Baking Success

Human progress happens incrementally

Take the word recipe to mean a set of instructions that lead to a particular outcome.  Now imagine a world with no recipes. A multitude of things--books, cars, houses, birthday cakes--would, in fact, not exist, and society as a whole would fall apart. Our modern civilization requires the passing down of recipes to function because we can only accomplish so much in a given lifetime. Recipes allow us to build off the knowledge and insights that people have already gained, rather than forcing us to start from scratch. As we add and subtract certain ingredients from previous generations’ recipes, we tailor our recipes to fit new ideals. This is how different cultures and societal constructs evolve, and on a more individual and short-term basis, how adolescents blossom into adulthood.

A parent demonstrates the behavior of an adult and teaches their child manners and skills essential to cultural assimilation. The child proceeds in the parents’ footsteps, and refers to a similar recipe when raising their own children. Though there is no one right way to raise a child (is there only one truly delicious type of cake?), some parents obsess over following a “perfect” recipe.

These parents, often referred to as “tiger parents,” push their children in a way that ends up stifling the child’s curiosity and motivation. Instead of trying to guide their child through social and emotional changes during childhood, they construct a wall between themselves and their child, only penetrable if their child meets a solid metric of success. Lately I’ve been reading the realistic fiction novel, Everything I Never Told You. Celeste Ng’s characters follow unique recipes, some of which resemble those of a tiger parent’s. James is the son of Chinese immigrants, while his wife, Marilyn, is the only child of a white American housewife.  Mix the ideals and perspectives of these two together and the result is total dysfunction.

Marilyn squanders her dream of becoming a doctor when she falls in love with James and gets pregnant, while James follows his recipe for success and becomes a tenured professor. Full of regret, Marilyn feels compelled to achieve her dream vicariously, through her eldest daughter Lydia. She force feeds Lydia scientific knowledge and talks incessantly about grades and her future plans, which prevents Lydia from exploring her true self. Marilyn’s recipe for becoming a doctor is simply that; a recipe for becoming a doctor. There is no room to breath, to grow up, to make mistakes, to fall in love. Lydia has but one fate in life because her mother refuses to accept the sacrifices she made to raise children. When Marilyn’s mother dies, Marilyn feels especially regretful that she did not follow her dream career path. “She [Marilyn] thought of her mother, the life her mother had wanted for her, the life her mother had wanted to lead herself: husband, children, house, her sole job to keep it all in order. Without meaning to, she’d acquired it” (Ng 78). Marilyn intended to defy her mother's expectations, by creating her own recipe for success. After having children though, Marilyn realizes that she has failed to stray from her mother, by adding too many of her mother’s original ingredient to her own. Depending on the perspective of the reader, Marilyn’s additional ingredients make her life more sweet. A husband, three kids, a lakefront house-- what could be better? But to Marilyn, nothing could be worse. James has gotten to bake his success-cake and is still hungry, while Marilyn, drained from ingredients, is feeding the dreams of other people. Analyzing this situation makes me wonder, “can only one member of a family follow their recipe exactly? Can only one bake the cake?”

In Everything I Never Told You, this certainly seems to be the case. Even Lydia is aware of it before she passes, noting that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. One went up and the other went down. One gained, the other lost. One escaped, the other was trapped, forever" (Ng 225). Marilyn and James's problematic relationship is the result of an ingredient mix up. Marilyn added love instead of career to her mixture, and sneaky James seized the opportunity. As much as Marilyn strives to control her own destiny, her mother’s recipe inevitably merges with her’s to take the place of "career." She can taste the difference--wants nothing more than to throw the batter out and start all over--but she's struck with what she has.
Luckily, we have the YOLO philosophy and Snapchat to help us move on from our life failures, but for those like Marilyn, indefinitely stuck in the past, their cakes will never bake quite right.