If You Eat, What Am I? By Geeta Kothari Summary

The thought of not being able to identify with a person’s culture of origin is frightening enough, but to not be able to identify with a host culture either is a new level of feeling lost. Being able to be identified as a part of a greater group is a necessity for most people to feel as if they belong wherever they are. In Geeta Kothari’s, “If You Are What You Eat, What Am I?”, Kothari describes her struggle with her identity through the differences in the food that her Indian family eats, as opposed to what her American schoolmates eat. The use of excellent imagery, giving characters identifying attributes, and finding ways to evoke strong emotion has successfully conveyed that Kothari feels as though living on the edge of two cultures has left her without a solid identity with either side. …show more content…
Kothari does an excellent job using imagery in the description of the experience that she and her mother had with the tuna. Kothari writes, “The first time my mother and I opened a can of tuna, I am nine years old. We stand in the doorway of the kitchen, in semidarkness, the can tilted toward daylight. I want to eat what the kids at school eat: bologna, hot dogs, salami—foods my parents find repugnant because they contain pork and meat byproducts, crushed bone and hair glued together by chemicals and fat” (Kothari 947). When using imagery, the goal is to enable the reader to really be able to feel the situation, this quote describes the circumstances in such detail that the reader is able to perfectly imagine the