4. "Magical Dinners" by Chang-Rae Lee

To most of us, Thanksgiving dinners are traditional, family gathering meals that have been practically the same as long as we can remember. Chang-Rae Lee, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the Asian American Literary Award, and current professor of Princeton’s creative writing program, attempts to show us the experience of a customary American meal from his perspective, that of a young Korean immigrant in New York, in his essay titled “Magical Dinners”. To do this, Lee uses the rhetorical tools of imagery and similes. The essay begins with him and his family on Thanksgiving Day waiting for the Turkey to finish cooking. Having no previous experience of Thanksgiving, Lee states, “I can already imagine how my father will slice into the grainy white flesh beneath the honeyed skin of the breast, this luscious sphere of meat this is being readied all around the apartment complex.” While many of us are already very familiar with Thanksgiving turkeys, through Lee’s use of imagery, we are offered a window into his point of view and how his first Thanksgiving turkey is perceived and imagined by someone who is entirely new to the traditional holiday and meal altogether. Later in his essay, while describing his experience with another common American dinner, Lasagna, Lee states, “my mother runs down her shopping list - it’s as if she were at the library searching for a book in the stacks, trying to find the particular spices and herbs, the right kind of macaroni, the right kind of cheese or cream...each decision another chance to mar the dish beyond my ignorant recognition.” Here, Lee uses a simile to compare his mother’s search for the proper ingredients to the often difficult and tedious search for specific books at a large library. This is particularly effective in conveying his and his mother’s perspective and confusion because in most supermarkets, we are familiar with where certain ingredients usually are found, but almost everyone has a somewhat hard time finding the exact book they are looking for among thousands of others. This allows us to relate the difficulty of finding the right books in a library to their Lee’s mother’s struggle of finding the right ingredients in an American supermarket. I believe Lee is ultimately successful in communicating his foreign experience of common American meals to those familiar with them through his rhetorical use of imagery and similes.

"The First Thanksgiving at Plymouth" (1914) By Jennie A. Brownscombe