Chang-rae Lee: "Coming Home Again Analysis

“But after weeks of pork parmigiana and chicken patties and wax beans, I suddenly realized that I had lost all the savor in my life. And it seemed I couldn’t get enough of it back. I ate and I ate, so much and so fast that I actually went to the bathroom and vomited. I came out dizzy and sated with the phantom warmth of my binge” (4).

            I like this quote because I think that it represents the narrator’s position in his life at that point, and the struggle that he was enduring. Having gone away to school, he had to try to completely immerse himself into a life with which he was pretty unfamiliar. At home, his main culture was a Korean- focused one and he was fine with that while he was there. Lee enjoyed learning about Korean cooking from his mother, and the language was often spoken in the house. However, his content attitude towards his family and their lifestyle, mainly that of his mother, changed once he was sent to boarding school. From here on out, he had to introduce American culture into his schema in order to fit in with his classmates and eventually become successful. It is not easy to balance living two separate lives, and this idea is reflected upon in this quote. Lee’s realizing how much he missed the food that he enjoyed so much is representative of his understanding of how different he had become since going off to school. While he enjoyed his time at school, I think that this quote captures the idea that he did not realize how much he missed his own life until he was brought back into it, completely and fully immersed once again. He says that he realized he missed all the “savor” in his life: although going to school obviously had its perks, it would never compare to his life at home with his family and the culture that he was a part of there. However, Lee soon realizes that simply eating all that food, or trying to completely dive back in to his own life, does not make it possible to get his old life back. His own body rejects his efforts to completely immerse himself back into his old culture when he vomits up the food his mother made for him. Lee wants to be able to live the best of both worlds, but he realizes here that is not completely possible. One cannot simply bounce back and forth between two cultures and remain unscathed, instead, it would take Lee a great deal of time and effort to try to become a full member of his household again: but he would never be able to go back to the person he was before he went off to school. He has changed at this point in the story, and by not taking that into consideration he only hurts himself- and his family.