Identity Crisis
The protagonist suffers from dissociative identity disorder which used to be known simply as “split personality.” But although the narrative paints a vivid and horrifying vision of Mulberry’s collapse into madness, it is not really correct to say that mental illness in general or even dissociative personality disorders are at its thematic core. The gradual process of Peach becoming not just a series of repressed wishes and desires into a fully separate and functioning individual capable of living without Mulberry is really a metaphor for a much larger thematic analysis at stake. And that is the split identity of China which took place around the middle of the 20th century when the ancient traditions of the past gave way to the cultural revolution of Mao and the communists. Just as Mao was once a part of that old tradition, but eventually disengaged entirely to give China a brand new modern personality, so can the same be said of Mulberry and Peach. They are the individualization of the much broader and complex identity crisis suffered by all Chinese whose lives spanned the early and late 20th century.
Feminism
What might be more aptly termed a sub-theme of the overarching concern with identity crises rises to a boil in the second extract from Mulberry’s notebook. It is where the reader learns the complicated story behind the conception of Chia-King; a story involving the pressure upon a wife to produce a male heir and the surrender to China’s tradition of concubines for the patriarchy when those expectations fail to be met. The story also results in murder of the concubine by a wife losing authority and power in her own household and how that failure to breed combined with that murderous capacity to create a matriarchal domination of the son who is not even biologically her own. This old-world manipulation of sexuality is counterposed against the post-war modern sexuality of Mulberry/Peach which represents another sort of feminist empowerment.
Repression, Imprisonment, Escape, and Freedom
Another offshoot of the identity theme is that of freedom from repression. In every famous case if not necessarily every reported case, the arrival of a new personality is characterized quite distinctly by the differentiation from the original. In most if not all of those cases, of course, the “new” personality or personalities tend to be not just strikingly different, but different in a more uninhibited, unrepressed way. If the original personality is shy and meek, the latent ones will almost certainly be more extroverted or at least less inhibited by repressing desires of wish-fulfillment. In the notebook just before the one in which Mulberry acknowledges the presence of Peach, Mulberry and her family are living an Anne Frank-style existence of hiding from the Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan who suspect them of collaborating with the communists at the very same time that the communists see their decision to flee to Taiwan as a complete rejection of their plans to modernize Chinese society under Mao. Those notebook entries are notable for its sense of paranoia, claustrophobia, secrecy, imprisonment and the burning desire to experience true freedom. Such that it becomes easy to see how an already weakened mental immune system could suffer the full-scale collapse outlined in the harrowing events describe in the fourth and final notebook.
