The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last Ship

Performativity of eating
In 
Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
, Butler (
2011
, p. xii) stresses 
“the materiality of the body” and maintains that bodies matter only when they fit in 
the dominant discourse. Eating, as a bodily act, is performative as it can determine 
whether the bodies of those who are involved in this act—such as the eaters, cooks 

---

1 3
The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity…
and sellers of food—are intelligible within the cultural domain of a specific regula-
tory system. In the context of diaspora and migration, the performative act of eat-
ing becomes highly important because diasporic people, especially women, “claim 
subjectivity through the cultural politics of food” (Mehta, 
2009
, p. 89). It may also 
function as a strategy of self-empowerment, which is shown in the fact that “resist-
ance to and through food as the exercise of power has been performed variously by 
marginalized peoples throughout history” (Cooks, 
2009
, p. 94). Therefore, the prac-
tice of eating may function for the diasporic group as a means of both constructing 
identity and resisting the dominant discourse.
In Shinebourne’s novel, Clarice eats mainly Chinese food even though it is bad 
for her diabetes, which eventually kills her because “she had overeaten at Doris’s 
wedding, eaten too much rice” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 79). She believes “Chinese 
food would keep them Chinese, keep their aristocratic Chinese blood and brains 
pure, make them better than anyone else” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 44). She has a 
cupboard in the kitchen where she keeps Chinese ingredients—“five-spice powder, 
Shaoshing rice wine, black rice vinegar, sesame oil, lapcheong sausage, transparent 
rice noodles she called funci, soya sauce, wanyi fungus that Frederick called ‘rat 
ears’, dried mushrooms, brittle yellow sticks of dried soya beans she called fuchk” 
(Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 62), and she “liked to open the door, stick her face right 
inside, take a deep breath and fill her lungs with the aromas” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, 
p. 63). As Brinda Mehta (
2009
, p. 92) observes, food is “an effective strategy to 
appease the diasporic wounds of separation, migration, and alienation.” The prepa-
ration and consumption of Chinese food is an empowering practice that facilitates 
the preservation of Clarice’s ethnic roots and grants her some authority over her life. 
Thus, for Clarice, eating is a constant exercise of negotiating and renegotiating her 
subjectivity. Through cooking and eating Chinese food, Clarice resists the erasure of 
her Chinese identity and finds her individual ethnic voice in the host society of the 
Caribbean.
Apart from gaining agency through food, Clarice also uses the act of eating to 
reinforce the Chineseness of her family:
On the last Sunday of the month, Norma would visit to cook a Chinese soup. 
All the dried vegetables would be boiled in their largest pot with a large slab 
of pork belly or a chicken. When the meat was cooked, it was drained and 
chopped into small pieces, and a dipping sauce made with salted garlic roasted 
in sesame oil, soya sauce and rice wine. Then Clarice and her children would 
sit around the table and eat noisily. […] they dipped morsels of meat into the 
sauce with one spoon, filled another spoon with soup and rice and slurped the 
contents of both spoons simultaneously into their mouths. It was a Chinese 
ritual for Chinese people. (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 63)
The rite of eating Chinese food together, through which the family articulates and 
celebrates their differences, is a rite of physical union and identity negotiation that 
confirms family bonds. A cultural affinity and emotional connection to the homeland 
is established by this intimate and special family ritual. However, Clarice’s insist-
ence on eating only Chinese food creates an insurmountable barrier between the 
Chinese culture and the other cultures (predominantly African and Indian) found 

---

 P. Su 
1 3
in Caribbean society. For instance, Clarice and her two daughters refuse to eat the 
“chicken curry, rice and roti” Susan has cooked, saying, “they did not want coolie 
food and instead ate their own chinee cake and mauby from the shop” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p.34). Clarice’s culinary preferences strengthen the binarism of self and other, 
leading to her failure to construct a diasporic subjectivity that fits in the interstitial 
third space of the Caribbean contact zone. As Ien Ang (
1993
, p. 12) reminds us, 
identification with an imagined homeland is often “a sign of, and surrender to, a 
condition of actual marginalization” in the host society. Clarice’s overemphasis on 
her Chinese root further alienates and excludes her as an outsider in the Caribbean.
Unlike Clarice, Susan grows up as an orphan in a convent after the death of her 
Chinese parents, cooks Indian food and becomes “part of the community of Indian 
peasant farmers” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 98) who sell produce at a food market. 
Although Susan looks Chinese, she chooses an Indian identity through the perform-
ative act of her food practices. Her loss of Chinese heritage, reflected by her culinary 
preference, causes her identity crisis and failure in life. Having lost her Chineseness, 
Susan seems rather confused about herself and suffers an inferiority complex. For 
instance, when she visits the Wong family to make a marriage match for her daugh-
ter, she addresses her future son-in-law as “sir” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 20) out of a 
sense of inferiority. Lacking confidence and self-esteem, she is not strong enough 
to raise her children alone after being abandoned by her first Indian lover, so she 
gives them away to be adopted by others. In contrast, Clarice, with her pride and 
efforts to maintain her ethnic identity as a Chinese person, is firm and unyielding. 
After the death of her husband, she works hard to look after the whole family—
her four children and parents-in-law. Although both Clarice and Susan have difficult 
relations with their children, it is Clarice who is much respected by them because 
she approaches being Chinese in a way that encourages her children to become 
respectable.
The different identities that Clarice and Susan perform not only shape their own 
lives, but also have lasting effects on their children and grandchildren. For instance, 
Clarice’s daughter Norma, imitating her mother, is obsessed with maintaining her 
Chineseness by cooking Chinese food and taking pride in her family history. How-
ever, she suffers an identity anxiety, is unable to integrate into a Caribbean way of 
life, and feels herself an outsider. Susan’s daughters have lost their Chinese heritage 
and have great difficulties in coming to terms with their Chineseness; they also suf-
fer an identity loss. Having a sense of shame and inadequacy over their impurity, 
they admire the Chung family for their pure Chinese blood and feel inferior because 
they can never think of themselves as real Chinese, even though the so-called real 
Chinese identity is a constructed and imagined one, and the meanings of Chinese-
ness “are not fixed and pregiven, but constantly renegotiated and rearticulated” 
(Ang, 
1993
, p. 5). The identity issues afflicting Clarice, Susan and their children 
demonstrate that neither a full embrace of the heritage of the home country nor a 
complete assimilation into the host culture can help the Chinese make sense of their 
existence in the Caribbean. The solution, as suggested by the author, seems to lie in 
a third option adopted by Joan, the granddaughter of Clarice and Susan, who “grew 
up feeling caught between these two Chinese grandmothers” (Shinebourne, 
2015
, 
p. 134). Joan grows up familiar with the Indian food “like stuffed karila” that Susan 

---

1 3
The Chinese Caribbean diaspora and performative subjectivity…
often cooks for her (Shinebourne, 
2015
, p. 96); the African food such as “split-peas 
soup full of fufu, pig-tail, salted beef and dumplings” and the “