Shiqiu Liang's Nostalgia In Talking About Food In Elegant House

Shiqiu Liang is honored as a master of the generation in the prose field in Taiwan. His prose established his position in Chinese contemporary literature and had a profound influence in the China as well as abroad. Talking about food in elegant house is regarded as the elite of prose in food culture. When reading, readers will feel it meaningful. It provokes our deep thinking and contains strong nostalgia. The soul of this prose is the complex of homesick. The author found a new path to express his strong missing of motherland by writing eating. This thesis aims at analyzing this prose in microcosmic aspect and traces back the whole life experience and thinking process of Shiqiu Liang in macroscopic aspect. A full-viewed and a lively figure full of scholarship and emotion will be presented before us. In recent unprecedented collision and mingling of the two greatest cultural systems, eastern and western, Shiqiu Liang's simple and unsophisticated nostalgia with a sense of humor can be no doubt regarded as a kind of improvement and understanding of Chinese traditional culture and western foreign culture.â… . The historical origin of nostalgiaNostalgia is a kind of common feeling of humankind. It is an eternal theme in literature from ancient to modern time. Because of a long period of man-made isolation between people in Taiwan and people in mainland, objectively, the nostalgia of those who drifted into Taiwan has a broad, specific content in comparison to the nostalgia in any ancient times. When Shiqiu Liang was writing, the endless of nostalgia and the love of hometown struck his heart. So, some quotidian home style food and some snack of hometown with wonderful taste became his missing objects.Moreover, the reason why Shiqiu Liang wrote so many of prose full of his love of hometown, can not be separated from his bitter life experiences, besides Chinese traditional national mentality and influence of Taiwan nostalgia culture. He was born and grew up in troubled times and walked around a lot of places, in mainland, from Beiping to Qingdao, Qingdao to Guangzhou, from Guangzhou to Sichuan, then from Sichuan to Beiping , finally from Beiping to Taiwan. He was fed up with the hardship of drifting from place to place, homeless and miserable. The homeless life in his late years deepened his sadness and solitude and he had a new experience of nostalgia. Therefore, the food of hometown, such as soybean milk, sugarcoated haws on a stick, radish soup, noodle, even tea all became his unforgettable objects.â…¡. The cultural meaning of nostalgiaThe article about food, written by Shiqiu Liang, puts his patriotic love of hometown into historical culture of the motherland. China is a great country whose food culture is famous all over the world. In Chinese history, there are a lot of articles and monographs talking about food. But, Shiqiu Liang is the first person who brought food culture into his artistic language system and tried his best to write great articles winning universal praise. All of these are related to his rich and accumulative knowledge. In his concept, the Confucian culture is deeply rooted and took traditional culture as the premise when he contacted western trend of thought. Keeping old friendships in mind is another important character of traditional Chinese culture. In this prose Talking about Food in Elegant House; he vividly described the origins of food, their producing area, culture background and customs of the people by taking examples from ancient to modern freely. The theme is eating beyond, or shows full-bodied nostalgia in eating. This is a cultural representation of his nostalgia to hometown.Shiqiu Liang's deep and strong love to hometown is full of kindness, lifelikeness. His simple, conventional theme with supernatural cultural meaning reveals the spiritual pursuit, that is, east or west, home is the hest: the courtyard of former residence, the trivial of old times, the amorous feelings of Beiping, the atmosphere of festivals and new years and hometown's snack, all became his objectives to express his nostalgic feeling. In his wide and profound emotional world, these tiny things contain implied meanings. Shiqiu Liang raised his personal nostalgia up to an all-pervading and rational level. This kind of nostalgia is not just geographical but also immaterial, of historical culture and of Chinese nation. He talked about food on the surface in some of his works contain a cultural meaning beyond regions and ages. The missing to the former homeland is simply the representation of conscience of Chinese intellectuals.â…¢. The aesthetic feature of nostalgia(â… ) The indifferent feeling of common people to fame or benefit Shiqiu Liang's prose expresses lays to cherish life, brings forth human nature as much as his likes and shows his enjoyment of life. In front of countless delicacies of every kind, he chose the most common food to enjoy, such as soybean milk, dumplings, bean curd, roasted ducks, congee with eight treasures and steamed food buns with vegetable. This made us feel a warm love of hometown and kind of simple feeling of common people transferred onto paper. The subtle and vivid descriptions make readers deeply moved.(â…¡) Primitive and naturalThe faith of Shiqiu Liang is simple and natural. The troubled times made him deeply feel the uncertainty of life and the weakness and puzzlement of personal strength. Moreover, to some extends, consciously or .unconsciously he agreed to the idea from Lauzi and Zhuangzi that taking things as they come and contented with their mildness and did not seek fame and wealth. He just did so in his writing. He used a quiet tone, mild characters and brief sentences without the trace of deliberate exaggeration to tell people the things about drinking tea, but he actually showed his true feelings beyond tea drinking. Following his feeling and memorial logic, he described his past life experience and emotions as poems to show his nostalgia of returning to nature by tracing back the unforgettable sticky rice in his childhood and the missing of mutton for several years and the comparison of differences between the former himself and the present himself.(â…¢) The humorous language styleEmotional appeal with a sense of humor was a kind of expression which Shiqiu Liang pursued. Humorous language, comfortable tone, telling you a story by casual chatting, either sarcastic or humorous vigor of style in writing , often make readers find something both funny and annoying but absorbing readers tightly. Shiqiu Liang used optimistic attitude towards life to describe his undetached nostalgia and his understanding toward life of life ever and again. He appeared humorous not on purports but in deed fun. In the prose on food, we can also taste a kind of attitude towards life which is full of amusement in his prose. Talking about food is only a sort of superficial phenomenon, actually his frankness and kindness under lied behind the sharpness and humor. The only purpose on talking about food is to experience the different tastes in life.(â…£) The harmonious beauty in trivial but not brokenShiqiu Liang did not use passionate words to express himself; instead he used some trivial and daily description which shows harmonious beauty. His prose focused on trivial in daily life. What he wrote was quite natural with novel perspectives. From his prose, we can see the glistening of wisdom, his deep thinking and simple life attitude with the tolerance of a great master.In a word, the works of Shiqiu Liang's generation posses the emotion of nostalgia, the consciousness of nation, a belonging of motherland culture and a deep expectation to the uniform of motherland and their significances which go beyond ages.