Grey Hair
A recurring image throughout the poem is of the speaker plucking grey hairs from the mother’s head. The plucking continues as an activity throughout the conversation they have about the mother’s dreams of the past. The commingling of past and present combine to make hair a symbol of both the chronological passage of time and the status of time within one’s memory.
Jigsaw Puzzle
The speaker compares the process of various memories associatively coming into place together with putting a jigsaw puzzle together. Each specific incident which is recalled stands in isolation and it is only when the right incidents combination of incidents are recalled that they can be put together to make sense of the whole picture.
Yellow
An example of the jigsaw symbol at work is exemplified within the poem itself through individual references to the color yellow: a sunflower, yellow scooter, daffodils. Though the word yellow is used just once, the familiarity of the references to yellow objects connects them into a symbolic image representing memories of the mother.
Exodus
The imagery situated in the opening stanza create a connection to the Biblical story of Exodus. Moses leading the Israelites to freedom after being held captive to the bondage of Egyptians is paralleled with the Mother leading the unborn baby in her womb to freedom from the bondage of war-torn Vietnam. The Biblical exodus is symbolically retold through the sacrifices the mother made—like Moses—to find paradise for her child.
The Scooter and Boat
The image of the mother as a young woman in Saigon, carelessly enjoying the freedom of her hair flying in the breeze behind her as she powers her scooter to school is the symbolic incarnation of the speaker’s idyllic imagination of the mother’s life pre-partum. The crowded vessel on which the mother was packed a refugee destined to become dismissed as one of the many “boat people” is the symbolic incarnation of the reality.
