Father Knows Best: Food as ritual in Ang Lee’s Eat Drink Man Woman

[This essay is from my postgraduate dissertation titled “First We Eat, Then We Do Everything Else: Studying Food in East Asian Cinemas”. It is a lengthy academic piece and I am not responsible for any disturbing/vivid flashbacks you may have to your uni days.]

“Eating, drinking, man, and woman, wherein lie human’s instinctual desires”, a quote from Confucius’ “The Book of Ritual”, is an old Chinese adage about the bare necessities of mankind; the title Eat Drink Man Woman conjures an image of food as integral to life in the form of paired binaries — eat is to drink, as man is to woman. The Chinese title “yinshi nannü” conveys the essence of Confucius’ idiom but is grammatically awkward when translated directly into English. Even with this contextless translation, the non-Chinese spectator slots the words into pairs that are different yet interdependent — eating cannot exist independently of drinking, and similarly, man and woman are mutually reliant. Eat Drink Man Woman is the third of Ang Lee’s “father knows best” trilogy — family dramas centred around a patriarchal figure. Lee, a Taiwanese immigrant to the United States, created these in the style of a “tragicomedy”, according to Ma (1996), who says that “the designation of ‘domestic tragicomedy’ brings out the distinctive movement of the trilogy. The initial, potential tragedy on immigrant predicament and nostalgia is transformed into a comedy as an exotic/ethnic tour is extended to the audience in a global market” (p. 193). Eat Drink Man Woman…