In Phillip Lopate’s novel To Show and to TellI, he describes the process of characterization in memoir by saying, “I would further maintain than this process of turning oneself into a character is not about self absorbed navel gazing, but rather a potential release from narcissism” (25). In Lopate’s chapter “On the Necessity of Turning Oneself into a Character” he describes different ways that memoirists characterize themselves and how to improve your skills in that art. Chang-rae Lee is skilled in the concepts that Lopate stresses and certainly strays from narcissism.
In his essay “Magical Dinners” by providing an honest depiction of his childhood memories as a Korean immigrant telling us who he is through the dramatization of his childhood quirks, vivid description of his environment growing up, and his attitudes towards his childhood behaviors. Chang-rae Lee is a master at what Lopate would call dramatizing yourself. He intricately illustrates his childhood obsession with tasting odd objects in a way that makes you feel that you are also experiencing the taste.
Whether he is licking the seats in his father’s car, or chewing on the corner of his lastic tablecloth, you become interested in this strange habit because it is both strange and very well described. Yes he was a kid who liked to lick things, but many children put their mouth all over things that they probably shouldn’t but it is in the way that he dramatizes it that makes it work. For example, this is who Lee describes the experience of licking a blind: “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. Another behavior that Lee ramatizes is the way that he breathes in the chemicals made to repel the bugs.
He sees himself as “a young splendid bug” that lives on toxins and fumes. Lee paints a vivid picture of his odd childhood self through the description of his eccentric habits. Lopate discusses the importance of ethnicity, gender, social class, and geography, as strong determinants in the development of character (21). Through Lee’s essay we catch a glimpse into the lower middle class immigrant experience in a New York City suburb, eager but struggling to fit while trying to old on to the place you know as home.
As a child Lee was very interested in American foods and wanted to eat like his white friends at school but his mother and father wanted to eat the traditional Korean dishes that they were used to. While all of the adults are speaking in Korean, the younger children all speak in English. His environment creates an obsession with food and tastes. The duality of his perspective of events as a child paired with small reflective comments made writing this essay as an adult allows us to see how Lee has changed and matured.
It is shown pecifically when Lee describes a conflict with his mother that ends with a fried egg in his mother’s shoe. As an adult Lee is able to see the characteristics that he and his mother share but while he was a child these same traits put tension in his relationship with his mother. We learn that as an adult he understands his mother’s behaviors and how the move to the United States was far more difficult for her and he sympathizes for her. He regrets abusing the power he had over her by making comments on the food she always worked so hard to prepare for the family.
His guilt as an adult from doing this to his mother as a child shows in this passage, “Naturally, she can’t counter me, and this makes her furious, but soon enough she’s simply miserable, her pretty eyes gone lightless and faraway, which is when I relent and tell her it’s still good, because of course it is, which I demonstrate by shoving the food in as fast as I can, stuffing my awful mouth. ” Without characterization of the self in memoir work, the reader gets lost by being uninterested because it makes it incredibly difficult to relate to the material and they can not fully nderstand the messages that the author is trying to convey.
It is an essential element that many writers struggle with, but Chang-rae Lee excels at it, giving the reader a clear picture of who he is. It was the first Christmas after the divorce my mother moved younger sister and I to the small house that she bought with the help of my grandparents when she graduated high school. Although this was only one town east of where we were used to living, the new foreign. I felt abandoned because every piece of the life I knew was shattered. My younger sister and I went from having our wn rooms to sharing the same rickety bed, the same shiny pink comforter, and the same Scooby-Doo bedsheets.
There were giant changes quickly made in our lives without being given any explanation because we were “too young”. We weren’t too young to set an alarm in the mornings to get ourselves up for school, or to make our own breakfast, or to walk ourselves a mile down the road to school at 8 and 9 years old. Anyways, my mother was probably right in withholding information from us because she was pregnant with a child by a man who was not our father. That is how she finally got caught, although the whole town had already known by then.
We kept all of the same decorations on our artificial tree: the old ratty red and white cotton stuffed ornaments that looked like something my grandma kept in her sewing kit to stick her needles into with the scary looking angel on top that very much resembled a voodoo doll. Our decorations were a family joke from the beginning because after bringing me home from the hospital right before christmas the only tree they could find was this wretched pre decorated tree at an Ocean State Job Lot but hey made it work for our first Christmas as a family. These decorations made me feel like my mom wasn’t the only one cheating on my dad.
Besides escaping reality through the means of books, ghborhood was completely television shows, and movies, I didn’t do much besides eating. My dad has always been the cook in the house and now that we were away from him my sister and I were exiled to eating only the types of food that if you left it on the counter for a few months and revisited it, it would still look the same. It was a life of pizza rolls, hot pockets, kid cuisines, ramen noodles, and any ther processed food that you can cook via microwave because Mom was at the bar but she didn’t trust us with the stove.
I ate these foods rampantly and slowly I forgot what it felt like to be hungry or full. A few months after the move I began to see myself as a little pig girl: always eating, never clean, making noises that only seemed to bother people. It was like my life had turned into one of the Animorph books that I always stayed up so late reading. I would look at myself and the mirror and oink in disgust. I didn’t look like myself, or feel like myself. I just wasn’t myself. Thanks Mom.
