Remembering statelessness in food stories from Jewish Shanghai

Memories of food and foodways feature prominently in Willens' memoir, and in analysing some of these, I have sought to highlight some of the contradictory experiences of statelessness for Jewish people in colonial Shanghai. Willens' stories of food reveal difficult personal or communicative memories. Her stories also recount the experience of holding multiple and contradictory cultural identities as a stateless person that are sometimes fragmented and difficult to personally digest: these include her experience of discovering the false memory of her Romanian nationality, being part of the Jewish diaspora, living within a European concession, and being raised by Chinese servants while attending a French school. Stories of food in the memoir act as metonyms for complex memories of statelessness and the absence and impossibility of citizenship through blood, soil or naturalization as a Jewish person in Shanghai. The exploration of cultural memories of Jewish Shanghai also provides insights into the relatively unexplored tensions between colonialism and statelessness, which is a lacuna within narrative and memory studies. Attention over the past decade has been given to narratives and memories that may be connected, move, travel and migrate beyond national boundaries, thereby leading to cosmopolitan, globalized and transcultural memories. But my analysis of cultural memories within the complex and multi-layered city of Shanghai suggests the need to pay more attention to narratives that invite readers to imaginatively identify with, and indeed metabolize, the personal, social and cultural memories of others who have found themselves trapped by historical conflicts and unable to move, with no citizenship and no clear national identity, despite the privileges they enjoyed through colonial occupation. Historically, not just in China but in many countries of the world, Britain and other European countries left complex colonial legacies from occupation that involved privileged economic concessions for a minority, as well as forced migration and displacement. We might find in these places a collision of cultures, a mixing and intermingling of hybridized identities and memories that are easy to digest, that move. Yet we also need to be attentive, as this chapter suggests, to the fact that there will also be narratives and communicative memories that were clearly difficult to digest. It is through cultural memory forms" such as the memoir" that the complex legacies between Britain and China may be shared and metabolized into a transnational body politic.