Food Symbolism in a Literary Work from Modern China - Essay Example

In Chang’s article, she liked to use food to hint the development in people’s emotions. In “Lust Caution,” she used the old proverb: “the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” which means if you want a man to love you quick, you need to cook him good food. In “How much hateful,” when Zongyu Xia went to visit Jiaying Yu, he started to praise her rice cake soup. Literally, he said he really wanted to eat her soup, but he actually wanted to get closer to her. When Xia said he was hungry, it means that he had a terrible marriage and needed stay with Jiaying Yu.

In China, food is a good way to enhance the feeling between two people. On account of Eileen Chang’s background, many of her stories talked about love triangle relationship and the reader can feel very sorrowful. In her article, she was metaphorically used staple food as the wife and she identifies the mistress as dessert. For example, in “The Red Rose” and “the Write Rose” and “Sealed off”, there were different places that showed the inner feeling in articles’ characters. In “The Red Rose” and “the Write Rose”, ZhenBao Tong meets his red rose called JiaoRui Wang and falls in love with her.

When they were dating, they ate refreshments. JiaoRui said: “I remember that you like tea” to which ZhenBao Tong replied: “Yes, you have good memory.” JiaoRui said: “No, you don’t know I always have worst memory.” After listening to this, ZhenBao had strong felling in his heart because this mean that JiaoRui was like him. They had a good development in their relationship, which made JiaoRui want to divorce her husband and get married to ZhenBao. Later, ZhenBao was forced to marry his right rose,YanPengMeng, because of his mother.

He met JiaoRui again when he was taking the bus and felt really sad. He asked YanPeng for dinner immediately after arriving home. He ate a lot