Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai by Nina Mingya Powles
“What does it mean to taste something and be transported to so many places at once, all of them a piece of home? To be half-elsewhere all the time, half-here and not-here. There are two sides of myself: one longing for the city, one at peace near the sea.”
Tiny Moons: A Year of Eating in Shanghai (2020) is a dainty yet delicious collection of memoir essays from Nina Mingya Powles. As she journeys between Wellington, Kota Kinabalu and Shanghai, Powles draws us back to two constants: eating and cooking.
While the collection takes its jumping-off points from the mouth-watering snacks, meals and delicacies Powles invites into her life - it is about much more. Initially raised in New Zealand, Powles walks us through growing up at the cross point between two cultures; her mother being Malaysian-Chinese, and her father white.
Although her mother spoke Mandarin, Cantonese, and Hakka, Powles rejected Chinese school as a five-year-old, feeling like an outcast because she didn’t see other classmates who looked like her or fathers who looked like her own.
She acknowledges that her looks, “big hips, brown eyes, and brown hair that turns lighter during an Aotearoa New Zealand summer” have afforded her “an enormous privilege.” Being white passing, “makes it easy for some white people to see me as the same as them.”
It’s through the essence of food and returning to Shanghai for a year through a Chinese government scholarship that allowed her to study Mandarin full-time that Powles embraces an unravelling of these ideas and an acceptance of a different kind of hunger in her life:
“I taught myself to cook around the same time I decided to take Chinese as one of my subject majors at university back in Wellington, along with English Literature. I was hungry to create, to make things with my hands, to relearn and recover what I’d lost.”
Powles arrives in Shanghai during winter, shortly after Lunar New Year and leaves the following year. Her timeline between these two points is dotted with her food experiences: her first meal in the campus cafeteria, street food, groceries and shop-bought snacks, bakeries, ventures into home-cooking and memories of her mother and grandmother cooking.
One aspect that stood out for me in Powles’ writing was her descriptions of eating alone in cafes and restaurants, especially in what is still quite a foreign place to her. Instead of something to feel embarrassed about, Powles embraces it as part of her process of returning, not least because it forced her more urgently to engage with language in nuanced ways:
“I was beginning to find a home in this language, one shared by my mother and her family but here and now, at this exact point in time, occupied only by me. The language was a lifeline, an opening, and eating alone became a silent ritual.”
Eating alone, particularly in Western society, is still an act that brings with it a sense of shame, even something to be feared - especially for a woman. In my own twenties, forcing myself to eat out alone broke a near-debilitating fear of loneliness, and Powles sentences around this act felt very poignant for me:
“It helps that in this city there are likely thousands of people or even hundreds of thousands eating their bowl of noodles or dumplings alone at any given moment. For a short while, I am one of them.”
Sitting hand-in-hand with the notion of eating alone is Powles’ analysis of what food and hunger mean to women. Societal expectations for women around food generally involves self-control in ways that aren’t required from men. Reclaiming food as joy and the prowess of hunger to explore, expand and develop tastes is a refreshing reframing.
“It is tiring to be a woman who loves to eat in a society where hunger is something not to be satisfied but controlled. Where a long history of female hunger is associated with shame and madness. The body must be punished for every misstep; for every "indulgence" the balance of control must be restored. To enjoy food as a young woman, to opt out every day from the guilt expected of me, is a radical act, of love.”
A beautiful ode to culture, exploration, growth and personal acceptance, Powles’ mini-essays are a heart-warming experience and will leave you with far more than a hankering for dumplings:
“In this city you’re supposed to keep moving, but I let myself be still. I go for long walks in the evening and watch other people in their private solitude. Everything around me is disappearing and reappearing at the same time and I will never be able to keep up, and for the moment I know that’s okay. I can’t stop the city from changing shape, but by writing things down – recipes, names, colours, Chinese characters – I can hold it still for a moment.”
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
