Question

Read the excerpt from "Fish Cheeks." On Christmas Eve I saw that my mother had outdone herself in creating a strange menu. She was pulling black veins out of the backs of fleshy prawns. The kitchen was littered with appalling mounds of raw food: A slimy rock cod with bulging fish eyes that pleaded not to be thrown into a pan of hot oil. Tofu, which looked like stacked wedges of rubbery white sponges. A bowl soaking dried fungus back to life. A plate of squid, their backs crisscrossed with knife markings so they resembled bicycle tires. What is the effect of the imagery in this passage? It makes the food seem like something that should not be eaten. It shows how hard the mother works to please her family. It gives important information about Chinese culture. It shows how complicated it is to cook Chinese meals.

Answer 1

A. It makes the food seem like something that should not be eaten.

The things to look at in determining the appropriate response for this question are the adjectives. Let’s take a look at the adjectives used within this excerpt to describe things: “strange,” “littered,” “appalling mounds,” “slimy,” “rubbery,” and even knife markings that resembled bicycle tires. These are descriptions that one would not generally use to describe anything worthy of ingestion. As such, the imagery within this excerpt certainly makes the food seem like something that should not be eaten.

Answer 2

Answer: First option: It makes the food seem like something that should not be eaten.

Explanation:

The speaker in "Fish Cheeks" wants to help the reader feel the same way she herself feels when she sees the food. Every single detail of the description is meant to make us disgusted: the black veins being removed from shrimps, the appalling raw food - slimy, rubbery, spongy, bulging etc.

What is important to take into consideration is that the speaker - and since this is an autobiographic essay by Amy Tan, the author herself - is a 14-year-old girl who is in love with a boy. She's from a Chinese family; he couldn't be more American. And his family was invited over for Christmas' dinner at her home.

In the excerpt we're analyzing here, Amy is not looking at the food from her normal perspective. She's afraid of what the American family will think when  they realize they'll have Chinese food for dinner instead of a turkey. She's afraid Chinese culture and customs will be too strange for them to put up with. All of that fear is reflected in the way she sees the food. The same things she describes as slimy, bulging and so on are, in reality, all Amy's favorite dishes. She wouldn't normally think of them as disgusting.