Food as Trope in the Works of Nora Keller and Jhumpa Lahiri - Essay Example

Food as Trope in the Works of Nora Keller and Jhumpa Lahiri The of food in Asian American literature, especially in the works of Asian immigrants and second generation fiction writers, is a recurrent theme. Food oftentimes represents the gap between generation and culture as well as link to one’s cultural origin and ancestors. The partaking of food, especially ethnic food, is also used to symbolize unity and communality of immigrants coming from the same point of origin. To such immigrants, sharing food with other immigrants from their own country becomes not only a ritual of reminiscing the past but also in finding comfort in a common historical diaspora and identity with others who share and understand their loneliness and yearning for their native land. Moreover, Asian immigrants who come from countries suffering from poverty and hunger in their homeland and who come to America to search for a better life often see food as the symbol of successful transition from poverty to a life of comfort and abundance. Thus, food often serves as a metaphor for abundance and better life, something that often eludes these immigrants at home (Simal & Marino 2004 215) . The existence of food as a metaphor in literature, often associated with Asian American writers made Brad Kessler proposed “A Gastronomic Theory of Literature,” a theory that sits on the idea that the presentation of food especially in the opening chapters of some literary works “opens doors to double and triple meaning” (cited Williams 2007 p.1). Three works of two Asian American fictions writers being discussed in this paper reflect an abundant of textual use of food as trope. Jhumpa Lahiri’s A Temporary Matter and When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine involve the stories of a couple that slowly drifted apart after a tragedy struck them and a family that played host to a Dacca national temporarily living in the US concerned about the family he left behind in his war-torn country. Nora Keller’s Fox Girl, on the other hand, tells a story set in post-war Korea where two schoolgirls are caught in the harsh realities of life while growing up in America Town where GIs were stationed. In all these works of fiction, food is constantly used as a trope to symbolize the extremes of affinity and alienation and apprehension and reassurance. This enforces the idea that Asian American writers have an inclination to place much importance on food in their works, which is not surprising considering that food is the primary physical manifestation that differentiates the home of their birth from the country they now embrace as theirs. In A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri food was a mute witness to the couple’s transition from a life full of happiness and great expectation to one of apathy and alienation between the two protagonists. The author uses food to parallel the state of affairs between the husband and wife, with the turn and twist of the couple’s relationship aptly reflected in the state of their pantry. The story presents an extreme of abundance and dearth, paralleled only by the great quantity of food in their kitchen and the subsequent scarcity of food in the pantry. Shoba and Shukumar, both of Indian origin but were born and reared in the USA, are newlyweds who are expecting their first child. Everything is turning up roses for them, their respective careers in full swing with Shoba working as a proofreader/editor in a downtown office and Shukumar on his last leg of graduate school. In the beginning, Shoba filled the pantry with all kinds of food stuffs, more than the two of them can ever eat, from boxes of pasta, sacks of rice, chopped and frozen meat of lamb and goat, artichokes and everything she can get her hands on from nearby markets and groceries. Although there were only two of them living in the apartment, buying food and more food and stacking them in the pantry became a penchant for Shoba and to help consume them, she would often invite friends to dine at home and “Shoba would throw together meals that appeared to have taken half a day to prepare, from things she had frozen and bottled, not cheap things in tins but peppers she had marinated herself with rosemary, and chutneys that she cooked on Sundays, stirring boiling pots of tomatoes and prunes. Her labeled mason jars lines the shelves of the kitchen, in sealed pyramids, enough they’d agreed, to last for their grandchildren to taste” (Lahiri 2000 7). The importance that Lahiri places on food as a reflection of abundance and subsequently, emptiness reinforces the idea that Asian American writers often associate food as a gauge, not only of emotion but also of economic condition. Of significance in the story is Shoba’s initial enthusiasm to prepare and cook food the way and the amount she wants to not only for herself and Shukumar but also for others. This implies economic independence and the ability to spend more than the basic necessity and Shoba’s propensity to overindulge, an aspect which the author must have used to impress the idea that Shoba and Shukumar are capable of overindulging having attained economic independence and stability. Food continues to play a focal point in the story even after a tragedy that eventually struck the couple is mirrored by the condition of their pantry and their kitchen. When Shoba gives birth to a stillborn child, the couple slowly drifted apart, finding it more difficult each day to take each other’s presence. And as their alienation from each other grows and their affection for each other withers away, the abundant food that used to be part of their life is fading as Shukumar, since Shoba has lost all interest in cooking, is using up the last of them. The author presents a stark contrast between the days of happiness and the subsequent period of emptiness through the images of over-abundance of food and the subsequent dearth of food. Food in this story reflects the couple’s relationship: the over-abundance of food coincides with their happiness and affinity for each other, and; the exhausting food for their growing alienation. Another perspective on the significance of food as a metaphor in this story is that it asserts “agency and subjectivity” as against the dominant culture. In this sense, Lahiri presents a complication to the home-food association (Williams 2007 p.70) In the story When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, although Lahiri evidently used a different symbolism for food, a connection nevertheless links between the first and the second story. While abundance and emptiness characterize the first set of symbolism, the author presents food here as the diasporic bond that ties the characters together. Nevertheless, the array of food mentioned in the second story reflects abundance and happiness being shared by people who relish sharing and eating together food authentically Indian, commonly eaten and served in the country where they all come from. Thus, happy memories of home are engendered by the sharing of these familiar recipes, served in abundance and generously by the host family as against the backdrop of the daily evening news where people are shown being displaced and hungry. In this sense, Lahiri contrasts the disparate conditions between the characters’ homeland and their newfound home, where hunger and want no longer exist and where they can even be allowed to be generous to other people, who are not relatives. In the When Mr. Pirzada Come to Dine, food as trope is used to reflect relationships and affinity brought about by communality of ethnicity and cultural origin often sought by immigrants far from their native land. This kind of literature, according to Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong, professor of Asian American studies at University of California at Berkeley, is divided into the first and second generation: the first generation treats food as a necessity, thus, symbolizing survival, and; the second generation deals with food as extravagance closely associated with glut, gratification and desire. Thus, in When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine images of ‘pickled mangoes,’ ‘eating rice with bare hands,’ ‘dipping austere biscuits into tea,’ ‘mincemeat kebabs with coriander chutney,’ ‘lentils with green onions,’ ‘green beans with coconut,’ fish cooked with raisins in a yogurt sauce,’ ‘plate of lemon wedges and chili peppers,’ all distinctly spicy and Indian, abound in the text during family mealtime with Mr. Pirzada as the family’s guest. Another that plays an important symbolism here is white chocolate (Lahiri 2000 pp. 23-42). Food is also used by Lahiri in this story as a metaphor to consolation, which is not really a far cry from the notion of abundance and security that symbolizes the first story. As a metaphor for consolation, food is resorted to by one of the characters, viz. Lilia, to allay her fears of the unknown. This second short story by Lahiri revolves around a family of immigrants who had made a new life in America far from their homeland India. Desiring to meet others who come from the same place, the father and mother of the girl from whose point of view the story is told, uses their university directory to meet up with people whose names sounds Indian and then call them. One of those they called is Mr. Pirzada, who turned out to be Dakan native and is in the country temporarily to work. Mr. Pirzada left a wife and seven daughters in Daka, a region of India being torn by strife and war. Lilia, the daughter of the spouses, has taken a great deal to their new family friend, who showers her both with gift and affection. And as the days go by and the news of the civil strife in India and Pakistan worsens, she begins to worry for Mr. Pirzada and the family he has left home. To allay her fears, she prays at night and melts white chocolate in her mouth and skips brushing her teeth so as not to take the chocolate’s teeth out of her mouth. In this sense, the white chocolate works as a reassuring taste in her mouth. At the end of the story, when Mr. Pirzada went home and news of his reunion with his family reaches Lilia, she drops the habit of melting chocolate in her mouth at bedtime. On the other hand, the anguished tale of Hyun Jin and her best friend Sookie, who later turned out to behalf sister, in the novel Fox Girl by Nora Keller, a half-Korean, half-German writer, uses food to symbolize that which, for a time, was unattainable by Hyun Jin. Thus, the story mentions Coca-Cola, chocolates, and other American food that is deprive from Hyun Jin and Sookie, either because they cannot afford them or they are off-limits to them. In one scene, when Hyun Jin is six, she finds a basket of grapes that her mother bought to be made into candies. Unable to resist it, she takes a sampling but is unable to stop herself until she finds that she has eaten everything in the basket. She feels sick and vomited everything exposing them to her mother who was desperately looking for the grapes (Keller 2002). At this instance, food symbolizes something that has parallelism to her life: grapes stands for richness, that at her age, her body cannot accommodate yet. The grapes cause her stomach pain because it is too much for her to digest, which has parallelism in Hyun Jin’s life – being thrown into the prostitution and hardships that, at her age, are very difficult for her to deal with. At a very tender age, Hyun Jin is compelled to deal with problems that girls her age normally are not faced with: prostitution and pregnancy. At the end, however, Hyun Jin attains her dreams after she left America Town and migrated to the real America where she finds an opportunity at last to eat all the grapes she wants without her stomach painfully objecting and live a life that she has always dreamed of. As in the other stories, Fox Girl presents food as a symbol of abundance and of comfort. Food is a recurrent theme and an often-used symbol in the fictional works of literary of multi-ethnic writers in the United States. Food often plays a significant role in these literary works as figures of speech portraying “celebrations of families and communities, portray identity crises, create usable histories to establish ancestral connections, subvert ideology, and practices assimilation, and critique global capitalism” (Gardaphe & XU 2007 p. 5). Some of the reasons why Asian American writers have the proclivity to use food in such a manner are because food plays an ethnic and cultural function for these writers. Asians have distinctive style of preparing food that are practiced or are found in the land they now call home. Whilst Americans eat food consisting of meat and bread, most Asians eat rice together with viand. Food, therefore, constitute the first physical difference between their home of origin and the country which they now try to embrace as their own. To provide a feeling stable and continuous racial and ethnic identity that is threatened on a daily basis with the compulsion for diasporic assimilation in their newfound land, Asian Americans often resort to eating ethnic food as a reminder of their origin and of who they are. A well-known Asian American professor puts it succinctly and aptly when she said, “Food is a critical medium for compliance and resistance to Americanization, a means for enacting the ambiguities of an Asian ethnic identity that is already in a constant state of flux” (cited Williams 2007 p. 77). Thus in the works of literature tackled in this paper, all three works show food playing recurring symbols of ethnic assertiveness and identity. In Lahiri’s A Temporary Matter, Shoba overindulges in buying food that she later on prepares not only for her husband and herself but also for others and subsequently drops the habit as her relationship with her husband turns awry. In When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, by the same author, food served as the rallying center of the Indian family and their Indian visitor that strengthen their bond as well as a comforting presence for the child when she worries about the guest’s family back home. And in Fox Girl by Keller, food serves as symbol for something that is at one time, unreachable for the main character Hyun Jin, but which she, at the end, finally attained. Works Cited Keller, Nora. Fox Girl. England: Penguin Books Ltd, 2002. Lahiri, Jhumpa. ‘A Temporary Matter,’ Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Houhgton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. Lahiri, Jhumpa. ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,’ Interpreter of Maladies. New York: Houhgton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. Gardaphe, Fred & Xu, Wenying. ‘Introduction: Food in Multi-Ethnic Literatures.’ MELUS. [2007] accessed on 10 December 2010. Simal, Begoña & Marino, Elisabetta. Transnational, National, and Personal Voices: New Perspectives on Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers, Vol. 3. LIT Verlag Münster, 2004. Williams, Laura Anh. ‘Foodways and Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies’ MELUS. [2007] accessed on 14 Dec 2010. Read More