I took some time to put together a synopsis of the four daughter's stories. The one thing I noticed is there is little to no mention between the mothers or daughters of "love," it is not outwardly said verbally. It is not customary for Chinese people to verbally express "love."
Rules of the Game
Waverly and Lindo
I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength.
My mother imparted her daily truths so she could help my older brothers and me rise above our circumstances.
My older brother Vincent was the one who actually got the chess set. I watched Vincent and Winston play during Christmas week. The chess board seemed to hold elaborate secrets waiting to be untangled. “Let me! Let me!” I begged between games when on brother or the other would sit back with a deep sigh of relief and victory
I read the rules and looked up all the big words in a dictionary. I borrowed books from the Chinatown library. I studied each piece, trying to absorb the power each contained. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell. Pg. 97 My mother place my first trophy next to a new plastic chess set that the neighborhood Tao society had given to me. As she wiped each piece with a soft cloth, she said, “Next time win more, lose less.” By my ninth birthday, I was a national chess champion. Pg. 99 “Why do you have to use me to show off? If you want to show off, then why don’t you learn to play chess?” pg. 100 I heard my mother speak in a dry voice. “We not concerning this girl. This girl not have concerning for us.” Opposite me was my opponent, two angry black slits. She wore a triumphant smile. “Strongest wind cannot be seen,” she said. I closed my eyes and pondered my next move.
As much as Waverly resisted her mother’s advice and praise, she wanted it just the same.
The Voice from the Wall
Lena and Ying-ying
Pg. 103 I always thought it mattered, to know what is the worst possible thing that can happen to you, to know how you can avoid it, to not be drawn by the magic of the unspeakable. Because, even as a child, I could sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ones that chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark corner of her mind. And still they found her. I watched over the years, as they devoured her, piece by piece, until she disappeared and became a ghost.
Pg. 104 My mother never talked about her life in China, but my father said he saved her from a terrible life there, some tragedy she could not speak about. My father proudly named her in her immigration papers: Betty St. Clair, crossing out her given name of Gu Ying-ying. And then he put down the wrong birthyear, 1916 instead of 1914. So, with the sweep of a pen, my mother lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger.
Pg. 105 I knew my mother made up anything to warn me, to help me avoid some unknown danger. My mother saw danger in everything, even in other Chinese people.
Lena heard the family next door to their apartment constantly fighting, worrying if the girl was dead. Then she realizes this is the way the family is, the fight and go on as nothing happened. She could see her mother was depressed after losing the baby, and was worried
Pg. 113 My mother was always “resting” and it was as if she had died and become a living ghost.
Pg. 115 I would watch my mother lying in the bed, babbling to herself as she sat on the sofa. And yet I knew that this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop. I still saw bad things in my mind, but now I found ways to change them.
And the daughter said, “Now you must come back, to the other side. And the girl grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her though the wall.
Does this give us, the reader hope that Lena will save her mother? Are our imagined fears far worse than reality? Has Ying-ying gone too far to be saved after losing two sons? When we hear voices and sounds from another wall, house, yard, etc., can we really trust what we are hearing? Like Mrs. Sorci and Teresa, fighting nightly because the mother feared here daughter would encounter danger, yet they had great love for each other, how was Lena to know there was really no fear or harm to be concerned about where Teresa was concerned. If we are always looking for and expecting the worst, is it possible we can bring harm to ourselves by being trapped in our mind of fears like Ying-ying and Lena were?
Half and Half
Rose and An-Mei
As proof of her faith, my mother used to carry a small leatherette Bible when she went to the First Chinese Baptist Church every Sunday. But later, after my mother lost her faith in God, that leatherette Bible wound up wedged under a too-short table leg, a way to correct the imbalance of life. It’s been there for over twenty years. My mother pretends the Bible isn’t there. But I know she sees it. My mother is not the best housekeeper in the world, and after all these years that Bible is still clean white.
Pg. 124 My mother had a superstition, in fact that children were predisposed of certain dangers on certain days, all depending on their Chinese birthdate. It was explained in a little Chinese book called The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates.
Pg. 125 My mother shout for me to stop them. And right after I pull Luke off Mark, I look up and see Bing, walking alone to the edge of the reef. Bing walks one, two, three steps. His little body is moving so quickly, as if he spotted something wonderful by the water’s edge. And I think, He’s going to fall in. I’m expecting it. And just as I thing this, his feet are already in the air, in a moment of balance, before he splashes into the sea and disappears without leaving so much as a ripple in the water.
Pg. 130 My mother had a look on her face that I’ll never forget. It was one of complete despair and horror, for losing Bing, for being so foolish as to think she could use faith to change fate.
I know now that I had never expected to find Bing, just as I know now I will never find a way to save my marriage. My mother tells me, though, that I should still try.
And my mother says, “You must think for yourself, what you must do. If someone tells you, then you are not trying.”
I think about Bing, how I knew he was in danger, how I let it happen. I think about my marriage, how I had seen the signs, really, I had. But I just let it happen. And I think now that ate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over. You have to pay attention to what you lost. You have to undo the expectation. My mother she still pays attention to it. That Bible under the table, I know she sees it. I remember seeing her write in it before she wedged it under. I lift the table and slide the Bible out. I put the Bible on the table, flipping quickly through the pages, because I know it’s there. On the page before the New Testament begins, there’s a section called “Deaths,” and that’s where she wrote “Bing Hsu” lightly, in erasable pencil.
Can you really lose your faith? I think I know people who have decided to stop practicing their faith after a loved one dies, but I have also seen where a loved one’s death brought them closer to their faith.
Two Kinds
Jing-Mei and Suyuan
My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. “Of course, you can be prodigy, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best anything.”
At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese Shirley Temple.
In all of my imaginings, I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect. My mother and father would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk for anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of here. I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And then you’ll always be nothing.”
Pg. 134 And after seeing my mother’s disappointed face once again, something inside of me began to die. I hated the tears, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night, I looked in the mirror above the bathroom sink and when I saw only my face staring back__and that it would always be this ordinary face__I began to cry, Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises lie a crazed animal, trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.
And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me__ because I had never seen that face before. I looked a t my reflection, blinking so I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful. This girl and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts, or rather thoughts filled with lost of won’ts. I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’ not.
Pg. 142 “You want me to be someone that I’m not!” I sobbed. I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me to be!” “Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!” “Then I wish I wasn’t your daughter. I wish you weren’t my mother.” I shouted. As I said these things I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest. But it also felt good, as if this awful side of me had surfaced at last. “Too late to change this,” said my mother shrilly. “Then I wish I’d never been born!” I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.”
Suyuan and Jing-Mei never spoke about the disastrous piano recital.
All that remained unchecked, like a betrayal that was now unspeakable. So, I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure was inevitable.
Pg. 143 So she surprised me. A few years ago, she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed.
Last week I sent a tuner over to my parents’ apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been getting things in order for my father, a little bit at the time. I found some old Chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk against my skin, the wrapped them in tissue paper and decided to take them home with me.
The two songs Jing-Mei played, “Perfectly Contented” and “Pleading Child,” were two halves of the same song.
Jing-Mei struggled all her life to please her mother, only she had to at some point save herself from becoming someone she was not, someone her mother imagined her to be, her prodigy, all the while forgetting to allow her to be who she was, her daughter.
All of these mothers and daughters clearly do love each other. The mothers do want what is best for their daughters, but.... do they even know what that is? These daughters were raised in America, they know very little about the Chinese way. The mothers seem to have so much fear, and so little trust in their daughters being able to make their own life choices. As little girls the mothers job is to provide them as much opportunity to help them in ways that will give them the best future possible, but.... have they done so in such a way its made them feel their mother could not or would not accept them for who they were, rather than who they wanted them to be?
I have an only daughter, and two sons. My daughter grew up with hearing contantly, "Oh, you look JUST like your Mom." She and I were very close, but I could tell she grew tired of feeling like she was in my shadow. She chose to move from our hometown of Ohio to Florida when she was twenty-one years old. I know she needed to get away from me and learn who she really was. She has found at the age of forty-five, she is much like me, and seems very happy in her own skin. Without her moving away, I don't think she could have ever learned who she really was, because I was so much a part of her life. I just loved/love her so much I wanted only the best for her. She rebelled ALOT, and went through some pretty tough years until she finally did move to Florida. I was pleased to hear Barbara Walters openly admit she and her daughter love each other, but must live far apart, because they can only take each other in small doses. My daughter and I are exactly like that. We talk almost every day on the phone, but if we visit each other, we need our space after a few days. We both say, "I love you," before we hang up with each phone call. I love her with all my heart and she needs to hear that, as do I. My boys hug me and say, "I love you," every time they leave my house or I leave theirs, and I always say it too. I just felt that was missing in all these chapters we have read so far.
