“Hello. Have you eaten yet?”
The very first lines of dialogue in the movie are perhaps not as immediately and directly meaningful to viewers outside Chinese culture as they could be. Fortunately, the dialogue still works without understanding the greater nuance. “Hello” is, of course, a greeting almost universally understood. What follows that standard telephone greeting, however, is also a greeting even if it may not seem like it. In most cultures around the world, “have you eaten yet” can be merely a polite bit of etiquette but in most cases it carries with it a varying degree of invitation. To ask someone if they have eaten yet automatically seems to imply that an offer is being made. In Chinese culture, however, “have you eaten yet” is really not much different from “hello.” Actually, it is less formal than “hello” and more akin to a standard type of informal slang greeting like “how you doing?”
Even though that carries a certain level of invitation to tell people of your current circumstances, most understand the unspoken etiquette that the person making this greeting really isn’t there to listen to a list of all your problems. “Have you eaten” is thus like an inquiry into how you are doing that doesn’t expect to end with really knowing how you are doing and is not necessarily a genuine invitation to enjoin for a meal. As the first word in the film, knowing this helps to ground the viewer in establishing the primacy of the importance between food and living in the culture being explored.
“Eat, drink, man, woman. Basic human desires. Can't avoid them.”
The title quotation sounds like it just might possibly be something one would read in a Chinese fortune cookie. The distinct lack of grammatical connective tissue which would make the four words which constitute the title an actual sentence is not accidental. Nor is the fact that it might make one think of a Chinese fortune cookie or just as easily make one think of a saying from Confucius. A popular song on college radio in the 1980’s featured a title and choral refrain that boiled life down to the barest essentials: “Birth, school, work, death.” It’s pretty much the same thing and certainly doesn’t require Eastern philosophy to make it work. Also of note: when David Letterman hosted the Oscars the year this film was eligible, he joked of the coincidence that its title also happened to be the exact same words Arnold Schwarzenegger used when asking Maria Shriver to go on a first date.
“Raising daughters is like cooking a meal. You lose your appetite by the time you're finished.”
Almost everything that is related to everything not having to do with food eventually gets related to food by Chu. This what is meant by the collapse of connective grammar: the essential are there and easily understood. Most people don’t need the full formal language additions to get the meaning of the title of this movie any more than they need the title of that song by The Godfathers to be explicitly explained. People get the nuance because they fully understand the significance of the important things. The real key to happiness and success, of course, does not lie in understanding those connections, but in doing what it takes to make those connections. Anything that is important to your life—that is fundamental to your sense of existence—can be inserted here. Raising daughters is like cooking a meal to someone for whom food is more than mere subsistence. Raising daughter is like creating art, surfing the big wave, surgery, acting—whatever. We all fill in the blanks with what we bring to the big themes of life. But the big themes are always shared; they are always universal.
