You are what You eat
... found it difficult to relate to the children in school because her life and upbringing were completely different from theirs. Another aspect of the essay that I was a little confused about was the tense that Kothari spoke in. It took me a while to realize that Kothari was going back and forth through her past and present life with each different section. At one point she talks about being a nine-year-old child cooking with her mother, and then moves onto visiting relatives in India, and then to being in her 20's and living her own life outside of her parents home. Although I think that it was a good idea to talk about the different parts of her life, I did not like that fact that her essay was not necessarily in chronological order. I think that it would have been better for Kothari to start off her essay as she did, speaking about childhood, and move throughout her essay by talking about her teen years and then onto her adult life. However, she did choose an acceptable order of topics that she discussed within the essay. By talking about both present and past, she was able to pull in different ideas and thoughts about her heritage, and show the audience what she had to go through. I also noticed that Kothari structured her essay in a very interesting and unique way. Like most authors do, they separate different ideas with a new paragraph, simply by indenting for each paragraph. Kothari, on the other hand, had broken up her essay by sections. It seems as if each separate section, denoted by a roman numeral, is a different topic or idea each time. For example, in the first part (I), Kothari talks about her childhood and opening up a can of tuna, which was not the same tuna kids at school ate. In the second section (II), a topic different than the first, Kothari talks about sitting on the back steps of her father’s office eating fried chicken. Personally, I think that this technique was an effective way of writing her essay. It broke up the reading so that it wasn’t a long, drawn out essay. It also helps the reader to recognize different aspects of Kothari’s life, both the past and the present. I have never seen an essay written quite like that, and by breaking up the essay, showing each individual topic as she discussed it was a great way of getting across her separate thoughts and ideas. I sympathize with Kothari’s difficulties with the food confinements that her heritage placed on her. However, I feel as if she is exaggerating the situation she grew up with. Her parents were raised in a certain manner, and were doing all they could to give their children a normal life. The food her mother cooked was what she grew up with, and she was simply instilling the Indian heritage in her children by feeding her children that type of food. Kothari had always felt that her parents were different than other parents and never helped her or her sister with their issues of being different than other kids. She expresses these feelings in the following statement: “There is so much my parents don’t know. They are no...