The film Once Upon a Time in the Middle East centers on a Chinese cook who uses food to create a fragile space of humanity and neutrality amid conflict, reflecting Chinese cultural values that treat shared meals as a foundation of peace and ordinary life.

The narrative highlights the plight of children in war zones and portrays the protagonist’s growing commitment to protecting orphans as an act of safeguarding a shared human future.

The essay frames the film as part of a broader shift in Chinese cinema toward internationally engaged, realistic storytelling that presents ordinary, imperfect Chinese characters acting with compassion as a form of cultural soft power.

Last weekend, I went to the cinema with my mother to see Once Upon a Time in the Middle East. It set in a Middle Eastern conflict zone, where an ordinary Chinese cook Xu Fu uses food to create a small space of humanity amid violence.

As the lights dimmed, the streets of a Middle Eastern country unfolded across the screen: dusty markets, weathered walls, and a red Chinese restaurant sign.

What I did not expect was that my tears would begin to fall from the very first scene, when Xu Fu prepares an elaborate meal before leaving home. They never really stopped. When the credits rolled, I looked around the theater and saw many other audience quietly wiping away their tears.

It was a film that made people walk out crying and thinking. It touches the softest truth about war, while also reaching deep into one of the most enduring cultural instincts of the Chinese people.

“Eat well.” It is perhaps the most frequently repeated line in the film, and also its most deeply buried cultural symbol.

One of the most ordinary ways Chinese people greet one another is to ask, “Have you eaten?” One of the oldest Chinese sayings about the foundations of society is, “Food is the first necessity of the people.”

In Chinese........

© Eurasia Review