In the seventeen years of my supposedly masculine life, I never wanted anything to do with the kitchen. I had never wanted to cook a meal for myself. I never wanted to handle a knife, I never wanted the scorching heat of the stove to scorch my face, but boy was I starving. 

After a tiresome yet fun session of basketball at the YMCA, hunger took over me as it would an empty-handed hunter. I felt the nutrients excreting from my body through my sweat, if that’s how science works, and I desperately needed to get those nutrients back in my body. On the train ride back home from the YMCA, my mind began filtering through the different dishes I wanted to eat. I could not choose a dish a wanted, from the modest number of dishes which were circulating through my brain—it was either rotini pasta or chicken legs with rice or garlic naan with kabob or lamb stew with naan or cheese bread or biryani or chicken sliders or cheese sticks or Turkish bread or chicken tenders. I really had a limited choice. The decision was tough, but I had quite some time to think about it, after all, it was going to take me 1 hour to get home on the train. Stop by stop, I filtered through the dishes in my brain, and I finally settled on the prize winner– lamb stew with naan. Though the walk home from the train station was like a path through hell, I had finally made it home. I didn’t even care to take a shower or change my clothes once I got home. It was like every time I got hungry and wanted to eat, my muscle memory simply led me straight to my sisters. Being the only and youngest brother of seven sisters, it was taboo for me to step foot into the kitchen. I was always the one being served. I went to of my sisters and asked her to make me food, though I really wanted to TELL her. She said no, explaining how she got a lot of homework from her German chemistry professor. She was continuously yapping about that same chemistry professor for about 5 minutes straight, which I really didn’t care about because I wasn’t in college at the time. But now that I am in college, and have an old Iranian chemistry professor with a heavy  

un-understandable accent, I cant totally sympathize with her. However, in that moment I didn’t really give a shit. I just wanted to eat. After her I went to my other sister, and she apparently was working on an art project for an art competition she was participating in. She also didn’t have any time to make her little baby brother any food. I thought to myself, why do they think that what they have to do is more important than my growling stomach. At this point I wouldn’t be wrong to say that I was starving. By the time I made it to my last sister, I looked like a beggar, going down a street from person to person asking for some change. However, instead of asking for some change, I was kind of asking for a 5-star buffet meal. After getting that final refusal I just lost it. Not even one of my sisters could find time in their schedules to cook for me. Their refusal filled me with anger. I thought to myself, how could my sisters be so busy in their own lives, neglecting their supposed responsibility of cooking for me? I always had this belief that my sisters were mandated by some divine revelation to cook for me. I always believed that cooking was a woman’s job and that a man should keep away from the kitchen. However, I soon came to realize that I didn’t willingly adopt this belief. The belief that my sisters were obligated to make food for me and take care of me was unwillingly instilled into my brain, and at the time, I didn’t realize that I was feeding into cultural misogynistic stereotypes 

I was at odds with myself and my beliefs. My brain was clouded with so many thoughts which were chaining me, not allowing me to step forth into the kitchen. I didn’t believe that it was my job, a man’s job to go into the kitchen and make food. I remember my father always saying to me, “Raja, don’t you shame me by taking on a woman’s responsibility. You are here to be the man of the house, provide and protect the family, not to meddle with the kitchen.” I acted upon these beliefs like a puppet, with the strings being controlled by my father. However, something didn’t feel right. I began to wonder if these beliefs were my very own or if I was just an embodiment of my father’s beliefs. In that little fleeting moment, my true conscience showed itself, and I desperately clung to it. 

I decided for the first time to experience life the way I wanted to, through my very own eyes. I finally manned up, picked up my sister’s crusty old cookbook which had the secret formulas for all of my favorite recipes and decided to make the food myself. I came face to face with many challenges throughout this expedition of mine. I had trouble with the simplest of things, like even finding the different ingredients necessary to make my lamb stew and naan. There were so many different cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, and I had no clue where my sisters kept each of the ingredients. I almost felt like a tourist in a foreign land. After finally finding all the ingredients, I finally began mixing and pouring and measuring and whisking. I followed the recipe step by step and soon enough, I had the stew cooking on the stove and I had the dough for the naan ready. I must point out that the heat from the stew on the stove was difficult to bare. It felt like my skin was peeling off, however, I sort of liked that feeling. I felt like I was on the way to accomplish something great and therefore, I didn’t let any pain stop me. After about 3 hours, I had finally finished cooking my food. Surprisingly, I didn’t really feel hungry anymore. My hunger was quenched by my new experience of cooking, though I definitely needed to drink a cup of water. I won’t go into much detail about how the food tasted because it would be embarrassing, but I will say that it wasn’t as bad as tuna fish.  

Now that I look back, I had no unique beliefs representing my individual experiences or perspectives. The bitter truth is that I was a vessel for my familial, societal, and cultural beliefs- and so was my father and his father and his father before him. So, I do not blame my father for screwing me over, in fact, he was screwed over himself. Living by stereotypes and limiting people’s experiences solely because of gender was the lifestyle passed on to him by the generations before him. Fortunately, I was courageous enough to shape my own destiny. I was able to break free from these cages for myself and my future generations so we can all fly high without boundaries. Its crazy how one can feel this boundless just by now being able to cook, but for me, the simple task of cooking a meal was a life changer.  

I was never a huge fan of reading books until I stumbled across mangas, webtoons and webtoon novels. If you didn’t know, mangas are basically Japanese comic books and webtoons are Korean comic books. I was introduced to these types of books from close friends back in high school and still to this point, I enjoy reading mangas and webtoons. With the arrival of the pandemic and the quarantine, I started to frequently read these books almost every day. Besides reading manga, webtoons and webtoon novels, I kind of enjoyed reading comic books because I can see pictures of what’s currently happening throughout the story. What I dislike reading would be history related books. I feel like reading books about the past makes me unmotivated to read these types of books because I am not really interested in the past. There weren’t that many good memories when reading books but a bad one was when I had to read out to the entire class in third grade. During that time, I had social anxiety so when I had to read out loud to thirty other students in the class, I just froze. As of now, my anxiety isn’t as bad, but I’m still trying to overcome this anxiety.

Compared to reading, writing wasn’t really as fun. At a very young age when I first started to learn how to write and then eventually write essays, I never enjoyed writing. When I would have to write essays for my school, my mind would always wander somewhere else. However, recently I started to write a daily journal of what happens throughout the day. Sometimes after writing these daily journals, I would like to reminisce on days where I had fun so I would go to that specific day in my journal. Back in high school, I would always have to write no matter what I was doing. Everytime I finished a chapter of a book, I would have to write a summary of the main points and what happened in that chapter. As I kept repeating this process for every chapter and every book, I started to heavily dislike writing. 

I haven’t frequently researched for information, but the last time I did do a research, it was about how covid impact the working field. I had to write a paper about how this pandemic impacted how and where people with office jobs would have to work. When I first started researching, I thought the main problem would be finding information that is trustworthy but the actual problem with researching this was that I didn’t really know that many places to obtain information regarding my topic. However after a bit of struggling, I was able to find multiple sources for my paper.

Starting this class, I feel sorta prepared as to passing this class because I really don’t want to repeat this course. From this class, I am hoping to improve in my writings because I’ve always considered myself to be lacking when it comes to this.