or as they sampled the local fish and chips on their trip to the sea and Lily ‘had to
concede it was good stuff’ (159). In the same conciliatory spirit, though infuriated at first by Man
Kee’s treacherous taste for ‘mince, jam, tart and custard’ Lily wonders: ‘Maybe ‘mince, jam, tart
and custard’ was simply a generic term for food –as one said ‘eat rice’ instead of simply ‘eat’ in the
traditional evening greeting of the south?’ (172) From here there is only a small step for Lily to
cook the respective menu herself at Grandpa’s party or for Mui and Mr. Lo to open a fish and chips
restaurant-the final step in their cross cultural journey. The food metaphor and imagery in Sour
Sweet seems to intimate that to understand food is to understand society and cultural mixtures are
beneficial as long as the sanctity of food and family is preserved. Its ultimate message is permeated
by a plural mosaic model of the post-colonial world where adaptability and flexibility are achieved
through an acceptance of differences rather than through a forced synthesis or melting pot. As Hall
argues, ‘the binary of primordial notions of ethnicity and ‘cultural authenticity’ on the one hand and
the modern and thus assimilated and alienated native on the other are rendered banal by the
innovativeness of writers such as Ishiguro and Mo…these two writers are not only re-imagining
what it means to be Chinese or Japanese but, more significantly, what it means to be ‘British’’ (92).
And despite his claim that he writes about ‘the clash of cultures’, Timothy Mo seems rather more
concerned and fascinated by the blending of cultures.
Bibliography
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London, Routledge, 1994
Hall, Laura. ‘New Nations, New Selves – The Novels of Timothy Mo and Kazuo Ishiguro’, in
Other Britain, Other British. Contemporary Multicultural Fiction. Ed. Robert Lee. London, 1995
Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. ‘Race, Identity and the Subject in the Novels of Timothy Mo’, in Fusion of
Cultures? Eds. P.O. Stummer, C. Balme. Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1996
Ramraj, Victor J. ‘Timothy Mo’. International literature in English: Essays on the Major Writers.
Chicago. St. James Press, 1991
Ramraj, Victor J. ‘Diasporas and Multiculturalism’, in New National and Post-Colonial
Literatures: An Introduction. Ed. Bruce King. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996
Winkelman, Michael. ‘Cultural Shock and Adaptation’, in Journal of Counseling and Development,
Nov. 1994