Chang Rae Lee's Coming Home to Food All Over Again

In Chang Rae Lee’s essay “Coming Home Again," he uses food as a way to remember the connection he had with his mother. Food was their bond. As a child, he always wanted to spend time in the kitchen with his mother and learn how to cook. Much later, when his mother became sick, he became the cook for the family. “My mother would gently set herself down in her customary chair near the stove. I sat across from her, my father and sister to my left and right, and 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” (164). He made the food like his mother did and it was the lessons that his mother was able to pass onto him. These lessons of cooking were like lesson he learned in life. He recalls the times where growing up, he rejected the Korean food that his mother made for American food that was provided for him, which his father later told him, hurt his mother. After that experience, he then remembers how he came back to Korean food and how he loved it so much that he was willing to get sick from eating it, establishing a reconnection to who he was before he became a rebellious teenager. Kalbi, a dish he describes that includes various phases to make, was like his bond with his mother, and like the kalbi needs the bones nearby to borrow its richness, Lee borrowed his mother’s richness to develop a stronger bond with her.
Food has been a great part of how he has grown up. He was always interested in how food was prepared. He wanted to learn, even if his mother didn’t want him to be there. “I would enter the kitchen quietly and stand behind her, my chin lodging upon the point of the hip. Peering through...

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...th his mother. His mother was really important to him and the same goes his mother. “She reminded me daily that I was her sole son, her reason for living, and that if she were to lose me, in either body or spirit, she wished that God would mercifully smite her, strike her down like a weak branch” (166). He and his mother were very important to one another that she would really die if he was gone from her life. They share something important and that is food. Now that she has passed away he looks back on his life and thinks back to all the times they had together. The food that he ate as a child gave him such wonderful memories. Now it is something that he was able to do himself and every time he would make it, he would think about his mother and it makes him smile.

Works Cited

Lee , Chang-Rae. "Coming Home Again." New Yorker. 71.32 (1995): 164-168. Print.