Coming home again - Chang Rae Lee

In “Coming home Again”, Chang-Rae talks about his relationship with his mother as he was growing up, and how it changed and transformed as he grew up. He talks about his mother’s cooking and goes well into detail with it, this can be seen by the quote “When I was six or seven years old, I used to watch my mother as she prepared our favorite meals. It was one of my daily pleasures.” (pg1). He talks about every minute action that went into preparing a dish as he watched his mom cook, one such example is when she prepares a dish called kalbi. “For kalbi, she would take up a butchered short rib in her narrow hand, the flinty bone shaped like a section of an airplane wing and deeply embedded in gristle and flesh, and with the point of her knife cut so that the bone fell away, though not completely, leaving it connected to the meat by the barest opaque layer of tendon.”(pg2). He deeply respected and loved his mother, but the relationship grew strained when he went away to boarding school. As he looks back in the essay, he regrets the fact that he hadn’t spent enough time with his mother before she passed. He began to think that choosing a boarding school made him lose valuable time with his mother.
I believe that the idea of this essay is the relationship of the author and his mother. I think Lee wants us to relate to his family and try to teach us from his experiences. He chose Exeter and thus he couldn’t spend enough time with his mother. It just goes to show how you always need to give up something to get something. At the end of the essay he writes,” Sometimes I still think about what she said , about having made a mistake . “(pg6).This shows how Chang Rae wasn’t sure he made the right decision in relation to going to the boarding school Exeter.