In the darkness of a thousand
withered souls, it was Er Lang’s hand that I
sought, and his voice that I longed to hear. Perhaps
it is selfish of me, but an uncertain future
with him, in all its laughter and quarrels, is better
than being left behind.
After all her adventures are ended, Li Lan recalls how constantly she depended upon Er Lang's help. He was a reliable, sacrificial friend in the spirit life. Rather than accept the certain wealth of a marriage in the Lam family, she decides to accept certain friendship in her marriage with Er Lang.
When Er Lang comes for his answer, I will tell him that I’ve always thought he was a monster. And that I want to be his bride.
Li Lan decides that she's more afraid of the Lam family than of Er Lang's ghostliness. She finally accepts him for who he is, despite his many faults and the complicated nature of their relationship.
It seemed to me that in this confluence of cultures we had acquired one another's superstitions without necessarily any of their comforts.
The "two cultures" here refer to the living and the dead. In her experience of both, Li Lan comes to recognize the misconceptions the living have about the afterlife. They fear death, but they are quick to abandon the dead to their own fates. Li Lan personally resolves to maintain respect for this experience with her for the rest of her life.
The problem with the dead was that they all wanted someone to listen to them.
In the spirit world, Li Lan is highly sought after by all the souls who have been forgotten by their living relatives. They desire closure and help and even love, but most of all they just want someone to listen in the hopes that they will be remembered again. Li Lan does her best to honor their requests, but she is busy with her own race for survival.
How strange it was that the spirit could sleep, eat, and rest, yet how else could one account for the quantities of paper funeral food and furniture that were burned to accompany the houses and carriages of the dead?
Li Lan is discovering that, contrary to her expectations, her experiences in the spiritual world are still deeply physical, so to speak. Even though the spirit world is new and strange, the fundamentals of existence are in some ways very similar. This moment reflects the lessons that Li Lan eventually learns about how deeply intertwined the physical world and the spirit world are.
When Amah told me this story, I couldn’t understand why such a tragedy was considered a festival for lovers. There was no happy ending, only endless waiting on each side of a river. It seemed like a miserable way to spend eternity. Instead, I was most interested in the ox. How did the ox know that the heavenly maidens were coming? Why could it speak? And most of all, why did the ox have to die? Amah never gave me very satisfactory answers to these questions. “The point of the story is the lovers, you silly child,” she said...
This moment foreshadows two elements of the narrative. Firstly, the bittersweetness of the tale Amah tells Li Lan about lovers separated by a river, eternally waiting for each other, reflects how Li Lan's own love life will be far from straightforward. Even though she won't be waiting on the other side of a river for eternity, life with Er Lang will involve a lot of waiting and will be hard and difficult. Secondly, it mirrors her own love story, which turns out to involve the supernatural.
My skin prickled at odd moments and I started at shadows, though I could no longer see anything. Yet I felt the presence of the unknown, the filmy touch of vapors that eddied in dark corners. It crossed my mind that these sensations were caused by spirits and that they hung, translucent as jellyfish, in the very air that I passed through. I had experienced a hidden realm, which though terrifying, had also been a source of pure wonder.
Despite leaving the spirit world, Li Lan cannot shake its impacts. It is something she can physically feel, the touch of the spiritual world. But more than just not being able to get past it, her experiences there have given her such strong feelings (both good and bad) that normal life seems to pale in comparison.
“You want promises of success, assurances that all will be well? I don’t do that. Ask your amah here. That’s why I’m the real deal.” She chortled again. “It’s not a gift, my dear young lady. No, no it isn’t. Those feng shui masters, those ghost hunters and face readers. They like to tell people that they can do what they do because they’re so talented and blessed by heaven.”
“And aren’t they?”
She leaned close to me. Her breath was pungent with a yeasty odor. “Tell me, do you think it a blessing to see the dead?”
When we left, she was still laughing.
This is the point in the book where Li Lan truly begins to understand how serious the spirit world is. At first, she doesn't believe the medium is qualified because she looks shabby and acts rudely, but her attitude and appearance turn out to be a function of her ability. As Li Lan discovers later, encounters with the spirit world are powerful, but seeing the dead rarely ends positively.
Suddenly, I was certain that I was in the presence of something completely foreign to me, not human at all, in fact. I wondered uneasily what he was concealing beneath the hat.
Although she grudgingly becomes friends with Er Lang, there are times when Li Lan is reminded that he is not human at all. Much of this book is about Li Lan learning to deal with things that are completely foreign to her and how to co-exist with them. As the book progresses, Li Lan turns convention on its head by accepting that foreign and nonhuman are very different things from monstrous and that sometimes the familiar and the very human are the most monstrous of all.
Fan had once said I did not know how to use my face and body, that they were wasted on me, and now I realized she had been right. It was strange to think that power in this world belonged to old men and young women.
One of Li Lan’s biggest lessons over the course of the novel is about the power of age and beauty. While most people have either one or the other, both beauty and age are leveraged throughout the book. What Li Lan ends up learning is that while age cannot belong to her yet, her natural beauty is extremely powerful, just as alluring and overwhelming as the political games of old men.
