Home food making, belonging, and identity negotiation in Belgian Taiwanese immigrant women’s everyday food practices

Abstract

This article examines the experiences of (re)producing home food in the daily life and food practices of Belgian Taiwanese immigrant women. The research is based on ethnography-both online and offline-and qualitative semistructured interviews with seventeen Taiwanese immigrant women/housewives in Belgium. Participants' food practices involve buying, growing, making, and sharing food. Buying Taiwanese food ingredients presents a genuine challenge, as Chinese and Asian supermarkets in Belgium do not carry all Taiwanese food items. Consequently, many Taiwanese immigrant women and housewives in this study share similar experiences of growing specific foods in their home garden; moreover, by doing so, they also transform their gardens in their private homes into transnational social spaces, and thereby connect their previous lived experiences and homeland memories with their present living circumstances. Moreover, Taiwanese immigrant women like to prepare and cook food with their husband and children while imparting Taiwanese food and cultural values through personal stories. Furthermore, by organizing and regularly participating in activities involving sharing and eating food with other Taiwanese immigrant women, these foodsharing events and behaviors also become an important social networking strategy that allows them to make, expand, and cultivate friendships; in addition, food sharing activities also assist the participants to construct a collective social identity of being immigrant mothers/housewives in a foreign land. However, what is meant by "Taiwanese" food varies substantially between participants, as do the associated emotional and ethnic meanings. Several things were stated to account for the taste of Taiwanese food, such as using certain condiments or the Ta Tung rice cooker. Equally diverse is the personal attachment of ethnonational identity toward the notion of home food, as discussions of childhood memories, ethnonational identity negotiation, and cultural markers are accompanied by critical reflection on the social constructed nature of home/ethnic foods in the migration contexts.

Social Change-based Identity Negotiation: Case of “Cina Benteng” and Indigenous Community in Kalipasir Tangerang, Banten

“…Togetherness usually being the feature of group identity. People who felt alienated from the community will form togetherness with the same group members to maintain their identity (Lin, Pang, and Liao 2020). However, togetherness and belongingness could be reintroduced and restored in a larger community as a form of identity negotiation response to collective experiences such as living together in the same place for a long time (Winkler and Kristensen 2021).…”

Counter-Frames Against Anti-Asian Racism During the Corona Pandemic in Berlin – Coping With Exclusion, Creating Belonging and Organising Resistance

“…A "home-culture frame" as defined by Feagin can function as a means of selfempowerment and everyday resilience but, depending on the situational context, can also be assessed as a singular or repeated act of direct resistance. This frame was particularly present in the participants' diary entries, which included examples highlighted in the literature such as detailed descriptions of meals based on family recipes, of conversations with family members and friends in Asian languages and of places such as Asian grocery stores (Lin et al, 2020;Roberts, 2018;Zauner, 2021). In the diary study, eating and sharing "Asian" food was described by half of the participants.…”

“…The following section will introduce our theoretical framework, for which we adapted Feagin's (2009) concepts of the “white frame” and “counter-frames” to the German context of a “postmigrant society” (Foroutan, 2019) and integrated Löw's (2001) sociological concept of the constitution of space. In a subsequent section, we will discuss different forms of anti-Asian racism as experienced by the participants of our study, with a specific focus on data regarding Berlin.…”

Negotiating Multi-layered Cultural Identities: A Study of Pan-Chinese Immigrant Descendants in Belgium

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