Summary
A fuzzy dream in which the man sees a cloud transforms into his creature standing over him. The creature’s tongue hangs out like a panting dog’s, and it appears happy to wake the man. The man looks out the window to see a ship in the sky. He then showers, shaves, dresses, counts his small amount of money, and consults a complicated map of the city. He sets out with the creature accompanying him like an obedient dog.
The man stands among other people at a transit hub. In the sky, there are lots of floating ships. His creature meets another person’s owl-like creature. The owner is reading a book. The man asks her for help with his map. She instructs him politely on how to get a little ticket from a phone-like machine next to them. The woman tells him what time his ship is coming. When the ship floats down to the platform, the man and woman get on and sit next to each other. The man shows her his immigration paper. The woman touches her chest in recognition, then shows him her own paper. In the photo, she is much younger.
Images tell the story of how the woman came to immigrate. Living in a prison-like place, perhaps an orphanage or a concentration camp, she is caught reading. An official locks her book in a drawer and gives her a shovel, demanding she shovel coal into a dirty furnace. She is barefoot in a raggedy dress. The perspective widens to show the girl is in a facility where other girls are made to the same task in separate stalls next to her, stretching into the distance. She uses her shovel to pry open the door to her shoveling room. She takes the keys out of a uniform, unlocks the drawer containing her book, and runs away to some train tracks. She gets in an open boxcar and stows away on the train.
On their transport ship, the woman points out landmarks and billboard advertisements to the man. His stop comes, so the man shakes the woman’s hand and alights on the platform. He wanders through a neighborhood, looking at the image of a loaf of bread in his dictionary. He finds a food vendor who sells peculiar edible objects out of many drawers and cabinets in a large wall. The food seller and his son happily put together a basket of food for the man to try. The man tastes things skeptically, but is ultimately grateful.
They then lead the man to an area full of small boats settled on sandy ground. In one, there is a pot. The boy opens it and a black spiky tentacle emerges. This startles the man, but then the full creature pops out. It is the boy’s pet. Using drawings, the man explains to the food seller that large black tentacles menaced his neighborhood in the place he is from. The food seller touches his chest and relates his own similar experience. With flames in his eyes, the food seller looks to the sky and speaks of his own harrowing escape. The next page shows giant men in hazmat-like suits vacuuming up tiny people fleeing from them. The man and his wife are among the tiny people. They lift a manhole covering and hide underground until the gigantic boot passes. They emerge frightened but safe. They walk until they find a man with a lantern and a map and a ladder. The woman gives the man her jewelry in exchange for the ladder. The couple uses the ladder to get over the city wall and onto the beach. There is a small rowboat. They get in it and row into the ocean.
The next page reveals that the food seller has been telling his story while rowing the protagonist in a boat to the island where he lives. The food seller’s wife greets her husband and son, welcoming them in. They cook the basket of food for the man, cooking using strange fire-blowing implements right at the table. They all laugh while eating and drinking. The family plays fanciful instruments together, entertaining the man. The man impresses the child by folding a page of paper into a figure that resembles the boy’s pet. Before he leaves, the man receives a clay pot from the food seller and his wife. The couple are smiling as they hand it to him.
In Part IV, the man wakes with the sun. He pets his creature. At the breakfast table, the man feeds the creature some of his food. He dresses to go outside. The creature is holding his hat for him like a well-trained dog. The man goes out. He stands before a chef, an engineer, a shopkeeper, and a ship mechanic. He holds out his hands desperately and politely. They raise their hands to him, delivering bad news. The man is sitting on a bench when he notices another man pasting posters to a wall. He approaches the worker, and the man hands over the brush and posters. But when the worker returns, he shows the protagonist that he has been putting up the posters upside down.
The man purchases a basket full of different-sized boxes covered in symbols from a woman on the street. He walks off with directions from her and then places the boxes into various slots in a wall full of little doors and symbols. He then enters a gate covered in warning symbols he doesn’t recognize. A large bird-lizard creature sticks its head out, and the man and his pet run away in a panic.
The man stands before a conveyor belt, appraising the small white figurine-like objects that pass by him. He selects certain ones and tosses them into a pipe. He is one among countless others working side by side in the foreground of a giant machine with huge gear wheels. An old man in a pointed hat works across from him; the old man offers the protagonist a glass of liquid. They raise a toast and take a drink together. The old man contemplates one of the small white objects, which evokes a memory of when he was young and a soldier. While marching, the man in the pointed hat catches a flower that a woman has tossed over the military procession. The subsequent panels focus on how the soldier’s boots change over the course of his time at war, becoming increasingly dirty as he walks over devastated landscapes. Eventually he loses a leg and is on crutches, hobbling alone in a destroyed town full of piles of skeletons and rubble.
The old man’s reverie ends when he checks the time and invites the protagonist to clock out of work with him. Together they collect their cash pay and walk outside, where the sun is rising in a brilliant display of illumination. They go to the top of a hill, where the old man knows two friendly men who have the balls and cones needed to play a game resembling lawn bowling. The protagonist plays with the old man. Though he appears uncertain about his skill, the other men clap for the protagonist.
Analysis
Although the man initially reacts to the tadpole-dog creature he finds hiding in his room by trying to attack it, Part III beings with the man lowering his guard around the creature. When the man leaves his rented room, the creature accompanies him obediently. With this new relationship, the man has begun to find alternative forms of companionship while he is separated from his wife and daughter.
Tan builds on the theme of companionship by depicting the man receiving help navigating the public transit system. The woman who he rides the floating bus with can relate to his immigrant status because she arrived in the new world when she was a girl—something she communicates by showing her own well-creased immigration paper. The woman recounts how she escaped slavery as a girl and stowed away on a train. Although her story is different than the man’s, she can relate to the experience of escaping oppression and aspiring to attain a better life.
Although the man’s desire to find food familiar to him goes unfilled, the friendly food seller and his son are happy to give samples of their food to the man. The man tastes the peculiarly shaped objects, which appear to be a cross between plant and animal, with suspicion and concern, but the moment is significant because it shows one of his first steps toward adopting the local culture.
The man also finds companionship in the food seller, who relates his own experience of immigration. To illustrate the overawing power of the dictatorial, genocidal force that drove the food seller from his homeland, Tan depicts the tormentors as giants in hazmats suits who use massive vacuums to suck the food seller’s people off the streets. As with the woman taking transit, the food seller’s backstory is different from the man’s, but they are united in their shared goal of escaping oppression and establishing decent lives in another land. The happy household into which the food seller invites the man stands as an example of the type of life the man aspires to attain for his own family.
In Part IV, the man finds himself alienated once again as he tries to find work and is turned down by almost everyone he approaches. One man is willing to give the man a shot and allows him to take over the job of putting posters on a wall. But in an instance of situational irony, the employer returns to inform the man that he has been putting the posters up upside down. Had the man understood the language, he wouldn’t have made the mistake.
The man eventually finds a job at a factory that produces tiny unfamiliar objects. As a recent immigrant who has yet to learn the local language, the man is forced into a position where he must take whatever work is available, even if it is monotonous and poorly compensated. As an antidote to the mind-numbing labor, the man finds companionship in the elderly man who works across from him. The elderly man’s backstory reveals that he too escaped oppression; in his case, a war wiped out his entire people and decimated the once-beautiful landscape. Although the trauma still affects the old man, he finds some joy in drinking and in playing a game that resembles lawn bowling. As another sign the protagonist is adapting to the new culture, he plays the game well enough that the others applaud his effort—a symbol of the man’s progress toward his broader goal of learning to play by the rules of the local culture.
