Paper short abstract:

The paper examines how free South Asian food in these select religious and secular sites offer a hospitality that can abet, unsettle and subvert attempts at home making among refugees when attachment to Hong Kong is contingent, problematic and temporary.

Paper long abstract:

This contribution aims to locate Hong Kong and South Asian food in the flow of refugees and other displaced people from countries in Africa and from Asia. It analyses the role that South Asian foods play in making Hong Kong hospitable to refugees in a range of settings; a temple, a gurdwara and refugee centre in eclectic budget 'ghetto' Chungking Mansions. Post-colonial Hong Kong, a Special Administrative Region of mainland China since 1997 is not a signatory to international instruments for refugee rights protection. The territory screens refugee claims but does not resettle successful claimants. And yet people can wait years for their claims to be heard, and so are de facto long term sojourners. Unable to work, instead they work strategies to leverage their daily allowance of HK$40 (£4) of supermarket food vouchers.

The paper examines how free South Asian food in these select religious and secular sites offer a hospitality that can abet, unsettle and subvert attempts at home making among refugees when attachment to Hong Kong is contingent, problematic and temporary. This paper builds on anthropological approaches which ground theory in objects and the irreverence of their surrounds which symbolise encounters of host and guest. It focuses on the intimate material practices of such sites include managing meat and other kinds of pollutions, of combining spices, the visual aesthetics of rows of stock pots, of certain kinds of portions on plates and, trays, certain modes of queuing sitting and eating which play with territorial identity.