Essay 2 - Rough Draft

Jaime Rivera

Lauren Servais

English 100

10 March 2011

Essay 2 RD

                Family is something that everyone cherishes the most. Family is what usually drives you, are there when you are in need of assistance or just need someone to talk to. When people ask me what matters most in my life I would always respond family. In my dictionary, family always comes first along with close friends who are also considered part of my family and then my job. Chang-rae Lee wrote a magnificent story called Coming Home Again in which he discusses his relationships with his family when he was growing up. Over all, you get to understand what had driven him in his life in order to shape him into what he is now and how he became to appreciate what he knows now.

                Lee gives many examples throughout the story that helps us understand as the reader how his life was growing up in a Korean family and how his personality began to change during his teen years, which ultimately helped him become who he is today. As a child, Lee writes about a time when he loved to see his mother cook. Out of all the different interests he could have picked up on, he remembers being in the kitchen was his most favorite place in which he holds dearly to his heart. He mentions, “When I was six or seven years old, I used to watch my mother as she prepared our favorite meals. It was one of my daily pleasures” (12). Lee formed a bond with his mother by visiting her in the kitchen as often as he could to observe the delicious dish she was going to prepare next. “I would enter the kitchen quietly and stand beside her, my chin lodging upon the point of her hip” (12). By spending time observing his mother cooking during most of his childhood, it helped shape him into the person he is today. He confirms this by introducing us in a setting of his mothers’ kitchen cooking up dishes that his mother had prepared for them many times before. “I was usually in the kitchen, preparing lunch or dinner, poised over the butcher block with her favorite chef’s knife in my hand and her old yellow apron slung around my neck” (11). Lee did this to help with his family’s needs since his mother fell very ill with cancer in her stomach in which he felt a certain obligation to cook in order to keep his family's spirits up.  

                Another time that is remembered most in most family's is the time that you get to bond when you gather around the dinner table. I know that anytime that I had sat around the dinner table it was always a pleasant time to speak to my family and just sit back and listen to what we each have to say. This was also one of Lee’s most cherished period of his life. When he cooked he mentions that “the point was simply to sit together at the kitchen table and array ourselves like a family again… crammed in the center was all the food I had made—a spicy codfish stew, say, or a casserole of gingery beef, dishes that in my youth she had prepared for us a hundred times” (11). Food played a huge role in this family, it’s what helped them bond and grow stronger together. It was one of the main things that helped shape Lee. Another instance, he mentions “during the following days, it was always the cooking that started our conversations” (16). He also recognized himself in positions that reminded him of his mother, “Whenever I cook, I find myself working just as she would, readying the ingredients… My mother never left me any recipes, but this is how I learned to make her food, each dish coming not from a list or a card but from the aromatic spread of a board” (12).

Moreover, we get to understand how a family’s relationship can become stronger when someone spends some time away. You get to appreciate that person or persons in your life even more and just think about the times that you would like to cherish the most. Lee speaks of a time when he was not so pleasant to his parents. He was a teenager going through so many changes and as most teenagers do, they react negatively towards their parents. He stated, “I was a teenager, and so ever inclined to be dismissive and bitter toward anything that had to do with family and home” (14). That pretty much sums up every teenager and their relationships with their parents, some of them are lucky to grow a stronger bond during these times but more than anything, there is a sense of aggravation.

****more to come****