Food and Identity: Chang-rae Lee’s “Magical Dinners”

Since the longlist of the Man Asian Literary Prize has been dominating my reading for the past few weeks, I was interested to see that an essay by one of the prize judges, Chang-rae Lee, has been named one of The Best American Essays 2011 in the annual collection from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The essay, “Magical Dinners,” appeared in the November 22, 2010 issue of The New Yorker. Subscribers can read it online. Everyone can view the abstract.

This account of a Korean-American family’s relationship with food reads like fiction. Looking back on childhood memories of his mother’s cooking and shopping for food, of their daily fare of Korean standards and the experiments with American dishes (such as lasagna!), Chang-rae ends the story with a description of their first Thanksgiving turkey dinner, that most American of meals.

The centrality of food in the immigrant experience runs parallel in this narrative with the experience of growing up with immigrant parents and the way the encounter with the new homeland affects the developing child’s worldview. At times Chang-rae can be very funny in his depiction of those days. He describes what happens when he finally loses patience with his mother’s serving him an egg every morning.

Always there is a fried egg, sunny-side up, cooked in dark sesame oil that pools on the surface of the bubbled-up white in the pattern of an archipelago; try one sometime, laced with soy and sweet chili sauce along with steamed rice, the whole plate flecked with toasted nori. It’ll corrupt you for all time. But one morning I’m finally sick of it, I’ve had enough. She never makes an exception, because it’s for my health–everything is for my health, for the good of my bones, my brain, for my daunting, uncertain future–but, rather than eat yet another, I steal into her bedroom with my plate while she’s talking on the telephone with Mrs. Suh (at that time her only friend in the country) and drop it onto her best shoes, black patent-leather pumps. And here’s the rub: there is no sound a fried egg makes. It lands with exquisite silence. This is the dish I’ve been longing to prepare.

The humorous mood breaks when his mother’s internal radar guides her to the scene of the crime, and the boy fears for his life as she yells and shakes and stamps her foot. “As much as I’m afraid for myself, I’m confused too, and frightened for her, for tears are distorting her eyes, and she’s saying, in a voice that I will hear always for its quaver of defiance and forfeit, how difficult everything is, how wrong and difficult.”

His mother’s perpetual cooking–breakfast, lunch and dinner–carries a powerful meaning for her as well as for him, and the egg prank brings the passionate hope and determination and need and frustration to the surface in a way the child will never forget.

This essay leads me to expect subtlety from Chang-rae as a judge for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Instead of commenting discursively about food-as-metaphor for immigrant experience, he presents it as part of the environment, like air to breathe. This tactic gives the essay its fictional feel. We must be alert to what the narrator does not say as well as to what he spells out for us. We can appreciate Chang-rae’s decision to become a writer without his discussing that point. His childhood history of going about the apartment licking everything he finds communicates a desire for experience, for information, for sensual understanding.

Sometimes, for no reason I can give, I lick the sharp edges of the blinds, the combination of tin and soot and sludgy pier a funky pepper on the tongue. I already know that I have a bad habit. I’ll sample the window screens, too, the paint-cracked radiators, try the parquet wood flooring after my mother dusts, its slick surface faintly lemony and then bitter, like the skins of peanuts. I like the way my tongue buzzes from the copper electroplating on the bottom of her Revere Ware skillet, how it tickles my teeth the way a penny can’t. My mother scolds me whenever she catches me, tells me I’m going to be sick, or worse. Why do you have to taste everything? What’s the matter with you? I don’t yet know to say, It’s your fault.

The child’s disgusting habit prefigures the man’s mature preoccupation with literature, and it blends easily into the depiction of food imagery. The essay shows the formation of cultural and personal identity in childhood, a time when the family’s dining habits lay a foundation of memory that becomes a part of adult character in ways extending beyond the culinary.

Chang-rae Lee was in the news not long ago when political observers noticed striking similarities between the plot of his 1995 novel Native Speaker and a scandal that has engulfed a Chinese-American contender in the 2013 New York City mayoral election: Did a Novel Foreshadow The Liu Fundraiser Scandal?.

Chang-rae Lee teaches creative writing at Princeton University, where this video was filmed. The writer discusses some elements of fiction that we can assume will interest him as a reader of the novels competing for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Note also his comment on the Princeton University website. “’I'm fascinated by people who find themselves in positions of alienation or some kind of cultural dissonance,’ says creative writing professor and novelist Chang-rae Lee of his literary creations. ‘The characters may not always be Asian Americans, but they will always be people who are thinking about the culture and how they fit or don’t fit into it.’”

Logo designed by Matt Todd of A Novel Approach.

The Man Asian shortlist will be announced on January 10th. To read some blogger reviews of the longlisted novels, click the Man Asian Shadow Jury button here or on the sidebar.

For a weekly round-up of blogger food posts, visit Beth Fish Reads for the Weekend Cooking links.

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