Taking Care: Home Cooking and Community in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century Chinese Diaspora

Abstract

How did members of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese diaspora care for spatially extended communities? Taking Care uses multiple methodologies from archaeology, ethnography, and history to investigate the complex, circulatory web of relations that shifted the social organization of food production and consumption across the Chinese diaspora. This dissertation explores different spatial and social configurations of home cooking, their impact on social experience at the time, and their influence on contemporary Chinese American conceptions of food’s connection with community care. I argue that home cooking was a primary means of care in northern California and the Guangdong Province. Home cooking is a flexible concept encompassing the places and care practices of feeding oneself and one’s intimate community. Recovering cooking practices at residential institutions, ephemeral homes of itinerant laborers, and family configurations, I re-site the locus of inquiry from the use of material food evidence for reifying race or labor-based identities (e.g., Chinese Railroad Worker, Chinese Miner, Chinese Farmer, etc.) to exploring the lived experiences—the structures, patterns, and material choices of daily life—of people who could, at any given moment, labor in any number of different ways and not once consider that type of work constitutive of their identity. Instead, investigating the care provided by home cooking offers an approach for understanding how communities form and maintain collective memories and identity.