The Smell of Coriander Essay

In the movie named The Smell of Coriander, I find a touching story about a man who realizes his profound redemption from the punishment. Waking up early, having a heartily prepared meal, dressing up and being picked up to the company by a private driver is the beginning of a normal working day of Thanh who is a successful middle aged investor in real estate and stock market in Viet Nam. He is also the CEO of the trading center naming Sky. Many people look at his successes and his happy family with the jealousness. But behind his current clean, perfect profile is an ashamed background in which he appears as a true, heartless betrayer.

Thanh was a talented, handsome man in a small village besides a mildly flowing river. His superficial youth led him to the pregnancy of Hoa, his girlfriend. They were really in love with each other, and they were planning for a wedding by themselves. A month after the pregnancy of Hoa, Thanh was accepted to an illustrious university. He was a smart and ambitious man, so he wanted to follow the call of a promising life which would change his life totally if he took the chance. Obviously his girlfriend became a burden for his own career.

Thanh knew that she would not let him go unless he would take her with him. He decided to leave Hoa in secret and pursued his dream. When Hoa realized that his boyfriend has left, she was drastically shocked, but she still wanted to keep the child. As a part of Asian culture, having a child without the husband is a considerable shame for a family, so Thanh left her family and born the child in a motel; then, she gave him to a poor family in another village. She could not admit the truth that his boyfriend had left her, so she committed a suicide in the hopelessness and the severe hurt.

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After graduating from the university, Thanh got married with a wealthy and powerful woman and began his own career, while his forlorn son, Huy, tried to overcome every single complication to go to school and to survive. Huy was as smart as his father. He always appeared as an outstanding student at school, so he got a scholarship to study business in a university. Ironically, that scholarship was sponsored by his unknown father’s corporation. Huy somehow knew about his mother’s death and his betraying father from the poor family in which he was adopted.

He grows the revenge toward his father. He swore that he will destroy his father’s current successes and be a big man in his father’s fields. Thanh kept moving on in his profession without the redemption of the past; he even did not care if he had a child. With him, money was everything. While he thought that nobody could stop him in controlling the market, a small company was established and tried to contract a project that the Sky of Thanh was also aiming at. The manager of the small company was Huy, he won the project from his crafty father.

Since then, thing began to change, Sky fell down in the market and Thanh lost his CEO position and his pride when the press discovered his past. His wife divorced him. He finally found himself and his own redemption when he lost everything. He lived by himself and thought of what he had done. He realized that he was totally controlled by money. He had never had the feeling of peace since he knew about the death of his death’s girlfriend. Two year later, Huy came and let his father know that he would forgive his past. Thanh finally felt he was back to his life with a recovered heart.

Similarly, Jeff Henderson in Cooked falls from the most insane richness into the prison to find out the redemption. The cause of JH’s Fall are the concupiscence, misguided success, and denial. However, the Fall is the beginning of a powerful recovery and redemption. His amazing adventure from the forgettable past is inspired by the imprisonment, the will to study and the resolution of to renew his own life. Concupiscence is one of the causes of JH’s Fall. According to McMahon’s blog Breakthrough Write, concupiscence is defined as the search for happiness based on gratifying pleasure and ego without a moral compass.

Slowly going over JH’s life, we can easily symbolize him as the man of concupiscence. First, he gives himself a very reasonable, magnanimous ground which defends that he is pulling his family out of the poverty. Then, things begin to change when he has made so much easy money. With him, money never has the definition of adequateness. JH admits “he had eights car, each one worth more than $30,000, and it still wasn’t enough” (64). Crack dealing in Hard Head’s eyes is not illegal. He considers himself as a “businessman” while his job is killing hundreds of people consuming his drug.

His so called “business” brings him a lot of money quickly enough for his awareness of value and labor to disappear. We need to make it clear between the self interest and the concupiscence in JH. More exactly, the positive self interest no longer exists in this man. The concupiscence controls JH in every step he makes when he is an immoral crack dealer. JH tries to satisfy his appetites in many unreasonably spending situations; in fact, his irrational expenditure just makes his demand of money go higher. It also means he is willing to trade more in his crazy so called business.

He is a talented man in his business. Unfortunately, he easily lets himself follow the flow of the concupiscence, and the result of his irresponsible acts is the out of control life. Besides the concupiscence, misguided success is also the reason that partly creates the Fall of JH. When he is a little Hard Head he has been taught how to steal by his grandfather (Henderson 13). And one more time, he categorizes his grandfather’s stealing into the knightly acts. He says that “his grandfather was kind of like Robin Hood” (15).

He slowly masters the stealing skills which he compliments about it as a proud achievement. We feel sorry for him because he is so deficient in the care of family although he still has father and mother. In fact, he has never lives in the really happy and safe childhood which every kid needs to have. T Row can be considered as the most influential element in forming JH’s characteristics and personality. T has the PhDs in game and he is extremely admired by JH. T is the replacement figure of JH’s ideal father with the weird ridiculous “homie love”.

Like father like son, JH finally graduates from the “crack dealing institution” of T Row when T is sent to prison. In the book named Freakonomics, the economists discovering the hidden side of facts make a stunning conclusion that drug dealers still live with their moms! (Levitt and Dubner 103). According to their calculation, the foot soldiers like JH earn just $3. 30 an hour, less than the minimum wage (Levitt and Dubner 103). That is the reason why JH wants to go his own way. JH desires to become a new professor in the game that T Row is playing which means he will keep moving forward in his criminal activities.

Educational misdirection leads Hard Head to the most serious Fall in his life, but he refuse to accept the truth that he is falling down from his insane wealth. He builds himself a thick, stable, undestroyable wall to protect his foolish criminal pride from the warning of his sister Cali Sim and family. He is absolutely insane about his success and tries to exaggerate its value by showing he is not about violence, taking drug or hanging out with gang bangers. He denies the fact that his drug dealing is extreme harmful and mortal.

In practice, the victims of his business can be abandoned and addicted babies, neglected children, strung-out fathers, battered mothers, or an addicted young man in a car accident... JH might not know that ninety percent of sentenced crack dealing cases in federal level are black, and he will be one of them (Brown). There is no doubt that JH is living in the illusion of insanity which means he is convinced that there is no truth and he is absolutely “untouchable”. He denies the wakening of his conscience because he is so under the spell of his virtual success and wealth.

Being imprisoned is the best way to stop Jeff Henderson’s Fall. This Hard Head is like a bungee guy who has just jumped out of a bridge. He closes his eyes and enjoys the excitement of a free drop. He will never know where the stopping point is if his face is not slapped by the cool, pure and fresh surface of the river. The imprisonment plays a role as this river. It wakes JH up, holds his head and shakes it up. At last, he realizes that he has reached the bottom. Like a bungee jump, the end of the Fall is the beginning of a recovery. In prison, JH experience many unique things which essentially turn him into a new man.

He finally knows that he is also vulnerable and helpless when he is striped in front of Fed officers (76). The feelings of weakness and lonesome make him keep praying to Jesus. We cannot imagine that Hard Head will cry in hopeless and regret. Crying will not help him out of the detention room, but crying shows us that there is something which stays deep inside this man’s soul is trying to pull him back with the real life. He painfully realizes how toxic his job was when he unintentionally witnesses a prisoner is dying because of a balloon of heroin (115). The fear of himself and his mortal job is rising day by day.

The man with the PhD in the game now fully learns the most basic lesson: how far people would go to get high (Henderson 115). His philosophy of life changes to Nihilism which indicates a life without purposes, meaning and intrinsic value. This can be the most dangerous thing for his return because a man living in Nihilism is not different from a man without a soul and mind. It directly ruins his owns life and put a huge bold period for everything. But as we mentioned earlier, JH has PhD in the game, and when he truly finishes the course he is going to come back. Being imprisoned has recalled in JH the will of study.

The hurting nineteen and half years punishment turns Anderson in to a totally new man. He learns how to read and to listen. He loses the passion for marriage and love. Instead, he concentrates on cooking; he wants to be a chef. He finally finds the passion which deserves to be pursued. Struggling with a dangerous life in prison helps JH horn his skill in confronting the problems. He is willing to work at the lowest position such as pot and pan room (Henderson 132) to get a change of promotion (Henderson 132). He built up for himself a strong endurance which supports him a lot in winning the popularity in prison and even after being released.

He reads more; sometimes, he wondering if the black is dominated by the white. This thought never has a bad influence on him; in fact, it pushes him to study harder, to earn the respects from the people in his life. A determined goal and a resolution to be successful make JH stronger than ever. After the years renewing and training in prison, the fear still follows him like a ghost. His fear is undetermined; he calls it the “unknown” (Henderson 176). We might wonder if this Hard Head will return to his familiar path of his forgettable past, but we have to admit that his mind is refreshed and his skill day by day becomes more perfect.

He is the person who truly knows the real value of cooking. In his point of view, cooking is not only an occupation but also the art of making food and the passion of facing new challenges. In the Cooked, there are at least four times JH move to a new location to pursue his cooking career. His efforts are paid by the prize Las Vegas Buffet Chef of the Year (Henderson 254). In that touching moment, nobody sees in him the figure of the past crack dealer but an impressive returning of a guilty soul.

When a door is closed, there is always another door open. With JH, the door of the prison is closed behind him, and now he is opening the door which leads him to the world of the most famous chefs. JH would never have the feeling of real success and complete recovery if he had not been stopped by the Fed. His Fall is the result of concupiscence, the misguided success and the denial. Luckily, his life is saved by the imprisonment, his will of study and the resolution of renewing his life. It does not matter if we are black or white.

We always have a chance to make a turning point for our life because “nobody pulled a gun on you to make you commit the crime; you made the choice” (Henderson 171).

Works Cited:

1. Brown, Joseph H. “A pointless lament for crack dealer. ” Headway 9. 10 (1997)
2. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. El Camino Coll Lib. , Torrance, CA. 22 Sep, 2009.
3. Henderson, Jeff. Cooked. New York Times Bestseller, 2007.
4. Levitt, Steven and Dubner, Stephen. Freakonomics. New York Times Bestseller, 2005.
5. McMahon, Jeff. “1A Lesson #1 for Cooked”. Herculodge. typepad. com. July, 2009.
6. El Camino Coll Lib. , Torrance, CA. 22 Sep, 2009.

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