Title: Alternative Flavors: Culinary Writing and Citizenship Transformation in Mãn

Abstract: Vietnamese-Canadian writer Kim Thúy’s Mãn uses cooking and cuisine as a lens to subvert the traditional trauma-focused narrative of refugee literature. The novel reveals how culinary practices serve as a driving force and intrinsic mechanism for refugee transformation. Rather than merely reproducing diasporic culinary culture, Kim Thúy delves into the intricate interplay of Vietnamese identity, cultural fusion, and colonial history underlying these practices. By moving from the material memory to cultural synthesis, the author constructs a “culinary citizenship” within a historical framework, portraying the transformation from “refugee” to “citizen,” shaping a proactive and innovative refugee subjectivity. Kim Thúy’s work not only reflects the exchanges and mutual learning among civilizations within the globalized context of diaspora literature but also establishes a literary paradigm that centers cuisine as a core medium for expressing the refugee experience.

Keywords: Mãn, culinary writing, citizenship, Kim Thúy, refugee fiction, diaspora

Author: Lu Yu, Ph.D. Candidate, School of Foreign Languages, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2025.01.004