As a child, the speaker was heavily influenced by his native culture, but, over the years the he has become more integrated with U. S. Ultra, which has thus caused him to lose identity of himself, and even become a stereotype for Asian Americans. The central purpose of this poem is to show hat if one loses touch with one’s culture, then one begins to lose identity of oneself. Unguent begins the poem with a personal anecdote relating to how he and his mother do not engage in conversations at the dinner TABLE anymore, because of how it reminds each of them how differing their accents are from one another, which causes each of them to become sad.
He further uses metaphor to describe his voice as “bleach,” because it has been washed away by his lack of Vietnamese culture, and has been replaced with the sterile and white voice of an American, which is later shown to be true because of en of the speaker’s first teachers assumed that the speaker was adopted, because of how well the speaker spoke English at a young age.
This description of the speaker’s voice with negative connotations is continued when Unguent uses simile to refer to his house as a “silent film,” because of how rarely the speaker and the speaker’s mother talk in the house, and how, when watching old home movies, the speaker can barely understand himself sometimes; however, in these home movies, the speaker is always TABLE to understand his mother telling him to smile, meaning that he can still remember a few words of his native language.
Unguent continues by calling himself a “fortune cookie,” and that he is “every Nikkei shoe that [he] own[s],” using metonymy to describe himself as these things due to the fact that fortune cookies are not often much more than American stereotypes for food originating in East Asia, and Nikkei shoes are often produced in East Asian sweatshops. These examples of metonymy are important to the poem because these clearly show how the speaker views himself as an Asian American stereotype, because of his lack of traditional Vietnamese culture, and his heavy influence on culture from America. His role as a stereotype in
America is proven once again when the speaker adds an additional personal anecdote, describing how when he and a friend went to an Asian restaurant, his friend asked him why he wasn’t using chop sticks, but instead, using a fork. The narrator replied by simply putting that “this is much easier,” possibly providing another view into his lack of Vietnamese culture. The speaker ends the poem very suddenly after this, by forcing “That is all. I have nothing else to say,” quickly closing the poem without much of a conclusion, adding to the anger that the speaker must feel, encapsulated in the many uses of poetic techniques by Unguent in this poem.
