coming home again analysis

Coming Home Again
By Chang Rae Lee

“But you know what?” she spoke up. “It was better for you. If you stayed home, you would not like me so much now.”

I suggested that maybe I would like her even more.

She shook her head. “Impossible.”

                  Coming Home Again  by, Chang Rae Lee centers around a young man's reflection on his relationship with his mother as her death approaches. When the main character was younger he had a relatively close relationship with his mother. He often watched her cook in the kitchen and he she was  his first basketball coach. In fact, in the text there is even evidence to suggest that when it came to basket ball his mother was like one of his idols or heros being that he says he kept his mother's photo from her high school basketball championships  "on the same shelf that housed the scrapbooks I made of basketball stars, with magazine clippings of slick players like Bubbles Hawkins and Pistol Pete and George (the Iceman) Gervin". Yet as he grew into a teenager and assimilated more  to American culture their bond and understanding began to strain. The reader saw this most prominently when as teenager he told his mother "Well, maybe you should consider it practice ", when she asks him to call the bank for her. It's can be inferred from the text that his mother asked him to do this because of her "imperfect english" and his arrogant and condescending reply hurt her deeply.  The distance between them grew even further after the main character went off to boarding school. However  as shown in the chosen quote above it was a decision they both would come to regret as her death approached and they realized just how little time they  had together.
        One of the most important aspects of  familial relationships that not only the quote but the text highlights as a whole is the detriment  of poor communication between loved ones. In the text the author points out that after he went to boarding school his mother "believed back then that I had found her more and more ignorant each time I came home. She said she never blamed me, for this was the way she knew it would be with my wonderful new education". However that was not how the main character felt about his knew environment or his mother . Rather the authored voiced that " My own secret feeling was that I had missed my parents greatly, my mother especially, and much more than I had anticipated". But because they never voiced these thoughts to each other or had a open conversation about the boarding school situation  at the time when they should have, the time he spent at boarding school transformed into  a period in their lives they both regret spending away from each other. One can even say in the chosen quote above the mother and son years later still haven't fully opened up and understood  each other. I say this  because the son doesn't go on to  explain to his mother why he feels he would have liked her even more if he had never gone to boarding school. The tragic fact that the mother dies without him wholeheartedly letting her know all she meant to him when he was growing up and how much he appreciated her, is the powerful tool Chang  Rae lee uses to warn the reader of the detriment concerning  miscommunication with the ones you treasure the most .