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Rivers of
CHANGE

Start
THE SPREAD

This piece was first published in Issue 3 WATER of Colournary Magazine.

Despite what you’re hearing today, the spread of spores through our population doesn’t have to be a dangerous thing.

The river
Where you set
Your foot just now
Is gone--
Those waters
Giving way to this,
Now this.

Often simplified to the adage: “You cannot step into the same river twice”, the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus in this fragment captured the notion that change is inevitable. We change, as do the worlds in which we live. Our cultural and environmental landscapes change as do our relationships with them. We cannot step into the same river twice, for not only does a river – our culture, our environment – shift and flow from one moment to the next, we as individuals are also ever evolving. As we step into these waters, the flow diverges around us; we alter the river’s course as it alters ours.

Over 1000 packets of starter have been mailed worldwide through New York-based community art project, Bread on Earth. I am happy to be a vector for this benevolent spread in Australia, as part of my ongoing work to gather and connect people through food, however remote we may now be. I join a small but global army of volunteers supporting Bread on Earth and its goal to map the evolution and diffusion of this culture worldwide. With this package, you too, can help start the spread.

Food cultures, at once durable and malleable, and entangled in each other, reflect Heraclitus’ allegory: As individuals migrate, their food and practices travel from one culture into another, and each culture bears the culinary traces of the encounter.

Throughout history, water has been the tangible conduit, the material vehicle, of such change. It was via ocean currents and trade routes, after all, that Chinese cultural tides flowed into other communities, leaving permanent marks on existing societies and their cultural landscapes. My grandmother, Popo, for example, sailed from China to Malaysia at the age of 13, to live with a man she had been betrothed to since birth. Amid the Chinese immigrant community that has established itself as the second largest ethnic group in Malaysia, my Popo anchored, raising seven children who have come to define themselves dually by both cultures, through the languages they speak and the food they cook and eat.

Over 1000 packets of starter have been mailed worldwide through New York-based community art project, Bread on Earth. I am happy to be a vector for this benevolent spread in Australia, as part of my ongoing work to gather and connect people through food, however remote we may now be. I join a small but global army of volunteers supporting Bread on Earth and its goal to map the evolution and diffusion of this culture worldwide. With this package, you too, can help start the spread.

A similar story unfolds in the historical development of Chinese-Peruvian food culture. The first significant wave of Chinese immigrants to Peru came on boats from the southern regions of Guangdong and Hong Kong in the mid-1850s. They were indentured labourers brought in to replace the African slave population after the abolition of slavery. Although through their contractual arrangements they represented a historical departure from enslavement, the Chinese were a major labour force that were still essentially regarded as slaves and treated as such. In this time, over 100,000 Chinese immigrants arrived, mostly male and bound for the sugar plantations.

When the Chinese labourers had finished serving their contracts, they were free to set up a life of their own in Peru. Cultures intermixed as the predominantly male Chinese immigrants married and settled down with Peruvian women. A large community of people known as tusán (born here) – those born in Peru with Chinese ancestry – grew as a result.
The effects were diverse; like the individuals themselves, their food evolved as a result of their proximity to Peruvian culture, developing into a cuisine known as chifa. Originating from the Chinese word chifan, (to cook rice), chifa describes a cuisine that blends Cantonese elements with traditional Peruvian ingredients and traditions. It grew out of an overall lack of familiar ingredients (even as the Chinese community progressed economically and were able to import some products), and the resulting difficulties in producing the food of their home country in a traditional way. Peruvian wives sought to satisfy the tastes of their husbands, preparing Chinese-style dishes with native ingredients, including pineapple, potato and ají amarillo, a spicy, fruity yellow chilli pepper found all over Peru. Dishes such as chaufa (Cantonese-Peruvian-style fried rice), lomo saltado (sirloin strips marinated in soy sauce, stir-fried with onions, tomatoes, peppers and potato fries) and variations on Cantonese dishes including wonton and egg-drop soup grew common. 

And just as the food of the Chinese immigrants became flooded with new flavours, likewise typical East Asian ingredients such as ginger, soy sauce and spring onion began to seep into local cuisine. Peruvian chefs became emboldened to use these ingredients that were being introduced into Latin-America for the first time. The legacies continue today. Chifa is now well integrated into Peruvian culture – there are thousands of chifa restaurants in Lima and across Peru – and has also spread to neighbouring countries such as Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia.

These rivers of cultural change, swept along as significantly by food cultures as they are by the ocean currents that carried them, have forked in more directions than from China to Peru. Ships have sailed across the seas carrying Chinese passengers, like my Popo, depositing them on shores at the edge of their new unknown. Their relationship to a new culture and past heritage ebbs and flows, reflecting the displacement and integration of culture and body.

Why bread, why sourdough, now? With commodity markets grinding to a halt, supply chains splintering, and the status quo upturned, we are experiencing a renewed urgency for self-sufficiency, security and comfort, and a need to reacquaint ourselves with forgotten means of sustenance and survival. As we settle uncomfortably into the disquiet of isolation and quarantine, bread becomes something we can turn to, not just for fuel, but as something tangible, productive, humbly powerful. This movement to spread starter - and with it, the fortifying practice of baking bread - arises as we seek solidarity through alternative ways of connecting to dispel the pervading sense of alienation and inertia.

Just as I observe from afar the global identity of Chinese people and cuisine shifting, likewise, within me, my cultural self swells and drifts. My connection to my Chinese heritage feels somewhat convoluted – I was born and raised in Australia, by parents born to Chinese immigrant families in Malaysia. I find myself writing and rewriting that description, as no statement concisely reflects who I am to the world, let alone clarifies my own understanding of my cultural identity. At times I feel more Chinese, at times more Australian, at times neither. Cultural identity shifts and morphs as much within as without.

I relate somewhat less to the culture of Malaysia, experiencing a sense of commonality anchored by childhood visits to my family and Popo. My exposure to Malaysian culture was shaped primarily by food and memories of eating at hawker stalls, night markets and the kitchens of my extended family. The dishes I voraciously consumed on these trips were often a blurry blend of Malaysian, Chinese and Indian food, each cuisine influencing the other in a way unique to Malaysia and reflective of the cultural make-up of its population.

Growing up in Australia, my concept of Chinese food and culture ranged from yum cha and seafood banquets at bustling, ostentatiously decorated Chinese restaurants to oversized spring rolls and deep-fried dim sims, now considered Australian corner store staples alongside battered fish and vinegared hot chips. Wherever it has traveled, to Peru, Malaysia, Australia or beyond, Chinese food has undertaken an intercultural journey to station itself in new waters. It is a diasporic culture that steps into the river and becomes immersed; itself altered by, and altering that which flows around, over and under, surrounding it.

We move beyond explanations of cuisine as distinct and self-defining food cultures and the ‘fusion’ of such. A cuisine’s fluid identity instead means we experience the ever-changing entanglement and mutual evolution of cultures. We are all instrumental in this, when we use food to connect to our past, and make sense of our present. In everything we cook and eat, the ripples of diaspora can be felt on our skin and in the rivers in which we swim.

And further, yes, this is about sourdough, driven by a surge in home baking and curiously, dwindling supplies of commercial yeast. More broadly however, the intent is a conscious readjustment, a collective shift away from despondency and despair; it’s about cultivating an abundance mindset in a time when everyone, including our instincts, is telling us to reduce, retreat, distance. Consider - what else can be shared? What else can we do to necessarily affirm and deepen channels of community and solidarity between us all?

 Copyright © 2022 — Xinyi Lim, Sydney

 Copyright © 2021 — XinYi Lim, Sydney