Bound Feet, Dumplings and Lotus Petals
Needless to say, imagery related to the practice of bound feet in Chinese tradition are to be found in the book. What maybe surprising is the means by which such imagery is presented. Not always, for example, with the sense of outrage and disgust as the prevalent emotional tenor one might expect:
“Because these dumplings, filled with red bean paste, are mushy and tender, they are also supposed to soften the feet of httle girls. It was the custom when I was little for a woman to have tiny, tiny feet. Westerners call them bound feet, but we call them something so much prettier in China: new moon or lotus petals”
Lost in Translation
One of the generational problems facing immigrant families in America is the assimilation that naturally takes place which begins with language. The closer a generation is to their homeland, the greater their dependence on that language tends to be whereas with each new generation, there is natural tendency to speak English more than the native tongue. This inevitably creates the sort of awkward circumstance depicted through imagery in this scene:
"You just call Douglas, 'You white turtle egg,' " my father said menacingly. It took me a few minutes— far longer than the instant I knew this insult would not work on Douglas — to understand that "turtle egg" was the translated Chinese version of "son of a bitch." My father explained to me that many different males fertilized a female turtle's eggs before she hatched them. To my father, a turtle egg was bad enough, but a white turtle egg was the worst.
Western Dress
As one might expect, the reference in the title to western modes of style and fashion is not exactly one which carries a positive context within traditional Chinese cultural expectations. The clash between conservative Chinese culture and more permissive American society is one of the more predictable aspects of immigrant life in the United States:
“At that time we lived next door to a family whose two daughters attended a modern girls' school in Shanghai. Each morning, before catching the train, the girls donned their school uniforms: brown pants and brown shirts with no collars. During her annual visit to our house, the matchmaker said the girls were pretty and learned. Surely one of them was suitable for the Chang boys. But Mama, whose robes all had high collars that covered the neck, wrinkled her face in distaste. `Such display of the neck is inexcusable,’ she declared.
“A Woman is Nothing”
It is hardly a secret that in Chinese culture, a baby is devalued immediately upon the discovery that it is a girl rather than a boy. The chapter titled “A Woman is Nothing” begins with precise descriptive prose in the form of advice from an older woman who asserts—more than once in just one paragraph—that a woman is without any real meaning in China. A couple of paragraphs later, assertion becomes imagery:
“When a boy was born to the house, the servants saved his umbilical cord in a jar under Mama's bed. When a girl was born, the servants buried her umbilical cord outside the house. A girl left her father's house as soon as she came of age, and there was no need to save the umbilical cord of a guest.”
