Eating Together

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Unifying Power of Food

The title points to the poem’s central theme: the bonds created over a shared meal. The lunch connects the speaker to their brothers, sister, mother, and father. The event organizes them into a daily ritual, puts nurture and comfort into the midst of their grieving process, and gives them a way to be a family despite the father’s death. Consuming the trout and rice is a shared experience, so the speaker uses the first-person plural pronoun “[w]e” (Line 4). The speaker, siblings, and parents are a group, and the thread that defines the group members is their presence: Without the lunch, there is less potential for individuals to become a “we” while remembering their recently dead father. Without the specific lunch of steamed trout with the flavor profile of traditional Chinese cuisine, the family would not be able to enact their culture with domestic ease.

Food is also the poem’s catalyst for memory. This literary device is most famous from Marcel Proust’s famed multivolume autobiographical novel about French society, Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927). Proust’s narrator is spurred to remember his entire biography by a bite of a madeleine; in Lee’s poem, the handling of the trout and rice take the place of this French pastry. The speaker’s father isn’t physically present, but the food summons memories of how he used to interact with meals. The family has a hierarchy, with parents at the top. When the speaker’s father was alive, he got to hold and eat the “sweetest meat” (Line 6) of the fish head. Now that he has passed away, the speaker’s mother takes over as leader of the family and gets to eat the best part. However, her ascension into his position comes with little discontinuity—the speaker shows us that she will continue leading the family in the same way his father did because she makes sure to replicate her husband’s gestures: She holds the fish head “between her fingers / deftly, the way my father did” (Lines 7-8). The food anchors the speaker, as his mother’s expert handling of the fish head reminds the speaker of his father, who thus enters the poem and spiritually joins the lunch. By the end of the poem, “eating together” includes the living and the dead. Via trout and rice, the speaker’s family can commune with the living members and the departed father.

Family as a Hierarchy

The poem’s family lunch establishes a generational hierarchy: Children revere their parents, who occupy positions of privilege and respect—a tenet of traditional Chinese culture. When the speaker’s father was alive, he was the head of the family, so the rest of the family ceded to him the choicest treats; in this case, it was his prerogative to handle the trout and “taste the sweetest meat of the head” (Line 6)—the best part of the meal. Now that the father has died, this position of seniority and leadership passes to the speaker’s mother; the siblings watch her perform the same actions as her husband used to and take the morsel formerly reserved for him. While the preferential treatment has passed to the speaker’s mother, she does not break the family’s traditions or expectations. Rather, all the members of the family accept that the elders will be held in high regard by their offspring.

This family dynamic reflects Lee’s own experiences growing up: “[W]hen I was young, I defied my parents, I projected or transferred all the god-presence on my parents and the world around me” (Breaking the Alabaster Jar, p. 145). As a child, Lee saw his parents as gods. In this poem, while the speaker still imbues his mother and father with awe and reverence, he has reached the bittersweet point of realizing that they lack godlike powers—his father has recently died, and all the speaker can do is comfort himself by imagining that his dad is “lonely for no one” (Line 12). There is nothing divine about the death the speaker mentions—a death he cannot even bring himself to describe except in euphemism, as if his father simply “lay down / to sleep” (Lines 9-10). With this lack of finality, the speaker projects ongoing existence onto his father, hoping he possesses a relationship with death that transcends the typical human experience.

The Presence of Death

Lee has stated that “death has to be in every poem” because “that’s part of our manifold being” (Breaking the Alabaster Jar, p. 123). Since “Eating Together” is an elegy that reveals that the lunch it describes is taking place during the family’s mourning of the father who died only weeks ago, death is the subtext of each line. Even the opening line, “In the steamer is the trout” (Line 1), which seemingly only introduces the prepared food that the family will consume, is about mortality. At one point, the trout was a living creature; someone has killed it. Its sacrifice becomes nourishment and comfort—the centerpiece of a meal which through daily ritual and repeated gesture evokes the dead patriarch.

Unlike the death of the trout, the father’s death is more explicit. The speaker cannot bring himself to directly describe his father as dead, but uses a metaphor and an extended simile to euphemize: The father’s death is first “sleep” (Line 10) and then “like a snow-covered road / winding through pines” (Lines 10-11). Though the road receives no “travelers” (Line 12), the father is “lonely for no one” (Line 12). Death isn’t an isolating experience. The father isn’t alone; his spirit is with the speaker and his family. The distant implication is that eventually, all of the family members will join the father on this wintry road.

As the focal point of the meal, the dead trout summons the dead father, who is still part of the “we” and whose gestures and preferences recur in the speaker’s mother’s approach to the fish: She handles it “deftly, the way my father did” (Line 8), taking over his position in the family by recapitulating his affect. In other words, the dead continue to have a presence among the living, shaping their lives and activities. The lunch revolves around the dead fish and the departed father. Without their presence, the poem loses most of its meaning.