One Grand Banquet Table: How Much of China’s Social World Can It Hold?

For many people, their first memory of a banquet comes at an age when they can barely reach the lazy Susan. A great pot of stewed vegetables bubbles and froths, meatballs straight from the back kitchen are still too hot to bite into, and every new dish on the table draws a round of gasps. A banquet memory is also a memory of home soil and childhood.

I used to love banquets when I was little. Looking back now, it’s all the freshly fried fish, the hot-from-the-steamer big steamed buns, and the stewed dishes bubbling away. The roast chicken was delivered from the shop nearby, and the peanuts and sunflower seeds were just out of the oven – a little burnt, a little scorching, but that was exactly the taste.

I’m from Lantian. We have famous sháo sháo kè banquet chefs here – the food is genuinely wonderful, and you can watch a dish transform from raw ingredients into something delicious, step by step. When there’s a banquet in the village, neighbours pitch in and work it out together; the host family prepares towels and soap as gifts for everyone. All the helpers in the back kitchen are familiar family faces, and when the meatballs were being fried, I’d always get a few stolen bites. When I was little, I thought the bride was the most beautiful person in the world, more beautiful than any star in a picture – we’d all crowd to the front row to have a look. I don’t have that feeling anymore.

The most iconic banquet in Sichuan is the bàba banquet – “bàba” means an open, exposed stretch of ground. On the third day of the Lunar New Year, my family goes to my elder aunt’s for a banquet. Her food is wonderful, everything is fresh, and she and the helping relatives are skilled cooks. They slaughter a free-range chicken on the spot; the cured meats, sausage, and cured pork trotters are all made fresh that same year; a big wok is propped up to steam and stir-fry in real time – no risk of “pre-made dishes.” Because everyone who comes is close family, my aunt puts a lot of care into this meal. Banquets were a lot of fun when I was little, running around playing with everyone, but I had to make sure I didn’t tear the plastic tablecloth. My aunt used to have a lot of fields, and after eating we’d play with fire on the ridges and chase ducks – a whole afternoon at a time.

In the old days, before the dishes even arrived, people were already looking forward to what was coming – starting from when the chopsticks were handed out. Every new dish was met with a round of exclamations. The food at a grand banquet was better than at any restaurant. The guōbāoròu and liū ròuduàn you get in a Northeast restaurant are, of course, good too, but they’re always a little short of the banquet taste. I can’t quite pin down why – is it the chef, the ingredients, or the wok?

A classmate’s graduation banquet was the most fun. We classmates were assigned to a special table, and the food included, besides the restaurant’s standard banquet dishes – braised pork belly, pork knuckle, prawns, scallops – things kids love: fried chicken, burgers, and grilled cold noodles. Then, to finish, a big cake with real animal cream appeared. Can you understand what that means to a kid who loves sweets? The whole class was going to adore him! You could also listen to his parents tell funny stories about him as a child, and discover a side you never saw at school: it turns out this quiet, reserved guy used to climb trees and scale walls as a kid.

In Wenzhou, the banquet feasts; in Chaoshan, the procession feast; in Shaanxi, a banquet begins at dawn with a steaming bowl of sāozǐ noodles. In Ganzhou, chestnuts and wild pear from the autumn harvest go on the table with the seasons; in the water towns, fish is a must; in the steamed buns of the military colony people, the past is tucked between the halves. China is so vast – spread the banquet dishes from every corner across a table, and you have a map of food.

🍝 Shaanxi people can’t go anywhere without a bowl of noodles. For weddings, funerals, and every kind of ceremony, the first meal of the morning must include a steaming bowl of sāozǐ noodles – chives, daylily, wood ear mushroom, tomato and egg, diced meat, daikon – all the little vegetable cubes as a topping. The noodles are usually hand-rolled, thin as a chive leaf, dressed with vinegar and chilli oil – absolutely delicious! The last dish at the banquet is a meatball soup; once you’ve had the meatball soup, the meal is done, symbolising completeness and fullness. Shaanxi also has the tradition of eight cold and eight hot dishes – no matter how cold the weather, you must serve eight cold dishes first!

The most memorable dish is the “sùhuìr” – a stew of assorted vegetables. The main ingredients are brined tofu, red glass noodle sheets, tofu skin, coriander, and shredded ginger, but the key is seasoning it with fermented tofu. The recipe varies slightly across the county-level suburbs, and you can basically only get it at this kind of continuous-flow banquet.

Shihezi is a military colony city, with immigrants from every corner of the country, so the food here is a blend of northern and southern styles. In my memory, banquets here are mostly stir-fried dishes with a few local Xinjiang specialities. The most distinctive dish is called military colony flatbread sandwich (I think that’s the name) – essentially a big round steamed bun filled with chilli-stir-fried meat. It’s said the dish originated when the military colony people, in a time of material scarcity, could think of nothing more delicious, which is why it carries a flavour of “remembering the bitter to appreciate the sweet.”

Before leaving home, I could get to a banquet three to five times a year. The autumn harvest banquet was the best, because of the new produce – wild chestnuts, steamed wild pear, sand-fried rice skin, and fresh chestnuts. These ingredients needed no special seasoning; they could go straight onto the table. The temperature was just right, and so was the appetite. The dishes varied by season, too: in winter you could have braised bamboo rat; in summer, fried purple sweet potato balls, fried fish slices, and fried small crucian carp.

In Wenzhou we call it “eating the banquet”. When I was little, banquets were usually held in the family house or courtyard, and the food was all Wenzhou specialty. For example, Wenzhou-style pickled radish – we call it càitóu – tangy and sweet, really good. There’s also sesame oil duck and zā yáng (braised lamb), and a kind of fried fish you dip in a sweet sauce like condensed milk.

I remember a dish – stewed pig intestine with peas – that was absolutely exquisite. Both the peas and the intestine were stewed until very tender and full of flavour (pá, a Sichuan dialect word for soft and yielding). You could tell it was made by a very skilled old chef; you simply can’t get this dish anywhere else.

We have a dish called “ròugēng” – that’s the dialect name. The method is actually quite simple: bamboo shoots (or water bamboo stem) and chicken gizzards are essential. The other ingredients are more flexible – shiitake mushrooms, dried tofu, and so on. Everything is cut into very small cubes, about half a grain of rice in size. Then you make a broth, thicken it heavily with cornstarch, and season it however you like. The taste is a plain, everyday savoury umami, but the chicken gizzards and water bamboo stem have a wonderful chew to them, and the texture is lovely.

I was born and raised in Chaozhou. Where we’re from, going to a banquet is called “shí zhuō” (eating the table), and the person who organises and sets it up is said to be “zuò zhuō” (making the table). The Chaoshan region has a particularly distinctive type of shí zhuō called the nàoruò zhuō – the procession feast. Every year during the nàoruò celebrations, the village organises a group to bring out the deities the villagers worship for a parade through the streets. People form gong-and-drum bands, folk music ensembles, and flag-bearing teams to escort the procession – a spirited deity procession, really. On the day of the procession, most households in the village lay out a procession feast, inviting relatives and friends. The more people, the livelier it gets, a way to secure even better luck in the year ahead. The nàoruò procession also draws on local geography and agricultural resources: Xikou Village in Linxi Town, for instance, was historically a major sugarcane producer, and sugarcane becomes the main prop in the procession on the sixteenth day of the first lunar month. Villagers cut the cane down, hang lanterns on the tops, and parade with the lights blazing – a tradition called “chuān zhè xiàng” (walking through the sugarcane lane).

Handmade, outsourced, or pre-made? The banquet itself lasts only a few hours, but the preparation starts well in advance. From neighbours lending a hand, to paying hired labour, to pre-made dishes taking over – the production and labour behind a single table has shifted many times over.

When I was little, things were scarce, and a banquet was the only time you could eat more and better food. In the village, everyone helps each other with the cooking – your family brings the bowls and chopsticks, mine brings the stools – and together we wash, chop, and stir-fry, and the atmosphere is wonderful.

Last year my father hosted a birthday banquet and I helped out a bit. Back home now, they usually hire a village chef team to run the feast – a dedicated crew, generally three: one chef and two helpers. The chef is almost always male, the helpers female. It’s certainly convenient, but I always feel something is missing.

I’ve chatted with a few village chefs. Things were poor back then, and much of the food at Chaozhou banquets wasn’t nearly as lavish as it is now – the emphasis was on handmade work. Fish balls, for instance, had to be made from local fish, deboned and pounded into paste, a great deal of effort to produce. Those handmade dishes have all made it to today’s tables, but almost all of them are now factory-produced.

Rural banquets used to be cooked with the help of relatives and neighbours working together; now it’s a head chef arriving with a team of four to six, and everything is assembly-line production. In recent years, even at hotels you regularly get pre-made dishes – some that haven’t even fully thawed from the ice by the time they hit the table.

Banquets at hotels these days feel pretty dull. Saying they taste like chewing wax might be a stretch, but calling them cookie-cutter is no exaggeration. You don’t get the simple dishes that still need to be made on the spot anymore – fried fish, fried prawns, prawns stir-fried with Chinese cabbage – even though there are now bigger-ticket items I didn’t have as a kid, like steamed crab and blanched prawns, they don’t taste nearly as good as the old ones. Apart from the king of pre-made dishes, steamed scallops with garlic and glass noodles, even the staple courses feel all pre-made: all kinds of steamed buns and bean-paste rolls, brightly coloured cakes with sharp geometric edges, sticky corn, dates and chestnuts.

I still remember when I was little – apart from the chef, almost everyone bustling about in the kitchen and at the tables was a woman: grandma, mum, my aunt, and the village aunties, big sisters, and sisters-in-law. While the banquet is being prepared, they prep the food and lend a hand; after everyone has eaten, they still have to wash the dishes and scrub the pots. They chat while they work and look happy enough, but even then I felt an inexplicable fatigue, as if I was already seeing myself in the future.

A few years ago when I got married and hosted my own banquet, I’d originally only wanted to do it at a hotel in town – easier, and no trouble for the family. But my father insisted we go back to the village and have one there, too, saying that all the relatives and neighbours had watched me grow up, and it wasn’t right unless everyone had eaten together. I hired a crew – one chef with five helpers who took care of the entire banquet. The relatives and neighbours still gathered round to eat, chat, and talk about old times, and the “please all witness this” that my father wanted was fulfilled. That was the day I realised: without all that supposed “collective labour,” the community can still come together. That’s the kind of banquet I wanted.

Banquets have their own unwritten rules. How much to put in the red envelope, how many people a family sends, who sits at which table, when to make a toast – every region has its own way of doing things.

Here, for a village banquet, each household puts 20 yuan in the red envelope. Neighbours in the same village with a different surname send one person; same surname, you can send one or two; close family all attend. Villagers follow local customs and village conventions out of their own volition – it comes from genuine feeling in the heart, not from some external obligation. Most people don’t keep careful score, and warmth shows through in everything during the event.

If it’s a wedding banquet, the groom’s family collects tea money (a Hunan wedding custom – a sum not counted in the standard gift list), and everyone attending the feast is expected to give some. Inner relatives give a higher amount; outer relatives usually 50 or 100 yuan. Occasionally there’s a moment of “laughing tea money” (asking the same person for tea money again after they’ve already paid). If it’s the bride’s family sending her off, no tea money is collected, though this custom has loosened somewhat.

I feel that banquets organised by different groups have different styles, depending on the organisers and the people at the table who set the mood. Some people really love their drinks and cigarettes, so they’ll urge toasts; others are easygoing – a bottle of Wang Lao Ji works fine. There are also default seating rules: the elderly and socially prominent people at one table, the children and mothers at another, the young people at a third.

At a funeral, the people keeping the vigil eat vegetables stir-fried in plain oil – only on the last day is there meat.

Now, to stop people from diving in and bagging leftovers right away, the chopsticks are usually the last thing to be served – at least back in my hometown of Harbin, that’s how it works.

Hosting a banquet has always been entangled with social obligation, and beneath the table there’s a set of unspoken conventions in constant circulation. A few rounds of wine in, work and salary, marriage and prospects all become topics of conversation, and many deep-rooted ideas shift the flavour of the food itself. Faced with “don’t mind me prying” and “it’s all for your own good” from these veterans of life, young people’s boundaries are under constant challenge.

A banquet is about face. The scale should be grand, and the more people who come, the better the family’s reputation. Wealthy families prefer to hold them at hotels – even though the food there is far from as good as the village chef’s, and it costs more – but it’s precisely the expense that shows off the family’s wealth and standing.

My own graduation banquet was a pretty unremarkable experience. In name it was to celebrate my admission to the next level of education, but in substance it was a display of internal clan connections and status back home. Each family centred on its male elders, and the whole thing ran for three days. In the middle of the night, the men were still drinking loudly, playing hand games, and cracking jokes, not a bit concerned about whether the women and children in the house needed to sleep. I sat table after table receiving people completely unknown to me, posing for photos like an NPC, and being lectured on the importance of gratitude, because the neighbours who’d come to help had worked so hard.

Before university, at my admission banquet, there was a man with no blood relation to me, but whom I was expected to call “uncle.” Perhaps it was also because his daughter had made a home and a career in Beijing and had a stable life. That day he first gestured for me to stand up, then called over a few other young people, and made a point of drawing our attention to his daughter. After that he started “planning the future” for each of us, as if, in his telling, our lives already had their set directions.

One time I was pushed by family into making a toast. I didn’t want to do it at first and just froze in embarrassment on the spot for over ten seconds while the whole room watched. My cousin on my father’s side poured my drink and egged me on, but another cousin, after I’d finished toasting, questioned me with such contempt: why I just went along whenever they told me to. It left a real mark on me. Other people’s looks and words are far too cheaply given. One thing: some people see it as a matter of dignity, others don’t care at all – and the ones egging you on or looking down on you won’t bear any of the cost for you. In that moment I felt an intense sense of loneliness.

Now that living conditions have improved and hosting banquets has become easier, why do we find it harder to get the old satisfaction from one? From just being fed to chipping in our own share, the “new generation” who were once brought along to banquets by their parents have grown up, and are gradually learning to hear the deeper meanings behind the banter at the table.

When I was little, after my parents sat me at the table, I mainly watched the dishes on the round table and tried to figure out who was going to be the one to spin it. Slowly, through a child’s eyes, I developed a habit of observation – noticing that people in different seats talked differently. Now I feel it more as a kind of information exchange and a bond that maintains certain relationships. Whether it’s a family gathering, a meal with friends, or attending someone’s big life event, the real focus tends to land on the money and face in the words.

When a banquet is held in the village, all the neighbours come to help – there’s laughter, bickering, and a bit of noise. The kids and the dogs get to be themselves, and it lets people let loose. A hotel banquet locks everyone in a big hall, each at their own seat, whispering to the person next to them or scrolling their phones. There’s no open space, no conditions for letting go – it’s as if an invisible urban lifestyle system is constraining everyone’s spirit. The experience is very suffocating.

Now that I work away from home, I attend banquets very rarely – the occasional one is actually quite enjoyable. But if I were living back in the village, it would become a burden, the ever-rising gift money and the frequency of banquets would put real strain on your finances.

The deeper reason I don’t like attending banquets is that I’m committed to staying single. I suddenly found myself envying Taylor Swift’s wedding, where the couple set the rule: no photos, no plus-ones. That matters a lot for protecting privacy and breaking out of the web of social obligation. If it were a banquet somewhere else, I’d still go with an interest in the food. But the flavours back home have already taken on a fixed shape – as if my mind has already “pre-prepared” the whole thing.

When I was little, I’d get carried off to banquets by my mum like a satchel slung over her shoulder. After calling all the aunties and uncles by name, I became the conversation starter: “Your child is so well-behaved – what after-school classes have you signed them up for?” “So-and-so had their second baby the other day – aren’t you having another one?” I ignored everything happening at the table and just used the opportunity to sneak a few extra pieces of scallop and glass noodles. I didn’t touch the prawns – too much hassle to peel.

Once I grew up, what I ate changed. “How busy is work? Don’t let it get in the way of finding a partner!” “Girls really should find a partner early – have a baby early and you can focus fully on your career!” Mayday Mayday! Detecting a boundary breach! I hadn’t even taken two bites when the small talk was already over. Can we please wait until everyone’s mostly finished eating before asking questions like that… I chipped in my share of the gift money… I’m stuffed with anger.

Maybe banquets have always been like this. I’ve just grown into an adult who can now hear the deeper meaning behind those looks and words. I’ve also acquired the “weights” by which I can be measured, compared, and put on display – inheriting that same system of prying into and exchanging information about each other’s lives that the older generation used.

What the traditional village banquet relied on was not just the stove and the chef, but a relatively stable village and the frequent comings and goings of neighbours. As the elders grow older and urbanisation drives population migration, such village banquets are becoming rarer. Twenty years from now, will the banquet disappear?

Every year around Qingming Festival, the suburban counties of Tianjin hold a rolling banquet in the village – you pay per head, and it provides a lunch for all the relatives who come to tend the graves. Now many people have moved from the village into resettlement housing, so if around Qingming you see large marquee tents going up in a suburban residential compound, that’s a strong indication the whole compound was relocated from a single village and still keeps the old village customs.

I’m attending fewer and fewer banquets. Most of the relatives in the main urban area hold theirs at restaurants now. And the relatives out in the suburbs – they’re mostly getting older, and the younger generation doesn’t often put on banquets either.

Attending banquets isn’t very frequent in the city, mainly because hosting one requires space, and cities don’t have much in the way of public areas or ancestral hall open ground. In the countryside, banquets are more common – there are ancestral halls, and some people host them in their own factory buildings or under their self-built rural houses. I probably attend one or two a year. I went to more when I was young, but once I grew up and left, it got less.

Besides the location of banquets shifting from village to city as people migrate, the format of hosting has also changed a great deal. I recently attended a wedding of a university classmate that had almost entirely dropped all the traditional “at-the-table rituals”: the couple hosted the entire wedding themselves, and the venue was the restaurant where they first ate together. Only close friends were invited. The menu was decided by a pre-event online vote among the guests – in fact, every table had a different set of dishes, and people could choose their seat based on which dishes they preferred.

I genuinely don’t go back to the village for banquets much anymore. Most of the friends I played with as a kid moved to the city for school and work, and the village elders are passing away one by one. Occasionally someone in the village still puts on a banquet, and the notice still goes up in the group chat, but when I see the name I sometimes have to think for a moment about whose family it is. My own life has entered a phase where I don’t really need to host big banquets either – there are fewer and fewer reasons to bring people back to the village.

Village banquets are probably slowly disappearing – after all, when the relationships are gone, the rituals that confirmed and maintained them don’t need to exist either. I don’t know what people will call banquets twenty years from now, but I think they’ll probably still be around. Maybe smaller, freer, more voluntary and inclusive. Maybe just friends, a partner, or people who share the same interests, sitting down to eat together.

The population mobility brought by urbanisation and marketisation, and the dissolution of the rural community, are eroding the social foundation that the traditional banquet depends on. People leave the village, families scatter across the country, and the ties sustained by blood, locality, and a society of acquaintances are gradually loosening. And the new generation of hosts is translating the old rituals into new forms that fit the values of the present. The rural world is receding, but perhaps humans still need, at certain moments, to become “we” again.

🗣️ 

Do You Think the Banquet Will Disappear?

If You Were the Host

What kind of banquet would you like to put on?

Feel free to leave a comment and share your ideas!

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Edited by: Li Ye, Lele

Layout: Ming Lin

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