Tasting Paradise on Earth

Jin Feng is professor of Chinese and the Orville and Mary Patterson Routt Professor of Literature at Grinnell College. She is the author of Romancing the Internet: Consuming and Producing Chinese Web Romance, The Making of a Family Saga: Ginling College (1915-1952), and The New Woman in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction. She is also the translator of Chen Hengzhe's Early Autobiography and the editor of Nostalgia and the Modern City.

"[A]n excitingly original challenge to the field of food studies. Although informed by theoretical perspectives such as Bourdieu's idea of middle-class anxiety, Feng is deeply and personally grounded in China's culinary present, an experience she uses to create new perspectives and sympathies for her written sources. In this way, she is remarkably successful at bringing voices of the past into meaningful conversation with the parallel transformations of China's food enterprises, tastes, and culture."