Chang-rae Lee Coming Home Again Answer Key
"Coming Habitation Again" by Chang-rae Lee
What purpose do nutrient and travel writing serve, when an writer is grieving?
Today'due south slice focuses on author Chang-rae Lee's training of traditional Korean family foods when his female parent becomes very ill.
Non everyone is a master chef. Some of united states of america hack and chop and frizzle away. The author's frustration is, in fact, at his at his inability to understand and ready the bully traditional meal. It is an imperfect language, excavating Lee'due south frustration and struggle to articulate that as a young son he didn't appreciate her beloved, sacrifice and self-effacement in the face of his ain hubris. The metaphor is that of nutrient and trying to duplicate the family repast and in part, failing. The agony of that.
"I would enter the kitchen quietly and stand up beside her, my mentum lodging on the betoken of her hip." "The bone barbarous abroad, though non completely" And then later, "careful not to dislodge the bones, I asked her why information technology was important that they remain connected."
It may be useful to compare Lee's piece with Momaday's "The Style to Rainy Mountain" and Hong Kingston's "No Name Adult female" in terms of the basic in the land; and that the chronology of events shifts dorsum and along via flashbacks yet all of the times are woven together to create, in the mind'south middle, that thing, that awareness, which had never been seen.
The concluding spectral image of the parents pulled over in the car and the son (in a dissimilar age) driving past and "seeing" them is the culminating image of his mourning. It is a synthesis.
It is not so much a piece about cooking every bit it is about coming to terms with the unfamiliar, expiry, (the tenor) in terms of the familiar, traditional Korean cooking (the vehicle).
The shadow-side failure at trying to say to someone, " I honey and respect you" through the preparation of a traditional meal for a mother, a child, who will not swallow.
His clumsy, imperfect mourning via cooking to sympathise his stalwart female parent's impermanence.
Here is "Coming Home Again" by Chang-Rae Lee.
The piece was originally featured in The New Yorker Magazine, October 16, 1995.
Let u.s. know what you lot think!
. . .A bit most Chang-rae Lee . . .
Chang-rae Lee (built-in July 29, 1965) is a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University,.[1] He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton'due south Program in Creative Writing.
Lee was born in S Korea in 1965 to Young Yong and Inja Hong Lee. He emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years former.
Lee'due south start novel, Native Speaker (1995), won numerous awards including the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award.
Lee explores issues central to the Asian American feel: the legacy of the by; the encounter of diverse cultures; the challenges of racism and discrimination, and exclusion; dreams achieved and dreams deferred. In the process of developing and defining itself, then, Asian American literature speaks to the very heart of what information technology means to be American. The authors of this literature higher up all concern themselves with identity, with the question of condign and beingness American, of existence accustomed, not "foreign." Lee'due south writings have addressed these questions of identity, exile and diaspora, assimilation, and alienation.¹
"The Great Eaters of Georgia" by Carson McCullers
By 1953 Carson McCullers'south dysfunctional spousal relationship was at a breaking signal. During a summer in Paris she and her husband were both drinking heavily, and Carson plant out that Reeves had (in one case again) forged Carson's name on checks. He attempted to kill himself and tried to talk Carson into committing suicide with him. She fled Paris lone and returned to the United states of america.
Around the same time, Holiday magazine had offered Carson McCullers fifteen hundred dollars to write a piece on Georgia where she returned in November to gather materials and memories.
While staying with friends McCullers learned that her hubby had committed suicide in the Hôtel Chateau Frontenac on November 18.
Although her hosts initially urged her to remain at their home to recover from the shock, McCullers insisted on going to visit Hervey Cleckley, a friend who was besides a psychiatrist. Cleckley, who was busy at work (with coauthor Corbett H. Thigpen) on his book The Three Faces of Eve, later told Carr that he and McCullers discussed his enquiry in psychopathology and talked at length about Reeves's suicide. Their conversations helped McCullers understand both her married man and their relationship, as she later described in her unfinished memoir:
McCullers (enduring what seems to be a rather uncomfortably close interview) nearly "The Member of The Wedding ceremony." McCullers states that the basic premise of the play was just "to belong- to exist a function of something; a function of life." Perchance this is besides true of those who write nearly food and cultural tradition when they are grieving.
"Hervey Cleckley has written a masterful volume called The Mask of Sanity, and in that book I could see Reeves mirrored. Psychopathic people are very often charming. They live on their charm, their good looks and the weaknesses of wives or mothers."
McCullers finally returned to Nyack, NY at the end of November—and the next day The New York Times published her husband's obituary, which suggested as a possible crusade of death injuries suffered from a car blow several weeks before. Still the actual crusade was hardly a secret to the couple's acquaintances and, amidst the drench of calls and condolences, in that location seemed to be a palpable sense of relief amongst some of McCullers's friends. Carr reports that the actress Helen Hayes, who also lived in Nyack, dropped past and told Carson'south mother, "I'm not going to say I'm distressing, Bebe, because I don't recollect I am."
McCullers soon returned to the job of writing the nutrient article for Vacation, and she completed a version in early 1954. The events of the previous yr surely explain the wistful and somewhat melancholy tone, and the essay was rejected because the magazine was "looking for a lighter, more than descriptive, less personal piece."²
Here is "The Great Eaters of Georgia" by Carson McCullers
McCullers' bittersweet narration (recovering from her spouses' suicide and reeling from a bitter marriage), evokes a longing. She discusses regional foods and all just likewise gets to the heart of longing; using the communal (or isolated) act of eating; of belonging or not belonging in a household, a family unit, a community. Of again, not the rosy magazine-slick travelogue her editors were expecting (this piece was ultimately rejected and was not published in Holiday Magazine) a much more meaningful exploration of cooking and dining every bit it expresses friendship, marriage, widowhood, isolation, etc. Again, the shadow side of the meal.
Consider an old human who has merely lost his wife, slumped in a wheelchair, trying to "enjoy" a steak at a family picnic and non wanting to chat only doing his best to make pleasant small talk. The Vietnam Vet at a Christmas party. 1 is perhaps able to move by the facade of emotionless silence to sense a great chasm of grief which was inarticulate as both Lee and McCullers went through the motions of describing and preparing nutrient. The beauty was non in the eloquence or grammar nor in the perfect execution of a meal (although McCullers seems much more chief of that!) but in the uncomplicated recounting of how they could NOT part normally.
So frequently today we take celebrity chefs and Food Telly gurus, who "Celebrate Holidays!" and take smiling to another farthermost with "Today on our show: Traditional Foods!" . . .it'south all so flouride-whitened. Mayhap these pieces are the yin to that yang. The power in the taking in of nourishment only not the outward power of flawlessly preparing information technology. The clinging, barely, to the retention of fruit, the children'southward treats, the holiday punch, as a rote endeavor to return to normalcy and exist nourished.
The foods and their memories and preparation go, perhaps, a sort of prayer for healing.
. . .A bit about Carson McCullers . . .
Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts in a pocket-sized town of the U.S. South. Her other novels have similar themes and most are set in the deep south.
McCullers' oeuvre is often described every bit Southern Gothic and indicative of her southern roots. However, McCullers penned all of her piece of work after leaving the South, and critics too describe her writing and eccentric characters as universal in scope. Her stories have been adapted to stage and motion picture. A stagework of her novel The Member of the Wedding (1946), which captures a young girl'southward feelings at her brother's wedding, made a successful Broadway run in 1950–51.³
¹ Source: Wikipedia
²Southummarized from The Library of America
³Wikipedia
harveyprostand1958.blogspot.com
Source: https://thewonderlings.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/week-twenty-coming-home-again-by-chang-rae-lee-and-the-great-eaters-of-georgia-by-carson-mccullers/
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