Roast Duckling, Schezuan Style: Zoila Ellis's Secret Recipe for Belizean Identity

The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which Zoila Ellis, in her short-story “Hang Seng Xiu’s Cookshop” (2011), identifies food and its preparation as an important tool determining the formation (or, as my analysis suggests, the absence) of what we could loosely call a Belizean identity. Food and its preparation can in fact be identified as an intrinsic part of culture, one of the many codes which, just like the linguistic one, enables the members of a particular group to identify themselves as part of the same community. By laying her emphasis on both culinary and linguistic habits of some representatives from Belize, then, in “Hang Seng Xiu’s Cookshop”, Ellis is able, perhaps more effectively than in any other of her short-stories, to depict the strong connection between food and identity, pointing in fact to the absence of a monolithic and univoque Belizian identity as such.