Walls
Overall, the narrative is thick with symbolic references to walls. Polly is especially intense in her awareness of the symbolic state of walls as a prison. When she actually gives voice to this awareness, her son is left confused, wondering what she means:
“It’s a man-made lake. Like West Lake Park in Fuzhou. I go there when the walls start to come.”
Poetic Polly
In fact, Polly voices an especially poetic sense of language whether speaking or in narration. She often composes sentences dense with figurative imagery as a way of trying to convey her feelings:
“In the factory dorm, sentences spilled out of me like a broken faucet, and when I moved even farther away and saw children splashing into rivers spurting from fire hydrants, water pouring into the streets like it was endless, I would see my younger self in that hydrant, but tugged open, a hungry stream.”
Ridgeborough ain’t the Bronx
After being adopted by the white college professor couple, Deming’s transition into the world of Daniel is rough. Mostly white Ridgeborough is certainly not the same thing as living in the Bronx and the immediate effect of culture shock hits hard:
“Deming’s first weeks in Ridgeborough were like sleepwalking, murky and addled, as if he’d wake up and be back in the Bronx with a finger snap.”
Crumbs
Amongst the sea of white face at his school in Ridgeborough, Deming recognizes his own place within the social structure. It is a perfect metaphor despite its self-effacing ugliness and lack of any authentic factual basis:
“Deming could see he was a crumb. Crumbs didn’t want to be noticed but were as noticeable as an open sore, tucking themselves away to avoid the places of highest concentration”
Music
Music is exceptionally important to the story, integral to both narrative and theme. Considering its singular significance, perhaps it comes as little surprise that the most artistically constructed and complicated metaphorical imagery in the book is directly related to this topic:
“Music was a language of its own, and soon it would become his third language, a half-diminished seventh to a major seventh to a minor seventh as pinchy-sweet as flipping between Chinese tones.”
