Best Quality- Jing-mei Woo
Magpies- An-mei Hsu
Waiting Between the Trees- Ying-ying St. Clair
"If she doesn't speak she is making a choice. If she doesn't try, she can lose her chance forever".
- An-mei
-Page 215
This quote spoke the loudest to me out of these three chapters. I felt it had a connection to each character. It emphasizes the importance of taking action to make a change. If you just sit back and watch things around you fail then the damage it causes is partly your fault. In today's society when citizens are disappointed in what the government is doing they do not have the right to critize if they are not voting. They only way they have room to talk is if they vote and choose the leader who they feel will make the best discisions. If they don't then they have lost their chance to make a difference for the better. It is always better to take initiative than to pass on opportunities.
June decribes her mother's last Chinese New Year's crab dinner in the chapter Best Quality. We come to see how June and her mother Suyuan are similar in the fact that they let other's take the best quality stuff, such as the best crabs. June recalls her mother giving her, her jade neckalace that night. She remembers thinking it wasn't the finest of jewlery when her mother said, "This is young jade. It is a very light color now, but if you wear it every day it will become more green"(208-209). I took this to mean that if you take pride in what you have, others will think it is made out of the finest quality materials. Others will see what you have as you see it.
In Magpies, An-mei tells us about her childhood when she left with her mother, who was banished from their family home for marrying again and becoming a concubine. She tells us of how she came to find out that her mother was forced into becoming Wu Tsing's fourth wife. An-mei's mother commited suicide to insure that An-mei and her baby brother would be promised a good life. The story in this chapter reminded me of a video I had seen before. Towards the end part of Amy Tan's interview below, I noticed that Tan was saying that she recently went to the place where her grandmother had been raped, had a baby, and then took her own life. This made me think that possibly Tan was writing about her grandmother as An-mei's mother's character.
In Waiting Between the Trees I really started disliking Ying-ying St. Clair. It gave me the impression that she was just a rich snob. I understand that she got married to a bad man who she loved and that he left her while she was pregnent with their son. She gets sympanthy from me for that. I just do not understand why she would feel it was okay to kill her baby in spite of her husband. She lets her husband leaving her ruin her life. When she finds out that he died she turns into a ghost of herself and marries Lena's father not out of true love. I feel that she is kind of a rich snob because she doesn't really appreciate anything Lena's father offers her and continuously says that she has seen better. Instead of pulling herself up from the bottom, she just buried herself further down and took everyone around her down with her.
All three of these chapters use a FRAME DEVICE. These are stories within other stories. "I can still hear what happened more that sixty years ago. My mother was a stranger to me when she first arrived at my Uncle's house in Ningpo..."(215-216).
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