Who's Irish?

“My daughter thought this Amy very creative—another word we don’t talk about in China. In China, we talk about whether we have difficulty or no difficulty.” 

In this passage the narrator is talking about her granddaughter’s previous babysitter, Amy, whom the mother faults for some of Sophie’s behavioral problems. This comment is another instance of miscommunication as the daughter has adopted an American value of being “creative” that the mother is not familiar with and therefore cannot understand.

“Use your words, my daughter say.” 

This moment foreshadows the climax of the story, when the narrator is forced to leave her daughter's house for using a stick and not her “words” (which would have been impossible with her sleeping granddaughter) to get Sophie out of the hole at the playground. It also brings up a theme found throughout the collection: how often language is not enough to bridge the gaps people have in their understanding of one another.

“There was Art, struggling to hold on to his job, only to discover that there were times you didn’t want to hold on to your job—times you ought to maneuver for the golden parachute and jump. Times the goal was to get yourself fired. Who would have figured that?” 

This quote marks the moment of change for Art Woo, who up until this point has been doing his best to look for opportunities and to hold on to the often little he has been given. Like his “birthmate,” Billy, he now realizes the importance of taking risks.

“The headhunter was a round, ruddy man with a ring of hair like St. Francis of Assisi, and, sure enough, a handful of bread crumbs. A great opportunity, he said.” 

Art remarks that his wife was someone who looked for signs and that this was the clear difference between them, because he instead maintained a logical perspective to get through life. Art has his epiphany about getting fired from his job and is therefore open to such a biblical view of the headhunter. This openness sends him rushing to his hotel to wait for the call. It is there, waiting for the call from the Saint Francis of Assisi look-alike who will never come, that Art is able to have a moment of grief about his baby.

“‘A good bureau’s more than just a bureau,’ she explained last time we had lunch. ‘It’s a hedge against life. I tell you, if there’s one thing I believe, it’s that cheap stuff’s just money out the window. Nice stuff, on the other hand—now that you can always cash out, if life gets rough. That you can count on.’ In fifth grade though, she counted on different things.” 

This passage is spoken by the narrator’s friend, Patty Creamer, in the dramatic present of the story. This passage addresses this theme of what individuals can use to protect themselves from the variables of life. Patty, like the narrator, has grown out of what she once used to protect herself, but as an adult, she has acquired something else, the furniture.

“To protect my sister, Mona, and me from the pains—or, as they pronounced it, the pens—of life, my parents did their fighting in Shanghai dialect, which we didn’t understand; and when my father one day pitched a brass vase through the kitchen window, my mother told us he had done it by accident.” 

The opening passage of this story sets up the three major tensions: warding off the “pains” of life, the violent relationship between the mother and father, and not being able to understand someone in your own house.

“Louise talks more in Chinese than in English.”

Professor Mo says this to Duncan after Duncan confronts him about why Louise was dismissed from the school. Professor Mo is commenting on the fact that Duncan doesn’t know Louise as well as he thinks he does, both because he doesn’t know Chinese and because Louise is a woman with secrets.

“‘You are lucky he has TB. That way, the government will tell him he cannot go to the United States. Otherwise, you will be required to tell him yourself. After all, a man like that, who is going to give him a job? A man like that, how can you let him come live in your house?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Duncan; although in fact, for once, he did.”

This passage marks a moment of change in Duncan. Not only does he finally understand Mo, literally. He understands something important about himself: that he is not the kind of man who will bring Guotai and Bing Bing back to America. Meeting his family has not made him recognize his Chinese heritage in himself; it has pushed him further away.

“‘Good dancing, good dancing!’ cried Guotai. ‘Show him what his Chinese cousins are! Embarrass him to death! He’s here to visit China—show him what our country is. In China, you can dance, you can starve. Still people act as if they do not even see you! Show him! You watch!’ Guotai turned to Duncan, his eyes glittering strangely. ‘This is China! Nobody will say anything! You watch!’ But he was wrong. In fact, a hostess was already headed their way with a frown on her face when Bing Bing passed out and fell into the tureen of duck soup.” 

In this passage, Guotai has realized that Duncan does not intend to sponsor him and his family. This climactic scene also calls back to the opening of the story when Duncan associates his heritage in China with the porcelain artifacts at the museum. Here Guotai is saying, “You are here to see China, yet you cannot look at us.” Indeed, Duncan has spent the whole day turning away every time Guotai coughs.

“Addie filmed these things, thinking how glad she was that, like Neddie and Reynolds, she was not going to be in the picture.” 

Addie’s thought about being glad she might be counted among “the absent” could be read at first as a comment about not wanting her physical appearance to be caught on the camera, as she follows this line of thinking with remarks about her physical changes due to pregnancy, but it can also be read as a commentary on the fact that one can go missing in a family even when one is present if one isn’t fully recognized.

“But in her thirties, she had come to realize that all her ambition was about death. It was about defying death. It was about denying death. It was about death, death, death. A friend had given her a book about this; the friend later asked for the book back. But it was too late.”

This passage appears in the section of “Just Wait” titled “The Problem,” I which Rex and Addie’s modest home and finances are explained. As a young man, Rex knew he would always be seen as lacking, and he chose to work on housing projects instead of doing something more lucrative; Addie gave up her art as she was rising in fame to work as an artisan, taking small spaces and making them beautiful. What is “too late” here for Addie is the ability to ignore or avoid the impending doom of death.

“[W]e could see everything and hear everything they did over there, especially if we turned the TV down, which we sometimes did for a fight. If only more was in English, we could’ve understood everything, too. Instead all we caught was that Chin got beat up over the cherry bomb, as if they thought it was owing to him that somebody put the bomb in the window.”

This passage reveals that Chin is unfairly blamed for the cherry bomb that ends up in his family’s apartment and also gives a possible explanation for why their windows are always closed. The passage also brings up the theme of understanding when the narrator comments that the language barrier is what kept them from not just seeing and hearing everything but also understanding what went on in the neighbors’ apartment. Thus, the difference between seeing and hearing and understanding is significant.

“What difference does it make what anybody’s seen?”

The narrator thinks this following a moment when he wonders if someone should tell “Mr. Chin” that Chin wasn’t responsible for the cherry bomb. The narrator then understands why his father doesn’t call up Mr. Chin and clear this up; it’s for the same reason that the narrator doesn’t tell any of the boys at school that Chin doesn’t have “monkey feet” like they say he does.

“[M]y father started to talk about his grandfather, and the village he has reigned over in China—things my father had never talked about when he worked for other people. He told us about the bags of rice his family would give out to the poor at New Year’s, and about the people who came to beg, on their hands and knees, for his grandfather to intercede for the more wayward of their relatives. ‘Like that Godfather in the movie.’”

In this section the narrator is recounting her father’s initial booming success with the pancake house. This is an important moment as it touches on the father’s desire to re-write their family history based on their current success. The fact that he uses an American movie, The Godfather, to explain this to his children further shows how American-centric he is in the view of his work—how much he desires to align himself and his business with his ideas of the American dream.

“‘A restaurant is not a town,’ said my mother.”

The narrator’s mother says this to Ralph Chang, her father, while they are arguing about Ralph wanting to bail out the employees who have been arrested. The mother is criticizing Ralph for trying to create a space or society for himself in the pancake house and, in doing so, treating the restaurant as the only community he lives in.

“‘You girls are good swimmers,’ he said finally. ‘Not like me.’” 

This moment comes at the very end of the story, when the family has decided to leave Ralph’s jacket floating in the pool and walk back to the pancake house even though his keys are in the pocket. Mona, the narrator’s sister, is extolling the father for how he handled the drunk man at the party and comments on how they’re going to have to dive for the jacket when they go back to the house to get it. Ralph then says that one of his daughters can get the jacket because they are better swimmers than he is. This comment hints to Ralph both finally giving up on trying to create his own blend of Chinese and American society and his continued hope that his daughters will have better luck joining the “American society” that they want to be a part of than he has.

“Joy was his characteristic mode in life, so long as lotions and sand and things of that ilk were kept out of it. He lived to delight and be delighted—one of the first things that struck Pammie about him, coming as she did from a family that thought mostly about bills.”

In this passage Pammie is recalling her early relationship with Sven. Sven’s enjoyment of life is something that Pammie is attracted to initially, and like many characters in this story, she identifies this kind of joy or lightheartedness as distinctly American in nature. Pammie will come to learn that this character trait of Sven’s also renders him unable to deal with some of the more bitter parts of life, and one must both seek joy and pay the bills to survive.

“Your inferior class, she knew what he meant. That was a shock. Yet it was a relief, too, to hear their difference acknowledged, even in this painful way. For in the acknowledgement, there seemed a promise of acceptance.” 

Pammie and Sven have been arguing about why Pammie should continue making art. Pammie is concerned with the theoretical argument while Sven says that art should be made because one would die otherwise. While Pammie is still trying to decide what she thinks about Sven’s radical yet conservative view of the artist as anti-establishment, Sven tells her what she is looking for is nerve, which is a result of her class.