We ate many meals in China, but we were never invited to a home-cooked meal in a village. A few years later, I learned more about country life from an anthropologist who had lived there.
“Food in rural Meixian is a total social experience. It is also a way to express ethnic identity. It is cultivated, wild, and a commodity,” says Ellen Oxfeld, a professor at Middlebury College, at her presentation at the Roundhouse Reunion, a Hakka conference in Toronto in 2008. She has firsthand experience. She lived in a village in the county of Meixian that was settled in the seventeenth century. This county is one of seven—Meixian, Dapu, Wuhua, Pingyuan, Xingning, Fengshun, and Jiaoling—that are part of the greater Hakka area n ow known as Meizhou. Her presentation paints a picture of daily life there.
