A R T I C L E
S E C T I O N S

Food in a post-socialist state

Re-encountering Vietnamese food in Australia

Food court fetish: the social arenas of Vietnamese diasporic youth appetites

Eating and meeting sites

Conclusion

Notes

References

R E L A T E D
I N F O

Viet Cookbooks in English

Viet Cookbooks in Vietnamese

Other Asian Cookbooks

Useful Reference Books

Magazine and Newspaper Articles

Noteworthy
Websites

Australian Journal of Anthropology, April 2004

Transitions in Taste in Vietnam and the Diaspora

By Mandy Thomas, Ph.D.
Cross-cultural Research, Australian National University

This paper argues that food and styles of eating have become the predominant markers of social change for the Vietnamese in both Vietnam and in the diaspora. In post-socialist Vietnam the transition to a market economy has allowed for a huge growth in the number of restaurants and cafes, and in the north, a return to an earlier style of cooking. The intense interest and emphasis on food as embodied pleasure has meant that it has come to stand for the transition away from a heavily state-controlled economy. The new configurations of family and friendship are being framed by newly available ways of 'eating out', which are both a means of social display and distinction as well as an indicator of the tensions between reform and festivity within an authoritarian nation-state struggling to define itself in a globalising world.

At the same time as food in Vietnam is undergoing rapid transformation so too has the Vietnamese diaspora generationally changed its eating patterns. Although there has been a focus in the literature on food in the diaspora that emphasises the nostalgic and recuperative elements of 'migrant food', I argue that food is the prime mechanism of intercultural engagement for each diasporic generation. For older Vietnamese, Vietnamese restaurants and barbecues have been the sites of interplay between cultural 'tradition' and innovation, and between Australianness and Vietnameseness, and these interstitial places continue to be important for younger Vietnamese. Within this established framework of cross-cultural interaction, for Vietnamese youth, the social settings of 'ethnic food', eaten at home and shared with family, have been grafted onto a sociality of eating fast food. This melding together of both invention and convention, of transgression and ordinariness provides the background against which young people from migrant backgrounds are reinvigorating the social spaces of food consumption and in the process both re-enchanting and destabilising the notion of migrant food.

I once asked my grandmother where she thought Vietnamese cuisine came from. After thinking about it for a few seconds she started laughing, her hands waving in the air, 'where else but from our "ong ba" (our ancestors)?'. (Mai Pham, Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table, 2001)

The comment above is indicative of the notion that for many Vietnamese people, their cuisine stretches back through time, through grandmothers, grandfathers and ancestors, through landscapes, through memory and through evocations of the past. This paper explores the comparative dimensions of the pleasures of everyday experiences of eating in Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia and reveals the modalities through which what is remembered and what is transformed become modulated by social and political contexts. In Vietnam, food is continuously inflected with political meaning. The changes in eating styles have become a means to grasp the legacies of the socialist past as well as their reconfigurations under a regime of global capitalism. The implications of these present tensions are the possibilities for the rise of new solidarities to form around popular activities such as eating. Presently in Vietnam, to participate in café society, to enjoy eating out and to feast at home becomes a way of constituting selfhood against a regime the populace may wish to oppose. At the same time as food in Vietnam is undergoing rapid transformation so too has the Vietnamese diaspora generationally changed its eating patterns. While pho (noodle soup) is a national passion in Vietnam, it is also thought to be the quintessentially Vietnamese dish in Australia. Many older Vietnamese migrants both nostalgically recreate Vietnamese food heritage in Australia as well as subtly transform it, though young people are increasingly turning to fast food eaten outside the home for many of their meals. In this paper I analyse the meanings of diasporic home cooking and restaurant entrepreneurship among older Vietnamese and compare the experience of eating food at home and in restaurants with the eating of fast food among young Vietnamese. This reveals, not only the ways in which this new style of eating marks out new forms of belonging, but also the diaspora now engages in an 'intercultural' space where tastes are reconstituted and re-imagined in relation to wider society.

Superficially, diasporic and homeland food may appear to be markedly different; however, the paper reveals the ways in which food is in both cases a primary means of embodying and making tangible both social change and the relations of power between groups in both societies. The paper theoretically extends Appadurai's (1996,2001) analysis of globalisation in the making of modem subjectivities by analysing the links between consumption and cultural diversity in their grounded everyday dimensions. I argue that different forms of belonging seen in the consumption of food in both sites carry significations which have the possibility of both dissolving and reinforcing national and/or homeland affinities. In Vietnam, food is presently being reclaimed as a space of the market, of the long-forgotten past, and of pleasure in a reassertion of Vietnameseness. By contrast in Australia, the eating styles of Vietnamese people are being transformed both temporally and generationally, as Vietnamese food becomes 'Australianised' and Australian food becomes 'Vietnamised'. This process of engagement is no simple borrowing or translation but a process of cultural creation with the material, cultural and social resources available in the diaspora.

Food in a post-socialist state

By examining the changing meaning of food in contemporary Vietnam it is possible to explore what happens to the sensing of cultural life under profound economic change or displacement, how one might literally 'experience' social change. I argue that it is important to explore the 'everyday embodiments' of experience--those sensory elements of material culture, of food, fragrance, clothing, bodies and the landscape. I explore what happens to the experience of eating after a period of deprivation has ended and there has been a return to a market economy--what stays the same and what has become modified and refashioned (Cf. Clifford 1997). I describe the ascetic food landscape in the 1980s and contrast this with the present escalation of pleasure associated with eating.
By the 1980s, Hanoi had been under a communist regime for over 25 years, had suffered through a long war in the south, bombings in the north, extreme poverty, malnourishment and was seen as a political pariah in much of the world. Throughout most of the 1980s many of my informants report that even if there had been money to buy goods there was nothing to buy. As Gabriel Thien Than, an overseas Vietnamese, described it, Hanoi was an 'ascetic' capital in the 1980s (Logan 2000: 217). Logan reports that during this period:
The once fashionable Rue Paul Bert was now an extremely depressed Trang Tien Street; the private shops and cafés had gone, replaced by the State Department Store--a 'palais de la desolation' according to Galude Palazzoli. Population densities in the Ancient Quarter had become extreme ... and people were feeling that life was scarcely better now than during the war when at least they had their revolutionary ardour to cheer them. (2000:217)

There was no street trading, only large state-managed outlets for the distribution of goods from state-controlled co-operative farms and industries. As a result, the streets did not bustle, and, as reported to me by Hanoi residents, people were under the close scrutiny of neighbours and employers and moved about to and from their places of study or work, but there were no hives of activity on the streets except at Tet. During this period individuals only experienced very limited freedom of movement and were almost continuously under surveillance by neighbours and colleagues. The economic transformations that then took place led to a rapid evolution of consumption patterns, to a highly diverse street trading cultural life and also to the possibility of people congregating in groups, at noodle soup shops, in parks, and with tea and cigarette sellers on the pavements. The transformations in the use of space and the corresponding dynamic city life that developed out of these spatial and economic changes have become too complex and uncontrollable to be disciplined by the police or the party in spite of ever-present directives and sanctions on street activities.

The contrast between the ascetic, carceral Hanoi of the 1980s and the sensuous, lively Hanoi of the present is exemplified in the following comments made to me by a Hanoi resident:
Our bodies and spirits were crushed then. It was a hunt for food every day. There were dark streets at night because there was hardly any electricity. We were miserable. Our food became more and more basic--rice, and fish sauce if we were lucky. Everything had no taste. We all wore our dark clothes--it was the only fabric available. We all looked the same. No hairdressers, no clothes shops, the grimmest of food, no drinks, just tea and water. And now we can get anything we want from anywhere in the world. We can buy, but we can also have fun. We can travel around the country; go visit temples and pagodas in the countryside. There's music again, and people are doing up their houses and painting them, and we can all wear beautiful clothes. People are out much more--everyone's on the street--activity everywhere--its fun to watch you know just sitting on the step and seeing all that colour go by. And the food is so varied, so abundant, so flesh. This morning in the market I could smell the green mangoes from the South. It was like Heaven. My mother is teaching me recipes her mother taught her when she was as child--she had forgotten them until now because there was no food to cook with! Its like a totally different world, an utterly different place than the one that I grew up in. (Nhung Tran, personal communication)

In contemporary Vietnam, the emerging focus on bodily pleasure rather than bodily discipline is mapping out social and political change and providing a cartography of a nation passing through a phase of critical re-evaluation. That many citizens describe the economic changes in the country in terms of a change in sensory experiences is mostly related to the contrast between the denial of pleasure that was evident in the post-1975 period. Hanoi had been under a strict centrally planned economy and co-operativisation since 1954, yet in the south the sensory life-worlds of citizens in the sprawling metropolis of Saigon have been impacted upon by many more external forces, not least the US presence until 1975.
As Nhung commented above, food has been one of the most obvious changes in the everyday experiences of the world. The domain of eating is reintroducing concepts of pleasure into the realm of the popular. A scarcity of food had meant that there was a scarcity of pleasure. An element of the economic impact of food is the legacy of the pre-1990 situation of poor nutrition and in many areas chronic malnutrition, especially amongst rural women in the north. The combination of a return to the normal open-air provision of food through stalls and streetside restaurants with the far better access to food led initially to a sharp rise in the quantity of food eaten. Later, higher incomes and better supply has tended to enable a shift to better quality and widening of the range of food eaten. As Probyn (2000: 7) argues, food brings our senses to life and foregrounds the viscerality of everyday experience. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the change in food in Hanoi has been a 'return' to an earlier style of cooking, where women had to bring up from their memories the way things used to taste before the communists came. As a result of many foreign influences over centuries, and even in people's lifetimes--Chinese, French, American, Eastern European, Thai, Japanese--the diet throughout the country has always been enhanced and diversified by foreign food items such as breads, cakes, paté, dairy products (especially yoghurt) and, more recently, espresso coffee (Fforde 2003). Although these products have hitherto come and gone depending on the colonial moment, they have recently returned in force for tourists and expatriate workers. In spite of this, Vietnamese tastes appear to have altered very little with no wholesale embrace of foreign food products in spite of their ready availability to foreigners (2003). There has been a huge growth in restaurants and the new urban wealthy are lining up to eat at the best pho restaurants in the city, having large and long-lasting family lunches on West Lake, and ice-creams and coffee by Hoan Kiem Lake. One woman told me 'Our tastes have returned'. She was referring to her perception that food was not only available once more but that flavour and the discrimination of tastes had come back.

It is not only in the urban areas that food has become the expression of a better life and a removal from the effects of central planning. John Kleinen in his study of northern Vietnamese village life, reports that family feasting at weddings and funerals and death anniversary banquets have been revived to often spectacular displays of food and music (1999:182-3). Ceremonial processions, where gifts and wedding robes are displayed and traditional umbrellas are put up, are coming back in often flamboyant fashion (1999:177). Before the mid 1980s, celebrations at weddings were required to be minimised and involved a limited number of guests and a modest dowry. 'Dowry was officially limited to personal clothing, a pillow or a blanket' (1999). As Hy Van Luong (1992) reports, during that time, government rules restricted the size of wedding feasts by restrictions on the food presented by the groom's family to the brides' relatives. These strikingly changed ways of making 'sense' of events like marriage are being experienced throughout the north of Vietnam. However, the state attempts to intervene with regular directives against lavish weddings and 'superstitious' practices. In December 2002 the interior ministry was ordered to produce a set of rules on how to hold 'proper, economical and civilised weddings', and the media were asked to produce stories that depict modest weddings between state workers (Reuters, December 5 2002).

As Philip Taylor (2003) and Alex Soucy (2003) have written, there is presently an emphasis on internal travel in Vietnam for religious purposes. This travel involves elaborate planning and discussions about eating. Travelling to pilgrimage sites throughout Vietnam is almost entirely the domain of women, who organise the trips and focus on the food, the enjoyment of travel and the social program of the pilgrimage. The pilgrimages have a carnivalesque atmosphere with lively consumer activities, performances and food. The sites of pilgrimage, cemeteries for the war dead and temples are reinvigorating not just public memory but also the landscape. A by-product of economic reform, this reenchantment of the landscape brings with it travel for pleasure, complete with travelling performance troupes and musical groups and an explosion of restaurants, drink stands and souvenir stores available from the sites and along the road. There are many sensory correspondences in Vietnam which create a code where colours may be associated with smells, flavours and musical tones.(n1) In the period of sensory depression, not only was fragrance unavailable, but music was restricted and foods rationed. Rituals can be performed now in taste-ful splendour, with music, wines and new types of incense, more pungent than before. Now one sense conjures up another, in a cultural synaesthesia where smells, tastes, textures and sensations are intertwined. On pilgrimages, in rituals and at weddings, feasting with an abundance of food is thus linked with a rich world of sensory pleasures, with music, incense and fabrics.

In the last decade the local market for music, foodstuffs and body products have simultaneously expanded. As is the case in China, the emergence of new sites for socialisation and new public venues enhances desire for 'commodity consumption and libidinous indulgence' (Zhen 2001: 133). These spaces include restaurants, nightclubs and luxury hotels, as well as pilgrimage sites and religious rituals. As the aromatic smoke rises from the grilling of meat in outdoor markets, the smell of baked bread rolls carried on the heads of women wafts along the avenues, chickens tied to bicycles squawk on their way to their deaths, and groups of girls in their freshly washed white ao-dais brush each others' hair in the sun awaiting their school graduation, it is clear that the senses have been awakened and now explode in many dimensions. The tactility experienced through being together in a shared space of proximity has political consequences. Habermas (1974) argued that the growth of urban culture and bodies against bodies--through eating, leisure and at meeting places--fuelled the development of a public sphere. In Hanoi the public sphere is being manifest in the rise of a city which more closely incorporates its citizens' yearnings for participation and bodily pleasure.

Food has become part of creative negotiations of the 'localisation' of the global processes that now dominate the world economy. These new eating activities also have to be negotiated with an unpopular regime which is still viewed as pleasureless. An efflorescence of new religious movements that explode in textures, sounds and tastes are enticing the populace away from the solemn state (stage)-managed spectacles in which bodies of high-ranking cadres are offered up as sense-less signifiers of 'nothing but' the people, the nation, and the party. Economic changes in Vietnam have impacted upon the sense-worlds of the Vietnamese and, as Serematakis argues, 'within a society that is undergoing turbulent shifts in material values, modes of representation and systems of reference, there can be a systemic character to these movements which frequently only registers at the level of the senses' (1994: 135). When Vietnamese migrate to Australia, their cultural difference is experienced and often expressed through their embodied differences and the foreign environment that they sense around them through their bodies. The harshness of the landscape, the space, the silence and lack of odour is for them both a sign of their separation and distance from their new environment as well as a signifier of freedom. The senses play an important role in social classifications and may trigger an experience of difference (Classen 1993: 169). The odour, feel or taste of difference is not so much a real scent or touch as it is a reaction transposed into a sensory domain. By mapping transnational relations in their sensory modalities in the process of thinking through migration, it is possible to reconceptualise the effects of displacement in all their lived complexity. I thus now turn to analysing the eating patterns within the Vietnamese diaspora, particularly young people, to explore not just how 'Vietnamese' food plays a role in connecting them to their parents' cultural background, but what meanings eating fast food, a global popular phenomenon, have in the diasporic context.

Re-encountering Vietnamese food in Australia

For Vietnamese people living in Australia, Vietnam is often remembered nostalgically as a place of sensory pleasure where the food tastes not only more 'authentic' but qualitatively better. 'Chicken in Australia is tastless' says Thuan while Binh insists that 'the only good pho is in Hanoi'. Lan says, 'I miss some vegetables that cannot be found in Australia such as xu hao, and ke (a certain cereal that exists only in the North). Vegetables taste a lot better in Vietnam. Everything is overgrown in Australia due to fertilisers and so have less taste'. Homesickness is often expressed as a longing to taste certain foods, to smell the fruits in the market and the odours of cooking. In the exchange of gifts between family members in Vietnam and Australia the goods leaving Vietnam are mostly relatively unprocessed items such as tea, or fruit while those entering Vietnam are usually highly processed foods like chocolate, alcohol and biscuits. Here the natural/artificial distinction is made apparent and reproduces the notion that Vietnam produces more 'natural' goods which the West acts on to transform them into something both more 'sophisticated' and more 'artificial' (see Thomas 1999). Food from Vietnam is remembered as part of the rich sensory world which is conjured up in multiple associations. A young Vietnamese-Australian Binh told me:

If there is one thing I miss about Vietnam then that would be the scent of this flower from the trees lining all the streets of Hanoi, it's called hoa xua. Every Hanoian misses this scent when they're away from the town. It reminds them of everything about their life there--their family, friends, the pho, the crumbling old French buildings. I love that smell.

Pho is sometimes viewed as the sensory essence of life in Vietnam. In 2002, a group of young Vietnamese-Australians in Sydney designed a T-shirt they would sell at their art exhibition--the T-shirt read 'I love Pho'. This they said represented what it is to be Vietnamese in Australia today. These young people all argued that although pho 'makes' them Vietnamese, pho in Australia is tasteless, nothing like it is in Vietnam. Even Vietnamese food had no taste in Australia, a country viewed as odourless, sanitised and bereft of the remembered sensory pleasures of Vietnam. Another difference between the homeland and Australia is that cooking Vietnamese food in Australia is thought to be primarily associated with domestic space and seen as time-consuming, whereas in Vietnam food is remembered as being readily available on the streets at any time, at least for those who left before the period of deprivation in the 1980s. Phuong, for example, tells me: 'My sisters and I recall the time in Vietnam when we were growing up, when we just called out to itinerant sellers (hang rong) to get whatever food we fancied. In one day there are at least a dozen of sellers selling different foods.'

Although the idea that food was easy to obtain, fresh and varied in Vietnam is what a lot of older Vietnamese people remember, in general the notion of the plentiful supply of food in Australia is often stressed in stories that people tell about how they eat differently here than in Vietnam. For example, Thuan says:

All our family can eat Vietnamese and Australian food. As meat is more tasty and plentiful here, we eat more of the accompanying dishes than the staple food itself which is rice. In Vietnam, by tradition rice served to fill up one's stomach so one can go and work in the fields. The accompanying or side dishes sometimes serve to give flavour to the rice. The soup or canh is served together to wash the rice down because rice by itself is too dry. Now it is the other way around, rice is a side dish and accompanying dishes the main dishes. But for people who grew up in Vietnam, such as my mother, she can't live without rice and nuoc mam (fish sauce). I told her all the times that rice is fattening, that she should eat more of the delicacies.

This indicates that the style of cooking might be similar but the way it is eaten and the amounts have changed in Australia. Vietnamese food has in this way been subtly altered in Australia through relative amounts, flavour and in the venues for eating. Non-Vietnamese food, however, is always seen at the other end of the spectrum of tastes and flavour. When Lien Yeomans arrived as a Colombo plan student to study in Australia in 1962, she says, 'The following morning I sat red-eyed looking at a lifeless bowl of cornflakes and pieces of cold toast, thinking of crowded warm Saigon with its bowls of piping hot noodle soup and the Vietnamese sounds and aromas. Tears fell into my corn fakes' (Yeomans 2001: 52). In 1962, she says, the only herb that was available in Sydney was 'ordinary' mint (2001: 59). What this story reveals is the very tangible way in which the 'taste' of a new country was experienced as loss. It is often these embodied sensory memories of 'dislocation' that Vietnamese people choose to write about when they describe their arrival in Australia and the adjustments they had to make. The experience of occasions surrounding eating and drinking are moments when their 'difference' is sensed as a cultural bereavement but also as something else 'in addition' as new cultural meanings are accrued. Barbecues in Australia, for example, often provide a moment of intercultural creation. Thuan, for example, thinks of barbecues in the following way:

When we have an Australian barbecue, we love the way my mother marinates the meat, the Vietnamese way with a lot of lemon grass, garlic, a dash of nuoc mare and pepper. So good that I remember one time when we were at Commonwealth Park barbecuing our meat next to an Australian group of people who just chucked the meat on to the fire straight from the packed trays. They asked us what is that delicious smell?

Here, the barbecue is a moment of cross-cultural invention, and is not viewed as loss but as something where one's Vietnameseness can be expressed within an Australian modality.(n2) Peter McKenzie (2003) comments on this 'double consciousness' associated with the diasporic experience when he describes his experiences on entering a Vietnamese-owned Australian pub, The Royal Hotel in Barkly Street Fitzroy, in Melbourne. On buying beer from the Vietnamese barman and sitting down with his group of Vietnamese friends McKenzie says, 'in this scene I recognised a mimetic image of the cultural mannerisms of the Australian male drinker. But the familiarity seemed out of place; the language and faces seemed so different, yet that sense of mates drinking and talking in a pub, endured' (2003: 20). This intercultural experience, 'this blurring of the familiar with the strange', he argues is a reflection of what Taussig (1993) has called 'second contact', something neither Vietnamese nor Australian but which involves their mutual 'co-implicatedness'. What I argue here is that it is through food that this co-implication becomes most apparent, both through Vietnamese food in the domestic and restaurant setting and also through what is perceived to be 'Australian' food.

When Vietnamese first started arriving in Australia in large numbers in the late 1970s there was an initial spatial concentration in certain areas of our largest cities; Cabramatta in western Sydney and Footscray in Melbourne, both very culturally diverse areas. Vietnamese people preferred to live in close communities at that time so they could easily speak their language, buy their food and have access to Vietnamese-language services. Even as Vietnamese people have slowly moved out of these areas the places continued to be viewed as the heart of the Vietnamese community in Australia, and people refer to them as having the best food. In Canberra, Vietnamese people often travel for weekends to Sydney 'to have the taste of Vietnam'. The fresh fruit and juice stalls, sugar cane juice, pho shops, restaurants, butcheries, seafood stores and fruit and vegetable shops serve the local diverse communities by providing a large range of items. The Vietnamese-owned businesses however, dominate, and attract not just Vietnamese, but also local Sydney tourists out for the day to participate in the city's 'cosmo-multiculturalism', to employ Hage's (1997) term. It is apparent that small business operations in the community have been primarily in the provision of food. Quyen commented on the path of Vietnamese people into restaurants:

The notion of Vietnamese chefs or Vietnamese gastronomy is non-existent. Almost everyone can cook, thus when you are in a new country, if you can't find a job, you can always open a restaurant. Foreigners can't tell! We learn to cook not with cookbooks, but through taste, for example, trying to work out what is in that dish. We experiment at home until we come up with something our own. My mother tends to do that when we eat something new at a restaurant (Chinese or French), she speculates what there is in it. I told her that she would put a lot of people out of business.

There are many reasons why Vietnamese restaurants have been such a successful means through which many families have made a life in Australia. The notion that Vietnamese cuisine does not need to be formally 'taught' combined with the necessity to find self-employment in a permitted niche market led to the decision of many Vietnamese to open restaurants. Food in this way is both a means for Vietnamese to be 'incorporated' into life in Australia and, the same time, 'eating Australian' is a mechanism for embodying Australian life. This is most apparent when exploring the relationship of Vietnamese youth in Australia to fast food and the settings for eating such food.

Food court fetish: the social arenas of Vietnamese diasporic youth appetites

To further the argument that Vietnamese people are often involved in the intercultural 'mirroring' (Mckenzie 2003) of what they perceive to be 'Australian' experience, the relationship of Vietnamese youth to food will now be explored. In interviews conducted during 2001,(n3) while most young people from Vietnamese backgrounds said they considered themselves Australian, being an 'Aussie' was frequently seen as a look (fair, light eyes), dressing a certain way (very casual), being interested in barbeques, sport and drinking, and, being granted a freedom from parental control (Butcher and Thomas, 2001). Particular foods are seen as 'Australian', such as meat pies, steak or lamb. The following are extracts from conversations that I had with two young men of Vietnamese background:

Q. What is your favourite food?
I've got a lot of favourite foods. I enjoy all sorts of foods, I mean I eat all sorts of backgrounds. I eat Australian food, I like eating steak.
Q. What do you eat at home?
Sometimes I cook like an Australian meal. Lamb cutlets or something. Peas and potatoes whatever you call it.
Q: What does the term Australian culture mean to you?
I don't know--barbecues?

The emphasis on the perceived contrast between 'Australian' food and 'Vietnamese' food is apparent in the interviews. Vietnamese food is mostly the food eaten at home with parents. Although eating in Vietnamese restaurants does also occur, the most common eating out experience is not in Vietnamese restaurants where the food is often perceived as being not as good as that served at home. As Ghassan Hage (1997) has argued the consumption of 'ethnic food' at home is one of a locus of food practices with which migrants work at feeling at home in Australia. When young Vietnamese people in Australia reach adolescence most firmly associate Vietnamese food with the domestic setting and eating out with 'eating diversely'. Although Mintz (1985: 213) suggests that eating has become desocialised and that the entire productive character of societies is being recast and with it, 'the nature of time, work and of leisure', my research reveals the way in which 'social' aspects of eating whether at home or out is central to how meals are perceived by young Vietnamese people. The meal remains an important template in Vietnamese households and retains its symbolic significance (see also Caplan 1997: 6). Some researchers have suggested that the meal stands as a powerful metaphor for the family and the nature of family life (1997: 7). Nevertheless, eating patterns of young Vietnamese indicate that eating out, particularly in food courts, enmeshes them in a social world of their peers which they deliberately differentiate from their parents. For these young people, eating out in food courts or fast food outlets reflects the contemporary changes in technology and social formations where meeting in shopping malls is a prime leisure activity and is often arranged through mobile phone communication. These eating occasions are situated in complex social spaces like the shopping mall which are both temples of consumption and also workplaces for many young people (Beardsworth and Keil 1997: 121). The eating patterns of young Vietnamese in Sydney concern these wider productive and social processes and the experiential modalities of consumption. Fast food is therefore a means by which, following Hage's formulation, young Vietnamese build a 'homely' space, but this space is not the domestic home, but rather the home in the wider world, friendship networks and youth popular culture.

Eating and meeting sites

We are in Cabramatta, in western Sydney a symbolically fraught space in the national imaginary--thought of as an Asian suburb, as a ghetto, as a site of criminality and drugs. I am conducting interviews with young people for a group of architects asked to redesign the public spaces of Cabramatta. In the group are more than a dozen school students from Cabramatta, all born in Australia from Asian parents. I ask them what they would like to see in Cabramatta and they all enthusiastically call out 'Macdonalds and KFC!'. I ask why? and they tell me, 'so we have somewhere to hang out after school, we have nowhere to go except the library'.

Thursday night, Westfield Shopping Mall, Parramatta. The food court is an energetic, jovial meeting place with many boisterous young men and women greeting each other flamboyantly, calling out to each other and excitedly engaging in conversation. Young men greet each other with displays of mock fighting, hugging or parodies of social closeness such as gripping each other's cheeks. The fashion and demeanour of the boys, although a mixture of styles, has some distinct elements which are borrowed from black American street culture. In a display of affinity to this cultural style it is also not uncommon for the boys to call each other 'bro'. The girls are dressed up for the outing to the mall. They keep looking about expectantly, glancing at the boys and making mock laughs, while they sip on their thickshakes. There are not only Vietnamese young people here but rather culturally mixed groups of migrant youth, mostly Middle-Eastern, Pacific Islander, Indian and Chinese. On Thursdays there are sometimes 800-1000 young people in this one mall, and in the three food courts there are hundreds at a time talking, 'hanging out' and eating in different groups. One young woman tells me 'If I come here on Thursday night I know I'll be safe because fifty of my cousins will be here too.' Friendship groups are mixed, being ethnically very diverse, however mostly young people from Asian backgrounds interlink with each other in groups of friends as do those from Middle-Eastern background (see Butcher and Thomas 2001).

In Chinatown on Friday night the Sussex food court is packed with young men and women in large groups, groups which break up and reaggregate, form and reform through the night. Tables are joined then separated, people introduced, food carried to and fro between the tables. These social groups are like cells dividing and growing, breaking apart and coagulating. The groups of young people are mostly Asian-Australian but also other migrant groups. These forms of eating, in food courts with large numbers of young people, constitute the new 'youth ethnic' mode of eating. And it is not the food itself that is given primacy in these sites, but rather the social domains generated by food courts and carparks. For young people from diverse cultural backgrounds, the social settings of 'ethnic food', eaten at home and shared with family, have been grafted onto a sociality of eating fast food. As Probyn argues, across different sites of food consumption, 'the interminglings of the cultural, the culinary and the corporeal' suggest different modalities of thinking through the concern for the self (2001: 4). Food and eating in this conception is one which Jack Goody sums up as 'a way of placing oneself in relation to others' echoing Douglas's assertion that eating is 'the medium through which a system of relationships is expressed' (cited in Probyn 2001: 7).

These eating styles in food courts have their base in relations of power. The tangibilities of power, its texture and flavour are experienced in food courts at the macro levels of economics and class, at the level of global industries of food production and consumption but is also palpable at the individual level. That fast food outlets are the most common first job for migrant youth in Sydney may also reflect the finding that eating in a food court is also likely to be the first meal eaten 'outside' a domestic or 'ethnic' setting for most migrant youth in Australia. Whereas cosmopolitans are driven to immerse themselves in the food of 'ethnic cultures' and different tastes to access 'cosmo-multicultural capital' (Hage 1997), ethnic youth often seek out food which is not marked ethnically, is culturally 'odourless' and homogenised, but still familiar such as that found at Macdonalds. For young Vietnamese, fast food exhibits more cultural capital and marks them out as having transcended their 'ethnicity' to acquire a more youth-oriented cosmopolitan identity.(n4)

For Vietnamese youth, the contrasts between food at home and food in a food court are numerous. An important one is that meals at home are seen as 'structured events', a social occasion organised by rules prescribing time, place and sequence of actions. A 'snack' at the other end of the spectrum has no structure (Nicod 1974, cited in Bell and Valentine 1997). From observing eating patterns of young people in foodcourts, it is quite clear that eating may not even be a component of the pleasure they gain from food court sociality. Ritzer (1993) who has studied fast food in the US argues that food courts are 'amusement parks for food'. He also suggests that eating without the anxieties of cutlery, tableware and the disapproval of other customers is a major component of their appeal. That is, at more formal 'cafés' and 'restaurants' customers are under the surveillance of waiters and waitresses, they are guided through menus, food is brought to the table, the tables are cleared and generally the diner is aware of the boundaries of behaviour and control, and of how long they are acceptably permitted to stay (1993). And herein lies one component of the attraction of Vietnamese youth to food courts. The lack of constraint in food-courts is an expression of an engagement with the wider youth culture they would often like to be immersed in and accepted by, and consequently also represents a distancing from what they may perceive as the boundedness of 'ethnicity' lived at home through eating 'traditional' Vietnamese food'.

Vietnamese youth's attraction to food-courts is not typically experienced as cultural loss or estrangement, but as 'access to the world out there' always with the security of friends. Eating in this respect can be a mundane exposition for Vietnamese youth of the visceral nature of their connectedness to other young people. This appropriation of spaces and styles, rather than demonstrating and reinforcing the social marginality of Vietnamese youth, marks out a new terrain of cultural expression in terms of language, consumption and leisure which is rapidly both re-enchanting and destabilising the notion of migrant food. Although numerous authors have emphasised the importance of meals in producing the home and the family (Bell and Valentine 1997: 59), it appears that for many Vietnamese youth food consumption patterns renegotiate notions of the family, or produce new understandings of the family in its diasporic setting. Vietnamese food, although found immensely pleasureable, is linked to the past, to parents and grandparents and to the ties of homeland, whereas fast food is perceived as linking young people to global youth cultures, to culturally diverse friendship networks and to wider society.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the political arenas of taste in a diasporic and homeland setting. Vietnam's embrace of a new era of mass culture along with the shifting sands of a postsocialist economy and politics reveals that it is the everyday activities such as eating and drinking which are creating new modes of political behaviour--not an active politics of dissent but rather an irreversible wave of non-state imaginaries which are changing the ideological landscape. Rather than dismantling socialism, these new pleasures and popular interests revitalise socialism and in its new decentred, de-essentialised forms it becomes a constitutive part of the daily reality of Vietnamese political and cultural life. As is characteristic of post-colonialism, in post-socialism the ideological legacies and cultural effects of past events not only remain at work in the present but are often taken in new directions, reinvented strategically for the contemporary moment. In relation to food, the post-socialist moment is one in which emphasis is given to the pleasures of food and eating in a market economy in contrast to the periods of deprivation in the recent past. In the case of diasporic Vietnamese, it is young Vietnamese-Australians who are changing the culinary cultures of their communities. Although still enjoying the smells, flavours, textures and protocols of cooking and eating Vietnamese food with family, they are also drawn to the less-structured, individualised eating of fast food outlets.

The new food cultures in both Vietnam and the diaspora are means of expression which involve people in a play between new forms of eating out and more culturally normative home cooking. At the same time, in both cases, culture and national identity are negotiated through the pleasures of eating. The public acts of eating out in Vietnam are both a means of social display and distinction as well as an indicator of the tensions between reform and festivity within an authoritarian nation-state struggling to define itself in a globalising world. In the diaspora, young Vietnamese are creating themselves anew in their styles of eating and consumption more generally. In both sites new ways of eating reveal the social force of the imagination. As Appadurai has argued, the faculty of the imagination allows 'collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life to emerge' (Appadurai 2001: 6-7). By eating in imaginative new ways, Vietnamese in Vietnam are resisting state control through the senses, and in the diaspora young people's fast food eating practices involve them in larger-scale patterns of consumption such as shopping and going to the movies. The links between food practices and wider social and political changes reveal that 'the small habits of consumption, typically daily food habits, can perform a percussive role in organizing large-scale consumption patterns, which may be contrived of much more complex orders of repetition and improvisation' (Appadurai 1993:13). Whereas in the homeland these new patterns of eating and consuming focus on the processes of becoming through consumption in contrast to the previous focus on production in the socialist economy, in the diaspora fast food is part of mainstream popular culture and eating in food courts thus reflects the desire of young people to share in wider contemporary youth culture. Adventures in eating--at home and outside, in the homeland and in the diaspora--become a means to ingest the wider sociopolitics of Vietnamese lives, and in doing so, articulate new forms of gastronomic participation. While in Vietnam the national 'home' is being remade through eating and other popular activities, in the diaspora homeliness is being sought by young people beyond the domestic setting, in the world of their culturally diverse peers in new sites of consumption where food remains central to the home-building project.

Notes

(n1.) My fieldnotes from 1991 capture this integration:
Here I am just waking up and I can hear the sound of a woman calling out that she has hot bread for sale. I look out and she is carrying the basket on her head and singing out at every comer. Its like music that sound, and it goes on all day but with different seller all with their different rhythmic calls. The sound and smell of the food intermesh. The call of hot bread is accompanied by the wafting up to my room of a fresh bakery. All day long sounds and smells carry through the air on a sensory wave.
(n2.) Barbecuing is an element of Vietnamese cooking, but it is done over small charcoal grills and not in public social settings such as in Australia.
(n3.) These interviews were conducted for the GENERATE project which studied the everyday lives and cultural expression of young people from migrant backgrounds in western Sydney.
(n4.) Likewise in Gillespie's (1995) study of young Indians in London, she found that they preferred to eat Western' or fast food outside the home in order to have more control over their bodies and to represent themselves as hybrid and as having separated themselves from the 'village food' of India.

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