Abandonment fear
Although the kids were not technically abandoned in the strictest sense, there is still a chance that they might have been. Each passing day for the four years the parents are gone is another day toward giving up hope on their return. By the time the parents finally send to them (notice they did not in fact return as they had promised), the children have already lost their innocence in their difficult and lonely struggle for survival. Their abandonment fear becomes a primary cause of hopelessness in their lives, and their parents never really have to own that. Danticat has a sacred "beef" against her parents.
Exploitation
The memoirist recalls the absolute carnage caused by European exploitation of American island nations. In this case, Haiti's absolute poverty and competitive scarcity of resources are motifs that implicate nations who colonized and exploited new lands. The motif of exploitation is also evident within the domain of the plot, because the children are exploited by their parents in order to "help the kids later," so to speak. The children privately conclude that the parents had ulterior motives for leaving Haiti.
The symbolic sending
When the parents send for the children, that is a symbolic moment for the memoirist's emotional identity. Her parents were never really "there" for her. In order to be united with her family, she had to endure a lonely journey of four years surviving in destitute poverty, and then another journey where she left behind everything in the hope of finding her parents. That symbolized to her that her parents did not really appreciate the suffering their actions caused.
Shame as a symbol
There is a famous memoirist named Karl Ove Knausgaard about whom Zadie Smith once said that he was an artist of shame. That connection between memoir and shame is a fitting comment about this memoir too, because shame defines the internal conundrums that the memoirist works through throughout her life. When she turns her mind to analyze her own memory, she discovers that shame is a spinal column through time defining what she remembers clearly and what she doesn't remember at all. Shame symbolizes the chronic nature of her life's drama as she struggles to make sense of abstract suffering. Shame defines her emotional dilemmas by blaming her emotionally for her own suffering.
Money
Money is a sacred symbol in the memoir, because if the daughter had access to infinite money, she could have made her parents stay. After all, that's what they wanted when they left, right? Their desire for money was more pressing than their desire to educate and support their daughter through four years of survival. During those four years, the daughter is forced to realize how desperate the money situation is, so that perhaps eventually, she can forgive her parents for their need of money. Money is famous for confusing family dynamics.
