Have you eaten? Finding echoes of China in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, one question followed me almost everywhere.

"Have you eaten?"

Sometimes it came from my landlord. Sometimes from friends, or someone I had only just met. More often, it was more specific: "Did you have breakfast?" "Have you had lunch?" "Have you eaten dinner?" As a Chinese person, the question felt close to home from the very first time I heard it. It took me longer to understand why.

One of the first things that surprised me in Bangladesh was how difficult it was to visit someone without eating something. In formal settings, a meeting often began with a cup of tea placed quietly in front of me, followed by biscuits, fruit, or a working lunch if the conversation lasted longer than expected. In family homes, the gesture became warmer and harder to refuse. A short visit could quickly turn into fruit, mishti, or a plate of biryani fresh off the stove. Refusing politely rarely worked. "Just a little," people would insist. Then a little became a full plate.

The same thing happens in China. When relatives visit during the Spring Festival, tables become crowded with food almost immediately. Guests are expected to eat more, not less. Parents worry that visitors have not eaten enough. In both societies, sharing food is one of the most common ways of expressing affection, and good hosting means anticipating what each guest needs before they ask.

There was another side to this hospitality: it often came with an attention to difference.

Last Ramadan, I travelled with local friends to Somapura Mahavihara, the renowned UNESCO site at Paharpur. We started from Bogura in the morning and arrived around noon. I had assumed I would skip lunch, as we were out of town and most people were fasting. But my friends had already called the site office the day before and arranged a meal for me. The gesture stayed with me. On another occasion, I took a train with friends to Kushtia to visit someone. We arrived late at night, and food was already waiting in the kitchen. The lady of the house mentioned casually that she knew our Hindu friend was coming, so she had prepared mutton for all of us. Such a simple line said a great deal: hospitality also meant making sure everyone could eat comfortably.

What struck me most was that food extended far beyond hospitality. It also structured emotional life within families, in ways I had not expected to find so familiar.

It is about the reunion meal. More than that, it is about the particular quality of time spent cooking with parents after months away, the specific taste of a dish that no restaurant can replicate because it was made by the people who have known you your entire life. In both countries, home is still imagined partly through food. The strongest memory of home for many people is not the building itself, but something as concrete as taste: a mother's recipe, a village speciality, a dish prepared only during festivals, tea shared with neighbours at dusk.

During my first month in Dhaka, my mother, thousands of kilometres away in China, did not ask how I was settling in, or whether I was making friends. She asked: had I eaten? Was I eating enough? Was the food different from what I was used to? In China, parents rarely say "I love you" directly. Instead, they ask practical questions: Have you eaten? Did you sleep well? Do you want more? Concern travels through these small, repeated acts of attention.

After arriving in Bangladesh, I noticed the same emotional language. Mothers called their university-aged children to ask whether they had eaten dinner. Friends reminded each other not to skip meals during exams or busy periods at work. The vocabulary of care was almost identical — not emotional declaration, but quiet, repeated checking.

Anthropologists of food and kinship have long shown that feeding is central to making and sustaining family relations, and that eating together helps produce social belonging. What I was encountering in Bangladesh was not a coincidence. It was a shared grammar of care.

Food also revealed something about how both societies manage the pressures of rapid social change — and what stays constant within it.

During my time here, I met many young Bangladeshis preparing for the Bangladesh Civil Service examination, the BCS, widely regarded as one of the most competitive tests a graduate can sit. One of them, a young man from Sylhet, had been preparing for a few years while living on private tutoring income and whatever his family could send. He ate irregularly, slept little, and carried what felt like the expectations of everyone at home on his shoulders. Success, he told me, was not really imagined as a personal achievement. It was about giving his parents security, sending his younger sister to a better school, and proving that the family's sacrifices had meant something.

This was deeply familiar. In China, families often organise significant portions of life around children's education. Parents save for tutoring, move closer to better schools, and rearrange household routines around study schedules. During the university entrance examination season, the gaokao, some parents prepare specific dishes believed to aid concentration or bring good fortune. Food becomes part of the architecture of family sacrifice, a way of saying: we are with you, even when we cannot be there.

One of the first things that surprised me in Bangladesh was how difficult it was to visit someone without eating something. In formal settings, a meeting often began with a cup of tea placed quietly in front of me, followed by biscuits, fruit, or a working lunch if the conversation lasted longer than expected. In family homes, the gesture became warmer and harder to refuse. A short visit could quickly turn into fruit, mishti, or a plate of biryani fresh off the stove. Refusing politely rarely worked. "Just a little," people would insist. Then a little became a full plate. The same thing happens in China.

In both Bangladesh and China, meals remain deeply collective. People eat together whenever possible. Family members wait for one another before starting dinner. Festivals revolve around shared meals. Guests are received into households through food almost immediately. Last Eid-ul-Fitr, I visited a friend's family in Tekerhat. The setting was idyllic, but one moment has stayed with me more than any view. Right before dinner, my friend's grandmother walked over and gently placed her hand on my head. I did not know how to respond. "She wants to give you her blessing," my friend smiled. I found myself utterly touched, a stranger from the other side of the continent, received not merely as a guest, but as someone worth blessing.

That moment in Tekerhat made me understand something I had been circling around for months. Home, in Bangladesh, is not just a place people live. It is somewhere they are pulled back to, across distance, across seasons, with an urgency that becomes most visible once a year. Nothing made this clearer than watching the great seasonal migrations that mark both countries' calendars.

Before Eid every year, Dhaka begins emptying in slow motion. Bus stations become chaotic. Ferries overflow with passengers. Entire families carry bags, blankets, and packaged dates as they make their way back to villages across the country.

Watching this movement, I thought immediately of Chunyun, the travel season surrounding Chinese New Year, during which an estimated three billion trips are made across China. Railway stations reach full capacity for days at a time. Highways slow to a crawl. People endure journeys of ten or twelve hours without complaint, because going home is not simply about travel.

It is about the reunion meal. More than that, it is about the particular quality of time spent cooking with parents after months away, the specific taste of a dish that no restaurant can replicate because it was made by the people who have known you your entire life.

In both Bangladesh and China, meals remain deeply collective. People eat together whenever possible. Family members wait for one another before starting dinner. Festivals revolve around shared meals. Guests are received into households through food almost immediately. Last Eid-ul-Fitr, I visited a friend's family in Tekerhat. The setting was idyllic, but one moment has stayed with me more than any view. Right before dinner, my friend's grandmother walked over and gently placed her hand on my head. I did not know how to respond. "She wants to give you her blessing," my friend smiled. I found myself utterly touched, a stranger from the other side of the continent, received not merely as a guest, but as someone worth blessing.

In both countries, home is still imagined partly through food. The strongest memory of home for many people is not the building itself, but something as concrete as taste: a mother's recipe, a village speciality, a dish prepared only during festivals, tea shared with neighbours at dusk.

Of course, Bangladesh and China are very different societies. Language, history, religion, and public life differ enormously. I do not want to flatten those differences with easy comparison.

But living in Bangladesh has shown me that beneath them, many ordinary social instincts feel unexpectedly familiar. Care still moves through food. Communities are still held together by shared meals. And going home still carries a weight that is difficult to put into words, but very easy to taste.

Before coming here, I expected Bangladesh to feel foreign.

In many ways, it does. But some of my strongest moments of recognition came not from anything grand or visible. They came from a simple question I had already heard all my life, in another language, on the other side of a continent.

"Have you eaten?"

Feng Jie is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Yunnan University, China, and a former visiting scholar at the South Asian Institute of Policy and Governance (SIPG), North South University.

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