Tasting a Good Life Narratives and Counter-Narratives of Happiness in the Documentary A Bite of China 2 (2014)

This essay mainly examines the documentary A Bite of China 2 (2014), which presents culinary culture as everyday practices displaying an "authentic" Chinese way of perceiving and pursuing happiness. This is a media artefact produced by CCTV, a cultural institution of postsocialist China, whose duty of promoting state ideology, drive for profit, and the various cultural positionings of its employees negotiated with each other in shaping this audio-visual text characterised by fissures and incoherence. In this text, narratives and counter-narratives of happiness interweave. Their reception is further complicated by an audience made up of various interpretive communities with different social and cultural backgrounds as well as cultural competence. Both the text and its reception reveal that the notion of happiness is complex and contested in such a drastically changing country as China.