Eating Together

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.