Magical Dinners

Magical Dinners, by Chang-Rae Lee is a personal narrative about his family’s first Thanksgiving dinner. The narrative focuses mostly on the food that is eaten and cooked by Lee’s mother, especially when he was a young kid. Through highlighting his mother’s cooking, Lee flashes back from Thanksgiving dinner to multiple meals that his mother cooked, and to her gradual progression to making Americanized meals.

Lee’s purpose is to connect to other immigrants by showing how through these meals, his family clings to their culture. He uses his own childhood to illustrate how an immigrant family could feel when trying to adapt to life in America. The audience can be anyone; however, this essay was probably meant to strike a chord with immigrant people, who have had similar experiences with culture.

Lee’s most common rhetorical device that he uses in his writing is his imagery. He describes all aspect of the settings and food in his story with vivid adjectives and vocabulary. Lee also does an exceptional job with conveying the emotions of a character. When he describes his mother’s disappointment if someone does not like her food, Lee includes the fact that first, “you can watch her face ice over. Shatter… but soon enough she’s simply miserable, her pretty eyes gone lightless and faraway,” (Lee 133). Not only does Lee tell of her emotions in a descriptive way, but he includes the gradual progression of different emotion as well.

Essentially, Lee’s narrative achieves its purpose without even trying. Immigrants are likely to connect to any story of other immigrants’ hardship because that is what most of them have in common. Many families from other countries have probably clung to an aspect of culture like food, so through merely telling the story, Lee can connect to many people.

Lee is the most credible author for this topic because it is his personal narrative. It’s all from his point of view, so one would assume he would not lie about his experiences. Also, he graduated from Yale and is a professor at Princeton so one would think he should be pretty trustworthy.

(source: http://www.cwsglobal.org/newsroom/news-releases/cws-supports-bipartisan.html)