Summary Of Code-Switching In Fred Wah's Diamond Grill

I will examine the function of food as signifier of ethnic identity and the culinary code-switching that occurs in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill. My analysis will be between two different types of food items in Diamond Grill: the sugary sodas and ice cream that Fred makes in the restaurant and the Chinese rice soup which his Grandfather eats and which Fred eventually begins to make. This comparison reveals interplay between the cultural memory of the nation his grandfather immigrated from and the North American identity that Fred is creating in Canada. Negotiating between these two culinary identities becomes a form of culinary code-switching, to modify Mary Louise Pratt’s terminology.

Wah cites Pratt’s definition of code-switching in a footnote as a practice “in which speakers switch spontaneously and fluidly between two languages” (qtd. in Wah 78). However, there are differences between Pratt’s formulation of

code-switching and how it arises in culinary terms in Diamond Grill. Being able to shift between different alimentary encodings and the cultures they signify is at times a vexed relationship, not one that is perfectly fluid or spontaneous. Wah’s use of culinary code-switching thus not only analyzes the fluidity between inhabitance of different culinary and cultural codes, but also the blockages and disconnects that occur when shifting between the two, or even when developing the codes themselves.
Fred believes that the predilection for the rice soup is being lost through the generations: “I try it a couple of times but don’t like it.

Going out of us. Gone now, from him, to him, to me” (Wah 74). Intergenerational change and immigration to Canada at first conveys the loss of both culinary identification and cultural identity. But one food practice that is immediately passed on comes from his father’s instructions on the maintenance of the soda fountain: “The soda fountain has to sparkle, Freddy, my dad warns. It’s your job to keep it neat, clean, and ready—real pizzazz, ya understand?” (Wah 41) Utilizing American colloquialisms, Fred’s father establishes a place for Fred to create confections and the cultural identity they connote. Fred notes, “The soda fountain becomes my territory” (Wah 41). By means of his territory, Fred has the ability to formulate his own cultural identity that assimilates Canadian culture — he is able to improvise his soda and ice-cream confections, creating “the Grey Cup Special”, a mélange of nuts, chocolate, fruit and

ice-cream.
Fred’s felt ownership of the soda-bar correlates to his father’s ownership of the restaurant itself, where both father and son are creating and negotiating a cultural identity within the dominant culture while still retaining their own ethnic identity. This corresponds to Pratt’s idea that code switching engenders “the power to own but not be owned by the dominant language” (qtd. in Wah 78). In terms of foodways, this transcribes into Fred’s power to territorialize or own the soda fountain and simultaneously retain a preference for the soup his grandfather enjoyed.
However, in Fred’s first entry about this particular soup of semi-burnt rice, Fred writes of estrangement from what he refers to as “muck,” that his grandfather eats, rather than any affinity for it. The ‘muck’ Fred’s grandfather eats is descriptively opposite the “sleek and gleaming” (Wah 40) soda fountain that Fred works at. When his grandfather eats his rice, Fred perceives that “A great distance dwells in his face” (Wah 74). Fred muses on what this distance might be: “I always think it’s China, mysterious, something he knows and we don’t” (Wah 74). This is the distance of immigration, of the diasporic relation to home, and it is expressed through the chthonic “muck” his grandfather eats and reminisces over. Yet the relation Fred feels towards his grandfather’s homeland is, at this point, as murky as the soup he eats.
In her discussion of ethnic foodways, Susan Kalcik notes, “The symbol system is flexible in that symbols can be replaced, different symbols can perform the same function, and the same symbol can change its function” (45). This is particularly relevant to the intergenerational fluctuations in symbols that occur with beginning a family in a new cultural landscape. Though Fred’s first entry concerning the burnt-rice soup conveys the intergenerational and international distance of immigration to Canada, the prose-poem which immediately follows is a recipe for the soup itself and a declaration of its importance to Fred’s identity: “Here’s how my dad taught me when I left home and I discovered that I couldn’t life without it” (Wah 75).In the first entry the soup is a marker of the cultural loss of immigration, while in the second it becomes a sign of what is retained between the generations and diaspora.
Within the non-chronological progression of prose-poems in Wah’s Diamond Grill, a shifting language of food is established, wherein a specific food item is symbolically coded yet changes over time. Further, this non-linear progression presents a synchronous encoding of Fred’s adolescent unfamiliarity with his grandfather’s foods and his need for them as an adult. This complex relationship to the culinary ties to one side of his family exists in tandem with his experience, also as an adolescent, of creating characteristically sweet North American confections behind the soda bar at his father’s restaurant. Rather than a spontaneous and fluid shift between the culinary codifications of North American sweets and the Chinese burnt-rice soup, it is only with Fred’s evolving relationship to the food as signifiers of ethnicity that he …