“The Tastes of Asia”: Leung Ping-kwan, Foodscape, and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013), a leading writer and cultural critic of Hong Kong, has around ten collections of poems published over the past few decades. Beginning in 1997, Leung wrote about food, making significant contributions to poetry in Chinese. Drawing literary texts from Leung’s collections of poetry, this paper aims to cast light on the role that Leung has played in the shaping of foodscape poetics and how he elaborates and addresses historical memory and cultural politics. In addition, this paper contends that his deconstruction of nationalism and an emphasis on “wisdom of peoples’ livlihood” lies at the core of Leung’s foodscape poetics, and they constitute a “positionality” rooted in his experience in Hong Kong.