Introduction
Through looking at all its facets, the narrative becomes one of the most important devices by which the social institutions within modern Asia and its diaspora are symbolically revealed and sometimes even challenged. This essay focuses on the way how Cathy Park Hong’s “Minor Feelings” and Madeleine Thien’s “Simple Recipes” provide the characters and the narrator with the tool of witnessing, which is used to help the viewers understand and articulate their varying realities with more depth. In the films, seeing remains a complex occurrence. Still, it is way more complicated and has a strong interweaving with the issues revolving around identity, migration, and racial consciousness. By comparing these representations, we introspect and analyze how experiencing personal and collective histories on a larger scale shapes one’s understanding of self in the grand scheme of societal issues.
Personal and Familial Witnessing
In “Minor Feelings,” Cathy Park Hong uses her autobiographical narratives to depict historical epochs, making her witness the intricate minority emotions and their psychological underpinnings. She tells about her life, using a hair-raising ribbon that overtops the prevailing cultural narratives. For example, Hong narrates, “I am the body electric, I thought, and my brain is haywire” (Hong, 2019). Here, she expresses her inner turmoil surrounding the question of belonging and identity. She is fighting these controversies within her while also watching others interacting with her and responding to who she is.
It follows this line with “Simple Recipes”–the context is embedded in the family setting. Thien employs cooking rice, an ordinary process, as a stealth tool to uncover complex issues of lineage and individuality. The protagonist witnesses her father’s ritualistic approach to cooking, reflecting on the past and her place within it: “The water line, no measuring cup or manual was needed. My father instead felt the water level with his eyes closed” (Thien,2009). This is the window into generational dissimilarity, as it speaks about lasting itself as the instrument of cultural continuity through the simple acts of daily rhythm.
Social and Cultural Witnessing
Both texts evoke the spirit of the times and people’s lives in different historical periods in their accounts of the said events. The essay entitled “Minor Feelings” details how the author’s narrative reveals racial injustices and cultural erasements that Asian Americans endure. The author defines the idea of a ‘minor feeling’ as sentiments arising out of the contrast between one’s experience and the approach of the outside world to your community. This concept is illustrated when she criticizes the racial awareness of a gallery manager who is ignorant of the complexities of Asian American identities. Thus, Hong witnesses and challenges misconceptions firsthand: “‘They’re like that because they don’t understand the world,’ he told me” (Hong, 2019). Hong replied,” That’s something only phonies believe in. That’s just bullish!”
While Thien depicts the cultural uprootedness of newcomers in ‘Simple Recipes,’ she also portrays their chances of survival in that new environment. The girl observes her delirium, and also that of her father, in the context of The West and, having described herself as being “in the middle of the kitchen surrounded by the gloss of kitchen counters” (Thien (2009), she wonders if she is truly being born or reborn in a land where everything is familiar yet strange. The young woman’s experience of this external observation further showcases the inner struggle of typical assimilation into new social surroundings while clinging to the bits and pieces of the home she could put together.
Witnessing as a Tool for Empowerment and Resistance
Both writers utilize witnessing as a passive approach and an instrumental mechanism for liberation and resistance. Hong’s essays help her to regain her authentic related stories that inappropriate opinion groups had long ignored. She writes with clarity that confronts and dismantles the minor feelings: “Whiteness has been unfairly dealing with us to see us as their juniors that they can twist into their demonic arrangements of bloody wars” (Hong,2019). This stand-alone statement emphasizes her thoroughness and insight into the events of the past and current injustices and employs witnessing as a vehicle for exposing the truth.
Using different characters in the book “Simple Recipes” by Madeleine Thien, their sensory experiences, specifically food preparation, work as a significant way of giving testimony and thus strongly prove the devouring of cultural identity. Thien shows how the raw dish is not only a way of tying the family together, but it also highlights the way in which we can regain our culture, but the force of assimilation overcomes it. Rites of passage in the preparation of local culinary practices become a symbol of courage in the face of the attrition of heritage. This idea is poignantly encapsulated when the protagonist recalls her father’s daily routine: “My father would always do this before dinner towards the evening (Thien,2009)”. This little episode is a great example of the law of man’s preservation of cultural practices as an action of resistance against the dissolution of personality. Thien’s elegy reminds us that preserving one’s cultural rituals is crucial for cultural survival and that cooking every day is an exhilarating bridge connecting people from the past with the present and the future.
Conclusion
In the books “Minor Feelings” and “Simple Recipes”, presentation turns into the fundamental device that enables the writer to navigate through the backgrounds of race, identity, and the experience of modern Asia and the foreign dwellers living in it. In their writings, Cathy Park Hong and Madeleine Thien utilize this device to craft reflective and resisting stories. The stories give an insightful portrayal of history’s personal and clan natures. They use their art to ensure that witnessing becomes an activist type, which could, therefore, make the same people challenge the life stories that they are part of.
References
Hong, C. P., & Chen, K. (2019). Cathy Park Hong. BOMB, (150), 84-89.
Thien, M. (2009). Simple Recipes: Stories. Back Bay Books.
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