Red Scare
The novel takes place during the Red Scare of the 1950’s, as opposed to the Red Scare of the 1920’s. It was a horrific period in America history in which communism was personified into a predatory villain. The novel captures the spirit of that metaphorical existence in an anti-communism pamphlet:
“Communism would take your home, your bank account; it would outlaw all religion; you wouldn’t even be allowed to have friends of your own choosing.”
Respectability
As Aretha made forever clear, everybody wants at least a little respect. But along with upside of getting respect comes down the downside of respectability. Well, also the upside, but for cool people there is something about respectability that is just not cool:
“Lily turned to the mirror. She saw a Chinese girl in a characterless gray suit—blank faced, nothing special, even a little boring. Respectable. The word felt square, immovable, like a sturdy box with all four corners equally weighted.”
Strategic Paranoia
There is a strategy for using the tactic of creating paranoia by oppressive organizations and governments. The main motivation is that if successfully implemented, the absurd irrationality of fear does half the job for them. All that is really required is to create just enough paranoia among certain groups of people and pretty soon almost everything requires metaphor for proper explanation. The following examples found less than a full page apart provide insight into the protagonist’ mindset as she first begins to learn about how the Red Scare is personally impacting her family reveal the endgame of creating paranoia: instability.
“The statement sounded like something out of a movie, and Lily gaped at her mother.”
“Now she was confused, as if she’d been reading a book that had several pages removed, but hadn’t realized the pages were gone until this moment.”
“She felt as if she had been ejected from a movie theater in the middle of the film.”
Like Chocolate
The Telegraph Club offers women who prefer the company of other women a secret oasis to be themselves in the middle of the Eisenhower era of conformity with the additional elements of being Chinese-American women. It is truly something to savor and that metaphor is put to the test by Kath as she describes her discovery:
“It’s like you’ve been told about chocolate your entire life but you’ve never tried any, and then all of a sudden someone gives you an entire box, and you end up eating all of it, and you feel sick…You just have to get used to it—to having chocolate more often.”
Like Water for Chocolate
Lily, the protagonist, disagrees. She is able to see through to the very essence of what such an oasis means when struggling in the desert of being an outsider in a land of freely giving into increasing oppression and authoritarian ideology:
“It wasn’t like chocolate…It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.”
