“The Taste of Home” (2022-2023)
Having lived most of my life in an industrial city that does not have a subway, the thought of studying in a completely foreign megacity like New York frightened me. After actually arriving, the fear of the unknown transformed into a sense of detachment. In an environment where I felt unable to establish a connection with anything I saw, it felt natural to be nostalgic whenever I could find a place that held even a tiny trace of what home was like. Since Chinese restaurants are so common in New York City, my attempts to make a connection with the city started there.
The prompt for the essay was to exhibit a cultural object related to NYC and provide insight into it. I found it fitting just to document how I established a connection to the city through the various Chinese restaurants I had visited, but I was hesitant to discuss what was unpleasant or unsatisfying in many of them. I wanted to leave the reader with the impression that the Chinese food is good in NYC.
It wasn’t until I read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s article “The Case For Contamination” that I realized those unsatisfying experiences were exactly what I should focus on. It was not fair to compare New York restaurants to ‘typical American Chinese food’ like General Tso’s Chicken or fortune cookies. A real comparison would consider how they differed from home. Once this conflict was established, together with the introduction of Sam Jacobson’s essay “The Few, The Proud, The Chosen,” I was able to resolve my paradoxical view on Chinese restaurants in NYC, in the essay and in real life.
Of the three essays that I wrote for “Writing The Essay,” this is the most intimate, most personal one, as it revolved around me: what I saw, what I felt, what I read, and how it changed me. This essay is the concentrated image of a semester-long process of experiencing, doubting, and reconciling that helped me to develop in ways beyond just writing skills, and I am grateful for what this experience brings into my life.
Ray Wang, ‘25, grew up in Tangshan City, Hebei Province in China. Fascinated by the rigorous logic and intricate axiomatic system that build the discipline, he is now pursuing an undergraduate degree in mathematics in the College of Arts and Science, and he wishes to carry this passion for mathematics into higher levels of study and his career. When he is not absorbed in math, he likes listening to various genres of music as well as trying out different kinds of food. His essay, through an impression of several Chinese restaurants found around campus, is a journey of questioning and reconciling his understanding of the concept “authenticity” as well as a bittersweet reminder of the lingering nostalgia that hides in his everyday life.