Chang-rae Lee (1995)
"Sometimes I still think about what she said, about having made a mistake. I would gave left home for college, that was never a doubt, but those years was away at boarding school grew more precious for her as her illness progressed. After many months of exhaustion and pain and the haze of the drugs, i thought that her mind was beginning to fade, for more and more it seemed that she was seeing me again as her fifteen-year-old-boy, the one she had dropped off in New Hampshire on a cloudy September afternoon."
There’s a bittersweet feeling rippling through me as I write
this, and I can’t figure our if it’s because this is the last chance I get to
do a reflection for this class, or because this story is so fitting for an ending. There’s a very
strong feeling of finality to this, and I can’t quite shake myself from it.
It’s sobering and sad, but at the same time quite fascinating, and a feeling
that I haven’t been made to experience in a while. Perhaps it’s something worth
struggling through for now.
This story, on many levels, hit me very close to home; I
felt an immediate connection to the narrator, because his experiences with his
family were so very similar to mine. Cooking in his family was as integral as
it was to my own – even though I’m speaking from an Italian background, not a
Korean one. My mother was always in the kitchen, cooking something new for us;
and I, much like the narrator, would linger around her feet as a child, looking
up and trying to see what she was doing.
What really is communicated through this narrative is the
briefness of life, and the importance of honesty as well as family. It’s
emphasized through the relationship between the narrator and his mother –
through his growing up and time at boarding school, their relationship is
strained. It’s further tested through her sickness, and the terminality of
their connection as mother and son. The impact of the realization the son has –
that his mother is going to die, and he cannot stop it – makes him cherish the
time left for them to share.
The importance of family is closely connected to the first
theme – the narrator’s family is joined by the seriousness of the mother’s
condition. The narrator’s father comes home early from work to spend time with
his family, his sisters come home from their jobs out of the state to stay with
their mother. It took a catastrophe for their family to come back together, and
it’s a very realistic reaction from a family. But I think part of the author’s
goal here is to show that time with your family is precious and valuable – you should
take advantage of every moment, and spend as much time as you can with them.
You never really know when you’ll lose them.
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