Are We What We Eat? Food and Identity in Late Twentieth-Century ...

More specifically, Ralph’s two aims that involve eating suggest that in the United States Ralph hopes to adhere to a Confucian lifestyle of temperance and moderation: “I will eat only what I like, instead of eating everything,” and “I will on no account keep eating after everyone else has stopped” (American 6). In China, where “everywhere there are limits” (4), Ralph, who wishes to do nothing “besides eat and sleep all day” (4), learns the importance of self-restraint. After Ralph’s father, an “upright scholar” of Confucianism, observes his son’s eating habits, he calls him “a fan tong—a rice barrel” (4) and stresses the importance of moderation, gastronomic or otherwise. Unbeknownst to Ralph, however, his list also reflects an American sensibility, espoused most notably by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography, that encourages temperance and self-restraint. As Rachel C. Lee explains, Ralph’s “resolutions to refrain from overeating” recall Franklin’s “list of aims,” specifically his “number one priority—‘Temperance. Eat not to Dullness. Drink not to Elevation’” (Americas 47). With his list, Ralph not only honors his own father but also inadvertently and unknowingly emulates Franklin, one of America’s “founding fathers.” In this way, Jen suggests the similarities between the Chinese (i.e., Confucian) and American values of moderation and self-control, a resemblance that myopic Ralph, who attempts to separate his Chinese past and his American present, fails to see.

Like Ralph, Alejo believes that he may eat and drink more excessively in the United States than in his birth nation; however, whereas Ralph plans to exercise dietary discipline in America, Alejo welcomes the possibility of “more excitement and fun” (Hijuelos 31), more eating and drinking. Ralph hopes to uphold Confucian (i.e., Chinese) principles of moderation and temperance, but Alejo tries to assume his own version of an American identity, which requires him not only to act as a self-indulgent consumer of food and alcohol but also to become a consumer in America’s capitalist economy. On the ship that takes him from Havana to New York, Alejo certainly acts the part of a big spender, “[p]laying the big man” and buying “daiquiris and icy beers” for his fellow shipmates “so that the money flew from his pockets” (Hijuelos 32). During his voyage, Alejo attempts to identify himself publicly as an “American”