"The Voice from the Wall"
posted by Mrs. Woods | Monday, December 10, 2007
Woods' English 2A
This blog is intended to be used as a discussion forum for Mrs. Woods' 2A students from Piedmont Hills High School. The blog will allow each student to offer responses and reactions to the novels read outside of class. This blog will also allow you to read the reactions of others.
- "Rules of the Game"
- "Moon Lady"
- "Red Candle"
- "Scar"
- "The Joy Luck Club"
- Directions for BLOGGING!
- Welcome to Woods' 2A blog!
186 Comments:
"Paranoia"
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1) Reaction:
This chapter was really bizarre and made me feel uncomfortable as I read through it. The chapter starts off with a story of a beggar being whacked into a thousand pieces and then delves into Lena St. Clair's life. Lena's mother Ying-Ying is a very strange woman. She is obsessed with chinese superstition and is overwhelmed by it. There was just too much going on in this chapter from a strangely written miscarriage, to a red-faced chinese man harassing the St. Clair's. ARGH! This chapter is just really confusing and it kind of makes me angry to even think about it. A definate two thumbs down. Amy Tan, what happened???
2) The main conflict in this story is between Ying-Ying and her daughter. Lena who is basically a normal girl has to deal with her mother's ocean of superstitions even witnessing her mother tear their whole house apart and rearranging it to fit her needs. This leads Lena into eavesdropping on her neighbors and wondering if her life is better than other people. Ying-Ying meanwhile wants to teach her daughter how to act with her plethora of stories and superstitions, but I believe that she is too emotionally traumatized to be able to even help her daughter out. Crazy lady! x_X
3) In this chapter I learned about some of the superstitions that the Chinese culture has. One of them being the arrangement of furniture in the house to keep peace. Another would be the way a house is positioned which can bring either luck on the family or bad luck. Personally, I have heard some crazy superstitions about houses before but Ying-Ying went over the top with these superstitions in this chapter. :c
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“My mother is crazy”
1)Reaction:
I give this chapter two thumbs down because it was very confusing to me. Lena’s mother told her weird stories such as her grandfather was murdered by a ghost or that their was a evil man in the basement. This caused Lena to see the worst of things. At some points, I thought her mother was sane at one point, only trying to warn her daughter of the dangers in the world. But, when her mother had lost the baby, Lena thought, “How could I tell [my father] she was crazy (117)?” The whole chapter was bizarre.
2)Lena’s parents’ relationship:
Her parents seem distant. Lena’s father can’t even understand Chinese, while her mother only speaks very little English. On page 109, it reads, “But with me, when we were alone, my mother would speak Chinese, saying things my father could not possibly imagine.” Her mother did not confide with her husband, and her husband did not see the signs that his wife was going mad. I hardly can imagine that they married because of love.
3) Relate to opening allegory:
In the beginning, when Lena’s mother seems saner, she warns Lena of the dangers of the world just like how in the allegory the mother warns her child not to ride the bike past the corner. Lena says, “I knew my mother made up anything to warn me, to help me avoid some unknown danger (108).” And when her mother told her to walk only to school and straight back, Lena questioned why. This is similar to how the daughter in the allegory questions why she can’t ride her bike around the corner. There are some very obvious similarities in this chapter with the allegory.
Hallucinations
The Voice from the Wall: Joy Luck Club
1) Reaction
It seems the St. Clair's stories are always the most surreal and confusing. This chapter has its amusing and profound moments, but I disliked how it was difficult understanding why Tan connected the beggar's story with the voices Lena hears from her bedroom wall. There's almost a creepy quality to this vignette, with Lena's somewhat sadistic imagination and how Ying-ying's own wild thoughts and Chinese tales influences Lena's way of viewing the world.
2) Ying-ying and Lena's father
The relationship between Ying-ying and Lena's father seems rather detached. The many scenes in this vignette seem to show how little Lena's father knows about Ying-ying. Their relationship seems to symbolize the problems a biracial family might have: Lena's father doesn't understand the Chinese language or its customs, and Ying-ying has a problem with learning English.
3) Theme or Message
I think this chapter tells us how even the worst things in our lifetime can be changed: all it takes is some time and a little bit of hope.
In most of the chapter, Lena sees terrible things: a girl splattering her face everywhere when hit by a thetherball, the neighbors arguments and Lena's belief that the girl is being murdered, the story of a beggar dying from a thousand cuts. Ying-ying's lost baby and lost hope adds to the tragedy and feeling that nothing would be right again.
However, Lena comes to a conclusion at the end, when her neighbor climbs back into her bedroom even though she argues often with her mother. Lena "knew that this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop."
“Anxiety”-“The Voice from the Wall”
1. This chapter was quite strange and weird in a way? I actually got kind of scared while reading it! Especially the scene about Lena opening the basement door and how her nose was bleeding and the man living there for thousands of years. That was also pretty confusing and the part about Ying-ying (Betty St. Clair) having a baby. Did she have the baby since she was at the hospital? When she said that the baby boy’s head was open, was that just her fear? Did she have the baby or was it just a false alarm? It’s interesting how Lena has such a vivid yet horrific imagination, like when she is picturing the girl next door, Theresa, being killed over and over again, being sliced into pieces by her mother. Ying-ying is a disturbed woman and I don’t understand how her husband could have a life with her for all those years without really knowing what she was saying. Or maybe he did understand her fear and anxiety but didn’t want to show it. Either way, it was all a little strange but intriguing at the same time.
2. The relation between Ying-ying St. Clair and her husband seems misunderstood. They don’t seem as if they’re on the same page because first of all they don’t really speak the same language because Ying-ying barely understands English and her husband speaks a very limited amount of Chinese. Her husband “would put words in her mouth” through the gestures and sounds she made, trying to understand himself the puzzle pieces which formed his wife. He usually explained her actions as what he wanted her to say but there was a much deeper meaning to what she was saying, only he never understood, or it seemed like he didn’t. Ying-ying’s overwhelming belief in superstitions overcame her and anxiety hung over her but her husband would try to explain it as she was “just tired.” I don’t think they fully understood each other.
3. The main conflict in this chapter seems to be internal and is human vs. self or Lena vs. herself. Ever since Lena opens the basement door, her mom pulls her out, and tells her about the man who has lived there for thousands of years, Lena begins to hear things. Not only does she hear things but her imagination expands to a great length, and she has to face her own imagination which overwhelms her life. When she hears her neighbors yelling at each other, she pictures the mother with a sword slicing the daughter into pieces, she also imagines the old beggar being sliced into a thousand pieces. Her imagination of violent scenes disturb her outlook on the world, but is resolved at the end of the chapter when she realizes that even the worst possible thing that can happen to a person or in life, has an end.
A thousand cuts!
Chapter 6: The Voice From the Wall
1) I give this chapter thumbs up because it conveys love, hope and peace in different ways. I like how Lena St. Clair is always hopeful despite the fact that her mother is psychologically falling apart. I love how she constantly compares herself to a girl named, Teresa, who lives next door. Lena St. Clair isn’t in a great situation because she is both mentally and physically dull. Her mother fills Lena with mysterious thoughts, for example, forbidding her from the basement. Lena’s imagination involves a lot of violence since she visualizes the beggar her mother tells her about, dying in gruesome ways. For example, she’s curious about the way the beggar died and asks her mother if his skin was sliced off first, his bones chopped or his screaming of pain. Talk about weird! Anyways, Lena isn’t like any ordinary girl because of her mother and she hates having to feel the sadness and loneliness in her home when her mother’s soon-to-be son dies. People tend to compare themselves to others worse than them to feel proud and be hopeful. Amy Tan makes a great connection since Lena compares herself to Teresa. However, when Lena hears Teresa and her mother laughing in joy, I thought she would be crushed because of the sadness in her home compared to Teresa’s, who’s supposed to be worse. Surprisingly, Lena becomes even more hopeful day by day! I love how Amy Tan portrays this young girl who always keeps her head lifted high.
2) Teresa and her mother’s relationship is very strange. They constantly fight and scream at each other and suddenly, collapse into laughter. Like Lena hears, the two are close to killing each other. Amy Tan displays the variety of ways a family contains joy. In this case, Teresa and her mother fight but make up and inside their yelling and screaming, they care for each other dearly.
3) Amy Tan captures some symbolism in this chapter. For example, Lena’s mother explains to her daughter while rearranging furniture, “See how narrow this doorway is, like a neck that has been strangled. And the kitchen fades this toilet room, so all your worth is flushed away.” In this case, the door is a simile since it is compared to a strangled neck. Thinking deeper, the neck can relate to Lena’s mother, Ying-Ying’s neck. Recalling the beginning of Ying-Ying’s chapter, Ying-Ying is described keeping her “true nature hidden” and being lost from not speaking since something prevents her to. Ying-Ying’s neck is strangled for not allowing her feelings out. Therefore, when someone keeps their sorrow and other feelings emotionally inside themselves, they become very quiet for nothing seems necessary to say. Like this situation, Ying-Ying keeps silent and like a toilet room, her “worth is flushed away.”
"Back to the Other Side"
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1. The beginning of this chapter creeped me out. Lena's depiction of her great-grandfather's death scares me. It reminds me of The Grudge. Ying-ying has lots of issues, and it seems that she passed them on to Lena. Both the mother and daughter are really strange. This whole chapter was more serious that the previous ones, but it really kept me focused because of its difference.
2. Lena's father and mother have a relationship built on fear. The father is afraid of knowing the truth behind Ying-ying's troubles, that's why he puts words in her mouth so he can avoid knowing the real pain. For example, when Ying-ying was suffering from depression and laying on her bed like a dead person, the father only said, "She's just tired." He tries to explain what is wrong with her in his own words to make the seriousness lessen. In reality, "he was thinking about her because he had this worried face," but he doesn't want to know what's wrong because he's afraid it would make the current situation worse. On the other hand, Ying-ying is also afraid of admitting to the truth. She can't say what's on her mind and what she's fearing. When her husband shoves words in her mouth, she just lets him do it. She doesn't try to explain herself or correct him. For example, when Ying-ying was rearranging the house, she only said that that things were "not being balanced." In truth, she was afraid of having a baby, but she never really explained what her fear was.
3. (How does this chapter relate to the opening allegory for this set of chapters?) This chapter relates to the opening allegory in a few ways. In the opening allegory, the mother knows the dangers that the daughter would go through if she disobeyed, but she couldn't say what the dangers were. Like the allegory, the mother, Ying-ying, knows what dangers might happen later on, but she couldn't say it because she was afraid they might come true. Ying-ying is afraid that Lena would become a guilty mother like herself, but she can't tell Lena her fears because she's not able to let go of her past. The connection is that both mothers know the dangers that the daughter would go through if the daughter did not listen, but both mothers cannot express their care and knowledge to their daughters.
Michelle H.
Through the Wall
1) I, personally, liked and disliked this chapter at the same time. I didn’t like the beginning because it seemed to me to be a little dull and boring. She looses her child and then she rearranges the house. I guess you can say that she was in a sort of depression. I liked the ending of it when Theresa comes over to their house after Lena thinks that she is being killed next door. She uses their fire escape and goes back to her room to give her mother a surprise. Her mother was not mad but was relieved.
2) Lena’s father and mother are growing apart with every step they make. Her mother is obviously sad about losing her baby, but when father makes excuses for her, like saying that she is just tired, I think it makes it worse. She wants to be told that it is okay to feel sad, and instead, her husband tells her that she is just tired. It is equal to saying that she cannot be sad, she is only tired and it is not right to be sad. Her father wants to help her out of her sadness, but he cannot, and her mother is bent over her lost child. There relationship has become from loving and caring like a family, to sad and depressing, everyone slowly drifting apart.
3) In this chapter, I learned that it is traditional to rearrange the house into a different way when some bad luck has gotten in. I learned that things must always be balanced. Also that the house must be positioned in a certain way to bring luck.
"The Crazy Lady"
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1: This chapter gets two thumbs down, I didn't care to read about this chapter. So far, both the mother and daughter vignettes from the St. Clair's family are strange and hard to understand. Why does Tan put all this stuff about a beggar thats given a thousand cuts, the miscarriage, the arguing mother and daughter, into this vignette? I don't really see how all of this stuff ties together. I also feel sorry for Lena because her mom is a crazy lady. She is way too obsessed with superstitions. Oh yea I didn't get the part where when Ying-Ying was having her baby, she says that the babyy came out with opened eyes and an oeneded head...I didn't really get the scene and what she was saying.
2: I think Ying-Ying St. Clair and her husband's relationship is misunderstood. They really know each other because first of all, they don't even speak the same language. On page 109, it reads, “But with me, when we were alone, my mother would speak Chinese, saying things my father could not possibly imagine.” This shows that Ying-Ying doesn't really tell her husband anything that goes on in her head. How is this marriage even working out if they don't even know what's going on to the other person?
3: The scene with the disboedient daughter and the angered mother is just like life today. In the book, Theresa and her mother argue constantly. They are always yelling and hitting each other, making Lena think that someone is murdering someone else every single night. It gets to a point where the mom locks the daugher out of the house (or apartment), making Theresa use the fire escape to return to her bedroom. This is like today because there are many teens/ young children that also argue with their parents constantly. And sometimes the arguements heighten so much that it gets to a point where someone pushes someone outside the house or someone runs away. In this case, Theresa was locked out of the house.
"Bizarre"
1)reaction: After reading this chapter, I conclude that it is quite strange. Ying Ying and Lena are both eerie characters. The mother and daughter are alike in the sense that they have a very odd mindset and approach on life. Like Ms Woods mentioned in class, these characters show Tan's enjoyment for gothic writing. Overall I give this chapter mixed reviews because it was scary and somewhat hard to understand but also well written and by stirring up my fear, Tan succeeded as a writer.
2)Lena is just a normal girl who was greatly affected by her mother's awkward personality. Lena then also grows into something strange and superstitious. She probably learned the personality traits from her mother unlike Waverly Jong in the previous chapter who disliked her mother's constant bragging personality. Both mother and daughter express their feelings in a weird and eerie kind of way.
3)This chapter displays the internal conflicts with herself. After her mother fills her head with fear and bizarre images, Lena has problems controlling her imagination. She hears things and imagine them to be a lot worse than reality.
The Voice from the Wall
"The Living Ghost"
For me, this chapter was really awkward because Lena St. Clair's mother goes crazy over the baby in her stomach. It was also weird how she visualized her neighbor's conversations as murder scenes each night. She seemed to be a very disturbed girl because Lena even pictured a torture scene on how her great-grandfather killed a beggar. "Even as a young child, [she] could sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ones that chased [her] mother until she hid in a secret dark corner of her mind." This quote shows how different Lena was compared to an ordinary young girl.
The conflict in this chapter is based between Lena and her mother, Ying-Ying. Ying-Ying is a Chinese mother who suffers from superstitions. She moved everything in her house simply because her "house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill. so you can never get ahead. You are always rolling backward." Poor Lena is just a regular girl who has to deal with her mother's weird obsessions of fearing any danger. She even has to lie to her father when she translates what her mother says because her Caucasian father never understood a word Ying-Ying says.
This chapter is connected to the allegory because Ying-Ying continuously warns Lena of the dangers in the world, but Lena seemed to always ignore her. She "knew [her] mother made up anything to warn [her], to help [her] avoid some unknown danger." By ignoring her, she is similar to the girl in the allegory who didn't listen to her mother when warned continuously.
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
"I think I'm Hearing Things..."
Reaction: =/
After reading all four chapters consecutively, I hold on to my claim that this chapter is the most depressing. After Half and Half that is. The Voice from the Wall is inundated with utter pessimism and dysphoria. It's saddening, really. However, I believe Amy Tan did that on purpose. This chapter was probably the one Tan used as an outlet for all that Gothic stuff, she had said in her interview, she liked writing.
Ying-Ying and Lena
The mother-daughter relationship Ying-ying and Lena have is in some ways different to the mother-daughter relationship Waverly and Lindo have. While Waverly strives to be and is very different from her mother, Lena is actually very alike her mother, disregarding their problems. Both Lena and Ying-ying live in a life of perpetual fear and mental suffering- Lena's mentality is most likely a product of her mother's own dark side. Suspecting the worse out of all situations, especially situations that they don't know about or are unclear to them, Lena and her mother border on a psychological and mental breakdown throughout the entire chapter. Their similar personality conflicts with one other: both refrain from expressing their thoughts and speaking openly, which obscures all their hidden anger and other emotions buried within. Thus, their relationship can be described as one that mirrors each other.
Internal Conflict
Although there is no shouting or physical fights in this chapter, internal conflicts arise instantaneously throughout.The conflicts can be described as a "silent treatment" for its bearers. Lena, for example, suffers from her own fear of the unknown. She tortures herself, imagining horrors and her neighbor committing filicide. This internal conflict Lena faces continues to distress her until she realizes the worst always has an end.
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BOO!
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter was a bit strange. I’m assuming that Lena St. Clair’s neighbor, Teresa and her mother are ghosts because they torture one another while laughing and they can walk through walls. This chapter was a thumbs down because it threw out events that had no connection to the rest of the story. For example, a man who claimed that Lena’s mother was the girl of his dreams was coming toward her to hug her and then his friend stopped him by telling him to stop fooling around, so he did as he said. Another example is when Lena’s mother had a dream that her baby boy didn’t have a brain.
2. The quote, “Sometimes she would start to make dinner, but would stop halfway…” (P. 117) shows that the person being described is Lena’s mother because the mother of a household usually cooks dinner and because there are only two females in the apartment, Lena and her mother. The quote, “I knew he was thinking about her because he had this worried face…” (P. 117) shows that he father was the person being characterized because he was the type of person who pondered a lot and worried when it was necessary.
3. At the very beginning of the chapter, Lena flashbacks a story that her mother told her about her great-grandfather. The story leads to the dark side of Lena’s mother, which got passed onto her. This flashback is important because it lets the reader know what led to Lena’s mother’s dark side and evil thoughts.
Empty Minded
I just got to say, that this chapter spooked me more than Edgar Allen Poe stories spooked me. There are many creepy passages that seem psycho to me. I get the feeling that the St. Clair’s have demented minds because of the referencing they make with death, rape, and ghosts. Though Tan had great description on the creepy details, I didn’t like this chapter because I can’t figure out why Tan puts them there. Conclusively, I still don’t get this chapter.
The relationship between Betty St. Clair (Ying Ying) and her daughter, Lena St. Clair, is protective and understanding. Betty is very protective of Lena and “made up anything to warn” her of dangers. For example, when Lena wanted to walk out on the street alone, Betty warned her that “a man can grab [Lena] off the streets” and rape her. Betty made this story up to scare her daughter out of walking off the street alone to protect Lena from the dangers of walking alone. Their relationship is an understanding relationship because Lena knows how her mother feels. When Betty was pregnant, Lena noticed that her mother “began to bump into things… as if she were headed for trouble.” Interestingly enough, Betty’s baby was born with no brain and “after the baby died, [Betty] fell apart.” Lena’s acute ability to sense things about her mother is a sign of understanding her greatly. On the whole, with protection and understanding, their mother daughter relationship is a very close one.
In this chapter, Tan uses very dark word choice to portray a creepy mood. In one paragraph, there were words like: worst, avoid, unspeakable, unspoken, terrors, chased, hid, secret, dark, devoured, disappeared, and ghost. All these words give a reader a chill in their spine because of their connotation. Avoid, chased, and hid are words that give a sense of getting out of the way of something dangerous. Others words, like devoured, disappeared, and ghost, gives the feeling of no existence. Finally, the set of words such as worst, unspoken, terror, dark, and secret, create the feeling of a mysterious danger. With words that give feelings of running away from something dangerous, having no existence, and a looming danger, definitely portray creepiness in this chapter.
Walls Can’t Talk
Chapter The Voice from the Wall
1. This was…the weirdest chapter yet. The chapter completely confused me from page 1 and it wasn’t really interesting. The only thing motivating me was the assignment sheet. I’m guessing that this chapter is full of symbolic things that when we discuss it will make us all “Oh, I get it now.” Besides that, I will have to say not a very good chapter, sorry.
2. Lena’s two parents have the strangest relationship. Why would someone marry another if they can’t even understand each other? The dad hardly talks anyway, and because he can’t understand Chinese, this puts the burden on Lena’s shoulders to translate correctly and accurately. This clearly can’t be trusted because Lena sometimes makes fake translations such as when their baby was born with no brain. I would say it was a bad relationship, no communication, weird mutant baby, and a weird neighbor girl.
3. I bet this chapter is overflowing with symbolism. I admit, when I read, I don’t try to hard to read under the surface. I just read for enjoyment and sometimes, for a grade, and that’s it. I can grasp a little bit of the under the surface stuff if the book was very interesting, but with a chapter like this, I was lost the whole way. I bet every object mentioned in this chapter symbolized something else, and I can’t wait to get that feeling when I finally understand the chapter’s meaning.
Wallflower
The Twenty-six Malignant Gates: The Voice from the Wall
This chapter was confusing. I liked it. Not the confusing part. I don't understand the basement part--who was in the basement? WAS there someone in the basement? What did her mom do in the basement? I don't think there was anyone down there but then what was the point of her mom telling Lena that there was someone down there? And the things she saw--was something actually wrong with her, did she actually see things, like a medical problem, or was it just in her imagination? The reason I liked this chapter is that it's kind of similar to one of my favorite books. The parts about her seeing things and the next door neighbors fighting with her imagining different things happening. I liked how she had an English-Irish father, as it is so different from the other daughters of this book and from Chinese. I felt sad for her mother though, because she didn't seem like she picked or wanted the life she had with her husband. Her husband didn't seem to understand her or truly love her either and I felt mad about that. It was annoying how her father put words in her mothers mouth.
Another thing I didn't get: What did Lena's mother mean when she was talking to Lena in the hospital? (I didn't like this part. I sounds like Lena's mom is trying to scare her all the time with all the things she says, not just this, and this one is just so sci-fi.) I couldn't tell what was true and what wasn't: the baby's open eyes; if his brain was visible; that he didn't have a brain; her killing her other son; she didn't want to have the baby; Lena's mom was crazy. At the end of the chapter: "Then you can see why you were wrong." Wrong with what? What does the wall represent? What is the sword slicing off?
Lena's father and mother don't understand and have anything evidently in common with each other. Her father doesn't notice, or chooses not to notice, how unsettled and unhappy Lena's mother is. By putting words in her mouth because he doesn't understand her language, he's telling himself what he wants to hear and think of his wife, even though it's not true. Lena's mother doesn't seem to notice her father. She never acknowledges him or talks about him. It's like he's not even part of her life. I think she had no choice to marry him or not because of the way she looked in her wedding photograph and would be happier if she wasn't married to him. This relationship is so shut off that it's shallower than surface level. Lena's mother is imaginary to her father because he's painting himself a picture of how she is. And to Lena's mother, her father is just an acquaintance--a person you don't know well and wouldn't particularly care if you got to know them or not because all you know is their name.
a Tan uses imagery well in this chapter (even if it's an image we don't like). Two examples are what Lena imagines is happening on the other side of her bedroom wall and what Lena's mother's description of what happened in the hospital. When, through her wall, Lena hears her neighbors fighting, she imagines one of them killing the other in the worst way described at the beginning of the chapter. Tan uses onomatopoeia and word choice to emphasize the horror of this desperate, horrific picture along with simple descriptions of what is happening. "Whack! Whack! Whack!"---the sword's sound as it "slice[s the girl's] life away." "Scraping," "slamming," "pushing," "shouts," and "screams," can be heard as the girl desperately tries to escape her horrible fate. The sword, "high above the girl's head," comes down on her "braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the point of her cheek," and "the slant of her nose." Reading this scene, I could picture the sword raised above the mother's head; the girl cowering on the floor, screaming for life; the red of her insides revealed as the sword lops off a slices of her skin.
“Who Said Walls Can't Talk?”
“The Voice from the Wall”
1.Reaction- This chapter was the most confusing chapter to me so far. Now that I think back on what I read, I understand it more, but I think it was just a really weird chapter. Seriously speaking, what was the whole story of the beggar and the basement scene? I didn't really even understand what Lena St. Clair was saying. Lena described some of the things she saw, and it truly disturbed me that a girl so young can have obscure thoughts of other children “hurtling through space” or a tether ball that would “splash a girl's head all over the playground.” I think that calls for some therapy away from her overly-superstitious mother who I think partial blame could be put on. Throughout the hospital scene, I felt really bad when I figured out that the baby was dead, but when its condition was described I definitely squirmed.
2.Lena's parents' relationship is, in my opinion, really awkward. I mean, how can you be married to someone you can't truly understand more than half the time? Throughout the chapter, there are various times where Lena's mom says something that Lena understands, but her father has a different meaning for what her mother has said. I think because her mother is Chinese and her father is Caucasian, Lena's parents have a lack of ability to communicate in their relationship.
3.This chapter relates to the opening allegory because in the allegory, the mother knows that her daughter is going to get her if she rode off by herself, and in the chapter, Lena's mother knows the dangers of the outside world. Lena's mother tries to warn her of the dangers of the world, but doesn't want to tell Lena directly, but in the end, “mother knows best.”
Other Voices
1. I still don’t really understand the part of Lena’s story about the man in the basement. It was confusing because at first I thought the part about Lena’s mother locking the basement door was a metaphor for maybe hiding a secret. Lena’s mother is afraid of many things. This might be from her past in China. Something bad had to happen to traumatize her that way. Now it is affecting how she is with her own daughter. The scene where a man runs toward Lena and her mom is strange because that man seemed drunk or crazy. No normal person would do that to strangers and in front of children. When Lena figured out that her mom was pregnant I don’t think her own mother knew about it since she “bumped into things” and “she didn’t speak of the joys of having a new baby.” I think when Lena hears the mother and daughter arguing she is overreacting to the noises. She thinks someone is getting sliced up and just ends up scaring herself. Amy Tan, once again, out downs herself with description in the scene with Lena’s mother babbling on about the baby’s death. It was gruesome and sounded very real. When Lena’s mother starts to “fall apart” it reminded me of some mothers who go through depression after the loss of a child. The part where Teresa comes over was like a relief from Lena’s mom and her problems. Overall I would give this chapter thumbs up. Lena’s mom being able to see and feel special things made the vignette more interesting. It helped to explain some issues going on like what happened to the baby.
2. Lena’s mother, Ying Ying and her father have a distanced relationship. Lena’s father doesn’t speak Chinese so he couldn’t understand when Ying Ying was speaking in the hospital. I think language barrier is a small problem. The cultural differences seem more of a problem for the two. Lena’s father doesn’t understand why Ying Ying rearranges the house. It doesn’t say how they met or even how they came to like each other. Through out the vignette Lena’s father doesn’t even know Ying Ying. Maybe something will happen to bring the couple closer to each other.
3. Amy Tan uses many techniques to enhance the story. I found that personification was used when Lena said she saw “lightning had eyes and searched to strike down on little children” and the monkey rings would “send a swinging child hurtling through space.” When Lena sensed that her mother wasn’t happy and talking about the baby it was like foreshadow that something bad was going to happen to the baby. The description of the baby was great imagery. Words like screaming, clinging and steaming conveyed a sense of terror and pain in the scene.
The Voice from the Wall
Keep your ears plugged!
1)This was an unusual story, though it had a very well-known moral: things are often not as bad as they seem, and things will always improve over time. When I read the first half of the story, I was incredibly depressed because of the miscarriage. It reminded me of some pictures of abortion that I had seen; red babies with oversized heads which were often not whole or attached to the body. I thought that Lena’s purposeful mistranslating for her mother was well-intentioned, but unnecessary, because her father would have understood what she was really saying, and he would have preferred to know the truth. When Lena was listening to the violent conversations through her wall, I was reminded of when my parents argued in their rooms while they thought my sister and I were sleeping, while in reality we were hearing every word, hearts pounding. I’d give this story thumbs up, because of its positive message and its ability to connect Lena’s conflict to another one right next door.
2) The relationship between Teresa and her mother is the total opposite of the conflicts we have seen between an Asian mother and daughter pair. Teresa and her mom fight every night, while in most Asian families, the child remains quiet, and suddenly boils up and starts a quarrel. Teresa also rebels by escaping, then mocking her mother by secretly returning to her room. The other daughters never attempt a scheme like this, and usually remain quite and contemplate what they have done.
3) Tan uses the “death of a thousand cuts,” which is mentioned throughout the story, to relate to the loss of the baby. When the punishment is explained at the end of the story, the mother says, “I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing.” When the baby died, Lena and her parents have experienced the worst, and that means that things can only improve over time.
What's Behind Wall Number 1?!
The Voice from the Wall
1)Reaction:
This chapter was a bit confusing. I really didn't get the ghost reference in the beginning and end But the beginning starting with the story of a death kept me reading. Another part that baffled me was the basement chained up by Ying Ying St. Clair. What was in there? Ying Ying is very protective of her daughter, Lena St. Clair. She always makes sure Lena is with her, because of what happened on the bus. I found it sad how Ying Ying and her husband had no communication, since Ying Ying could hardly speak english. He would always put words in her mouth, and Lena would always have to lighten up what her mother was really trying to say. Lena has a strange imagination. She must've gotten it from her mother. She began imagining that the girl next door, Teresa Sorci was getting killed many time by Mrs. Sorci. And it was a surprised to always see Teresa so happy right after an argument. Although some parts were interessting, the whole vignette was hard to understand.
2)Ying Ying and Clifford St. Clair
Although they are husband and wife, they have no communication. Clifford doesn't understand a word Ying Ying says, but he tries making it out by putting words in her mouth. Most of the time, Ying Ying seems unhappy but Clifford doesn't see it. It's hard to believe why Ying Ying ever married Clifford.
3)There are two messages in the story. Even though it may seem like ones beliefs are bizarre at first, you will understand and learn about the beliefs later on in life. Ying Ying was always superstitious and Lena didn't really see what her mother was seeing. But later on in the novel, she begins seeing what her mother was seeing all along. Another message is, although you bicker a lot, it's out of love, not anger. Teresa and Mrs. Sorci always get into fights, but Mrs. Sorci yells at Teresa because she was worried about her, not because she hated her.
"A Displaced Person"
The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter was more weird than confusing, but not as much as "The Moon Lady" was. The St.Clair's stories seem to be the ones that are awkward and bizarre. The beginning really threw me off track. I don't understand why Amy Tan included the story about the beggar and the man in the basement. I don't think this chapter had a good opening. In this chapter, it seems as though Lena 's mother only sees the dark sides of things and doesn't find happiness anywhere. I don’t think that Ying-Ying St. Claire wanted another baby because she was always bumping into things and never was joyful. It was freaky when Lena started hearing voices from the other side of the wall. I think she was just letting things get to her like her mother did. Ying-Ying is sometimes too superstitious. The one thing that I like about this chapter was the way Tan described things. On page 106, she described Lena 's eyes animatedly; "no eyelids, as if they were carved on a jack-o-lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife."
2. Lena ’s mother, Ying-Ying, and father, Clifford, have a discrete relationship. The two never seem close and can’t even communicate too much because they don’t know each other’s language well. Also, the pair never share their emotions. When Ying-Ying was displeased with the new apartment, she never told Clifford directly. Also, when Ying-Ying had troubles when she got a miscarriage, she never got over it but instead, became miserable.
3. This chapter relates to the allegory. In the allegory, there is a child who asks a lot of questions to her mother (“What are they, then? “How do you know I’ll fall?”), and the mother replies back with negative thoughts (“you will fall down and cry and I will not hear you”) (97). This is true for Lena and Ying-Ying St. Clair. On page 109, when Lena asks why she cannot walk anywhere but to school and back, her mother tells Lena all of the terrible things that can happen; “A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby. Then, you’ll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in a garbage can, then what can be done? You’ll go to jail, die there.” Because Lena and the girl ask questions about why they can’t so things and Ying-Ying and the mother reply back with morbid thoughts, the allegory and this chapter are related.
'' Eek! What's that!? ''
1. I agree with most of you in that this is the most deviant and strange chapter amongst the four in the reading. I thought of it really weird how Tan's peculiar mind is portrayed quite well in this chapter. She shows this by how crazy and unconventional Ying - Ying is. The crazy thoughts that Ying - Ying has and her grotesque personality display Tan's ability to creatively put her unique mind and thoughts into a character in her book. At the same time, this chapter was very confusing, especially at the beginning. I didn't understand how Lena's story of the man in the cellar could relate to the life her and Ying - Ying shared. Also, I found it quite hypocritical how Ying - Ying scolded that Lena and those '' Americans have only these morbid thoghts in [their minds ]. '' (p.105) Isn't it obvious that Ying - Ying is the one with all these glommy thoughts? Two thumbs down on my part.
2. Lena and Ying Ying's attitudes in their relationship are very similar. Both of them love each other, but at the same time they're both wanting more love from Lena's father. While Ying - Ying's mental state and wanting for more attention is alluring Lena's father, Lena's want for her father's love continually grows. Ying - Ying thinks that her life is incredibly terrible as she constantly grows more crazy and depressed. Like her mother, Lena's life in her own eyes seems to crash down. The constant internal struggle for the two are both coming from problems that arose in their own lives : Ying - Ying's loss of her baby and Lena's psychotic mother being the causes for each of their depression and mental breakdown.
3. The theme of the story that Tan is trying to portray is that one's life isn't always as bad as it may seem. There are some people who face far more challenges everyday others, so one shouldn't be ignorant in thinkin that their life is so terrible or worth not living. When Tan says that the mother has '' perfect understanding '' and that she's '' already experienced the worst, '' (p.121) Tan displays the ignorance that most people have when they're in a bad position with their lives. As the daugher in the end of the chapter explains that she '' can see why [ her mother ] is wrong, '' (p.121) the reader is shown that the mother was wrong, and that her life isn't as bad compared to another person in this world.
"'No brain, the doctor shouted!'"
The Voice from the Wall
1) My first reaction to this chapter was “Ewwwwww…” I found that the baby scene was almost too descriptive and that kind of made me see every picture in that scene, which wasn’t very pretty. I give this chapter thumbs up for the great detail but sometimes too much detail. I think that this chapter was another chapter showing your typical Asian family, but nowadays you don’t see that much parents like Ying-ying. However, I do tend to see many grandparents like that. I thought that this chapter had a sad and gloomy mood throughout that I didn’t like. The mood was too descriptive along with everything else and made me sad after reading it.
2) I think the relation between Teresa and Lena to be very different. In the beginning Lena believes that Teresa is much worse off because her family yells a lot at each other, but later on as Lena’s own mother gets worse, she finds out that Teresa’s family is much better. Even though they yell a lot, they still love each other and they don’t feel bad or truly angry at each other, but ever since that incident with the baby, Lena’s mother has been spiraling into depression or something else. I think that Lena in fact, envies Teresa’s life.
3) Question 1: The details that Amy Tan puts into this chapter are extraordinary. I feel like I saw the scene in the hospital a little too well. So well, that I stopped reading for half an hour after that scene just to try to get that image out of my head. Also, Tan used a lot of similes to show how much one thing happened in the story. She also uses these similes and metaphors to exaggerate a scene or to make someone able to see the extent of a scene.
Talking Wall
1) This chapter totally confuzzled up my mind. It was really confusing, and I thought that the story was extremely random, as if words were just poking out of the book in no apparent order. Besides, how does Ying-Ying marry Clifford if they can't even understand each other? I would give this a two thumbs down, however reading sparknotes does help me to understand it a teeny tiny bit, though not much better.
2) I think that the relationship between Lena and her mother is one of embarrassment. I feel as if Lena is embarrassed to have a near-crazy mother with a husband that speaks a different language. Lena gives other people a false impression of Ying-Ying by changing what she says to something more logical and coherent. Furthermore, Lena tries to consolidate herself by eavesdropping on their neighbors.
3) Although this chapter had both internal and external conflicts, I think that this chapter was mainly an internal conflict inside of Lena. Lena feels ashamed to have a mother who is a lunatic. Lena tries to cover up her mother's weird talk by translating it differently. I think that Lena is desperate for a new and normal life.
“They’re Killing Each Other!”- “The Voice from the Wall”
1) This chapter was a little bit disturbing because of the mother’s instability. She is not happy with her life in the new apartment because of the “imbalance.” This is just the beginning of her mistrust in life. I thought it was sad how the mom tried to protect herself (or the unborn baby?) instead of Lena when the crazy man was running toward them. If I was little and a scary man was running at me I wouldn’t want my mom letting go of my hand. I thought it was pretty scary when the baby was born without a brain because of the mom’s reaction. She became crazy and mumbled to herself and would not speck clearly with her family. I thought it was interesting when Lean compared her life with the girl from next door. It seemed like that girl really did have a worse life than Lena, but in truth, Lena’s was worse. Even though the other girl’s was louder, she would always resolve the conflict with her mom. Lena never solved her conflict.
2) I think the relationship between Lena and her mom is very important because it is never solid. Her mom does not always communicate well with Lena and Lena takes advantage of this to get things her way. It can also be bad for Lena because she does not always understand what her mother is really saying and gets scared often. When her mom comes home from the hospital and starts acting weird, Lena often wonders about her life. She wants her mom to return to normal so that they can be friends again. It seems that her mom forgets all about Lena because of the other dead baby.
3) I think this connects well with the opening allegory because it is about getting lost. The mom and Lena do not always understand each other, but still maintain a constant relationship. They talk about life and do not argue too much. Lena is having a fine life until her mom is about to have another baby and starts to leave Lena behind. She no longer talks directly to Lena and when the baby is born dead, she becomes worse and constantly mumbles. Lena is then lost to her mother and does not know how to get her back, just like the child who disobeys and is now alone without their mom.
I know mirrors can talk but walls thats crazy
The Voice from the Wall
1. I thought this chapter was weird and confusing. It didn’t get the parts with the beggar being cut into a thousand pieces and the thing that was in the basement. It was weird when Lena heard voices from the other room and always thought of murders. Lena is like her mother because they always think of the worse possible situation. I also didn’t get that part when the man at the bus stop runs towards them and Ying-Ying only protects herself. Ying-Ying is too superstitious and seems to be controlled by them. It was confusing when Ying-Ying talked about how the baby had no brain and how she could hear him screaming inside. This chapter gets a thumbs down because it was hard to understand what was happening.
2. Lena’s parents relationship seems very distant. Her mother speaks very little English while her father speaks no Chinese. Lena is stuck in the middle and has to translate for both of them. When she has to translate she changes what her mother says to make her sound saner so her never hears what his wife says. When Ying-Ying was depressed he says, “she's just tired” because he doesn’t know of her troubles. Ying-Ying has to speak to her husband through gestures, which seems really weird because they married but can hardly communicate.
3. Tan uses lots of imagery to improve the story. When Lena hears her neighbors arguing she always imagines what’s happening in the worst way. She thinks of them as murders that are very descriptive and are easy to imagine. I could picture the sword slicing off every layer of skin, which was very disturbing. Another example of imagery was when the baby was being born. I could imagine the baby on the table with its empty head.
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Eaves dropper: The voice from the wall
1) In this chapter i think it is pretty neat that the two chinease people could see what other people cant see. The fact that the baby died was sad and the mother really started going crazy made me sad. The girl who was supposedly beaten next door related to the first part of the story. In order to understand the others persons perspectiive you need to be in that persons shoes.
2) Lena St. Clair and her mother relate in this chapter. Both ladies can see things that normal people can't see. This relates them a lot.
3) The conflict in this chapter is internal. Lena is fighting what she knows is right and what is right. Her mother suffers and Lena thinks she knows why.
“Mutated Babies”
The Voice from the Wall
1/ This chapter was bizarre and confusing. I don’t get at all the connection between the story, the begger who was sentenced to be cut one thousand times, and the ending where the girl pulls the mother’s hand out. One good thing about this vignette however is that it is interesting to see that the St. Clair family is so messed up. First of all, we have a husband and wife that don’t know what each other are saying half the time. Secondly, we have a daughter that is crazy. When she hears the mother and daughter next door argue, she imagines them beating and killing each other. Lastly, we have a depressed mother who has to put up with the fact that she bore a son with no brain. Such a bizarre family.
2/ Ying-Ying and Clifford St. Clair are very distant from one another. They don’t really communicate very well with one another because of the language barrier and Clifford doesn’t seem to know his wife very well because of the fact that he wrote his wife’s birthdate wrong. When confronted with the tragedy of the death of their son, they don’t even help one another cope and rebound from it. Instead, there seems to be a wall between them because they language barrier causes Clifford to not really understand his wife and thus, cannot know what is wrong with her.
3/ I liked how Tan used imagery to show the dark parts of the story. One scene that really got to me was when the son was born. When Tan described how the baby having “tiny legs,” “small arms,” “thin neck,” and a large head with a gaping hole and no brain in it, it left a very disturbing image in my mind. Images like these enhances the story for me because it helps me feel and relate to the shock and awe that the St. Clair experiences when they see their mutated son.
Lost in Life.
1) I thought this was a very strange and awkward chapter, but i still give it a thumbs up for its plot. My first impression was that it was going to be another dull story about how she grew up and would end up disliking her mother because of the way that her mother spoke to her. In the beginning of the story is tells a story of a beggar that is whipped and cut, as Lena St. Clair asks questions about the story her mother doesn't answer them and complains about why she is asking this kind of stuff. As it progress, i noticed that it had become more complex then just asking questions. I thought it was weird how Lena always eavesdropped on the neighbors arguments, and tried to stalk the girl who was living there. Another reaction i had was when the baby was born and died, i thought that that was very sad, including how the mother almost gave up on life because of that incident.
2) I think the relationship between Lena's parents is far apart. For one thing, Lena's father does not speak any Chinese, yet he is always trying to translate it into something else, his own words. The father never knew what his wife was trying to do and lies to cover things up. It is really bad, but at least he also tries to help her and worries about her. Ever since the beginning, Lena's father has made mistakes and bold movements towards "Betty's" life, such as writing the wrong birth year for her, and changing her name from Gu Ying-ying to Betty St. Clair.
3)Conflicts:
The main conflict in this chapter is an internal one with Lena's mother, Betty. After the baby is born and dies, she cracks and loses her will. I think that this conflict was not solved within this chapter but it caused a lot of problems and worry for the whole family. I know it was the main conflict because it was was one of the biggest points in the chapter.
-Aaron Ly
The baby has no brain!
1. This chapter made me feel a little uneasy from all the bizarre events that occurred. The chapter starts off with a beggar who has had a thousand cuts, and resulted in her grandfather dying? Anyways, Lena has a pretty cool father, id have to admit although hes clueless, he always looks on the bright side, and when things look glum, he says things that make it seem that everything is going to be alright, which is re-assuring. However, Lena really knows whats going on with her mother, because of her fathers lack of knowledge of the Chinese language. I dont know if this chapter deserves a thumbs up or a thumbs down, so im just gonna give it a n/a.
2. While spotlighting on Lena and Ying-Ying, there is a very noticeable conflict. Lena is a really innocent girl who, all her life has been taught to find fear in everything due to her mothers crazy belief in superstitions. An example of this is when the man goes out with his arms out hollering, "Suzie Wong, you are the love of my life". The effect had Lena screaming and her mother covering herself as if she were naked. I feel pretty sad for Lena, having to grow up with wild superstitions as her mother.
3. In this chapter, it made me remember a cartoon character from the old show on Nickelodeon named Hey Arnold. There would always be a kid who was weak, flimsy and would always get hurt and held an unbelievable amount of superstitions. This resembles Lena and her mother, going through the same crisis. I also thought that the Italian girl getting beat is kind of what Asian parents do to their children if they don't get good grades. :(
Superstitious much?
1. Lena is brought into a life full of Chinese everything by her, Ying-Ying. First, Ying-Ying tells her daughter not to look at a woman because she looks bad. She immediately predicts that she met a bad man and had an unwanted baby, just to scare her young daughter. And then! On page 109, Ying-Ying tells Lena that she cannot understand certain things because she hasn't put them in her mind yet. I thought that was pretty typical for a Chinese mother in the Americas. Mothers always think they know everything and they always want to put only the things their daughters should, or should i say, allowed to know in their minds. Also, I thought it was kind of scary when she said she saw the baby's head was open too. Talk about weird. Towards the end of the chapter, Lena realized that the family next door was nothing of what she thought they were. She thought the mother was going to practically kill her daughter, possibly due to the fact that Ying-Ying has been telling her all these crazy things about people. She is so judgemental. This chapter was, well, interesting.
2. The relationship between Ying-Ying and her husband seems to be very distant, almost non-existent. He probably doesn't understand half the things she says or does, and the same for her. He's constantly asking his daughter, "What is she doing?" or "What did she say?" When he tells Lena about her mother after the miscarriage, he doesn't seem to understand her all that much either. They don't seem to argue, though. Their relationship is like none other, it's very unique.
3. I think the main conflict in this chapter is human vs. society, Lena being the issue of this problem. Lena, after being told about much of the Chinese superstitions, is probably confused about what kind of people there are in this world. Her mother has taught her that just by the looks of the person, you can see what kind of person they are or have been. That is of course, not true. But towards the end of this chapter, with the help of her neighbors, she begins to realize that she was wrong about people. She doesn't have to rely on their actions or words to figure out who they are. Lena has to figure out who people really are, and not using the "words of wisdom" her mother has given her.
"Help, I Hear Voices..."
1)This chapter was okay, but very confusing. The beginning was really confusing. I didn't understand what the beggar meant. Ying-Ying tells Lena all these stories about superstitious things. And then they baby...Ying-Ying is sort of strange...If she knew about all these things then why didn't she do anything to stop it?! Anyways, i think this chapter was just weird...too much stuff going on.
2)Ying-Ying and her husband:
Their relationship is very strange. Why would they have married each other if they can't understand what they say to each other. Isn't one of the most important things in a relationship communication? Lena's dad doesn't seem to understand anything about Ying-Ying. He always misinterpret what she has to say. And makes things up, like when she makes a good meal he says it's because she thinks they are a great family. I don't know how they could have even gotten married.
3)This chapter relates to the opening allegory because in the opening, the mother warns the girl about The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates. The book is like a book with superstitions. Like the book, Ying-Ying has a lot of superstitions of her own.
"Is It Just Me, Or Am I Hearing Things":
1)Reactions on "The Voice from the Wall":
In this chapter, I was kind of surprised the of the way Lena St. Clair was treated as a child. first of all, it was just freaky how Ying-ying made her daughter believe in such a monstrous figure at a young age; such nonsense in the first place. When she says on page 105 how her mother prevented her from dying, Ying-ying was pretty much implying her fears onto her daughter. I kind of feel the same way because my mother is always annoyingly overprotective of me and forces me to fear many of the same things too. Also, the neighbor, Teresa Sorci, who I think was pretty spoiled. she argued with her parents and was kicked out by her mother, and yet then she came to Lena's apartment and goes through the fire escape window to her room, saying "Nah, she'll just be glad I�m not dead or something.(Tan 119)" What is up with that?! She practically has her mom twirled around her finger, knowing she'll be able to get away with anything.
2)Relationships in "The Voice Beyond the Wall":
An unseen, but very important relationship in his chapter is that between that of the man in the basement and Ying-ying St. Clair. When Lena says, �As I remember it, the dark side of my mother sprang from our basement in our old house...until the day I was finally able to pry it open with my small fingers...only then did my mother tell me about the bad man who lived in the basement..." she tells of how her mother had a shadowy force that caused her to invoke fright. In this relationship, the man stands for the trauma that ying-ying faced when she was younger when watching the Moon Lady turn into a man and all these other instances, and her fear of these returning forced her to assimilate them into an imaginary personality, which she could then restrict and lock away , so she will never have to see again. But after this incident, she believed these fears had been set free.
3)Essential Questions in "A Voice Form the Wall":
In this chapter, I learned a lot about birth dates in Chinese culture. I found out that people in China start the record of their birth as soon as they are conceived instead of when they were born, which can cause a lot of confusion when a Chinese family moves to America.
"Devil in the Sandbox"
{The Voice from behind the Wall)
1) Reaction: I liked this chapter for the most part. When I was a child attending sunday school lots of the storys adults would tell were pretty morbid. I would have bad dreams about relatives dying and other absurd notions. I started doing small compulsive things like farcing the sharp side of knives to the left and avoided saying "good night" for reasons I dont remember. The superstitions that Lena inherited from her mother reminded me of my own childish habits that I've grown out of.
2) Relationship: Lena's relationship with the Sorcis girl who lived in the appartment next to hers is a strange compelling one. I kept thinking to myself, "Why is she apart of this story?" I think that the purpose of her role was to represent how Lena and her mother saw bad omens in everything and sometimes these things can be positive. It's a bit like comparing how complicated mother-daughter relationships are in general. Amy Tan gave a bit of a strech connecting this issue with an Italian family. I am not at all familiar with the culture of this family and do not understand their relationships because I do not know the whole story. I still want to know if I'm missing something here.
3)Culture: From this chapter I learned that Chinese people revere ghosts and fear them. They also see their surroundings as walking metaphors like "See how narrow this doorway is, like a neck that has been strangled. (p. 112)" Instead of seeing the doorway as narrow and interpreting it too good like... for example, if the door was too narrow to let the big, bad demons in. I thought it was rather peculiar, and I wasnt too sure what to think about Ying- ying's superstitions...
“the worst thing”
The Voice from the Wall
1.Strange and confusing doesn’t even begin to describe this chapter. It was extremely bizarre. Lena sound really mental when she talked about all the disturbing images she saw in everyday life. I didn’t really get why she saw them either. Another thing I didn’t get was the Chinese man and what he was really doing? Was that supposed to be a joke? If it was, it wasn’t really funny nor did it really make sense. But then again there are some strange people out there in the world. When Ying-Ying was talking about her then dead baby, she says a lot of crazy things which I didn’t really get. What did she mean by “ I could see all the way back, to where his thoughts were supposed to be, an there was nothing there.”
2.Ying-Ying and her husband don’t really have much of a relationship because they can’t even communicate with each other easily. Neither of them will take lessons in the language that the other speaks. Without communication how can you have any kind of good relationship with anyone? Mr. St. Clair just “ put[s] words in [Ying-ying’s] mouth.” (108)
3.I think the main conflict in this chapter is an internal conflict with Ying-Ying and herself. After the death of her baby, she loses it and begins to grieve during random times throughout the day. She even begin “resting” a lot more. Ying-Ying has to deal with ‘the worst possible thing,” which was losing her child, and try to move on.
What a bunch of LOONEYS!!
1. I really liked this chapter. the weird factor entices me:) haha. The beggining with the story of the thousand cuts was intense, i mean come on! thats awful just shoot them in the head and get it over with. Lena's mother is a strange woman who is very interested with chinese culture and the superstitions. Then when Tan wrote about the scene with the dead baby with no brain, the reader gets a very clear picture of what Lena has to live with, a crazy mom. I also thought it was funny when Lena's mother moved al lthe furniture around. Her explanations for the arrangements were interesting...haha 0_o
2. The main conflict between characters was pretty hard for me to decide. on one hand you got Lena's mother and father who do not even speak the same language. And on the other, Lena is overwhelmed with all the weird stuff her mother says and does. Lena is so overwhelmed she even starts to judge her life with yelling families who live next to her. All in all the St. Clair family is whack.
3.I think the theme/message is that there is always a silver lining to a grey cloud. Meaning that there is always something that could make your situation better. The silver linig for Lena in this chapter was when the girl who lived next door came over to hide from her mother. Lena learned that she did have an okay life because she was never really abused in her house. She also learned that even though familys might fight they will still love eachother(most of the time).
“Voices in my Head”
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter was very strange. I thought that it was kind of scary how Lena would imagine things when she listened to Traci’s conversations through the wall next to her bed. This is probably the result of Ying-Ying not being very present in Lena’ life, Ying-Ying seemed to be in her own world and not care about her surroundings any more after the lost baby.
2. The relationship between Ying-Ying and her husband Clifford does not seem like one at all. Clifford really has a passionate love for Ying-Ying, but Ying-Ying does not. Lena is always lying to her father about what her mother says. Clifford practically makes up whatever he wants that he thinks Ying-Ying is saying. I think that deep down inside, he knows that Ying-Ying does not truly love him. He is just using their disability as a blindfold to cover up what he does not want to see. With the help of Lena, Clifford is successful in becoming blind to all those little hints that are right in front of his eyes that there is no love between Ying-Ying and him.
3. In this chapter there is an internal conflict between Lena and herself. Even though the way she thinks comes from partly from her mother, but she also has the ability to decide not to accept that way of thinking if she did not want to. If she was having thoughts that are troubling her, she should talk it out with somebody. But she doesn’t and instead they are bottled up inside of her and cause her to imagine things that are not there.
A Thousand Cuts
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1. Reaction
I did not enjoy reading this chapter at all. It was all too bizarre and creepy! All those Chinese stories that Lena’s mother told to Lena such as the story about how Lena’s great-grandfather was murdered was really weird and scary. Lena and Ying-Ying’s personalities and views of the world are very odd and almost sadistic. Ying-Ying obviously had some problems in her past and those experiences are effecting Lena’s present life. The parts where Lena was listening through her wall to hear the girl’s and woman’s voice was really creepy, especially how Lena imagined all these sadistic assumptions of what was going on. Overall, I thought this chapter was really out of place and confusing.
2. Ying-Ying & Lena’s father
The relationship between Ying-Ying and Lena’s father is very distant. Although they may have tried to become accustomed to each other, there were too many differences. The chapter showed that Lena’s father seemed to know very little about his own wife. The main problem is that Lena’s father does not understand Chinese while Ying-Ying does not understand a lot of English, making it hard for them to connect. Lena’s father had to use Lena to understand what Ying-Ying was saying and that is not a very healthy marriage!
3. Relation to the Allegory
This chapter relates to the opening allegory because Lena’s mother warns Lena about what she shouldn’t do and the dangerous consequences of those actions. In the opening allegory, a mother threatens her daughter to listen using the book of The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates. Lena’s mother told Lena to “not walk in any direction but to school and back home” just like how the mother in the opening allegory warned her daughter not to ride her bicycle around the corner (109). Both daughters question why to the warnings of their mothers and argue about the reasons. This is how the chapter is very similar to the opening allegory of a mother’s influence and warnings.
“The 6th sense”
(“The voices from the wall”)
1)If this chapter had any good in it, i didn't enjoy it. I was so confused when I finished reading this chapter. I read it and then I finished, I put the book down and was like “say what!?!?!?!”. It was scary in a way. When Lena tells us about her mom barricading the door, I wondered what Ying-Ying was hiding. At first I thought it was a murderer or something, or a rabid dog, I never found out what it was. Then as everything progresses I came to the conclusion that Ying-Ying was a mental case!!!! Does she have a baby? Did she have a miscarriage?!?! I was sooo very confused.
2) Lena St.Claire and Her father have a sweet relationship. I thought it was very nice that she takes care of her father and that he takes care of her. He seemed to protect her a lot. Especially when her mom would get really nutty. On the other hand Lena protected him too. She told him lies about what her mother would say because he could not understand that she said. Lean’s father doesn’t really realize that she is a wreck inside and some times I think she might end up like her mother. I think that’s her real fear. With all the factors, they cared for each other deeply and we can tell that they love each other.
3) From what I understood, about what I read, Ying Ying married Lena’s father to get her green card. I’m I right? Well, if I am, then I this relates to real life because many people do this to get immigration rights. They get married to a citizen and then they receive citizenship. But the fault, I belive, is that many people divorce after this action. Ying Ying doesn’t and I got the feeling she doesn’t love her husband. She seems estranged.
-Andrea Ulloa :D
"Driving Me Up the Wall"
1) Reaction
I've never liked the St. Clair vignettes because they're bizarre. The descriptions were good but there were too many psychotic things going on. I didn't get why that one guy was running at Lena and Ying-ying, and also, I didn't get what was happening when Lena fell down the basement or the scene with the baby. I give this chapter two thumbs down. ):
2)The relationship between Lena and her mom is not so normal. Throughout Lena's childhood her mother has been a mystery to her, making her see dangers where there wasn't. Instead of telling Lena how her grandfather really died, Ying-ying makes up a story about how he was pulled into a wall by a man made of broken pieces. This exaggeration causes Lena to dwell on it horribly and some of Ying-ying's wild superstitions affects Lena in the future. For instance, unlike other children, Lena can see a girl "splashed in the head" with a tether ball or a kid hurtling off the swings. Like her mother, Lena exaggerates simple things and turns them into potential danger. All these fears stem from what her mom told her when she was little, like the man in the basement that would eat them. Their relationship is a mystery where the daughter thinks her mother is mad and crazy.
3) In this chapter I learned that things like objects have to be balanced in order for life to be happy and balanced. Sometimes furniture or houses have to be built a certain way or at a certain angle for correct balance.
“I think I’m hearing things…”
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter was so strange and uneasy to read, although it was interesting. The opening paragraph really caught my attention. It states, “When I was little, my mother told me my great grandfather had sentenced a beggar to die in the worst possible way…” After that, the passage reads how the dead man comes back to life and kills the great grandfather. This I thought was really bizarre; I wondered why Amy Tan would put such a beginning in her chapter. But as I read through the rest of it, I thought, why does this chapter even matter? I know it discusses the struggle Lena S. Clair has with her mother’s depression; how her family is falling apart, but the chapter really doesn’t relate or connect to any of the other stories in, “The Twenty-six Malignant Gates.” In addition to the chapter, Lena starts to hear and see a little Italian girl get tortured every night. Again, there goes another part of the chapter that I think is weird and misplaced.
2. The relationship between Lena and her other is a very odd distant one. Lena’s mother’s depression is causing Lena to see the disorder that is formed in her house hold. It alters Lena’s future and also her self being in many ways. Not at all is the relationship one were Lena could ask her mother for advice or guidance, it’s hardly a relationship at al. Her father, who is oblivious to the matter, makes it even worse.
3. Although not stated in the chapter, I think the little Italian girl is a symbol of hope for Lena and her family. As Lena listens to the fighting and torture of the next room, she feels remorse and is glad she isn’t as bad off as the little girl. But as Lena’s life starts to crumble apart, she believes her situation is near close to the little girls. When the Little girl comes to the door asking to use the fire escape to return to her room and successfully fool her mother, Lena is scared for her life. But later she hears laughing and kissing which gives her a sense of hope that her family will once again be balanced.
"Disturbing childhood"
"The Voice from the Wall"
1. I give this chapter thumbs down because it was really disturbing to me. I do not understand why Lena's mother told Lena that there was a creepy man in the basement for thousands of years. The thoughts and illusions Lena started to have was so diabolic and bloody. "Tether balls that could splash a girl's head all over the playground in front of laughing friends" (106). Lena was only five when she had these types of thoughts which are not healthy for children. The only thing that made my laugh was when Lena's father would try to translate what his wife says but he says the total opposite of what she means. He thinks Lena's mother is whenever she turns moody.
2. The relationship between Lena's parents is lacking. They lack in communication because the only language Lena's father can understand is English and her mother can only understand Chinese. Her father tries to put words in her mother's mouth whenever she tries to talk or makes a gesture. "So with him, she spoke in moods and gestures, looks and silences, and sometimes a combination of English punctuated by hesitations and Chinese frustration" (108). They could not really communicate with each other so they depended on Lena to translate and tell what they are really saying.
3. This chapter relates to the opening allegory because Lena's mother had told her to walk directly to school and back home. Just like the opening allegory where the girl asked her mother why she couldn't ride her bicycle around the corner, Lena asked why a couple of times. Both mother could not give a direct reason why but to make something up. The allegory mother answered that she wouldn't be able to see her when she falls and Lena's mother answered that she will be taken away and get raped. Both daughters did not believe what their mother said.
I’m Hearing Things I Shouldn’t Be – “The Voice from the Wall”
1. I thought this chapter was kind of weird because Lena St. Clair always talks about how she sees the evil in life that she inherits from her mother. I also thought that it was weird how her mother explained the dead baby. What was also weird was when Lena realized that her neighbors were actually getting along and better off than Lena’s family even though they yelled every night.
2. I think the relationship between Teresa and her mother is very unique. Even though they fight every night and even hurt each other, they still love each other dearly. They just show their affection for one another through yelling. In the end, it is obvious that Teresa and her mother care for each other when Lena hears them “laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love.” At that point, one realizes that no matter how much two people might say they hate the other, nothing can stop a love between a mother and her daughter.
3. In this chapter, the main conflict is both external and internal. Lena’s mother will not accept that fact that she is pregnant and is not careful with taking care of her child when it has not been born yet. In the end, the child is born with an open head. Lena’s mother is internally conflicted because she does not want to accept that she is having a baby. She is externally conflicted because in the end, she gives birth to an already dead baby. Lena’s mother is also internally conflicted when she sees the dead baby born. She feels awful because she killed her own child.
Unspoken Terrors
1. No thumbs. I don’t really think this chapter is good, but it isn’t bad either. I was really confused in the beginning. What was in the basement? Whatever was in there, it made her really really paranoid. Hello? Tether balls can’t smash your head open. Not possible. I also don’t understand how Mr. St. Clair could fall in love with Ling-Ling if he can’t even understand her. The ending was confusing where a girl was cutting up her mom….
2. Ling-Ling and Lena
Ling-Ling is a really strange person. She’s very paranoid and afraid of all kinds of things that can happen. She looks out for Ling-Ling and tries to keep her safe by scaring her with stories. She’s usually off in her own world and doesn’t really pay attention to Lena. She says things like, “‘a man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby. Then you’ll kill the baby. And when they find this baby in the garbage can, then what can be done? You’ll go to jail, die there’” (109).Lena sees these strange things of her mother and is affected. She starts to see these things herself, her mother’s paranoia rubbed off on her. Lena cares about her mother, but she doesn’t know what’s wrong with her and how she can help. She feels like she is “not being seen” by her mother and feels uncared for (120).
3. Events of Life Today
After Ling-Ling’s miscarriage, she breaks apart. She cries in the middle of cooking and doesn’t pay any attention to what’s going on around her. It’s like she died inside. This often happens in life. A mother has a miscarriage and fall apart. They think the death of the baby is their fault, though often, it is not. They feel they did something to make the baby die and they break apart with guilt and sadness.
"Morbid Images"
The Voice from the Wall
1. I thought it was an intriguing change that suddenly, not only do you have crazy Asian parents, but you have such a vivid, running imagination that sometimes it even frightens you. It is apparent that Amy Tan has portrayed her imagination through Lena St. Clair. I give it one thumb up because I found it interesting how she could imagine a full murder scene just because she heard her neighbors fighting. The story is also a one thumb down because it is a bit disturbing how her mother has that freaky hallucination that there is some man in her cellar and all these other extreme images I get from reading the descriptions. However, I do remember a funny part where Lena tries to make her eyes bigger by opening them wide and her father asks her why she looks so scared. I found that hilarious.
2. Lena and her mom are the main characters in this chapter. Lena has to deal with her mother’s odd superstitions and hallucinations. One of her main fears is a man “making [Lena] have a baby”. That is what she often says to her when she tries to prevent Lena from something. Lena on the other hand is a normal daughter that has inherited her mother’ imagination. She translates for her mother and stands by her. They are pretty close compared to most of the other Asian mother daughter pairs in the other chapters. However, when her mother’s second child dies, her mother goes crazy. Their relationship is shattered as her mother is seemingly in another world, consumed by her superstitions and worrying all those around her.
3. In this chapter, I learned that in Chinese culture the placement of furniture determines your luck and peace. I think in certain situations it makes sense but in this chapter it made no sense at all. Yin Yin was just crazy because she was pregnant and she felt the world around her was unbalanced. She lost her mind.
Title: Ying-ying has PROBLEMS
(Focusing on “The Voice from the Wall”)
1) This chapter was very morbid and dark, to me. Ying-ying definitely lost her mind by the end of the chapter, what with her seeing things that don’t exist. Why was the baby born without a brain? It must have been really traumatic, for Ying-ying to see through her son’s head and find that she’d had a still-born child. I didn’t like the scene where Ying-ying is explaining what she saw. I got confused too much; I thought that the baby really did raise its head even though it had no brain and was dead, that it really did look at her. Why would the baby’s head do that in Ying-ying’s mind, fill with hot air and stare straight into her thoughts? I didn’t particularly like this chapter, as it was mostly confusing and just plain disturbing at parts, but I did like how Lena would listen to the girl and her mother next door and think that they hated each other, but they really loved each other instead.
2) For Lena’s father and her, I think that their relationship is pretty much in denial, or fake, when it comes to Ying-ying. Lena tells her father what he wants to hear, knowing that if he heard otherwise he would worry for his wife, and she cannot tell him the truth of what happened to Ying-ying; that she’d gone crazy. Lena’s father is always trying to help, but he makes excuses for a lot of things, so though they love each other, his resistance to the truth may cause them some trouble.
3) In this chapter, Amy Tan uses some literary devices, but mainly imagery. How she describes the man that Lena’s great-grandfather, and how he looked when he was a ghost, she says that he looked “like a smashed vase hastily put back together.” Though somewhat gruesome, it gives us an idea of just how the man was killed and why he would want to come back and haunt Lena’s great-grandfather. She also uses imagery when Ying-ying is describing her still-born son, how “his body slipped out and he lay on the table, steaming with life.”
Going Crazy….-“The Voice From the Wall”
1. This chapter was thumbs down for me because of all the confusing events that happened and the dark mood that lingered over each word. It starts off with Lena talking about a story her mom told her of Lena’s grandfather sentencing a beggar to death. Lena imagined the beggar dying from a thousand cuts but his mind shattered into a thousand pieces first. Then, her mom tells Lena about the man in the basement, who lived there for thousands of years and was “evil and hungry.” Lena has been haunted by these stories ever since she was a kid and they have changed her view about the world around her. She claims to be able to “sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded [her] house…”
2. The relationship between Ying-Ying and her husband is filled with miscommunication. Ying-Ying speaks little English and her husband doesn’t understand Chinese. Whenever Ying-Ying describes something in Chinese, her husband doesn’t understand what she’s trying to say and puts words in her mouth instead.
3. I think the main conflict in this chapter is internal: Lena vs. herself. Lena’s overprotective mother always warned Lena of all the horrors in life. For example, the man in the basement and the man who died of a thousand cuts. What makes matters worse is that Ying-Ying seems to be going crazy, seeing things that don’t seem to be there. Now, Ying-Ying is unsure of what is real and what her mom wants her to see. Her view of life has become distorted from her mother’s teachings.
Hey, Can I Use Your Window?
(The Voice From the Wall)
1. I didn’t like this chapter as much as previous ones. It would be very strange for me to go to my neighbor’s house and to jump their fence in order to get to my room. I would rather sort things out with my family than to bring my neighbors into it. I don’t think it’s realistic that someone would be kicked out of their house and then start to laugh. The scene where Teresa and her mom fought for the last time in the chapter, it was corny to have them fighting and then all of a sudden to have them hugging and kissing one another.
2. Theresa and her mom seem to always be angry at each other. Lena would imagine them killing each other, and then coming back to life the next night. Teresa doesn’t find peace with her mom until she is in danger, which happens at the end of the chapter. No matter how bad a mother feels about their child, they seem to help when their child is sick or in trouble.
3. This chapter refers to the allegory because the mom is trying to protect Lena. The mother’s way of protecting her is seeing, hearing, and speaking no evil. The mom believes what Lena does not know cannot hurt her. In both stories, the mother’s try to protect their daughters.
"I'm Curious to See This Chapter On Screen"
(A Voice from the Wall)
1) As I was reading this chapter, with all its description and complexity, I felt like I was watching a very well planned scary movie (without the screeching violins in the background). What I find odd is why Ying-Ying married someone who has no knowledge of the Chinese culture nor its language. Because of this, Lena has to translate everything to him. The awkward thing is that sometimes Ying-Ying says something nonsensical in Chinese and even though Lena can translate her literally, she does not know its meaning. On a side note, this movie did remind me of The Grudge, don't know why.
2) There was a very awkward relationship between Teresa and her mother. Each and every night, Lena could hear the banging, screaming, and other horrific things coming from the other side of the wall, only imagining the worst (in this case, Teresa being killed). When Teresa came up to her front door, it is revealed that even though they fight constantly, it's their only way to socialize. To me, that makes no sense. Fighting would be something totally opposite from talking normally. Then, after sneaking back into her room when she was kicked out by her mother, she was scolded for a moment. But after her mother scolded her, they laughed, like a sign of relief. And in the end, their family seemed to be normal and happy.
3) Something I learned from the Chinese culture is the positioning of furniture inside the house. Depending on how everything's placed, it would either bring good or bad luck into the house. Actually when I think about it, my house is kind of like this, too. I don't really understand it myself, but it has something to do with an object facing in a certain direction (north, south, east, west) and angle.
"Unlucky House"
(chapter: The Voice from the Wall)
1) Although this chapter had its share of awkwardness, I really found myself enjoying reading it. I find all of Ying- Ying's superstitions very interesting to read because it got me thinking at how my house is. What if my house is also unbalanced? Are my doorways too narrow and should I move my bed so it's not by the window? After reading the chapter, I felt the urge to rearrange my room.
2. The relationship between Ying- Ying and her Caucasian husband was quite unique. Unlike most married couples, Ying- Ying St. Clair and her husband don't share the same language and had a hard time communicating. Even though language isn't required in love, its hard for me to consider their relationship to be "true love" since they don't really know each other. Although they don't really speak to each other, I think that her husband does love her.
3. Writing Techniques
The one thing that really made this chapter a thrill to read is its imagery and sensory details. Amy Tan's word choice really created a bone chilling mood during the scene where Lena was imagining that her neighbor was being beaten to death. I could just picture the girl being chopped into individual pieces like a piece of tender beef. I was disgusted but couldn't stop reading until the end.
“Who’s there?”
Chapter “Voice from the Wall”
1) My Reaction
In the beginning and ending of the chapter, I was confused at what was going on. I did not understand the story of the voice from the wall. I gave this chapter a thumbs down because I thought the story line was too draggy and confusing. The weird part of the chapter was when Ying-Ying described how the “baby’s eyes were open and his head was open too” (116). I was disgusted and once again confused. How could the baby’s head be open and have no brain? Was Ying-ying just being overdramatic or was she actually telling the truth? The image just made me gag.
2) Lena’s parents
The relationship between Lena’s parents was very caring and considerate. Because of Ying-ying’s lack of English and her physical gestures, Lena’s father “would put words in [Ying-ying’s] mouth (108). He could understand Ying-ying even if no one else could. After the death of the baby, Ying-ying became weak and traumatized. After dinner, she would just rest on the bed while Lena’s father “was doing the dishes” (118). I believed Lena’s father was a very thoughtful husband.
3) Relation to the Opening Allegory
This chapter relates to the opening allegory because in the allegory, the mother doesn’t want her daughter to wander off away from their home just like how Ying-ying doesn’t warns Lena “to help her avoid some unknown danger” (108). Both mothers always want to protect their daughters from any harm or danger. As a result, both of the daughters are fed up with their mother’s boundaries that they wound up disobeying their mothers.
“I see dead people.”
1.)My first reaction was “what the heck?!” no words could’ve have described on how confused I was. As I read the chapter over and it made more sense. Just like the previous chapter, I could relate. In this chapter Lena St. Clair’s mother is very superstitious and believes in every saying and curse she was raised to believe. She is very paranoid, which scares Lena and her father. I was very disappointed when I had found out that the baby that they were going to have died. This chapter made me very paranoid, and disappointed at the same time. It wasn’t one of my favorite chapters.
2.) Two characters I would like to relate to each other is Lena St. Clair and the girl Teresa. Although they only meet once through this chapter, it is as though they know a lot more about each other than they think. That’s where the title “the voice from the wall comes from.” Teresa and Lena are alike in more ways than you think. They are both having troubles with their mothers, yet they both forgive them, even though they have to go through the same thing with them everyday. You can’t really hate your mother for that long. Teresa and Lena are just two girls trying to find a spot in the world, just like everyone else, whether they make good or bad decisions.
3.) #4
I am learning many things by reading this book. In the chapter “the voice from the wall” I have learned that the Chinese are very superstitious, and take everything literally. They believe in the art of feung shuy, and mysterious crafts of that kind. They believe that if furniture is in the wrong place, the room is unbalanced. I have also learned many Chinese people had to leave another home behind, and change their names to come to America. Just by reading “the voice from the wall” I have learned many things about the Chinese culture.
This chapter was one I particularly disliked, because I couldn’t make sense of what Tan was trying to do with the ideas that she put in here. I also read it late at night, and the chapter sort of scared me, because I was afraid of these things when I was a little kid. The part I didn’t understand the most was the baby’s birth, because it supposedly had wide open eyes. I actually sort of found a way to connect Teresa’s leaving with the scene at the end. If we take the mother, lying in the bed, to be Teresa’s mother, and put Teresa in the position of the girl, then we can say that the thousand cuts was inflicted by her running away. The girl then pulls her mother, makes the mother, “come back” to the land of the living by returning and pulling her out of her pain.
The relationship between Lena and her mother starts out being sort of normal, with a paranoid mother and her confused daughter, but then goes down after she becomes crazy. At first, Lena asks her mother about this and that, usually having to do with some danger that she was warned about. But then, Lena begins losing her mother, watching in regret as the elder of the two fell apart.
There are actually two conflicts in this chapter: the one in the St. Clair home, and the one next door. The one involving Teresa is external, because it is the mother and daughter arguing and fighting over things. The one that Lena is going through is that of her mother going crazy, and is internal, because Lena’s reluctance to lose her mother is going against the mom’s inexorable journey towards madness.
Scary People Next Door
The Voice From the Wall
1)This chapter was not so great. It was creepy and strange and it sounded very sad and emotional. Hearing two women yelling next door and then thinking that one of them died, is a very scary thought. It is weird how Lena thinks of the bad stuff and killing and violence. I didn’t really get this chapter because Lena was only thinking of evil events and I didn’t get the message.
2)Lena’s mother is overprotected and always not answering Lena’s curious questions. It like she doesn’t want Lena to know the truth, like she is hiding something. Lena’s mother lost her baby and she believed thing had to be balanced so all these probably had an affect towards Lena and that is probably why this mad her think in a scary way.
3)I learned that Asians believed that things should be balanced and if it isn’t, then something bad would happen. Like when Lena’s mother was imbalanced because she had a baby. But because she thought her house was not balanced, she started to move things around, bumping things into her stomach. And in the end, she lost her baby.
“Insane in the Membrane”
“The Voice from the Wall”
Reaction:
Hahahaha. This chapter made no sense! Ying-Ying is crazy. She goes through so many things in her life, suffering a baby loss, a house that is apparently “unbalanced”, and people changing her words around. This was a very hard chapter to read and left me going back a couple times to read again because some things did not make sense. This chapter is obviously thumbs down.
Clifford and Ying-ying:
This relationship shouldn’t really be a relationship at all. They both do not understand each other that much since they speak different languages and Clifford doesn’t seem to be a helping figure to Ying-ying. She’s crazy and has these hallucinations but Clifford doesn’t seem to know what’s up. He takes her words and turns them into something positive when the words aren’t.
3] I learned a lot about Chinese culture, some crazy stuff too. I learned that moving furniture around will balance the house so that it will be peaceful. I think this is ridiculous but it is a superstition.
I Hear Dead People – “The Voice from the Wall”
This chapter was a little on the weird side for me. I confused from the beginning and even more confused towards the end of the chapter. It starts off with a bloody scene and ends with a bloody scene as well, which made me shiver inside. I thought Lena was one of those “special” children that saw the world differently from others and even she thought so too. From her point of view, everything had some deep dark secret and Lena could see right through it. I expected her mom to be insecure as well because she had scary childhood in “Moon Lady”. Although I didn’t like the way Ying-Ying lied to her daughter, I really felt close to her because of how she always wanted to protect Lena.
In a lot of ways, I admired Ying-Ying and her husband’s relationship. They had huge language barriers and even then, they still loved each other. He even helped sign her immigration papers. However, I think she kind of lost her Chinese identity in America. People do not even know that Lena, her daughter, is half Chinese among the Caucasian girls. They would have to look really close to notice the Chinese in her. Ying-Ying’s relationship with her husband was bittersweet but their differences were also what separated them in the same way. Her husband had Lena translate for Ying-Ying most of the time and a few times, Lena wasn’t a very reliable translator.
I think the story of their neighbors, Teresa and her mother was a huge symbolism in this chapter. At first, Lena thought she had a better life compared to Teresa because she always heard arguments through the walls and things being banged against the wall. But towards the end of the chapter, Lena realizes that Teresa doesn’t worry about her situation at all and although Teresa and her mother’s relationship seem so stressed, everything always turned out fine in the end. Lena was confused after learning about Teresa’s situation. Teresa’s relationship with her mother symbolized Lena’s relationship with her own mother. I think Lena was able to realize the true definition of a happy life and a beautiful relationship with one’s mother. Despite their arguments and resentment towards each other, Teresa and her mother loved and accepted each other.
Everyone’s After Me!
“The Voices from the Wall”
1. This chapter kind of freaked me out when Lena talked about all the things she saw as a child, mostly the beetle with the face of a child. Just imagining that is really weird. Lena and her mom seem very similar, as they both seem terrified most of the time, seeing creepy things around them. I thought it was very awkward of Lena’s dad giving Ying-ying a different name, birth year, and with that a different animal. He also seems kind of stupid when he attempts to explain what Ying-ying is saying. I think it’s pretty bad of Lena to lie to her mom about what’s going on, and taking advantage of her just to get a new lunch box. In the new house, everything seems all wrong, especially when Ying-ying and Lena are harassed by the crazy drunken man on the street. Everything in their lives seems to be so terrifying, and Lena’s imagination exaggerates the fight her neighbors have. Even though no one’s dying, Lena thinks up all kinds of crazy things that are happening. After the death of the new baby, Ying-ying gets even crazier. She falls apart, always resting or having nervous breakdowns, while Lena continues to hear the fights going on in her neighbor’s apartment. However, when Teresa runs away and sneaks back in, the next fight Lena hears, she feels hope because she realizes she was wrong, and things weren’t so terrible for them. It was a bright end to this pretty sad and scary chapter, with hope for the future. Even at the end of the chapter though, I wonder what life Ying-ying lived in China that made her so fragile and paranoid.
2. The relationship between Ying-ying and her husband seems to be one of obligation. Without him, Ying-ying might have just been sent back to China, so she stays with him out of some sense of loyalty or obligation. He can’t even understand her half the time, so he has to make up things or guess what she’s trying to communicate. Even though they don’t understand each other though, the positive side of it is that they don’t fight much, and get along enough to have kids.
3. The main conflict of this chapter seems to be an internal struggle, human vs. self kind of struggle that Lena has with herself. Seeing all these crazy things and imagining the beating that Teresa gets every night, it seems to be driving Lena crazy just a bit, but definitely making her scared and sad. All of these things though, are all just in her head.
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"Trouble in Paradise"
The voice from the wall
1. This chapter was just crazy and weird. Lena must’ve been speaking metaphorically or something, because I didn’t understand this chapter. There unexplained problems everywhere and unresolved moods and actions. Was there another son? Why did the baby die if it was steaming with life? What are the problems? There was so much going on and so little understanding on my part. If I discuss this chapter and understood it a little more, then maybe I would’ve liked it more.
2. Lena St. Clair and Teresa Sorei, from what I think, have similar lives, but different problems. Lena, problem as well as Teresa stem from their household, or home. With Teresa, there is constant noise, fighting, and chaos. There is never a quiet moment in her home. Teresa’s problems are “outspoken” and wild. In contrast, Lena’s home is quiet and inactive. Yet, there are problems under the quiet vrel. There are mental issues concerning Lena’s mom, Ying, some troubles that are always on her dad’s mind, and unanswered thoughts in her own mind. They both have problems, but one is more open and noticeable than the other. What is strange though is that both girls might think the other has had it worse.
3. In this chapter, imagery caught my attention the most. Several scenes had shown vividly many minds. One scene was of the Sora’s fight, where Lena believes Teresa slices up in pieces, and her body mutilated. And her scene is when Ying-Ying describe her babies birth, hoe he had no life. Also, Lena’s imagery caught my attention and no anything. The flashbacks of when they lived in Oakland and Lena entering the dark basement made me curious and made me think about what happened. Now, I’m not sure what the eye opening is a symbol for, but I believe it is their struggle to adapt to their environment, it is said that they always looked scared when they opened their eyes. It could mean something and it makes you think. One last thing, relating the title to the story is a bit differently not sure what it means.
“Half and Half”
1. This chapter was a lot more enjoyable than the previous chapter. The only problem I had with this story is that it was a bit depressing. When Bing was lost, Rose and her mother An-Mei looked desperately and so faithful, yet Bing didn’t come back. It hurts to know that the faith these people believed in so strongly failed them. Other than that, the story was quite enjoyable. It was very confusing, yet amusing have Ted and Rose could divorce so easily after a stupid reason, just because Rose couldn’t make up her mind. I also found it cool have An-Mei and her husband had such NengKan, how they were so determined to succeed and so focused accomplishing their mission.
A Mother’s Love
“A Voice from the Wall”
1. Lena St. Clair shares a close resemblance with her mother because both their vignettes include something supernatural or fantasy-like. Lena inherited her mother’s supernatural gene because she can “sense” things which kind of scared me because she could see things a normal kid shouldn’t. I felt bad for her because she had a rough childhood seeing things like that. I thought that the story of a man that was executed with a thousand cuts was interesting. Like Lena, I was interested in knowing how that man died as well so it was funny when her mother said that American’s only have morbid thoughts in their mind.
2. Lena’s father and mother’s relationship can be described as an appreciative marriage. Her father claimed that he saved her mother from a terrible life in China. However, for some reason, it seems more like a sibling relationship rather than a loving relationship. Throughout the vignette, it doesn’t occur to me that they are married because they can barely communicate but rather, Lena’s father puts words into her mother’s mouth.
3. Amy Tan uses flashbacks to show Lena’s struggle to remain American. In the first flashback, Lena is revealed to be half-Chinese and half-Irish and although people think she looks like her father, she can’t help but try to make her Chinese eyes look more round. It helps to enhance by making it signify a conscious loss in heritage because Lena wants to get rid of her Chinese half.
4. The allegory in the beginning shows a mother who doesn’t want her daughter to ride her bike on the curve because she will get hurt. The daughter was too persistent and the mother let her go so she will learn her lesson. It means that when a mother loses sight of her daughter, the daughter will get hurt. In this vignette, Lena constantly hears her next door neighbors, a mother and her daughter, fighting. Lena believes that the girl’s life was unhappier than her own but finds out that the mother truly loves her daughter and the fighting is because they loved each other. Lena imagines a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen is unbearable, therefore connecting back to the allegory.
1. Rikki Dionisio, Period 6
2. “I see dead people…”
3. The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates: “A Voice From the Wall”
4. Tan uses symbolism throughout this chapter. I believe that the wall between Lena St. Clair’s bedroom to the family next door’s is a sign of a barrier between the families and her own family. Because the wall is always there she can never fully understand what is going on next door, the same goes for the language barrier that the St. Clair’s have. Lena is always translating for her mother to those around her, including her own father, which is strange. The wall between Lena and her family is that her mother, Ying-ying is unable to communicate clearly her thoughts and beliefs to a daughter who, in a sense, refuses to accept her mother the way she is. The wall also represents the cultural barrier that similar to the previous chapters, the mother’s and daughter’s share. In the chapter Lena explains her mother’s immigration to America with the few details her mother has shared with her. Ying-ying feels the home she has is San Francisco is unbalanced and Lena refuses to understand, or possibly just simply cannot, because of the cultural barrier (“wall”) that they share.
5. The relationship between Ying-ying and Clifford St. Clair is slightly amusing in the sense that half the time Clifford cannot even understand Ying-ying, yet he is still a devoted husband and she is a devoted wife. Clifford shows extreme devotion to Ying-ying not only because he saved her from a tradgety in China, but by also bringing her here and actually staying with her! Talk about devotion. Clifford constantly would put words in [Ying-ying’s] mouth (108) to sort of cover up the fact that he doesn’t fully understand her. A person who stays in a relationship with someone who they barely understand is a real trooper.
6. What are you learning about Chinese culture?
I am learning that you must basically buy a house that has a “good vibe” to it and that will bring good luck because if you don’t you’ll spend your days constantly mobbing furniture around to bring in “good luck” or else you’re letting “bad luck” into your home. Ying-ying moved into a home in San Francisco that she believed had a “bad vibe” and constantly had to move furniture around in the hopes that she’d finally hit the jackpot and find a good placement for all her furniture.
1. “Silent Struggle”
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. I found this chapter slightly disturbing compared to the previous chapters in the book. I thought it was hilarious when Lena’s mother screamed, “Why do you Americans have only these morbid thoughts in your mind?” (105) In my opinion, this is true. Americans sure do love their gore, with all the new rated “R” horror films constantly being released as proof. When Lena’s mom “barricaded the [basement] door with a wooden chair, secured it with a chain and two types of key locks” (105), I began to wonder what she was hiding. My curiosity was still not sated because even though Lena fell into the basement, she didn’t see anything. The explanation Ying-Ying gave her daughter was also not very satisfying to me. A “bad man” could not possibly live there “for thousands of years” (106). I really hated how Ying-Ying, or Betty, gave lies to Lena to explain things. For instance, she told Lena to stay away from a homeless woman because that lady had a child she didn’t want. Betty didn’t know anything about that homeless woman and I hated the fact that she just assumed the woman met a bad man and had an unwanted child. I also hate it when people label others based on appearance, not personality. To me, it’s extremely unfair. Since Betty talks so much about rape, it makes me wonder if she was ever raped when she was little. I was freaked out when Lena heard the neighbors getting into a fight. I half expected to read about police and a dead body the next morning. Betty’s baby being born without a brain was gross and also really sad. I pitied Betty because she seemed to take the loss of her child really hard, as would most other mothers.
4. I would describe the relationship between Lena and Betty St. Clair as caring. Although Betty makes up lies to do so, she constantly tries to protect her beloved daughter from harm. She tries to set up imaginary examples for Lena so she can learn from them and not make that mistake in the future. An example of this occurrence would be the time she and Lena passed by a homeless woman on the street. Lena also shows this caring nature towards her mother.. When Betty began compulsively rearranging the furniture in their apartment, Lena became very worried about her. This worry also shows when Betty started falling apart after the death of her baby.
5. In this particular vignette, Tan uses a lot of imagery. This helps the reader imagine the scene so it feels much more lifelike. When Lena “began to see terrible things” (106) after the incident where she fell in the basement in her old Oakland home, Tan described a lot of the things she saw. For example, tether balls could “splash a girl’s head all over the playground in front of laughing friends” (106). This line and ones like it put an image in my head that helped make this statement a reality. I my head, I could hear the scream and see the girl’s brains and blood splattered across the concrete.
6. This vignette and the allegory in the beginning of this section of The Joy Luck Club are connected because they both have to do with a mother’s advice. In the allegory, the mother tried to warn her seven year old daughter not to ride around the corner because she will fall off her bike. The girl did not listen to her mother’s advice, and that resulted in her injury. In this chapter, “The Voice from the Wall,” the mother Betty tries to keep her child away from the basement door by barricading and locking the door. Lena did not heed these warning signs her mother put up and decided to look inside the door, which caused her to fall in headfirst. Lena, like the girl in the allegory, got hurt when she did not heed her mother’s advice.
1. “Exaggerations and Hallucinations”
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. When I first started to read this chapter, it was exactly 11:35 pm. Outside was pitch black, and my room was silent. I was startled when Any Tan began writing about death, methods of execution, and a possible baby-eating pedophile in the basement. You can imagine how freaked out I was when reading about that scene…all alone…by myself...at night. I quickly closed the book, deciding to read the rest of the chapter when it was brighter and I wasn’t alone. Reading further into the chapter, I was surprised to learn how similar Lena St. Clair’s mother, Betty St. Clair, or previously known as Ying-Ying Gu, was to my own mother. Both mothers are outrageously protective of their children to that point that it’s just ridiculous. When Lena asks too many questions about why she can’t walk anywhere else in the neighborhood besides school and home, her mother always has one answer for all of them: “A man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, [and] make you have a baby” (109). My mother uses this excuse all the time too. Even though my house is less than five minutes away from school, my mom won’t allow me to walk home because she’s extremely paranoid that I’ll get kidnapped, raped, and/or even sold to a foreign country to become a slave and never return home again. Like Lena, we’ve both become annoyed with these nonsense answers. The thing I loved most about this chapter was that Lena’s life events were eerily similar to my own. Our mothers’ personalities are exactly the same, and both of our mothers have had babies with missing organs. Lena’s potential sibling had a missing brain, supposedly. Before giving birth to me, my mom had to abort a child who didn’t have a functional heart. A majority of this chapter was actually pretty attention-grabbing for me, even though I didn’t understand the closing passages about a daughter giving her mother “the death of a thousand cuts” (120).
4. It’s clear to me that Betty St. Clair holds a very protective relationship with her daughter Lena. She reminds me of a shielding mother bear. Mrs. St. Clair always “[makes] up anything to warn [Lena], to help [her] avoid some unknown danger” (108). She tells her daughter that “a man can grab [her] off the streets, sell [her] to someone else, [and] make [her] have a baby” (109). She tells exaggerated scenarios in order to scare her daughter and help her stay clear away from any potential dangers. While she’s protective, I can tell that she also cares for Lena, like any normal mother would. When a weird (and possibly drunk) guy approaches them on the sidewalk, Mrs. St. Clair reacts improperly, shielding herself rather than her own young daughter. When they shop for dinner at the market, however, she mother bear senses pick up, “[clutching Lena’s] hand so tightly it hurt” (111). Once she let go to pay at the cash register, Lena attempts to slip away to take a peek at the candy section but couldn’t because her mom “[grabs her] hand back so fast [that Lena knows] at that instant how sorry [her mother is] that she [hasn’t] protected [her] better” (111).
5. I really liked how Amy Tan uses dialogue to describe the personalities of her characters in this chapter. On page 109, Lena questions her mother with words like, “why” and “why not.” This shows that Lena has a curious personality, wanting to know what’s going on in life around her, like the filthy lady on the sidewalk. The stories about the harmful men that Mrs. St. Clair tells to her daughter and the scene in the market demonstrates the protective and “mother bear” characteristics that she has.
6. From this chapter, I learned that the Chinese were superstitious. When she sensed that her life was unbalanced, Mrs. St. Clair decided to rearrange the entire apartment, including Lena’s room. The reorganizing of furniture and other equipment to create balance and harmony within the home is recognized as feng-shuay. The Chinese believed that the way that the house is arranged can bring either good or back luck to the family.
-Terri Tan
Period 6
(:
Ache
“The Voice from the Wall”
1.This chapter to me was really depressing and frightening too. I also found the story about the man who was killed with a thousand cuts truly horrifying and terrible. It's amazing how Betty St. Clair's character is in some ways very similar to my own parents, especially my mother. With all the murderers and rapists out there my mom always has this fear of my sister and I being taken away from her and is therefore always protective of us every second of every day, giving us ridiculous rules to follow. She doesn't approve of our hanging out with boys or even walking to school in the morning, which is 2 minutes away by car. When I learned that Betty lost a son due to complications at the hospital and her claiming that he came out with no brain, I felt immediate sympathy for her and for Lena too because she almost had a little brother. Betty must've grieved for a long amount of time after this tragic event.
2.Betty St. Claire's relationship with her daughter, Lena is viewed as really protective, but also caring. Although Betty concocts numerous outrageous and scary stories to tell Lena in order to prevent her from doing anything dangerous, she's only doing it out of love and concern for her daughter. An example that shows Betty's overly protective side is when Lena and her mother are walking along the street and they come across a homeless woman. Lena shows some concern and for her mother too when she started to rearrange their furniture in the apartment and after the death of her son.
3.I liked how Amy Tan uses some indirect characterization to describe Betty St. Claire's character and her protective personality. The scene where they are walking in the street next to the homeless woman and the one where they're in the market portrays how her mother acts and the warm, defensive quality that she has for Lena. The fabricated stories that Lena's mother told her daughter was her way of trying to teach her daughter of the many dangerous and wild stuff that could happen to her if she isn't careful enough and it also shows how greatly concerned she is for her daughter's safety.
4.I learned that in the Chinese culture, most people were very superstitious and would sometimes rearrange their furniture whenever they felt that their life was unbalanced. The different placement and shifting of certain furniture objects in order to bring some sort of harmony and tranquility is called feng-shuay. Lena's mother approached this technique in hopes of the family receiving good luck.
“The Worst is on the Other Side.”
The Voice from the Wall
This chapter confused me a lot in the beginning. I was quite discombobulated from the story about the great grand-father sentencing a beggar “to die the death of a thousand cuts” (104) to some sort of cannibalistic sex-offender who lives in their basement to the sixth sense Lena St. Clair inherits from her mother. It was like a haze of some spiritual fantasy, I couldn’t decide what as real and what wasn’t. Yet, at the same time, it was all so interesting to me. It’s wretchedly horrible that as a child, Lena is burdened with seeing devils in sandboxes, beetle-faced children, and head smashing tetherballs. I hope she doesn’t end up in a padded rubber room or go psychotic. I think it’s interesting that her father is English-Irish, which makes her half English-Irish and half Chinese. This reminded me of Katie Leung who played Cho Chang in the fourth and fifth Harry Potter movie. Although Katie had an Irish accent, she still looked very Chinese. It was kind of depressing when I read that Lena “use to push [her] eyes in on the sides to make them rounder” because even though Chinese people may have small eyes, they’re still very beautiful and they don’t have to change it just because other people around them have large eyes. My cousin told me once that people in China or Japan used special glue or some sort to glue their eyes or have some surgery to make it look like they have eyelids. Those kinds of things make me want to gag, it’s revolting. I think the girl that was being stabbed to death by her mother every night was all in Lena’s mind. It might have been her conscious and imagination working together to create something horrible. It’s like nightmares that are trying to teach you a lesson or telling you something important. Somehow I think that girl was a ghost, like the one her mom was fading into. By the end of the chapter, I felt so many things rushing through my brain…trying to connect the girl and her mother to Lena and her mother and to the beggar and great- grandfather. To be honest, it made my brain hurt. I think the ghost was trying to show her mother that there is “no worst possible thing” after dieing, on the other side, and after she realized this, can she go back to the real world and “see why [she was] wrong” (121). Lena had also been wrong when she thought that the girl’s life was terrible. She understood her foolishness when she listened closer and “heard them laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love” (120). Now all that Lena needs is for her mom to realize that she’s not down a mine and losing her baby is not the end of the world, the worst thing.
Ying Ying St. Claire’s relationship with her husband is forlorn, lost, and hollow. It’s definitely not the happiest marriage, or even a really close knit one. They don’t even understand what the other is saying half the time. Ying Ying’s husband “puts words into her mouth” (109). I think their relationship can be summed in that scene when Ying Ying and Lena are walking through Oakland’s Chinatown and there was “a woman sitting on a sidewalk, leaning against a building” who “was old and young at the same time, with dull eyes as though she had not slept for many years” (108). Lena asked her mom “What did she do to herself?” to which her mother replied “She met a bad man. She had a baby she didn’t want” (108). My guess is that Ying Ying was that woman, and Lena was the unwanted baby.
This chapter had lots of horrific gory imagery that I bet disgusted a lot of the readers. From the very beginning Amy Tan starts off with the scene of the beggar dieing a death of a thousand cuts to the bad man living in the basements who eats girls with babies and tosses the bones away. And the “monkey rings that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space” (106). I think Amy Tan’s word choice fits the darkened and gloomy mood; she chooses words such as “slice,” “chop,” “devour,” and “squash.”
Before reading this, I didn’t know that Chinese people did Feng Shui, where they organized furniture to help them achieve their goals. I remember seeing something like this in Lizzie McGuire where Lizzie’s grandmother went all Japanese and it’s funny, because she’s actually Caucasian. It’s a fascinating concept, I think, but rearranging more than one room a lot of times can get tiring for me. And at first, I thought Lena’s mom really went nuts, but she probably wanted good luck for the baby, like all Chinese people do. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out too well…
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Eileen Ly from 7th period
Through the Wall in a 1000 Cuts
“The Voice from the Wall”
In this chapter, I feel enlightened by the hope that Lena holds even though her life is nearly empty for her. She takes hope in finding light in her situation which is already riddled with plenty of fear, thanks to the way her mom raises her. I feel sorry for her mother, who seems to have gone through a lot with the world, to have to be able to see bad in everything. She teaches Lena to see all the bad things in life, with herself, “[seeing] danger in everything, even in other Chinese people” (108). The father reminds me of those Caucasian Pixar characters in movies like Bugs Life, the flat ones, who do have emotion but they never change. They never realize how to change, or maybe they’re never given a chance to change. Well anyhow, he seems like one of those people who try to patch up other people together. I feel like his relationship with Lena’s mother is lacking love, though. Perhaps it’s a different kind of love, but how Tan describes it in her first-person narration, even Lena doesn’t really seem to love her father. She never addresses him as Dad or interacts with him, except to discuss her mom. Additionally, I didn’t get the opening (or ending for that matter), at first, but after thinking a bit about it, I think that Lena has a strong spirit, even though she displays few emotions. (She doesn’t look like she has real friends.) I also think that Lena’s spying on Teresa felt a bit strange but I realize that it kept her together.
The relationship between her mother and father is best described as one-sided and hopeless. It’s clear that Lena’s father does love her mom, but in the same way an owner loves his puppy- with careful, blind devotion. I mean sure, he cares for her when she has a mental breakdown, but does he ever actually understand her? He even got her birthday wrong on the immigration card! Also, Lena’s mom doesn’t even appear to love her husband. She’s too wrapped up in her own misery and fear to return his love. Even in the end, her husband starts to break down with her, “[falling] apart in a different way” (117).
Tan uses the small story told to Lena by her mom as symbolism to represent the theme. There is a lot of dialogue to help with indirect characterization for the characters, such as Lena’s mother and her husband. This adds life to the story, by making it more emotional and true to life. She makes use of round characters and develops the plot. It improves the story by adding in the general mood of the story.
The theme of the story is “Hope can be found even in the darkest of situations, you just have to look hard enough.” There are several scenes that support this theme. However, the most important one is the story that Tan repeats in the beginning of the novel and at the end:
“But before he could even raise the sharp sword to whittle his life away, they found the beggar’s mind had already broken into a thousand pieces. A few days later, my great-grandfather looked up from his books and saw this same man looking like a smashed vase hastily put together. ‘As the sword was cutting me down,’ said the ghost, ‘I thought this was the worst I would ever have to endure. But I was wrong. The worst is on the other side.’ And the dead man embraced my great-grandfather with the jagged pieces in his arm and pulled him through the wall, to show him what he meant.” (105)
“I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable. I saw the mother lying in bed in her long flowing robes. Then the girl pulled out a sharp sword and told her mother, ‘Then you must die the death of a thousand cuts. It is the only way to save you.’ The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh. The girl said, ‘Do you see now?’ The mother nodded: ‘Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing.’ And the daughter said, “Now you must come back to the other side. Then you can see why you were wrong.’ And the girl grabbed her mother’s hand and pulled her through the wall.” (120-121)
It’s complicated and barely makes sense to me at all. However, the girl and her mom are already on the other side that the beggar was talking about. Living, but not really living, eyes open but seeing nothing. The girl had to make her mother realize this, that there’s nothing worse than losing your soul, not even dying. The way how I see it, that girl is Lena. She desperately searches for hope within a world of emptiness and fear created in her household, by turning to spy on her neighbor’s apartment. Even though they seemed angry enough to kill each other, they still loved each other. With that, Lena realizes that she was wrong, that it was better to live a life filled with happiness and of course, fear, but also to live. Through the excerpt, she shows her desire to free her mother from her depression and paranoia, to show her mother life.
Jane Wong
Period 6
1. Lost and Found
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. In this chapter, there was a lot of small scenes going on throughout Lena St. Clair and her mother's minds. They both had a lot going on and I was actually drawn in to the chapter. I felt bad for Lena St. Clair's mother because she has gone through so much from the past that is bad enough to still affect her to that very day. It seems like Lena St. Clair's mother Ying Ying has a lot to hide behind from reality. Looks can be deceiving, but the way Ying Ying acts is so bitter. However, this only lets the reader know that she is just trying to let Lena St. Clair have the best like any other parent once again. I thought Lena St. Clair's father acted like a clueless man because sure, he probably loves Ying Ying, but I don't think he could love her enough to learn all the Chinese words there are for her. He actually put down the wrong birthyear on his wife's immigration papers too. So what kind of husband does this make him? A careless one? The way he put it didn't seem like he was in for a very responsible husband that would care less if her wife was born in the year of a Dragon of a Tiger.
4. The character relationship would be between Lena St. Clair's mother Ying Ying and her father. Again, the way he acts still seems so unrealitisic. Though it was nice that he could speak some Chinese words, he can only communicate with Ying Ying through hand signs and signals. When Lena St. Clair asked his father why her mother looked so scared, he never really knew the answer. He would only say, "I think Mom is trying to say she's tired" (109). This seems like he doesn't know that much about her when she's moody because it doesn't seem like he knows what's up with his own wife in a more indept way. Sure, he may have saved her from Day 1 from a terrible tragedy and they may be married to each other, but they can only communicate through signs, and not words. So that just makes it harder for the reader to picture how they are a happy married couple.
5. Amy Tan uses a lot of word choices and similes in this chapter. "So my father would put words in her mouth" (108). This is saying that when her mother couldn't speak, he would try to feed her words, so she would have something to say. I thought this was pretty strong because though you cannot literally put words inside people's mouths, it portrayed how she would have something to say after someone else helped her with the replies. "After the baby died, my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one" (117). This really explained how she fell apart and how upset she was with the tragedy. Plates falling off one by one really shows how bad it was becuase it's almost the same as saying they were crashing all over the places piece by piece with broken glass. Amy Tan's word choices were very powerful because it let the reader see and feel how it bad it actually was for Lena St. Clair's mother.
6. a. I think the theme is that no matter what it is, you just have to pull it through. "Now I have perfect understanding. I have already experienced the worst. After this, there is no worst possible thing" (121). These words came off strong from Lena St. Clair's memory from the mother she imagined saying. I thought these words were strong because it does actually show how life actually is. There are always many flaws in the world and in people. Though people may go through harsh and unwanted conditions at times, they know that sooner or later, they will all come to an end anyway. Things happen for a reason. There may be worse things that happen again afterwards, but some reasons can be good and some can be bad. However, it is up to one to decide whether to accept it or run away from it.
True Sight
The Voice from the Wall
1. I didn’t really understand this chapter that much the first time I read it. After reading again, several times, I began to understand it. Once I did though, I really hated it. This chapter is very depressing, and Lena and her mother can only see bad things, everything bad. Even if they things that they saw were not real, they believed them to be bad. Just like Teresa and her mother always fighting, Lena believed that Teresa had a horrible life, and that she would be killed, but in the end, Teresa and her mother showed that they loved each other.
2. Teresa and her mother’s relationship is that of a typical mother-daughter relationship. Teresa and her mother get into fights all the time, making it seem like they dislike each other. But once a little bit of fear is put into one of them that the other is in danger, they will do whatever they can to find them, to make sure that they are safe. Teresa climbs back into her bed silently, where her mother finds her. Her mother then tells her that she almost had a heart attack. Teresa and her mother end up laughing and crying, shouting with love for each other.
3. Amy Tan uses a lot of imagery in this chapter. She uses many gruesome scenes and explains it very descriptively, so that readers can get an image of what she is trying to show. She explains the beggar’s death very deeply. She also describes many of the people who Yingying decide are bad people very gruesomely.
4. From this chapter, I learned about Feng Shui in Chinese people. I never really believed in Feng Shui, nor does my family. So Lena’s mother rearranging the entire house so that the house is more balanced really amused me. I never knew that a kitchen that faced the bathroom would flush all the worth away, or that a narrow doorway could be seen as a neck that has been strangled.
Kimmy Tran
Period 6
1. The grass is greener on the other side of the wall
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. The starting paragraph really caught my attention. I thought that this chapter was much more disgusting than “Scar” which included a human flesh soup. Lena’s and her mother’s imagination scared me to death. I think that both of them tend to imagine the worst possible thing and try to guard themselves from it.
I felt really sorry for Ying Ying because she didn’t know a lot of English and was basically trapped in a world of foreign people, foreign food, and foreign behaviors. She lost her Chinese identity, her son, and her mind. Ying Ying always “saw danger in everything” (108) which made me sad because then she cannot enjoy America because she is always in caution of everything around her. Eve though the father thought that he saved Ying Ying from a horrible situation in China, I think that he just made the situation worse.
I thought that Lena wasn’t as spoiled as Waverly in the previous chapter and I liked her more. I didn’t like how she lied to her mother sometimes and used her ability to translate Chinese to her advantage. Instead of translating her mother’s words into positive things, I wish she should have told it like it was because then the family could have seen the severity of Ying Ying’s condition and could have gotten her help. I hated how everyone in the family decided to ignore Ying Ying’s condition even though they knew that it was very serious. I wouldn’t do that to my mother or my spouse.
I felt sad for the girl living next door because I thought she really was getting abused by her parents. I was confused when Lena said that she didn’t see a bruise or scratch on her. I eventually realized that Lena was probably imagining it. But when Lena realized that the neighbor’s side was a better place than her side because their yelling was really how they showed their love for each other, I felt really bad for Lena. Her apartment was filled with silence, which meant that no one rather showed their love for one another, which I can’t imagine living like that since my family usually says or shows their love frequently.
I couldn’t understand why Clifford, Lena’s father, and Ying Ying married each other. They barely could understand each other so how could they have fallen in love? I don’t think it was an arranged marriage because the father was white.
4. I would describe the relationship between Clifford and Ying Ying as ignorant. The father often ignores Ying Ying’s mental health and make up reasons for it. When the family moved to an apartment, Ying Ying often spent her time rearranging the furniture saying the place was “not balanced.” While Lena asks why her mother does that, Clifford simply says that she’s “just practicing her nesting instincts” (112). Lena even wonders after is her father is blind to the problem and why he never worries. He “tried to make things better” (117) by trying to make Ying Ying’s condition as no big deal and remains always ignorant of the problem.
5. Amy Tan uses symbolism in this chapter. An example of this is when Clifford named Ying Ying as Betty St.Clair and puts down the wrong birth year for her when he did her immigration pictures. In America, putting down the wrong birth year may not be such a big deal but in China, it changes what animal you are. Like lena says, Ying Ying “lost her name and became a Dragon instead of a Tiger” (107). This means that she has lost her identity when she is put in America. Also she was categorized as a “Displaced Person” in the migration categories which also represents her position in America. She doesn’t belong and America and feels “displaced”.
6. (c. What are you learning about Chinese culture?)
I learned that the birth year is important in Chinese Culture. Each year is a different animal and it is a part of the person’s characterization. So if it suddenly changed, then I guess the person would be angry and would feel a bit lost. I also learned more about feng-shei. I know now that the main point of it is to create a balance, like Ying Ying was trying to do. By creating a balance, you create peace of mind and it will help you to relax.
The Gnawing Secret
The Voice from the Wall
1. I feel that it was kind of ignorant of Lena’s father and how he just totally changed the name of Lena’s mother and her birth date. Lena’s mother must have felt really lost and confused when she arrived in the United States. Changing her name might have made the mom feel like she even lost her identity. Also, the fact that her birth year was wrong is very big to Chinese people. They believe that depending on what year a person is born in, they will have a certain characteristics and personalities. Lena’s mother is very superstitious and she keeps on warning Lena against bad men that will plant a baby in her. I think that this hints at the past the mom is trying to escape from. I think that her mom killed an unwanted baby.
2. I think the relationship between Lena’s father and mother can be described as misunderstanding. The two of them come from completely different cultures and cannot understand each other. Because they had a language barrier, the father would “put words into [Lena’s mom’s] mouth” (108). This means that instead of truly understanding what Lena’s mother would say and do, the father would just make up words or explanations for what the mom was doing. Because Lena’s mother could only speak very limited English, she had to settle for “moods and gestures, looks and silences” to convey her ideas and thoughts (108).
3. Amy Tan uses word choice in this chapter to portray the dark and superstitious environment Lena grew up in. She uses words like “barricaded,” “evil,” and “devils” to show how dark and scary things were for Lena and her mother.
4. I think the main problem in this chapter is human vs. self. There is no threat from society or outward things, but the threat is from the inside such as fears and superstitions. Another internal conflict is the past that Lean’s mother is trying to leave behind, but keeps haunting her.
-Laurie Jengt
“Illusions”
CH. The Voice from the Wall
3. This chapter is so disturbing! Right as the story begins, it talks about a beggar dying from breaking into a thousand little pieces and then about a man that lives in the dark basement waiting to eat and rape people. It confused me when Lena’s mother went crazy and started to rearrange everything in the house. However, I felt sorry for her because when she immigrated to America, Lena’s father basically gave her a complete identity change, thus losing herself and maybe part of her sanity. She relates everything bad to babies; like when they were walking, Lena saw the woman with rotten feet and hands and asked her mother what happened. Immediately, Ying-Ying says “‘she met a bad man… [and] a baby she didn’t want” (108). Also, when Lena asks why she couldn’t walk to anywhere else, her mother tells her that “‘a man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, [and] make you have a baby…” (109). Ying-Ying is probably haunted by an experience she had in the past and I was able to follow the story until the part where Lena’s mother’s baby died. I was so lost that the rest of the story didn’t make any sense at all. It feels as if this vignette does not have a specific plot or purpose other than freaking its reader out.
4. I would say that the love and relationship between Ying-Ying and her husband is not that strong. Even though Lena’s father probably cares a lot for his wife, he is too careless and proud to notice anything. The very act of accidentally changing Ying-Ying’s name and birth date shows how much he doesn’t care just as long as he got her. Even worse, the language difference between them often leads to misunderstandings and it gets worse when Ying-Ying goes crazy.
5. I noticed that Amy Tan uses a lot and a lot of imagery in this chapter. Not only does she successfully describe the morbid scenes with great detail, but every part makes us feel as if we are part of it. She even uses onomatopoeia to stress the meanings of specific things such as at the end of this chapter when Lena imagines the girl telling her mom that the only way to save her was to die the death of a thousand cuts. “The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! Whish! Whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain” (120). Very vividly described, right?
6. b. What is the main conflict in the chapter? Is it internal or external, human vs. self, vs. society, vs. nature, vs. human and how do you know?
I think the main conflict in this chapter is mainly human vs. self, Ying-Ying vs. herself. Always afraid and cowering from the society because of her own thoughts and fears, she has always lived in her own little world of superstitions. At first she would still go out and shop around Chinatown; however, after the incident with the drunken man, she completely shut herself off from the outside, leaving Lena and her father with an empty shell. Ying-Ying is probably internally battling with her own past because maybe she had an experience that has troubled her mind for a long time.
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Through our good & bad days, I promise you that I'll never walk away.
“The Voices from the Wall”
1. My first reaction to this chapter was after the first paragraph where Lena described what her mother told her about her great-grandfather making a beggar die in the worst possible way. I thought that was a really cruel thing to do, making someone die (in a horrible way too) just because he's a beggar. Hasn't he ever heard of treating others the way you want to be treated?
I think Lena's mother is a lunatic. Lena said her mother tried to hide from her. Her mother “barricaded the door with a wooden chair, secured it with a chain and two types of key locks”(105). That's crazy when no one's after her. She even sees “danger in everything, even other Chinese people”(108). Well, why does she want to be safe all the time? That's no fun.
When Lena's mom tells her to not look at a homeless woman, it reminded me of how my mom tells me not to look at creepy homeless men and gangsters.
I thought it was mean of Lena to take advantage of her mom's lack of understanding for English words. Lying is bad. It's not even for a good cause; it's for Lena's own selfish reasons.
When Lena's mom talks about “things not being balanced”, I remember it was something I learned in my history class called chi (112).
2. I think Lena's mom is very overprotective of Lena. Too overprotective. She thinks that “a man can grab you off the streets, sell you to someone else, make you have a baby”(109). Even though my mom says those things, I don't think that Lena's mom has to worry about anything because they live in San Francisco, which is very crowded. I also think it's unfair to only let Lena walk “to school and back home”(109). When I was little, my mom always let me play outdoors. You can't learn much if you stay home all the time. Lena has to experience things for herself. It's so weird how her mom “clutched [her] hand so tightly it hurt”(111). She should be able to walk fine on her own. I guess that I think Lena and her mother's relationship is tight. Unbearably tight.
3. I noticed that Amy Tan used many similes in this chapter. One of them was when she described how Lena's mom lost even more insanity. “...my mother fell apart, not all at once, but piece by piece, like plates falling off a shelf one by one...”(117). I thought this made the situation sound more dramatic, like when the last plate falls, she'll burst. Similes can improve your writing if you use good ones.
4. I think the life lesson is this chapter is that you should just let life happen. Staying safe isn't always the answer. In order to learn things, to build stronger relationships, you have to let things be the way they are. There has to be downs as well as ups. It's just something called chi.
The scene when Lena's mom explained this to her shows this theme. “When something goes against your nature, you are not in balance. This house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill. So you can never get ahead. You are always rolling backward”(112).
Brian Tat
Period 7
The Hidden Fears and Dangers
The Voice Behind The Wall
After reading the story three times, I really did not understand about the “worst” things that would happen. It was confusing to me, because I tried to see what the wall represented and how which worst is worse. How was he wrong about the worst he has encountered? What is this “other side” that the ghost talks about? Does it mean outside the person’s life or was it the afterlife? When reading the first sentence of page 105, I thought it was dumb for Lena to think about the worst possible things that can happen to a person. I believe that because when a person thinks about the worst possible things in life, I think they will continue to fear for their life. Lena and her mother Ying-Ying both live in constant fear of the “worst” outside of their selves, thus, they create a wall from each other. With both the mother and daughter in this condition, it appeared impossible to me that they cannot express their love or fears to each other. Ying-Ying spreads this nature to Lena when Lena drops into the basement and is informed about the bad man. It is described that Lena begins to have this nature as Lena expects the worst of things. I wondered what happened to Ying-Ying in China that was so horrible that she could not speak about it. From the story “The Moon Lady,” her family is rich and I wondered how her rich status in life has been “terrible.” I thought it was pathetic of how her father hid her Chinese side as if it was a shame. I loved page 107 for its symbolism that Amy Tan includes. In many different ways, Lena’s father covers Ying-Ying’s Chinese heritage by changing her name, birth year, and western clothes. To me, I believed that the St. Clair family was dysfunctional, because no one could actually communicate well with each other. Ying-Ying had to translate things for her mother from English to Chinese, and her father would fill in her words for her. Now, I wonder why Lena’s father even married Ying-Ying and brought her to America. It was depressing to hear that Ying-Ying’s child died and how the father did barely anything to make it better. I liked, however, Teresa’s presence changes her mind about the “worse.” I was confused about the ending, if the mother went into the other side already or was in the side of the living?
I believe Ying-Ying and her daughter have a distant relationship. I believe this is true, because they have the same fear of the “worst.” They do not express their feelings for each other when having the exact fear. For example, Ying-Ying does not tell Lena about her feelings of the baby that died, for she might have another tragedy upon her if she does.
Tan uses a lot of symbolism in the story, for she has the opening of another smaller story told from a character, and this story relates to the basic plot. It was, however, difficult to identify the symbolism in the story and actually understand it. This technique did frustrate me, but it gave me a chance to take my time and discover the hidden meanings encrypted.
In the vignette, Ying-Ying tries to warn Lena about the basement by barricading the door, just as the mother warned the child of going out of her sight. Both mothers tell, or in Ying-Ying’s case show their daughters out of love and fear that they will get hurt. Both the daughters ignore all warnings created from the mothers and eventually fulfill their mother’s own predictions.
Trung Tran
To the other side
“The Voice from the Wall”
1.This story was disturbing and yet it made me want to read more. It began with Lena St. Clair’s great-grandfather sentencing a beggar to die by one thousand cuts and ended with a daughter giving her mother a thousand cuts. This chapter made a little depressed at the fact that Lena and her mother can only see bad things. They always see the negative part of every situation. I think part of the blame is Ying-ying because ever since Lena was young, she was the one scaring her and filling her head with horrifying thoughts.
2.The relationship between the mother and the father is difficult and annoying. Both of them barely can communicate with one another. I do not understand how they can live and spend their whole life together when they can barely talk with one another. What kind of relationship is that? It is rather sad for a father to have his own daughter translate what her mother is saying because he doesn’t understand her language. Maybe its love or something but I don’t get what is keeping them together. Reading about them was really frustrating. Especially when Ying-ying was in a horrible condition, he tries to push it away and believe everything is fine.
3.In this disturbing and bizarre story, Amy Tang used a lot of imagery to describe the morbid scenes. She would use sentences like “The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish! and the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain” (120). Sentences like these makes it seem like you were there with the characters and it was happening to you.
4.The theme of this story is not to be so negative. If there is something wrong, don’t let it overcome you, change it and make it better. Lena and her mother always see the worst in every situation and that was what made them sad and depressed. When Lena realized the people next door was not anything like she thought, she started to have more hope. She realized the bad things can be changed.
1. “A Mistaken Love”
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. I actually took a bit of time understanding this chapter. There were so many hidden meanings that confused me. On top of the graphic killing scenes that involved the pain of “a thousand cuts”, Lena St. Clair talks about evils that lurked around her home. Apparently, these evils were unavoidable, and throughout her life, they always haunted Lena’s mother until she fell apart. This really scared me because I don’t believe in evil spirits or any superstition. But from the way Lena described the terrible miscarriage that her mother had to go through, I doubted myself for a second. It seemed really unfair to Lena’s mother because she did nothing wrong, and didn’t deserve to give birth to a dead baby. I felt sorry for her but at the same time very horrified at the way Ying-Ying(Lena’s mother) dealt with the accident. She had totally lost herself, and become a crazy woman. Ying-Ying didn’t know how to forgive herself for letting her baby die inside her; she lost all sense of hope and love, never treating Lena the same loving way she used to. Meanwhile, next door Lena had neighbors that would fight constantly. I was frightened when Lena told of the loud shouting and beating she heard from across the wall, I don’t know how she was able to fall asleep to that. Although the girl gets beat and yelled at constantly, it is only because her mother truly loves her, and wants the best for her. She probably did something or said something stupid that upset her mother. In the end, the two always make up. The heartwarming scene of the neighbors reuniting lifted the sinister mood of the chapter, and made me happy to see at least someone had a good ending. As for Lena and her mother, I felt like they had no hope in going back to the way a mother and daughter should be.
The talk about “going to the other sides” really confused me. I understand that symbolically it pointed to the other side of the wall where there was a different life, a different pain that was dealt with, but what was Amy Tan really trying to tell us? Also the story of a thousand cuts meant that after dealing with the worst amount of pain, there is no worse pain. So was the miscarriage the worst pain Ying-Ying could possibly have? Why couldn’t she overcome this? Lastly, what was the last story that Lena told trying to say? Was going through the wall supposed to mean there is no such thing as “the worst pain possible” because everyone had their own stories?
4.The relationship between Ying-Ying and her husband, Mr. St. Clair can be described as returning gratitude. Ying-Ying needed Mr. St. Clair to get to America, and stay here without going through any trouble. When she first immigrated here, she was scared of what to expect, but luckily she had met this man who had saved her from some “terrible tragedy”. Later, he married her, and gave her the opportunity to live in America. This was a dream that most Chinese women would want, a chance to break free from their confined lives in China. Their relationship was not based on romantic love. They agreed to live together, and start a family, but it is because Mr. St. Clair wanted to have a family, and that’s Ying-Ying’s way of returning her thanks. Mr. St. Clair doesn’t even understand what Ying-Ying tries telling him half the time they communicate, but he treats her well, and tries to make her happy nevertheless. The bond that they share is more of a friendship than a marriage.
5.Amy Tan makes really good use of imagery in this chapter. She puts in deep thought about her word choice and paints a descriptive picture in our minds. The disturbing scene of the neighbor who was beat was very painful. “Then I heard scraping sounds, slamming, pushing and shouts and then whack! Whack! Whack! Someone was killing. Someone was being killed. Screams and shouts, a mother had a sword high above a girl’s head and was starting to slice her life away…(114)” From this we can see the actual murder happening, or better yet, the wild imagination Lena had from what she heard through the wall. Afterwards, when Lena sees the girl who was beat, in person, Tan describes her being “quite happy, [while] her two brown braids bounced jauntily in rhythm to her walk. (115)”. The girl wears nice clean clothing, with no scars on her skin; obviously, we can see she hides the pain that she goes through.
6.In this chapter, I learned that Chinese people can be VERY superstitious, and have peculiar imaginations. Lena describes her creepy thoughts as seeing “things with my Chinese eyes, the part [she] got from [her] mother (106)”. From the noises from the other side of the wall, she cooked up a totally different story from the truth. Anyway, the first time that the family moved to the new apartment, her mother was not happy, and rearranged the furniture so that everything could be “balanced”. Apparently, when things weren’t balanced, it meant that her life would not be balanced either. She tried to put things in the right place, but after everything was different, Lena had a feeling that “some terrible danger [laid] ahead (112)”. There were no real facts that she based her theory on, but still she believed it. Soon enough, the terrible things started happening.
Did you see that?
The Voice from the Wall
1. Ying-ying St. Clair is definitely disturbed. She was the one who smeared the fish blood on her clothes at the moon festival, and apparently seeing her idol as a man traumatized her, because she is still crazy. She passed it to her daughter too. Lena says that she saw “things with [her] Chinese eyes, the part [she] got from [her] mother” (106). Lena was fine until her mom was telling her about this beggar who was cut into a million pieces, and then she started seeing all the world’s “evils.” We did get to know more about Yin-ying’s past though. We found out that she immigrated, changed her name, and lost two years of age. Was her husband even aware that he did that? And how did they communicate? He spoke common Chinese phrases and she didn’t know English until she married him. I loved how when Lena would translate what her mom said, she embellished. It just sounds so much like something a teenager would do. And how she was freaking out about the neighbors. Her mind just kind of wandered to the worst that could happen, an extreme over reaction once she actually talked to Teresa. I do that sometimes. I guess I could relate to this chapter more than some of the others, so I kind of liked it.
2. I want to describe Teresa’s relationship with her mom, because it reminds me a lot of the typical teenager’s with his or her parent. They scream at each other…a lot. Lena thinks Mrs. Sorci kills Teresa every night because they hate each other or something, then there’s an explanation about how their relationship is about yelling and threats, and they forgive each other and repeat. It’s funny, because it’s so stereotypical.
3. There’s some of imagery. Tan uses great words to describe what Lena sees on the playground, like “tetherballs that could splash a girl’s head all over,” or “a swinging child hurtling through space.”
4. I learned about how superstitious Chinese people can be. Ying-ying feels unbalanced, like she is in trouble, so she turns to feng-shei. She rearranges all the rooms in her house, several times, to achieve good luck for the baby she is having and to give herself peace of mind. She thinks she needs more balance to help, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work out to well.
1) Things Not Seen
2) The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates “Lena St. Clair: The Voice From the Wall”
3) I think that this chapter wasn’t, should I say...the most pleasant chapter I have read so far in to book. The details are so brutal and… bloody. Lena described a few superstitions that she imagined to happen such as “tether balls that could splash a girl’s head all over thee playground in front of laughing friends,” (106). What I thought was most confusing was when Lena’s mother Ying-Ying chained up the basement door with locks and a wooden chair. Then she said that a bad man who lived there a thousand years was living in there now. He would “plant five babies in [her] and then eat [them] all in a six-course meal,” (106). I thought is she for real? I still wonder whether they really believed that, but if it wasn’t real, than how did Lena get her bloody nose? Gosh and my mom is afraid to let my sister see her own scabbed knees. I think that it is somewhat Ying-Ying’s fault that Lena sees any of this because she, after all put all of this in her daughter’s mind. Lena just, well, kind of… spiced it up? Compared to Waverly in the last chapter, I really admire Lena for one thing… the fact that she can speak and understand Chinese. Most bi-racial children cannot speak both languages. For example, if their parents communicate in English, it is possible that that is how they talk to their children and as a result, English is the only language that the child knows.
One thing that interested me was that Ying-Ying thought that things were “not balanced,” (112). It was like she knew what would happen before it happened which I really don’t know whether or not I believe really happens. I mean, I don’t have proof to say that I can’t happen and I kind of what to believe that it does too. It creates this mysteriousness about our world.
I think that Teresa, the girl next door is a bad influence. Although it is nice that she and her mother really do love each other, she had no guilt whatsoever in worrying her mother. That was shown whe she said “… She’s going to wait. And when she gets worried, she’ll open the front door. Only I won’t be there! I’ll be in my bedroom, in bed,” (119).
4) I would describe the relationship between Lena and her mother as an influential relationship. Although Lena never did much to influence her mother, Lena learned to find fear in almost everything as her mother once had. It seemed as though Ying-Ying past down her “Chinese” superstition-ness to her daughter. Lena claimed to see all those terrible things through her “Chinese eyes, the part of [her she] got from [her] mother” (106). Like mother, like daughter. Because they lived together, it was bound to be that they may have the same habits though I’m not sure whether Ying-Ying’s imagination was quite as barbaric.
5) Imagery was definitely the most noticeable writing technique that Amy Tan used in this particular chapter. It improved the story because I was really about to see everything happen as if I were imagining the thousand cuts myself. I was able to hear the voices and other sounds from down the street and in the wall. Maybe more than I wanted to see and hear, but it was all remarkably vivid.
6) (b. What is the main conflict in the chapter? Is it internal or external, human vs. self, vs. society, vs. nature, vs. human and how do you know?)
I would say that the main conflict in this chapter was human vs. self; as in Lena against her own superstitious thoughts. It was shown throughout the vignette. The very beginning portrayed her grandfather and the beggar with his thousand cuts, the middle described the violent scenes that Lena saw but couldn’t tell anyone, and the end presented a nightly audio of the next door neighbor and her daughter with the thousand cuts. Her superstitious thought always gave us the feeling that it could be the worst possible thing and Lena learns that the worst possible things is on the “other side,” (121).
The Other Side
Focusing on: The Voice from the Wall
My initial reaction to the majority of this chapter was fear. Descriptions of ghosts, beatings, and death caused an eery tone and left countless scenes in my head way after I had finished the vignette. Amy Tan caused further fear by associating painful scenes with what seemed like forces from another world or dimension. For example, when I read about the scene in which Lena's baby brother was laid upon a table, he was not only described as having no brain but as also being able to "see everything inside [Lena's mother]," like a ghost or demon.
One adjective to describe the relationship between Lena and her mother is "telepathic ". Even as Lena said herself, "even as a young child, I could sense the unspoken terrors that surrounded our house, the ones that chased my mother until she hid in a secret dark corner of her mind," she is able to connect with her mother's feelings and "sixth sense." Also, Lena is able to literally translate her mother's thoughts and words, thus being able to understand her in multiple ways.
One writing technique that Amy Tan used in this chapter was imagery. For example, when describing Lena's eyes, Tan made readers imagine a person carving "two swift cuts" into a jack-o-lantern instead of simply saying that Lena's eyes were like two small slits.
I believe that the theme, or life lesson of this chapter is "once you've gone through a difficulty, you have basically already gone through the worst thing possible, so don't stay where you are but leave that fate behind and go back to life as if that difficulty had never happened, or in terms of the book "come to the other side of the wall."
1. Fear
2. “Voice from the Wall”
3. I really did not understand this chapter. It seemed dark and confusing, with little explanation of what was going on. What confuses me the most is Lena’s mother Betty’s behavior. She seems scared of the world almost to the point of paranoia. An example of this is when Lena was very small and her mother locked her out of the basement and told her this gruesome story about what a “bad man” that lived down there would do if she went in there. Was Betty really superstitious enough to believe this? Or was she just trying to scare Lena away, maybe there were steep stairs down there that she was afraid Lena would fall down? The part about this chapter that bothers me is that we never find out the answer to these questions. How can we learn a lesson from something that is never explained to us?
4. I would describe relationship between Lena’s mother and father as “misinterpretive.” Betty speaks very little English, and her husband does not speak Chinese. I wonder how they could possibly have an understanding relationship. Lena’s father is constantly putting words in Betty’s mouth. It almost makes me dislike his character because it seems like he doesn’t really care to put the effort into finding out what his wife is really saying, how she feels.
5. There is a lot of imagery in this chapter. It happens to be very graphic imagery, mostly of the things that Lena and her mother fear, such as “tetherballs that could splash a girl’s head all over.” It gives the affect of making the chapter all the more eerie than it already is.
6. This chapter teaches about Chinese Feng Shui. Lena comes home one day to find her mother arranging and rearranging the furniture, saying something that Lena does not understand about things not being “balanced.” She is unhappy about the house they are living in because it is “unbalanced,” and this makes her feel that her life is unbalanced.
Insanity
The Voice from the Wall
1. My reaction towards this chapter was that it was really disturbing and crazy. Her mother going crazy and the voices from the wall were confusing. Lena thought that girl next door was being beaten to death and dying, yet she seemed fine and happy when she met her. Her mother seemed crazy from the beginning when she started to re-arrange everything, and lock up the basement and forbid Lena from going there. It seems as if both Lena and her mother were crazy because Lena kept hearing the voices in the wall and seemed as if a girl was dying, when she was actually happy and the relationship between the mom and daughter was fine. I thought the ending was kind of complicated too. It seemed really complicated because it didn’t tell what happened to Lena’s mother.
2. I would compare Lena’s relationship to her mother’s more of friendly then motherly. It seems to me that Lena is more of a friend to her mother, she talks to her mother and her mother tells Lena her thoughts just like a friend would tell there thoughts to a friend. It wasn’t motherly because Lena’s mother didn’t really take care of her; it was more of the other way around. Her mother was crazy and she didn’t really help Lena with her troubles.
3. Amy Tan uses a technique of flashback and moving time forward in this chapter. Her symbols indicate this time change and it is used to progress that chapter. I think this technique is good because it makes the story flows easier and makes it easier to read. It’s like breaking a chapter down in smaller parts to understand it better.
4. I learned about the Yin and Yang in Chinese culture in this chapter. They believed that everything in the house had a balanced, and that things had to be arrange depending on there location and where everything is. Everything in you and the house has a certain harmony that is only balanced when everything is in its right place. When something is off, something must be changed in order to move it back into place.
1. Am I Hallucinating…?
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. I didn’t really like this chapter because it was slightly confusing than the other stories and it was also very depressing. I felt really sad for Lena’s mother because she “saw danger in everything” (108). She never tried to break through the sadness that surrounded her and she, therefore, saw the dark side of things. Her life was miserable because she was never able to feel the happiness around her; she was so stuck up in her superstitions that she ignored the beauty of the world. Ying-ying is probably depressed because she has lost her true identity. She left her homeland and immigrated to a foreign country. Ying-ying’s husband changed her name and birth date; which demolished her Chinese identity, a part of her heritage.
4. The relationship between Clifford and Ying-ying can be described as ignorant. They both come from different cultures and have a hard time understanding each other. Although he loves her, he tends to ignore Ying-ying’s problems. He “puts words into [her] mouth” (108) because he has a hard time understating Ying-ying. He, also, changes Ying-ying’s name and puts the wrong birth date on the immigration card! Clifford ignores Ying-ying’s strange behavior when she assumes that things are “not balanced” in her home. Clifford “tried to make things better” (117), but was still unaware of Ying-ying’s feelings and remained ignorant of the problem.
5. The thrilling imagery and the sensory details pulled me into this chapter. Amy Tan used imagery to paint the scene into the reader’s mind so they could imagine what she was trying to show. This chapter had a lot of horrific imagery that created a disgusting and bone chilling mood. Tan starts off by describing how a beggar had died by the death of a thousand cuts and then to a bad man living in the basement who planted babies inside girls and then tossed away their bones. Even though these were all disgusting scenes, the scene that horrified me the most was when Lena was imagining Teresa being beaten to death. After I read those lines, I imagined Teresa’s body being chopped up into little pieces and red, warm blood flying onto the walls, the floor, and Teresa’s mother. The gruesome thought made me nauseous, but the interesting suspense made me want to continue reading until the end.
6. I think the main conflicts in this chapter are internal and they can be seen through human vs. self, Lena vs. herself. Lena, for example, overwhelms her life with her imagination. In the beginning of the story, Lena imagines the beggar being inflicted a dreadful death by “sentence[ing] to die the death of a thousand cuts” (104). Lena, then, torments herself by imaging horrific and gory scenes about her neighbor, Teresa. She imagines Teresa’s mother slicing Teresa into a thousand pieces. Lena’s imaginations of horrific and ghastly scenes agitate her perspective of the world. She resolves the problem at the end of the chapter when she finds out that the worst things in life have to come to an end; that they “would one day stop” (120).
1. "And the green grass grows all around, all around…"
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. This chapter, with Lena St. Clair narrating, is quite the odd one. As with "Rules of the Game," it was filled with many rich descriptions. However, the detail in this chapter contrasts with those of the last, for these are so much less vapid – that made me feel uneasy. Reading about the way Lena imagined her neighbor, Teresa, being beaten and bruised made my imagination go wild… and not in the good way. Overall, the text from this chapter is just a little too dark for me, so I didn't enjoy it as much as I would've.
4. Lena and her mom, Ying-ying, share a relationship that is consequentially indifferent. Although Lena is quite fluent in the language of Mandarin and can comprehend what her mother says, she never truthfully understands the deeper meaning in which her mother tries to offer. Moreover, when Lena tries to translate her mother's words for her father, Clifford, to hear, she fails to and converts her mothers words into much simpler thoughts. Though they are tranquil, there always seems to be no "balance" within the three members of the St. Clair family.
5. As mentioned above, there is a great deal of sensory details woven into the text. As much as others probably enjoy this literary device, I contrastingly feel most of the gory details aren't quite necessary.
6. (c. What are you learning about Chinese culture?)
This chapter subtly teaches of feng shui. I think Ying-ying has a mild case of paranoia because she is constantly reminding others of ancient Chinese superstitions. Since feng shui always needs "balance," she goes about tearing apart the house and rearranging the furniture so that everything is in harmony to each other.
1. What is Unseen
2. The voice from the wall
3. As I read this chapter, I was confused and I still do not understand. I thought by the descriptions that there were actual killing going on but as I read it seemed nothing happen and the next day was normal. I was confused for most of the chapter except about the baby which died when being born. It also seemed weird about Lena’s mother rearranging things around the house. It’s hard to understand that it was to have Feng Shui but for some reason I think it seems weird to do it that many times. It also seemed Lena was insane to hear voices and such. I did not get how the neighbor had all these arguments but seemed normal the very next day. The end confused me because I did not know what happened to Lena’s mother.
4. The relationship between Mr. St. Clair and Lena’s mother was mutual. It seemed Mr. St. Clair was pretty happy to have a wife and start a family. Lena’s mother got to live in America and escape the life of living in China which was a dream for most Chinese women at the time because China back then wasn’t a very good place to live.
5. One of Amy Tan’s writing technique in this chapter that was noticeable is imagery. She uses descriptions of “a mother had a sword high above a girl’s head and was starting to lsice her life away, first braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the the point of her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothing left, no sound.” This gives us a picture that is very gory and disgusting. She uses a few other similar description as well.
6. In this chapter, I learned about Feng Shui and how to have your house balanced with certain things on one side and some on the other. I also figured that you might have to move things around a few times for it to “balance” for yourself to feel. It incorporates the Yin and Yang of balancing the dark and light side to have a perfect harmony.
1.The Worst Is Yet To Come
2.The Voice From the Wall
3.I found it weird how Ying-Ying St-Clair, the one who was the most well off of all the women in the story, met something that would’ve given her a terrible life there, as Lena St. Clair’s father had said. Then I also wondered what thing that Ying-Ying was trying to hide her daughter from, the thing that was in the basement, which I found creepy but also interesting to find out what that thing is. Then, when that seemingly drunk Chinese guy lunged for Ying-Ying and Lena, Ying-Ying “covered her body with her arms as if she were naked, unable to do anything else”(111).It led me to believe that she might’ve been raped because she seemed traumatized by a man running at her with arms out. Also, when she was describing the lost baby, her descriptions scared me and I thought she was possessed or had lost her mind. Also, as the chapter ended, I realized that the cutting into lots of pieces and bringing into the wall thing that was mentioned in the beginning of the chapter wasn’t as horrible and deranged as I originally thought it was. It could also mean that after feeling the worst thing in the world, which was cutting up someone into thousands of pieces, and going through the wall into the next world, you would’ve felt the worst thing in the world. That way, whatever you feel in the next life won’t be as hard as that, and that you would see how everything else is better and your life is much better also.
4.The relationship between Lena and her father is one that is partly misunderstanding. Her father thinks that she is always a child that must be protected from everything bad. After Ying-Ying had one of her traumatizing attacks from losing her baby, Lena once asked her father why Ying-Ying just laid down on the bed. Her father says that “she’s just tired,” (117), when obviously it was something way worst, like her not recovering from the horror of losing her own newborn child. He never gives the truth to Lena and always put a lie for her to believe that everything is all right. He treats her like a very young child and tries to protect her from the harsh truth.
5.Amy Tan’s word choice in this chapter is amazing. Her descriptions in the way where the person is cut to many pieces and how it is the worst thing that can happen really got to me because it showed me that it seemed painful, but the way she described the very same thing with a different view in the end completely turned it around. It showed me that it was a good way to deal with something, be over with the worst thing and everything else would be considered pleasant to you, the idea completely contradicting my thoughts of it from the beginning.
6.The main conflict in this chapter is internal for Ying-Ying because she can’t seem to get over the loss of her newborn child. Also, it’s internal for Lena because she believes that her mother has gone crazy, and that what Ying-Ying said about the death of her great grandfather was true. It crept to her mind and she eventually associated that to a lot of things she thought about. I thought that Lena was going insane along with her mother.
1) The Grass is Always Greener On the Other Side Of the Wall
2) The Voice From the Wall
3) One word, CONFUSING! This chapter was morbid and horribly misleading. I have no idea how in the world this is supposed to do anything for the reader except let us catch a glimpse of craziness from the St. Clair family, but maybe that was the point. I mean, a mom who’s obviously gone off the deep end, a traumatized daughter who always has scenes of death and gore in her mind, and a dad so oblivious to all of this, he might as well be blind and deaf (in fact, considering he isn’t home to see anything happen and doesn’t understand his wife’s Mandarin phrases, he is practically, blind and deaf). At first, I thought, “What is up with Ying-Ying? She’s crazy!” and then I realized that this was the same Ying-Ying who had thought as a child that she could cover up specks of blood with rivers of blood. Then things kind of clicked. Although I say that the daughter, Lena, is traumatized, both she and her mother are victims of that disease. Ying-Ying just has some odd issues with babies, telling her daughter that a homeless woman has rotting body parts because of an unwanted baby (108). She tells her daughter that there is a thousand year old man in the basement who would plant babies in her body and eat them all up (106). She also says that Lena must walk directly home after school because there will be some man there to rape her and, of course, get her pregnant. This piece of advice, however, keeps going. Lena will apparently kill this baby, dump it in the garbage, and be charged with murder! I’m just thinking, “oh…kay? My mom warns me against having kids at a young age, but Ying-Ying is ridiculous! The girl’s like what, 10?” The way Ying-Ying describes her son’s death in the hospital really freaked me out and so her behavior after that (lying still in bed doing nothing) was a little more understandable. There was the baby’s death, which was almost predicted by Ying-Ying who thought things were misplaced and wrong. There was the wild man named Joe trying to “attack” Ying-Ying and Lena on the street. When she was young, she was left out alone all day almost naked during a festival, and almost drowned. Ying-Ying also discovered that her idol, the moon lady, was a male actor with a long wig. She’s been through a whole ton of stuff that no one could ever imagine experiencing! I guess I could cut her some slack. But the insanity kind of passed down from Ying-Ying to Lena. Lena hears the arguments that Teresa, from next door, has with her own mother and imagines bloody scenes of macabre and grisly knives slashing at scalps, eyebrows, toes, thumbs, and noses “until there [is] nothing left” (114). This conveniently fits the description of Ying-Ying’s story about the man who dies of a thousand lashes that was told to Lena at a very young age. Lena, who is bi-racial, seems to try very hard to fit in with the Caucasian crowd even though she imagines “tether balls that could splash a girl’s head all over the playground in front of laughing friends” (106) during school time. At least she can speak fluent Mandarin; I’ll give her some credit in that area. And as for Lena’s dad/Ying-Ying’s husband? I think he’s an idiot. Trying to translate Ying-Ying’s mandarin phrases and pass them off as simply being tired or something, that’s just stupid and inconsiderate. He needs to try harder to get up to the level of human beings to me. He didn’t even know his wife’s birth year and made up a new American name for her official immigration papers! Come on, BETTY? What could he possibly gain from crossing out his wife’s Chinese name? He can’t possibly hide the fact that she’s Chinese, I think the eyes she passed down to Lena are obviously Asian. He took away Ying-Ying’s identity as a person, even though she wasn’t really a whole person in the mind to begin with.
4) I would describe the relationship between Ying-Ying and her husband as “estranged”. They’re never really on the same page with each other. Ying-Ying is forced to learn English by her husband who refuses to learn Mandarin, but even then, Ying-Ying will speak in Mandarin rather often. Her husband would try to “put words in her mouth” (108) and she’d never say anything about how wrong it was. During the pregnancy, Ying-Ying does her own thing and her husband just beams at being able to have another child, dismissing Ying-Ying’s peculiar behavior as “nesting instincts” (113). As Ying-Ying gets more and more insane as a result of the baby’s death, her husband worries about her health but really doesn’t do anything.
5) Amy Tan, master of imagery. I hated how real the horror felt, seeing a “beetle wearing a child’s face” (106), tether balls beheading little girls on the playground, mothers holding swords above a daughter’s head ready to slice her open and proceeding to do so, and open-headed babies scratching inside the womb! All too real and disgusting at that. I’m not sure it made the chapter better for me or even bearable at that, but from a literary standpoint, it was fantastic, vivid and emotional.
6) This relates to the allegory in the beginning because as a child, Lena questions Ying-Ying’s story about the man who died and returned to haunt the man who had him killed. In the chapter, Lena would later be haunted, not only by her mother’s weird actions but by this story. She later refers back to it while listening in on Teresa’s conversation with her mother from across the wall. She also thinks of it again toward the end of the chapter. In the allegory, the little girl questions her mother as to why she cannot ride her bike around the corner. Her mother doesn’t give her straight answers, dismissing the questions, and it comes back to haunt the little girl in a different manner.
1. Over the wall, through the cracks!
2. The Voice from the Wall.
3. This chapter for me was rather confusing yet exquisitely interesting as well. I liked the suspense and the little glimpse of drama we, readers, were able to capture while reading this chapter. My first reaction towards Lena’s mother was that she was a lunatic or someone suffering from a mental illness. However as the story progresses, I realized that her mother acted such because something was wrong. In the end, Lena’s new-born baby brother had died, which caused Lena’s mother to even become ill and dramatized. Another drama factor to this chapter was the girl that lived next door, Teresa. At night, Lena would hear voices of a girl receiving brutal physical treatment, things that Lena wouldn’t have ever thought of hearing. She ponders and wonders if the girl is alright, and evidently, the girl seems and acts as though nothing has happened from the night before. And yet, night after night, Lena hears voices through her bedroom wall, with each night the same thing. Lena does not know what to make out of this, until the young girl comes over one day and asks if she could use their window. Lena then was able to put together all the pieces and distinguish the story of her strange neighbor. It was a mother and a daughter who regularly gets into fights and arguments. And even so, the mother and daughter make up in the end and both still loves each other. It was truly then that Lena understood she was wrong and she then tears of joy ran down her cheeks.
4. The relationship between Lena’s mother, Ying Ying, and the father, Mr. St. Clair is very awkward. Though the love might be there, the relationship and communication is not. It was quite clear because when it was time for the immigration papers, the father crossed off Ying Ying’s birth given name and gave her an English name to make life easier. Aside from that, Mr. St. Clair also wrote the wrong birth date of his wife! That just shows how little the husband knows about the mother. Another example of miscommunication is that Mr. St. Clair does not put in the effort or time to understand his foreign wife. Though they speak two different languages, he could have at least taken the time to try to understand his wife. However, he deliberately puts words in her mouth, telling Lena when her mother is frustrated or content. Shockingly, Mr. St. Clair proves to us he is not a good husband when he does not try to help his wife cope with the fact that they just had a miscarriage. The wife, Ying Ying, is dramatized, yet the husband brushes her off to the side and let her be, telling himself everything is alright.
5. In this chapter, Amy Tan uses a lot of imagery. She describes the cutting of the mother. Tan was able to create the scene and let us, the readers, see it as if we were there. “But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.” (121).
6. The lesson that we got out of this chapter is to always be on the happy note. Make the best out of unfortunate events. Do not always be gloomy and mope about what could have happened. Instead, one should move on and learn from those mistakes. Always have a smile on your face and be optimistic. Like the wise one would say…
Turn that frown, UPSIDE DOWN!
“Unexpected”
2. LENA ST. CLAIR: “The Voice from the Wall”
3. At the beginning of the chapter, I thought everything was going to be really scary and creepy, due to the gruesome stories and connotations the words gave off, so I was nervous about continuing on with the chapter. But, braved it and read on and realized the chapter wasn’t scary at all. I didn’t get why Amy Tan had to use those words, but I assumed it was just to emphasize the impact of whatever had happened to Lena St. Clair’s mother before, and to help the reader understand the significance of what the traumatic experience may have done to her.
The relationships between the members of the St. Clair family left me flabbergasted. I was expecting St. Clair’s parents to be able to communicate better, but it seemed as though St. Clair’s mother kept more to herself and the other two were either left to translate for one or the other, or they had to assume things. I couldn’t believe that St. Clair’s parents could actually continue a marriage like that, with a lacking form of communication. I also thought it was cute though, that they could survive despite St. Clair’s mother’s seemingly tragic past and through the racial problems that were sure to have occurred as they lived together. But either way, I really didn’t like the way the family communicated, especially how St. Clair’s father, “would put words in [St. Clair’s mother’s] mouth” (108).
When St. Clair first began hearing the “Voice from the Wall” I felt sorry for her because of how she compared her family with her neighbor’s, especially when she said, “it comforted me somewhat to think that this girl next door had a more unhappy life” (118). I felt even worse for St. Clair when her neighbor came into her house, because then she realized that her neighbor’s life wasn’t actually that bad, that she “had been wrong” (120). At the end of the story, as St. Clair began to realize the way she could “save” her mother was to tell her that she had already been through the worst, and that there would be no more “worst possible thing”, I thought that was really touching because it gave hope for both St. Clair and the rest of her family, and it really showed the bond between mothers and daughters, how they can understand and help one another. I also liked how Tan added the line, “I saw a girl complaining that the pain of not being seen was unbearable” (120). This particular really stuck out to me because it connected back to the chapter “The Moon Lady”, where St. Clair’s mother wanted to be found. And here, St. Clair wanted to be seen. Like mother, like daughter.
4. The relationship between St. Clair’s parents could be described as distant. This is especially shown when St. Clair’s mother had a miscarriage, and both St. Clair and her father were incapable of consoling her. The fact that St. Clair’s father did not understand her enough in order to console her already shows their distance, and their distance was further pushed when St. Clair, “could not tell [her] father what [St. Clair’s mother] had said” (117). Their language barrier proves as a difficulty in their relationship because they cannot directly communicate, and so makes it harder for any emotional communication to take place. Surely, St. Clair’s father’s inability to comprehend St. Clair’s mother’s thoughts, feelings, and words pushes them apart even further, especially as St. Clair’s mother already tends to keep to herself.
5. In this chapter, I noticed Amy Tan using word choice to intensify the thoughts of Lena St. Clair. An example of this is when St. Clair hears, “scraping sounds, slamming, pushing and shouts” and, “screams, more beating” (114), from her neighbors home. The specific words that Tan used to describe the “Voice From the Wall” that St. Clair heard displays the emotion evoked from St. Clair. If Tan had decided to use other words, like yells instead of screams, or hitting instead of beating, the negative and terrifying emotion that St. Clair felt would not have been clearly read. Readers could be misled to think that the things St. Clair heard were merely simple, non-impact sounds that St. Clair happened to have heard that night. It surely improves the story by exuding St. Clair’s thoughts and emotions, as well as the reader’s.
6. What is the main conflict in the chapter? Is it internal or external, human vs. self, vs. society, vs. nature, vs. human and how do you know?
I feel that the main conflict of this chapter is human vs. self. Though the family does undergo several problems in this chapter, I think that the conflict is between Lena St. Clair and her own self, because she is consistently troubled with “the pain of not being seen” (120). Also, there are no outside forces that conflict with St. Clair. Mainly, St. Clair wanted her mother to care again, for her mother to find hope and to find a way to tell her mom that there was no “worst possible thing”. St. Clair consoled herself by saying that life in her neighbor’s home was worst than hers, but later on she realized that she was wrong, and that they were actually happier. St. Clair was conflicted with herself as she felt that her family had lost all hope, no matter how much she wanted it to be the other way around. But after realizing that her neighbor’s were happy, she realized that her family could be that way too and she felt hope inside herself. She no longer felt that the “worst possible thing” in her mother would stay there forever, and she began to find “ways to change [the bad things in her mind]” (120). Instead of telling herself that she could no longer be seen, that there was no more hope for her family, she found ways to change them, and hopefully change her mother. Once the conflict of pessimism inside her was resolved, St. Clair found hope for the rest of her family.
1.You Must Be Seeing Things
2.“The Voice from the Wall”
3.…And then the abnormalities pick up again. I did not like this chapter too much, because of the paranoid thoughts that both the mother and daughter had. It surprised me that such a child could conjure up images so sickly. Other than being in complete shock about Lena, I thought she seemed older than she really was. When she first compared her life to that of the girl next door’s, Tereas, I thought, I’m glad that she is not totally embodied in self-pity. But in the end, when Lena heard the Sorcis “hugging and kissing one another,” when she “was crying for joy with them,” when she realized she “had been wrong” (120), it seemed to me that she had aged drastically, and what she realized was just so heart-wrenching.
4.Ying-ying and her English-Irish husband seem to have a marriage that lacks communication and depth. They cannot communicate efficiently, because Ying-ying barely speaks English and her husband cannot speak her Mandarin language. Maybe they do love each other, but Ying-ying throughout the chapter does not display any affection toward him, only to her daughter Lena. It seems as if they only communicate through their daughter, and in no other way. What further convinces me that their marriage is flat is how careless Ying-ying’s husband is with the immigration papers – he “proudly named [Ying-ying]…Betty St. Clair, crossing out her given name” (107), and even “put down the wrong birthyear” (107). When I think back to “The Moon Lady” chapter, I can see that Ying-ying’s husband is helping her lose her identity. Although it is probably unintentional, it does not seem like the best path for a relationship.
5.The word choice for “The Voice from the Wall” was incredibly real, and gave me the creeps when Lena or Ying-ying started dreaming up some disgusting images and happenings. The chapter even starts with a beggar dying “in the worst possible way,” which meant “the death of a thousand cuts” (104) according to Lena. The whole entire chapter was filled with a deep sense of inescapable paranoia, starting from Lena to her mother, and back the other way. Although the fears and (maybe) superstitions of the mother and daughter frightened me a bit, I have to say that the word choice creates a vivid view of some of the thing they imagine, and that makes the chapter much more real.
6.In this chapter, I learned about the “balance” of things. I did not realize that in Chinese culture, things have balances, and that they affect your life. The fact that Ying-ying does not reply to Lena questioning the outcome of what were to happen if things weren’t balanced, told me that the answer probably wouldn’t have been good.
1. Madness
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. How emotional. Lena seems a fragile person just like her mother but she has a better grip on reality. So I wonder has Ying-ying been like that ever since the night she fell into the water and wished to be found. She sounded normal when she was telling her story but the way Lena describes her sounds like she’s lost it. Lena seems a caring child though because when she hears the “voices” of the daughter and mother next door reconcile and fall into each other’s arms with love. She wishes she could save her mother from that paranoia and madness.
And the usual superstition that has never been heard of. Such as the balancing of a house? No idea where that came from. But I understand the part she seriously loses it after loses her child.
And once again comes the feminist pasts of Amy Tan. The American husband is inconsiderate when something really matters such as that he insists that Ying-ying learn English and when she doesn’t, he just puts words in her mouth with really regarding her feelings about that. So as a result, he actually denies her the ability to communicate, and so eventually, she drowns into the depths of madness, maybe as a way to deal with her isolation and loneliness. I’m not sure about that because she has her daughter.
Ying-ying has a really big paranoia in sex and how horrifying it is. She cautions Lena that a bad man in the basement that will “plant five babies in her” and then devour her. Later she cautions Lena to avoid strangers who will snatch her and “make her have a baby” and everything Lena knows isn’t true. If I was Lena I think I would be more nervous around my mom and knowing she’s going insane than the stories that she tells me.
At the end I didn’t get that dream she had at all. Was Lena dreaming of saving her mother from that madness when she pulls her through that wall???
4. What, oh what, has gotten into poor little Ying-ying who used to be such a buoyant young girl. It shows that her life where we have not read yet must have traumatized her. But no matter what she loves her daughter and has passed that same love down to Lena who loves her back just as much. It shows in everything they do. Even though Ying-ying might embarrass Lena sometimes, Lena doesn’t get all mad and start yelling to her mom, but then that’s also because Ying-ying isn’t like Lindo.
5. There is a symbol that related to Ying-ying. When Gu Ying-ying came to America, she was declared a Displaced Person because the immigrant officials could not categorize her. Her name was changed to Betty St. Clair by her husband and her birth was postdated by two years. This misclassification is a symbol of a new Ying-ying: she is stripped of her Chinese identity; she is literally a displaced person in a foreign world. When her identity is erased, she doesn’t exist anymore.
6. The theme of heritage is important in this section, especially when Lena is faced with her double identity. She is half Irish and half Chinese, a combination of two cultures. Although her coloring makes her seem Caucasian, her eyes are unmistakably Chinese. Personally, like her appearance, she is on both sides of cultures. She says, “I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me I got from my mother.” Like the beggars death, there are two version of reality, Chinese and American. Imaginative, horrifying, but her other vision helps her maintain her grip on reality.
Johnny Chu
Period 7
1. Soul Crusher
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. When Lena St. Clair inherits her mothers Chinese superstitions and customs I find that weird. Lena is half white and half Chinese; however, she got the superstitions of the Chinese and saw weird images. I think Lena is more Chinese than White. I also feel bad for her since in my opinion she had mental problems more then superstitions. However, her parents didn’t seem to notice and spent too less time with her. Result, is a daughter with a lot of psychological problems. Another significant thing I want to talk about is someone Caucasian marrying someone Chinese in the early 1900’s. This is very uncommon during Lena’s time. Even the immigration officials have to put them in a different category when they enter the United States. I find it odd to see that in the early 1900’s. The couple would have to talk in hand signs because of the language barrier.
4. Lena and her mother’s relationship can be described as close and they shared a lot of secrets. Lena’s mother passed on her superstitions and stories to her as a kid making her having these images that aren’t supposed to be real. The relationship between Lena and her father is not too close. Since her father cared more about her mother than her.
5. The writing technique I find Amy Tan use the most in this chapter is imagery. She described Chinese torture with very breathtaking words, and actions.
6c. Chinese people are again very superstitious and it is shown again in this chapter. They have beliefs that we don’t understand. In my opinion these customs might not be true, but they are a belief.
“With my Chinese Eyes”
The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter is quite dark and at times confusing, but it was interesting enough to keep me wanting to read more. To read that there was a “bad man who lived in the basement”(105) in the St. Clair’s previous house in Oakland who would eat people is definitely creepy, which made me wonder why they continued living in that house for so long. When the family moved to North Beach and Ying-Ying became pregnant, she constantly kept rearranging the furniture and bumping into sharp corners. What was she thinking to cause her to do so or was she even thinking? After she gave birth to a son who did not make it, she started speaking nonsense in Chinese about the son. I felt sorry for Lena who must have been in a tough situation. She had to secretly deal with the insanity of her mother while putting on a good façade for her father. Later in the chapter, a girl next door, Teresa appears and is quite an odd character. She gets hurt every night but whenever Lena sees her, Teresa is all smiles. That did not make sense to me and caused me to become confused.
2. Ying-Ying St. Clair and her husband’s relationship can be described as problematic. Ying-Ying’s main language is Chinese while Mr. St. Clair’s is English. It is hard for the two to communicate besides looking at each other’s “mood and gestures, looks and silences”(108). Both begin to fall apart in their own ways: Ying-Ying with her sudden episodes of silence, crying, and repeating of “Mei gwansyi” and Mr. St. Clair with trying “to make things better”(117).
3. A writing technique that Amy Tan uses that improves the story is imagery. The scene where the Chinese man comes lunging toward Lena and her mom is pretty hilarious. Another scene that shows great imagery is when a girl cuts her mother a thousand times. “The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish! whish! whish!”(120).
4. I feel the theme of this chapter is that life is always better than you think it is. Lena thought that her neighbor, Teresa, led “a more unhappy life” than she because Teresa was “being beaten to death” every night (118). But in fact, Teresa was the one in the end who was “laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love”(118) with her mother.
1. My Mother – The Ghost
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. As soon I as I began to read this chapter, I learned about how Lena’s great-grandfather was killed by the ghost of a beggar he executed. At first, I questioned why they would put this as the beginning, but then I realized it was to show the mother’s deep concern toward the unknown spiritual/ghostly realm. This whole belief in a ghost would be shown later when Lena compared her mother to one, because of her lifeless life laying in bed all day. In the beginning of the book, Ying-ying tells her daughter to stay out of the basement of her Oakland home because there was a ghost inside that had lived there for thousands of years. I honestly questioned this because the home they lived in must have been only a couple decades old, unless they lived in a worn down house from the mining era of the bay. I also questioned if Ying-ying herself was crazy because throughout the story Lena describes her mother as seriously disturbed because she is “unbalanced.” Perhaps Ying-ying’s ghost was just an evil trick inside her mind that followed her wherever she went, causing her to live unhappily. When Ying-ying was speaking to Lena about her dead child she gave birth to, who would later cause her much grief, she also made a reference to another former dead son. Lena thought her mother was crazy, but I again was confused. Was this other son from a past relationship in China or the U.S., or was it with her current husband, before Lena was born? Throughout the story Lena took much advantage of her mother by lying to her relatives about what her mother would tell her in Chinese. Lena probably thought her mother was crazy and that everything she said was fiction; this lack of trust was probably the reason that Ying-ying thought her daughter was foolish. When Ying-ying became unbalanced from the strange drunken Asian man walking towards her, I honestly wondered why. Why did she have to rearrange all the furniture? And why would one man make this much of a difference in her life? Perhaps he reminded of her of a past lover, whom she didn’t want to remember. Another aspect that I noticed was the whole relationship between Mrs. Sorci and Teresa next door. At first, their fights seemed totally irrelevant, but I soon noticed how it fit into Lena’s life. The Sorci family would fight, many times, but out of love, not so much as hatred. All Lena seriously wanted was a loving relationship with her mother, who at this time was a complete “ghost” who lied down way too much and had such little interaction with the family. She wanted a loving relationship like the Sorci family. The ending paragraph was quite confusing, when she envisioned cutting her mother with a thousand times to show her she was a ghost. Overall, I think the whole paragraph was trying to show how Lena just wanted her mother to become less absentminded and become more “alive” and loving.
4. The relationship between Mrs. Sorci and her daughter, Teresa, can be described as harsh love in a way. The two were heard by Lena, always fighting and bickering at each other. One time in the story, Teresa was thrown out of her house. But this worried her mother dearly despite all the arguing. They fought out of love in a way, not hatred. They forgave and forget, and eventually started their arguments all over again. It was quite clear that Mrs. Sorci didn’t hate her daughter, and that Teresa didn’t hate her mother; although, Teresa did act quite bratty for a twelve year old girl. From an outsider, their relationship could probably be seen as one big feud. But from an insider, all this could be overlooked, as one would see that it was all concerned love.
5. A major writing technique Amy Tan used that can be seen multiple times throughout the story is her use of foreshadowing. She used this for Lena as Lena would describe the horrific events that occurred to her mother. One phrase she used was in the beginning, was when Lena said that her mother was “devoured, piece by piece, until she disappeared and became a ghost” (103). This was a major giveaway as countless ghost references were made, as well as the description of her “lifeless” mother. Another foreshadowing hint was when she said her mother “lost the struggle to keep her eyes open,” another ghost reference (105). One other foreshadowing phrase can be seen when Lena noticed her mother was “unbalanced,” when she rearranged all the furniture. Lena said that she, herself, “could see that some terrible danger lay ahead” (108). This foreshadowed the continued crazy habits and life of Ying-ying who almost went insane.
6. d. In the beginning allegory, Lena ask her mother how the beggar was killed, because she didn’t believe he actually became a ghost. Ying-ying scolded her daughter for questioning something so gruesome. Ying-ying feared the unknown much, for she believed in ghosts. This could be seen when they lived in the Oakland house and Ying-ying locked the basement to keep the evil spirit away. Ying-ying also saw her dead child as a ghost in the vision she told her daughter. The whole concept of a ghost described how Ying-ying lived her life at the end of the story, lifeless, when she confined herself in her room.
1. Mirror Walls
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. Overall, “The Voice from the Wall” was very dark, twisted, and mysterious. Lots of places were left open-ended for me. Maybe Amy tan intentionally wrote very vaguely because of the subject and nature of this story which seems more explicit than the others. One unanswered question was, why did the strange Chinese man lunge at her in the street? While reading some portions, I felt absolutely disgusted by her. When she was pregnant and began bumping into things, specifically. That, to me, was very corrupt and wicked. I can’t stand the thought of it.
4. The relationship between Lena and her father could be described as reliant and trustworthy. They both count on one another at one point in the story when her mother is sick or disturbed. Her father, although not fluent in Mandarin, optimistically presumes what she says, rephrasing her frustrations as simply “tired” and when she made a good dinner he would presume she said, “we’re the best darn family in the country!” which made me laugh. The father relies on Lena when he could not understand what she said, and Lena understood perfectly. So, in return, she gave him the same hopeful response saying, “…we must all think very hard about having a baby...And she thinks we should leave now and go have dinner.”
5. A technique Amy Tan liked to use in “The Voice from the Wall” was obviously word choice. With the daughter’s sick and twisted imagination, you could only describe such morbid thoughts through powerful word choice. She vividly describes her disturbing thoughts such as when she digs into the sandbox and sees “devils dancing feverishly”. The despicable image she creates when her neighbors are fighting, of how her mother would “slice her life away, first a braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the point on her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothing left, no sounds.” The word choice improves their story by giving more insight and reality into the character’s mind, especially Lena. Without word choice, Lena’s voice would wither.
6. The conflict within this story is very much an internal conflict between Lena and her mother. When he mother’s sanity disappears, she becomes selfish. This human vs. human conflict is of how Lena struggles to be loved and acknowledged of her own thoughts and feelings because of her troubled mother. Even her father ignores her when her mother becomes very sick.
Tiffany Vuong
6th period
1. The Death of a Thousand Cuts
2. A Voice from the Wall
3. The beginning of this chapter was a bit confusing. I didn’t understand the whole ghost story and why it needed to be told. While not understanding it, I actually still wanted to read on. The description of the text made everything that much better. The mom seems overprotected and I feel bad for Lena. When her mom reached for her wallet to pay at the register and let go of Lena’s hand for a quick second, Lena took the opportunity to take a little peek at the candy and the mom rushes and grabs her hand and apologizes. It made me really think about Lena’s future. How will she survive without her mom always being there to hold her hand every step of the way? When Ying-Ying starts to replace the cans in the cabinet with other cans or when she starts moving the furniture around because things seemed to feel unbalanced I was getting the feeling she had something along the line of a mental disorder.
4. Lena and her mother’s relationship could be described as abstract. Her mother has some type of internal problem that she’s facing throughout the chapter and it made Lena feel so distant from her. No matter how many questions she had asked her mother, she never got one true acceptable answer. Every time she tried to reach out to her mother to figure out what wrong with her, she never got any closer than the position she was in. Lena asks her mother about the girl she saw on the streets of Chinatown “what did she do to herself (108)?” “She met a bad man…,” her mother replied but Lena knew that wasn’t true. If Ying-Ying couldn’t even tell Lena the truth about a woman on the streets she barley knows, what makes Lena think that her mom would tell her about herself, about her actions.
5. In this chapter Amy Tan uses similes to clarify the description from the text. For instance, “she looked ruffled, as if she had fallen out of bed with her clothes on (118).” Tan uses similes to explain the situation in other words we can imagine or visualize in a more guided manner.
6. I think the main conflict in this chapter is human vs. self. Ying-Ying has terrible fears and situations going on inside her head. She's always in her own little world and doesn’t know how to get out or what to do. Ying-Ying can't even communicate to Lena without lying to her own daughter. And because of these situations Lena and her father are also. The dad doesn’t really know what's going on because he doesn’t really understand the superstitions of the Chinese culture and Lena doesn’t really have the words or knowledge to explain to him.
1. “The Living Ghost”
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. I thought this chapter was really weird and disturbing. The story Betty told Lena about the beggar and how he died was creepy to me. Although, like Lena, I did want to know how they killed him in the end. When Lena opened the basement door and fell in, her mother told her there was a “bad man” who “lived there for thousands of years” ( 106). All I thought was, “What? That’s crazy.” And when Lena said she started “to see terrible things” with her “Chinese eyes” (106), I thought she was going crazy. I didn’t like how Betty told her ridiculous stories every time Lena asked her something. She just gave Lena bad thoughts to think about. Not only was Betty paranoid with everything, thinking it all contained some danger, she seemed to have gone crazy in the end. The way she explained her miscarriage of the baby was confusing and just insane. And Lena’s next-door neighbors, what was the “whack! whack! whack!” (114) noise? Just someone getting hit? Lena’s conclusions were sure more bizarre than that. That girl has a lot of imagination.
4. The relationship between Lena and Betty is very overprotective. Betty constantly makes up little bizarre stories to explain something to Lena. She tries to scare Lena from doing anything that may cause her any danger. The scene where they pass a homeless lady, her mother tells her that “she met a bad man” and “had a baby she didn’t want” (108) which most likely isn’t true. But she tells Lena that to make sure she doesn’t make the mistake in her future and end up homeless and all alone. Another scene was when they run into the Chinese man who tried to harass them. When they’re in the store shopping, Lena slips away to browse around and Betty “grabbed [her] hand so fast [she] knew at that instant how sorry she was that she had not protected [Lena] better.” (111) which shows how much she truly cares for her daughter’s safety.
5. Amy Tan uses wonderful imagery throughout this chapter. When Lena said she could see terrible things, and explained what she saw, I could imagine it in my head. She “saw a beetle wearing the face of a child” (106) which gave me the image of a beetle walking around with a kid’s face. And the line that describes the “tether balls that could splash a girl’s head all over the playground” (106) I imagined a little girl’s head smashed on the floor, blood and guts oozing out. Tan really knows how to make the reader be able to create their own image of the scene in our head.
6. This chapter and the allegory at the beginning both have to do with a daughter not listening to her mother’s warnings, and having to deal with the consequences of that. In the allegory, the mother tells her seven-year-old daughter not to ride her bicycle around the corner, or she’ll fall and hurt herself. The daughter being stubborn did it anyway and fell before she even reached the corner. In this chapter, Betty told Lena not to go into the basement, and due to her curiosity, she went in there anyway, causing herself to hit her head. Both girls got hurt because they did not listen to their mother’s words of advice.
1. “The Other Side”
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. On page 105, Amy Tan wrote, “And the dead man embraced my great-grandfather with the jagged piees of his arm and pulled him through the wall to show him what he meant.” It wasn’t until later did I realize and full understood what Tan meant. I thought Lena was a bit disturbed, since her mother began to put morbid thoughts into her mind. This vignette states that she saw “things that caucasion girls at school did not” (106) like “a beetle wearing the face of a child” (106), and “monkey rigns that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space” (106). I thought that wa a bit awkward because usually, a kid wouldn’t see such terrible images. I wonder why Lena didn’t tell anyone about what she saw, especially her mother. I also wonder why Lena’s father “re-named” her mother Betty instead of keeping her given name of Gu. I can’t believe he put the wrong birth year! I thought it was sad to read that the baby died. Lena’s mother must have felt so bad that one of her children passed, she began to fall apart. However, I sympathize for Lena’s mother because when something like thathappens, it is tragic and not something a person just forgets about. It takes time. I thought Teresa, the girl who lived next to Lena, was rebellious, using a fire escape to get back home.
4. The relationship between Lena’s mother and Mr. St. Clair is lifeless and dead. The two don’t even communicate with each other. However, when they atleast try to communicate, Lena’s mother tries to speak English; but, her husband would just put words in her mouth, saying “she is just tired.” I don’t understand why they would stay together. I understand that she needed his help to immigrate; but, why didn’t she get a divorce after she was a citizen? Because clearly, I don’t see any sign of affection towards him. It’s somewhat sad that their daughter has to translate for Mr. St. Clair just for him to understand his own wife.
5. A technique Amy Tan uses in this vignette is imagery. She carefully chooses precise words to paint a descriptive image in our minds. For example, she wrote, “screams and shouts, a mother had a sword high above a girl’s head and was starting to slice her life away, first a braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a toe, a thumb, the point of her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothing left, no sounds” (114). By writing that simple sentence, she allows the readers mind to picture what happened during the scene.
6. Once again, reading this vignette teaches about Chinese people. I’ve learned that they are very superstitious. Because Ying-Ying feels unbalanced, she begins to use feng-shei in her house. She tries to rearrange furniture in several rooms, more than once; but, it doesn’t seem to work out in the end.
1. Things that Go Bump~
2. "Voice from the Wall"
3. Lena St. Clair and her mother are very similar. I thought it was funny how Lena is so influenced by her paranoid mother when I, myself, doesn't take after anything from my own mom. She inherited her mother's "sense" of paranoia and the fear that everything is dangerous. I was amused when I remembered a phase in my life when I was afraid of everything also (the closet, under the bed, the toilet, etc). I found it especially hilarious when she thought her neighbor's mother was killing her daughter. I didn't know anyone could be that cynical in life. (:
4. Lena and her father's relationship can literally be described as a translator that cares too much. Lena's father is clueless to Lena's mother's words so he often asks Lena to help him. Lena tries to protect her father by feeding him false translations to what her mother says, scared that if he knew the truth, it would worry or bother him.
5. In this chapter, Amy Tan uses flashbacks relating to Lena's childhood. Lena is half-Chinese and half-Irish but when she was younger she tried to lose her Chinese side by expanding her eyes. Her father asked "why [she] looked so scared" (106).
6. In the chapter the main conflict was human vs. self throughout the chapter. Lena's mother battles her loss of balance in her life, her constant paranoia, and the emotional damage to the loss of her baby. Lena is paranoid all the time, she has the burden of helping her father and translating for him, and she can only watch as her mother feels apart.
1. “Balance”
2. THE TWENTY-SIX MALIGNANT GATES: “LENA ST. CLAIR: The Voice from the Wall”
3. This chapter was very dark and creepy. I was surprised that Lena would want to know in great detail about how much pain and agony a person would face when they died in the worst possible way. It was frightening to read the parts where Lena saw horrible things with her Chinese eyes. I was nervous for Ying-ying when she didn’t stop rearranging the furniture and everything around the house and when she kept on bumping her pregnant belly on things. I thought that a mother would take special care of her growing baby when she is pregnant but it looked like Ying-ying didn’t really care about her stomach. I cannnot believe that Lena posseses a vivid imagination. The fact that she thought that someone was being beaten to death next door was petrifying to even think about. This chapter was like a horror story.
4. The relationship between Betty and her husband can be described as distant. Lena’s father is caucasian and speaks english and few Chinese words. Betty, on the other hand, immigrated from China so she is the opposite of her husband. Both don’t communicate very well because sometimes Lena had to translate what her mother says to her father. One important scene is when Lena, Betty, and her husband were at the hospital after Betty lost her baby. Betty told Lena in Chinese about her feelings while her husband waits for Lena’s translation. Two people who are married should understand each other, especially what they are speaking.
5. One writing technique that Amy Tan uses is foreshadowing. The fact that Lena’s mother acted in a strange manner after the incident of the red-faced Chinese man suggested that something bad was going to happen in the future. Also, Ying-ying, or Betty, constantly rearranged furniture and things around the house means that something is wrong and she has to take action even if it seems odd from Lena’s point of view. Finally, the fact that Ying-ying repeatedly bumped her stomach on things when she was pregnant signified that maybe the baby would have some complications during birth.
6. I learned about balancing things, something Chinese people call feng shui. In the story, Betty rearranges things in the apartment a number of times. She does this because she feels uncomfortable and not at ease because she feels something is wrong. This is one technique Betty uses to fill her home with harmony and peace.
Raymond Yeh
1.Dead or Alive?
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. This chapter was a lot darker than the rest of the chapters. What really confused me was the part when a man called Lena’s mother the girl of his dreams. I didn’t understand why Lena’s mother was so frightened. I also thought that Lena’s mother should try to move on with her life. Lying in bed and sulking around is not going to bring her son back. Her behavior is really affecting her family and greatly deteriorating her relationship with her daughter. She should worry about those who are still alive, not those who are dead.
4. At first, Lena feels bad for the girl that lives next door. Everyday she hears her fighting with her parents. She imagines in her head that the girl next door was being beaten to death. Lena was grateful that her life was not that bad. Then Lena’s mother has a miscarriage, becomes very depressed, and starts to spread the grief around the house, making Lena’s life very miserable. One night, the girl from next door comes over and seems to be happy even though she always fights with her mother. Lena is glad that she was wrong about her neighbor. In her head, she imagines the girl telling her mother to come back to life.
5. Amy Tan uses a lot of graphic description in the violent aspects of the chapter. She explains how the beggar was sentenced the death by a thousand cuts, had his bones crushed, skin sliced off, and felt all one thousand cuts. She also describes how the girl next door was being cut into a thousand pieces by her mother and was also being beaten to death. These descriptions help add the darker tone of the chapter.
6. Death by a thousand cuts, called lingchi in Chinese, is an actual method of execution. It was used in China from 900 A.D. to its abolition in 1905. It was usually reserved for very severe crimes such as mass murder and the killing of one’s parents. In most accounts the prisoner would be tied to a wooden frame and would have various body parts amputated with a sharp sword. The body was to be chopped into 3,600 pieces and the process was to last for 3 days. Contrary to popular belief, the prisoner usually dies after 2 severe wounds and would not feel all one thousand cuts. Westerners saw this method of execution as and example of cruelty and barbarism of China.
1. “Corrupted Perception”
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. I think Ying-Ying St. Clair is paranoid about guys snatching away women and forcing them to have their babies. Yet, at the same time, I question the relationship between her and Lena St. Clair’s father. Lena’s father obviously did not understand a word that Ying-Ying said, so how did they manage to get married? “For once, he had no words to put into my mother’s mouth” (116). He was at complete despair when she was going crazy, and hadn’t the slightest clue why. Is he the reason why she is so paranoid about being forced to have babies? I also believe that Lena St. Clair and her mother need to go see a psychologist, because seeing visions and hearing voices is not at all normal.
4. The relationship between Lena and her mother, Ying-Ying is like the loving bond between a mother and child. However, the roles occasionally switched. Ying-Ying showed her role as the mother when “she grabbed [Lena’s] hand back” really fast when was wandering away in a dangerous area (110). Other times, however, Lena acted like the parent because she had to tell her mother everything that was happening around her, since she didn’t know English.
5. In this chapter, Amy Tan made Lena’s mother Ying-Ying foreshadow when she was about to have a baby. First, she began to re-arrange the house in a way that the crib would be in Lena’s room next to the window. Second, she foreshadowed that the baby would be a stillborn, having “no brain” (116). Later, all of this came true in that she did have a baby, and it did die.
6. b. This main conflict in this chapter is human vs. self. Both Lena and her mother suffer from mental traumas. Lena constantly imagines the “girl [coming] back to life with more screams, more beating, her life once more in peril” (114). Her mother can see visions of her own baby, and “could hear him screaming inside [her] womb” (116).
1. No, I'm not hearing things
2. Voice from the Wall
3. Most of the chapter was really confusing to me. In the beginning, the begger and basement scenes seemed really unrealistic. I couldn't decide whether she was telling the truth or telling something that had come up from her overactive imagination. After I got past the begger and the basement, the chapter started getting really scary. All the things that Lena and her mother, Betty, saw were so terrifying. It must've been terrible living in such fear and always having to look over your shoulder to check if something is about to eat you or not. Lena and Betty saw all the demons and dangers that most other people, including Lena's father, could never imagine. I can understand that Betty is trying to protect Lena by scaring her so that she can be aware of her surroundings, but that isn't the only way to protect your daiughter. After the miscarriage, I couldn't understand what Tan was trying to say. Although I re-read the chapter a couple times, I'm still confused on what message she's trying to tell us.
4. The relationship between Betty and her husband is a strange one. I don't understand why they got married if Betty couldn't understand what her husband was saying and vis versa. In addition to the language barrier, Betty's husband doesn't seem to notice the physical clues that she's dropping because he doesn't understand that she is sad because of the miscarriage. He also doesn't see the fear she's constantly living in. Lena has the task of traslating between her parents, but because she translates incorrectly sometimes, their relationship is even more complicated. Betty is in turmoil and pain and her husband doesn't seem to notice a thing.
5. Tan uses imagery in this chapter beautifully. She describes all the things that Betty and Lena see in so much detail. The horrible things that Lena saw just in her school playground were brought to life with the help of Tan's imagery. She also describes things like the photo of her mother, the woman in Chinatown, and the apartment complex in such a way that I felt myself walking with Lena and experiencing the things with her.
6. The conflict in this story is mostly internal. Lena has the challenge of choosing whether she should translate exactly what her mother is saying, and create chaos, or she can lie about it and postpone the damage for later. She also has to live paranoid of everything around her because of what her mother taught her.
Dan Truong
Period 06
Inherit the Fear
(on “The Voice From the Wall”)
3) I thought “The Voice from the Wall” was a really odd chapter. I had trouble understanding what the meaning to it was. I felt this chapter was a dark chapter and felt sorry for Lena because her mother Ying-ying St. Clair passed on her paranoia, the strange things that she constantly feared. It causes Lena to always anticipate the worst in every situation. I thought Ying-ying was a weak person for falling prey to her fears, even though she was a Tiger.
4) I would describe the relationship between Ying-ying and Lena as protective, maybe even overprotective. Ying-ying is sure to always grab hold of Lena’s hand and make sure she is safe. She warns Lena about all the dangers that could occur. This is to ensure that Lena will be careful. I think they are very close because Lena is the only one who could understand Ying-ying. Although I do question Lena’s father’s marriage to Ying-ying when he cannot understand what she is saying. That’s stupid.
5) Amy Tan uses very dark word choice in this chapter. She uses words such as die, worst, kill, smashed, slice, chop, dark, etc. This dark word choice emphasizes the dark past of Lena St. Clair’s life and gives the story a dreary mood.
6d) This chapter relates to the opening allegory because in the opening, the mother warns the girl about The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates. The book is like a book with superstitions. Like the book, Ying-Ying has a lot of superstitions of her own. She teaches them to her daughter. Lena does not understand them, questions them, and is embarrassed by her mother. She ends up not listening to her mother.
1. eggshell with no chick
2. Voice from the wall
3. while Lena St. Clair moved her bed from the window to against the wall. There she listed to the neighbors family argue and feud across the wall. Well, I thought that was sort of creepy. Not knowing that everyday someone would be listening to your private life from across the plaster wall. Not knowing that someone knows how messed up your life really is. Not knowing that they take a secret pleasure in thinking your life is worse than theirs. Invasion of privacy?
4. Lena and her dad have an understanding relationship. They both try to keep each other sane even though their mother (wife) is slowly losing her mind. During the quiet dinners while her mother was laying in bed he would comfort Lena. When Lena’s mother spouted out nonsense, she would translate to her father a different message so he would not worry. In a way, they are both protecting each other.
5. Irony was used when Lena discovered that perhaps the other girl may not have such a bad life after all. When Teresa sneaked back in and her mother thought that she gotten hurt she became really worried. They hugged each other and cried in happiness. It was not really the reaction that Lena was expecting. She thought that this would be the last day Teresa would be alive. It was suspenseful.
6. The main conflict was internal. Through out the time that her mother was acting strange Lena had to deal with the question “ why me?” how come her mother was this way, why didn’t she have an normal life like the other kids at school. Then, she listened to the neighbor Teresa and all the argument she went through everyday. Someone this bought her sense of joy, knowing someone had it worse. Lena is always worrying what is happening to her life. In the end, she is comforted by the fact the worse was over.
1. Imaginations Gone Wild
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. My first thought after reading this chapter was, “Wow. Both St. Clair women are really crazy”. Lena, the daughter, has one twisted imagination. What normal little girl imaginations gruesome images of tether balls smashing a girl’s head all over the playground and a mother slicing her daughter’s body parts off? And why would Ying-ying/Betty tell her daughter crazy stories of her grandfather’s death and stories of bad men in basements? The chapter was seriously demented.
4. I would describe Lena and her father’s relationship as merciful towards each other. When her dad asked Lena what her mother was saying in Chinese, Lena spared him from more worry by lying about what her mom actually said. In another case, Lena’s father tried to comfort Lena by explaining to her that her mom was “just tired” when she was lying on her bed like a statue although he knew it was more serious than that.
5. There are a lot of imagery and good descriptions in this chapter, like when Amy Tan describes what the St. Clair’s apartment building was like. Imagery helps set up the setting of the story in the reader’s mind. Good imagery enables readers to picture what a place or area is like without having to be there firsthand.
6. One aspect of Chinese culture incorporated into this chapter is feng shui. The Chinese have superstitions that if a house is arranged poorly, they will be unlucky so they use feng shui. Feng shui is when people rearrange furniture to achieve a sense of “balance”.
1. Listening to the Life of Others
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. Very disturbing, morbid even, yet I still liked it. Right at the very start I was drawn into the book. The beggar’s death, the mysterious evil that lived within Lena’s basement and her vision of devils all seemed so captivating. I enjoyed this chapter not only because of its horrid scenes, but because of the psychological horrors. Most of these disturbing scenes were thoughts that never happened, but were only seen by the host. Especially when what “[Lena] had just witnessed with [her] ears and [her] imagination.
A girl had just been killed”(114). Lena must’ve seen this death over and over again, each time a different death. The most interesting part in this chapter, I have to say, would be the birth of Lena’s brother. A baby born without a brain and yet it still moved frightened me. I thought the brains controlled the nervous system allowing movement, but I guess this was unexplainable. To me, description of the baby seemed to be a ghost, peering into her mind.
4. I would describe Ling-Ling and her husband’s relationship as misunderstanding, or distant. Their verbal communication is broken since they speak different languages and barely understand their love’s language. They could only speak with signs and expressions which wasn’t enough to create a conversation, let alone understand each other’s thoughts.
5. The imagery is beautifully shown during the recapping of the morbid thoughts. While reading the words, the sentences, fully detailed paintings were crafted in my mind, or if it was a disturbing scene, burned into my mind. This made the chapter much more interesting when a detailed screenshot of each scene is created; being able to see all the horrors of her childhood.
6. I believe this chapter’s theme is to not always be pessimistic, but see the joys in life. Lena and her mother have this sort of ability which seems to drag them down. They always see the terrible things in life but never the good things. Lena learns to be able to see the positive, optimistic view as she later learns that these bad things could be changed. She hears the life of another, believing its one thing, but she later learns that what she heard was different than what she saw. Lena begins to have more hope.
1. Insanity
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. Throughout the whole chapter, really bizarre things happened. The red-faced man running while calling out “Suzie Wong, girl of my dreams!” (111) was extremely random. I think it just ties in with all the insanity of this chapter. This chapter was creepy and it made me uncomfortable because it offered little explanation for a lot of things. For instance, her mother became crazy after losing her baby. During her pregnancy, she would talk in riddles and became obsessed with superstition. She was constantly rearranging furniture due to the “unbalance” of the room. Her insanity did not stop there; it worsens after her miscarriage as she becomes a “living ghost”. I felt bad for Lena St. Clair because she does not seem happy at all. In her room, she is more interested in listening in on other people’s lives.
4. Ying-ying and her husband have a strange relationship. I don’t really see how they got married in the first place. It’s like they come from two different worlds. Her mother, who speaks mostly Mandarin, doesn’t seem to communicate with her English-Irish husband very well. When asked about the mother’s well-being, Lena’s father answered that she is “just tired” even though the situation is much worse. Lena St. Clair was also the one who had to translate to her father what her mother wanted after she just suffered a miscarriage. Her father means well, but he just remains confused and worried.
5. Amy Tan’s use of imagery lets you picture disturbing images. The way she describes the baby makes the reader cringe. “His tiny legs, thin neck...the baby’s eyes are open—and his eyes too!” (116). Being the mother, this memory will always remain in her mind. She feels that it is her fault that she had not cared enough which drives her into insanity.
6. I think the theme of this chapter is that things can always be worse and you have to look at the situation in another way to make it better. Lena St. Clair thought that someone was being killed from the other side of the wall but really, it was just a mother and daughter arguing. Now she knows that she can’t assume the worst from something without looking at it from a different view.
Lost in Translation
The Voice from the Wall
1) There is something seriously weird about any of the chapters that are about the St. Clair’s. First one makes very little sense to me and now this one has men hiding in the basement and a paranoid mother. The husband doesn’t understand Ying-Ying at all, and Lena understands her words but not the meaning. The wall is weird too, its both at the start and at the end, the worst thing is not knowing? Lena listening to the family next to her is also like Ying-Ying and her husband. The husband hears everything but he gets to the wrong conclusion, just like Lena and the family next door. Personally, I think this is a strange chapter, a lot of things are happening and we don’t know why they are happening.
2) Ying-Ying and her husband. Lost. I have no idea why Ying-Ying married him. They seriously don’t understand each other. Lena hears what Ying-Ying is saying, and the husband just comes up with all these words to put into her mouth. I’m not even sure Ying-Ying understands her husband, though, she must have in order to get married.
3) In this chapter, Amy uses foreshadowing to get us thinking about a topic, then go somewhere with it later in the chapter. An example of this is that Ying-Ying is always telling Lena that she will get pregnant then have to kill the baby if she doesn’t follow Ying-Ying’s directions. At the end of the chapter, that is what happens to Ying-Ying. She gets pregnant with a baby she didn’t want, and then kills it.
4) This story connects to the allegory at the start through many ways. One of them is how Ying-Ying sees danger in everything, just like the mother at the start, but she won’t tell Lena what those dangers are or were they are, just like the girl at the start. However, Lena doesn’t run away like the girl at the start, she stays by her mother and believe everything she says.
“Unbalanced”
The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter was a little confusing. I didn’t understand the story about the beggar who had apparently died in the “worst possible way.” The first section was pretty gruesome. I didn’t particularly like it. In general, the story was depressing. It was so sad how Ying-Ying lost her baby. That is probably the worst thing someone can experience. It was also sad that neither her husband, nor her daughter understand her, or even try to. Her husband just puts words in her mouth so that everything is the way he wants it. Her daughter does the same thing when she mistranslates what her mother is saying. I could relate to the part where Lena describes how she mistranslates for her mother though. I had often done that in the past for my grandmother when I was embarrassed by what she had said. When the girl, Teresa, who lived next door, was introduced into the story, I felt pity for the poor girl. I thought she must be sad and lonely. When I leaned of her true circumstances, I felt foolish. I had jumped to conclusions, assuming that she was beat. I felt relieved though, that she was unharmed. I felt good for her that she had a relationship full of love with her mother. I instead transferred my pity to Lena, who is misunderstood by her mother, and misunderstands her mother as well.
2. The relationship between Lena St. Clair and her mother is one of misunderstanding. Lena seems to fear understanding her mother completely for fear of any skeletons in the closet that she might uncover. When her father understates the turmoil her mother is going through following the death of her baby brother, Lena does not wish to probe deeper and try to understand what her mother is feeling. Ying-Ying does not help with her daughter’s understanding of her. She does not give voice to what she feels. She never once tries to explain what she is feeing. When Lena asks why she is rearranging the furniture, she just gives a vague answer that things are out of balance. If she had shared her fears with Lena, they could have bonded and understood each other more, but instead it seems their relationship was doomed to become one of miscommunication.
3. In this chapter, Amy Tan uses a lot of foreshadowing. Through the chapter, the reader gets a sense that a horrible tragedy is going to occur. When Ying-Ying rearranges the furniture because things are “out of balance,” one gets a feeling that something bad is going to happen. Lena worries about the new baby her mother is going to have saying “it was stuck somewhere between [her] mother’s stomach and [the] crib in [her] room” (113). This foreshadows that the awful event that is going to occur is going to have something to do with the new baby. The use of foreshadowing improves the story because it adds suspense and excitement to the tale.
4. This chapter is connected to the allegory at the beginning of the section in the sense that both mothers anticipate every possible evil that could ever lie in store for her daughter. Like the mother in the allegory, Ying-Ying does not fully express what the dangers are specifically.
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A Thousand Cuts to Save You
“The Voice from the Wall”
1. In my personal opinion, I found this chapter slightly frightening. It was strange for me to know that Lena saw supernatural things with her “Chinese eyes, the part of [her] [she] got from [her] mother” (103). I also felt pity for Ying-Ying, that she was delusional. She saw “danger in everything” (105) and was not well suited for American life. Her true identity was stripped away from her, her birth year was no longer the year of a ferocious tiger, but the year of the devilish dragon, and then, her son was taken away from her. I reread this chapter a few times to understand what the story with Teresa was about. However, I realized that Lena had felt pity for Teresa, thinking that she had been abused, nearly killed. However, she realizes that the arguments were just expressions of love and that she “had been wrong” (115). I truly pitied Lena, that she lacked these expressions of love from her own family, her mother and father whom were both turning delusional, piece by piece.
2. Ying-Ying and Lena seem to have a relationship similar to one of a babysitter and a child. These roles switch back and forth between the two. Sometimes, Ying-Ying is protective of Lena, especially from what she feels is dangerous to the two of them. Two men had even called Ying-Ying and Lena “that poor little girl and her maid” (108). Lena also plays the role as the babysitter to her mother. When her mother becomes delusional after losing her son, Lena would make up excuses and tell her father something completely different from what her mother really said. Lena does this to protect her mother so that her father will not say anything that may cause Ying-Ying to completely lose her mind.
3. Amy Tan’s use of imagery was just amazing in this chapter. Her descriptions like “the steep, fog-shrouded hill” and “loud, happy people, laughing, puffing gasping” (107) give me the sense of actually being in the setting witnessing the events happening. Tan’s description about the baby’s features was extremely horrific as well. The eyes “were open” and his head “was open too… like an empty eggshell” (112). It gave me an exact image that I could see clearly on my head. Amy Tan truly does fantastically with her use of imagery in “The Voice from the Wall”.
4. I felt that the theme of this vignette is, “Not all things that one sees as bad will remain bad forever.” The biggest example of this would be Teresa, and how Lena thought that her family was abusing her, trying to kill her. It was only after Teresa had come to her house, climbed her way back into her own house that Lena realized the abusiveness she had heard before was really family love, something her own family was lacking. However, she now knows that her mother’s craziness, “the worst possible thing, would one day stop” (115).
1. The Other Side
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. This chapter kind of scared me. Lena and her mother seem to be crazy. Lena's family lived in Oakland but later moved to San Francisco. She and her mother often saw things that weren't there or happening. They imagined horrible things out of nowhere. Soon after they moved to the new house, Lena's mother became pregnant and started moving all the furniture around because she felt unbalanced. She moved Lena's bed from the window to the wall to make room for a crib, and because of that Lena heard their neighbors through the wall. She heard a girl and her mother arguing. She imagined that the girl was being killed over and over again. Later on, she visits her mother at the hospital after the baby boy died after birth. Her mother became even more ill and from then on was always "resting." I thought that was really sad, Lena lost her could-have-been little brother and her mother lost her mind, completely. One day, her neighbor Teresa, the girl she heard through the wall, comes over and uses Lena's fire escape to climb back into her room after being kicked out. Lena thought Teresa was going to be in a lot of trouble, but her neighbors ended up crying with joy instead. Lena joined them, and from then on she looked at things differently. Lena tried to change the bad things she saw.
4. Lena and her mother have a certain kind of bond, because they both saw things. It's probably something Lena inherited from her mother. Lena also could understand Chinese while her father couldn't (as well), so she often purposely translated wrong, keeping the meaning to herself. Lena and her mother could communicate a lot better than her mother and father.
5. There is a lot of imagery in this chapter. Amy Tan describes what Lena and her mother imagines. The descriptions of the images, such as the torture, are pretty disturbing. This improves the story because it helps the reader imagine the scene and sets a mood for the environment and how they are feelings.
6. (c) When Lena's mother became pregnant, she started moving all the furniture around because she felt it wasn't balanced. This is part of Chinese feng shui. Lena's mother said that things weren't going well because it wasn't balanced. She also said that the house being on a hill made all your strength roll back down the hill. Lena's mother was a strong believer in feng shui and thought that it was the cause of their misfortunes.
1. Another’s Life
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. I thought that this chapter was truly repulsive when it talked about Betty’s, or Gu’s, baby which had no brain whatsoever and its eyes were wide open staring at anyone who paid any attention to the lifeless raggedy doll. Also, I believe that this chapter was intense to read to the fact that torturous ways were discussed and for me, this chapter was difficult to read. I do not understand though the meaning of “the beggar’s mind had already broken into a thousand pieces,” (pg. 102). Did it mean that he had succumbed to a horrifying shock in his mind of himself being cut up and that he couldn’t bear the thought? Even so, I am not quite sure that I understand the meaning of the chapter, but my guess is that the theme is to try and see another person’s world through their eyes.
4. The person that caught my attention the most in this chapter would have to be Betty, the mother of Lena. She is a strange person to me and there are some actions of hers that were interesting and a bit depressing. The first one is when she was moving all of the furniture and decorations around in her family’s house many times. I had never heard of someone doing this constantly over and over again. The other action she had done that made me depressed and made me want to give pity towards her is when the unpleasant, doll baby that she had born and had never been completed in her womb died. She had lain on her bed almost all day long for days and when she was not, she would mostly be seen and or heard crying. When I had used imagery to configure this picture of a dark room with a lifeless human on a bed I had become poignant.
5. I was not able to find the theme in this chapter or even come close to it and because of this the conflict that I had come up with was the heart wrenching part in which the sibling of Lena had died at birth and the mother had changed from a cautious woman to a gloomy non – moving object. The conflict was human vs. self because Betty, the mother, had to find the bright side of life and turn over from the dark and gloomy side of life to the loving and warm side where she could make herself joyful once again.
6. This chapter is connected to the allegory at the start of the section because the allegory at the start of the section was the man who was killed by a thousand slashes who came back to kill the great grandfather of Lena was a symbol for the saying which is, what goes around, come around. The old man probably did not deserve the treatment which he was given and the same goes for the great grandfather of Lena. I believe that the chapter has to do with seeing another’s point of view without making a horrific decision. The chapter talks about the girl next door and her mother and how they had to see each other’s point of view before any horrible actions could have occurred like dying, which the old man had gone through.
The Wall Monster
“The Voice from the Wall”
By Fiona Cheung
I immediately recognized Lena’s disturbed mind as an inheritance from her mother; they both seem to like horrid things. At first, I thought the chapter would be about her hallucinating ghosts in the wall, hence the chapter name. I also thought she had an eye for seeing things not seen. Still, I think Lena’s mind is seriously disrupted to imagine all the ways someone could die. I was also reminded of Coraline when I read this, because of the forbidden basement, just like the room that started all the trouble in Coraline. I was also able to relate to her mother’s over protectiveness and how she warns me to not look at someone when we walk past them but I still slightly peek at them. I think her mother was probably raped at some point in her life, because every time she warns her daughter to be careful, she mentions a bad man and a baby, and when a man walked up to her, she instinctively stood there, trembling, covering herself, as if she had experienced it before. I was confused at the end, though, however, with the story of the daughter killing the mother. I saw that it related to the chapter and was important, but I didn’t get who or what it represented.
Lena also seems to be mature at an early age, but also childish. For example, she doesn’t see the world as a perfect place like most kids might, but instead, has a negative view on the world. She sees the worst in things and always thinks about the worst possible thing that could happen. However, she is childish in that she believes many stories her mother tells to protect her. She had inherited a troubled mind from her mother—the girl who liked to watch women chop heads off of animals. Thus, she sees the worst in the most innocent things, even something as innocent as monkey bars, something that brings joy in one’s childhood, she saw them “split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space” (103).
The main conflict in this story seems to be an internal one within Lena. Her mother’s constant stories and warnings have put a fear in her mind. As a result, Lena constantly struggles with the negative side of things, wondering what the worst possible thing that could happen is. Her mother had fed her all these thoughts and it’s too much for a child to live with a mother who seems crazy. She has the pressure of translating her mother’s thoughts to her father, yet is too scared to tell the truth.
Just like in the allegory, Lena’s mother always cautions her to be careful. Her mother is very protective of her, just as the allegory mother is, telling her child to not bike too far. The girls’ mothers don’t tell them why they need to be careful, but instead seem to keep everything inside of their slightly crazed minds. The mothers both see the bad in things and believe in “all the bad things that can happen to [their daughters] outside the protection of [their] house” (87). However, unlike the girl in the allegory, Lena believes her mother most of the times and also sees the terrible side of things.
Arun Jandaur
Period 3
Blog# 3: The Voice From the Wall
1. That’s A Lot of Pieces!
2. “The Voice From the Wall”
3. I found this to be a very mentally bloody chapter. First of all, I think that Lena is a disturbed child. Why would she want to know if a man seventy years ago was cut into a thousand pieces? She was trying to imagine this person’s pain and how exactly he was cut up. That is really gross. Second, the sword that ‘cuts up’ Lena’s mother is also a violent image in Lena’s mind. Lastly, Lena’s mother is very overprotective and always tells Lena that if she isn’t careful, someone will plant a baby in her or sell her as a slave. Ying-ying (Lena’s mother) mentions this twice: at the basement and when telling Lena about walking straight home from school. Another thing about this chapter is that it’s interesting at times but it can be hard to follow and sometimes I’ve had to reread some parts. I didn’t find the girl living next door to be very relevant and I don’t know what Joe (the one who scared Lena and Ying-ying) had to do with the chapter either. Are they symbols? Also, I have no idea what the sword and ‘a thousand pieces’ symbolizes. Does the sword symbolize comfort and solace because it doesn’t look or seem very comforting to me?
4. The character that I liked the most was Lena’s father. He is almost the opposite of Lena’s mom and he’s the only one who stays calm and constant throughout the chapter. He would be the static character. I am surprised that he stayed static even after the death of his newborn baby. That was a sad event and it mad me feel sorry for Ying-ying. It must be tough for any mother to go through that. Lena’s father, however, stayed strong and tried to support Ying-ying in her state of depression. He is true to life by being the backbone of his family. That makes him a round character as well.
5. It was hard for me to figure out the conflict of this chapter. I think that it is human vs. human. I think that Lena has a conflict with her mother. It isn’t a relationship conflict but instead it is about Lena trying to understand her mother. Lena’s mother is always very overprotective and Lena always thinks that her mom is lying to her about how someone might take Lena away and sell her. Also, Lena is confused about her mother’s behavior and why her mother kept rearranging the furniture and mumbling about balance and harmony. Her mother never told Lena straight up what she was doing and why. Lena’s dad had to tell Lena himself that the reason why Ying-ying was acting so weird was because she was going to have a baby. I believe that the conflict does get solved because Lena slowly understands her mother more as the chapter progresses.
6. In a way, this chapter is similar to the allegory at the beginning of “The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates”. In the allegory, the girl doesn’t believe her mother and doesn’t heed her mother’s warning, thinking that it’s a lie. Similarly, Lena doesn’t believe her mother’s warnings that someone might take her away and sell her if she isn’t careful walking home. Lena, however, doesn’t disobey her mother like the girl in the allegory does.
The Worst Possible Thing
Lena St. Clair: The Voice from the Wall
I thought that this vignettes was . . . interesting. I have a lot of questions. What terrors made her disappear and became a ghost? Does this vignette have to do anything with Ying-ying’s vignette (since Ying-ying does not speak much and keeps her wants to herself)? What is with the dark side of her mother? It’s weird . . . Her daughter starts to see terrible things . . . I would be paranoid! Why was there two babies? This vignette is very confusing for me. I don’t think I am getting much out of this vignette unfortunately. This vignette, honestly, sort of scared me . . .
In this vignette, Ying-ying is also quiet. She does not oppose to her husband’s decisions like how she learned to when she was younger. She is also very superstitious as she practices feng-shui by rearranging furniture in her new home. She stays loyal to her Chinese culture even though she is married to a white man. She still speaks Chinese and her English is broken.
I think the conflict in this confusing vignette is external human vs. society. Ying-ying does not speak English and therefore, her husband puts words in mouth. The conflict is also internal human vs. self as Lena is paranoid . . . The conflict is not resolved as the family is somewhat broken.
Amy Tan uses grim word choices in this vignette such as: unspoken terrors, dark chasm, devils dancing feverishly, blood-stained, etc. These words are the reason why the vignette is scary to me. With such dark connotations, I can’t help but to feel scared! I think Amy Tan is a great writer if she can do that with her words.
1. Insane
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. I thought this chapter was really gross and disturbing. Lena seems too curious and weird to me because she wants to know about a man and if he was cut into a thousand pieces. The thought of someone being cut up that much is just disgusting and it isn’t something a child should be thinking of. Lena tries to imagine what it would be like, which made me think she was crazy. This was an interesting chapter, but I wanted to put it down at times. It was hard to follow at some points, but a little re-reading got me through it.
4. Ying-Ying (Lena’s mother) stays true to her culture and practices feng-shui. This also shows she is superstitious because feng-shui is thought to bring good luck if done correctly. Even though she is married to a white guy, she doesn’t give up her heritage.
5. The conflict in this chapter is external and human vs. society. Ying-Ying’s husband puts words in Ying-Ying’s mouth and he takes advantage of this because of the fact that Ying-Ying can’t speak English. Another conflict is human vs. human because Lena doesn’t understand her mother and the things she does (feng-shui). Lena does start to understand her mother towards te end of the chapter, but I don’t think the conflict was resolved.
6. This chapter is very similar to the allegory in the beginning of “The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates” because Lena is in a position like the girl in the allegory. The girl in the allegory doesn’t believe the things her mother tells her, and she disobeys her mother. Lena doesn’t believe her mother, but she obeys her mother which is the difference between Lena and the girl in the allegory.
One flew over the Cuckoo’s nest
“The Voice from the Wall”
1. I wouldn’t exactly say that the chapter was bad. I actually thought that it was interesting. The weird events are what kept me reading. I feel sorry for Lena St. Clair because her mother Ying- ying is mentally unstable. Although Ying- ying wasn’t always that way, I wouldn’t quite say that she acted normal all the time. Ying- ying would always give Lena intense warnings but she would never really say it right to the point. Ying- ying felt it necessary to hide her warnings of certain things in life with cultural sayings. I also noticed that the relationships in Lena’s family aren’t strong. I wonder how the family gets by even though Lena’s dad and mom barely understand each other and Lena has to hide Ying- ying’s crazy condition from her father.
2. A conflict in the story is that Lena has to deal with her mother’s strange behavior. It must be hard for a young girl to look forward to life while her mother tells her crazy superstitions and thoughts. Lena sees and knows that her mother thinks differently and that there’s something wrong with her. We know that Lena recognizes her mother’s strange behavior because she hides it from her father, who seems oblivious to his wife’s extreme behavior. Even though Lena is just a child, she has to deal with keeping her family together, and being able to live her life happily.
3. I learned a little about the culture from this chapter. I’ve heard a few things about feng shui but I didn’t really know how it worked. When Ying- ying felt and imbalance in the house, she rearranged the furniture a lot until it felt right to her. The reorganizing of the house isn’t really as much about the house looking right, but when she was present in the house, it had to feel right. Ying- ying knew when the house was balanced when she, herself felt balanced in the house.
1. Delusional
2. Lena St. Clair – The Voice from the Wall
3. Starting from the beginning of this short story, I was already somewhat intimidated by the direction the story was headed. Beginning with someone getting cut into a thousand pieces, continuing with hearing voices through a wall and seeing someone die over and over again, and ending with a mother being cut a thousand times, this chapter was extremely perplexing and terrifying. Throughout the chapter, there were a plethora of spots in the story that were extremely confusing, such as the basement scene, the mother going crazy, and many others. Why did the mother lock up the basement and tell Lena that there was a man waiting for her down there? What was the cause of her mother’s craziness? Why was the father so oblivious to everything going on, and how did the mother and father even meet and marry, as they were so different from one another? It seemed to me that every member of Lena’s family had mental instabilities, and overall, it was an extremely weird chapter for me to read.
4. Lena’s mother constantly tells Lena stories that obviously aren’t true, in order to teach Lena moral truths. However, this shows how extremely superstitious Lena’s mother is, as shown when she barricades the basement and tells Lena not to go in. After Lena curiously enters, her mother pulls her out, telling her that a bad man lived down there and would eat her. The stories Lena’s mother comes up with are all extremely far-fetched and really scary, possibly showing the craziness inside of Lena’s mother.
5. The main conflict in this story, in my opinion, would have to be man vs. self. Both Lena and her mother face their inner consciences and their wandering minds, which can be said to ultimately possess them. They both seem to have trouble sleeping, waking up with constant nightmares, and Lena herself sees many illusions, such as the one with the girl constantly being killed. The trouble they have with their inner self is obviously a hindrance to them leading a normal life.
6. Strikingly similar to the allegory presented at the beginning of “the Twenty-six Malignant Gates”, this chapter displays the use of parables, or in some cases extremely short stories, to strike fear in the heart of children, cautioning them not to do something. However, in both parts, the child doesn’t listen and ends up getting hurt. The stories are always far-fetched and definitely impossible; however, it still scares Lena a lot.
~scott lee 3rd period
"Death by a Thousand Cuts"
-"The Voice from the Wall
1. I thought this chapter gave a lot of cultural information on the Chinese, especially their superstitions. Ying-Ying, or otherwise known as "Betty," St. Clair, is the stereotypical Chinese mother who allowed Chinese superstitions to overwhelm her. She thinks everything is a threat to her balance in life, a danger to her daughter. Ying-ying has always been overprotective of her only surviving child, Lena, and I think its because she has already lost one son during birth and later experiences another death while giving birth to her second son. She imparted this fear of seeing evil everywhere to her daughter. Lena began to see things everywhere, things that other girls of her age could not see nor imagine. She imagined gruesome images of tether balls smashing children up and "monkey rings that could split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space,"(Tan 103) which haunted her childhood. I felt that her american father was not understanding and hopeless to help Ying-ying because he did not understand Chinese. Ying-ying on the other hand did not bother to learn English and so they had to require on Lena to understand each other.
2.Ying-Ying St. Clair. I think Ying-ying St. Clair was still haunted by her past in China and brought much of the superstitions into her life in America. Her husband brought her here for a better life and saved her from the life she would have had in China. She did not take the time to learn English and try to expel her past. Maybe if Ying-ying tried to learn English and communicate to her husband, she would have opened her eyes to the new haven in America. She believed in too much superstition, maybe it was due to her past and the death of her son. She believed everything had to be in balance, and if not, then a disaster will strike. Ying-ying was already a nervous and uptight woman, not to mention fragile. The death of her second son tore her apart. In the end, when it says the girl sliced her mother with a thousand cuts and pulled her through the wall, I think it relieved Ying-ying of her pain.
3.I think the main conflict was human against herself. I didn't think this vignette was necessarily about Lena, it could also be about her mother Ying-ying. I believe one of the main conflicts in this story was Ying-ying and herself. She could not pull herself together to face the world in America, and saw danger everywhere. She also had an eternal struggle with herself, fighting to keep herself together after experiencing her son die in birth. She broke apart after then and thus she had to fight to keep her sanity.
4.I think the main symbol in this chapter is the beggar that was mentioned early in the story who died of a thousand cuts. I believe the scene itself was a symbol. A symbol of one being relieved from their spiritual pain and suffering by experiencing physical pain. Ying-ying suffered from too much Chinese superstition and her past haunted her. Also experiencing failure in chile birth, Ying-ying became a fragile woman, bound by her own dark thoughts. The thousand cuts, although not given to her literally, seemed like a pain killer to me. It gave her the worst and most painful physical experience but in turn, she can now open up to the world and take damage because she has already experienced the worst. The thousand cuts freed her from her emotional pain.
Reality Beats Insanity
“The Voice from the Wall”
Jeez. This chapter was filled graphic images and I could picture them all. I really could picture the girl slowly being cut up and the empty skulled baby. Ying-ying or Betty is extremely superstitious. She believes heavily on balance and without balance many bad things will occur. In the beginning of the chapter, I can see Betty inserting a sense of security and fear into Lena with the deadly man in the basement. Because of Betty, Lena has many thoughts and disturbing images run through her mind. Every situation is a possible danger to Lena and her mother. The way Amy Tan has Lena paired up with a Chinese mother and American father did stand out to me. I thought at first it was going to be mostly about heritage due her two parents. Unfortunately, I was wrong and this chapter had a lot of strange twists. I am still confused at the ending, but hopefully I’ll get it.
Betty [Ying-Ying] is revealed to be a very superstitious person and a very cautious person. I believe some of her Chinese beliefs have haunted her all the way to America and possibly the day she experienced with the Moon Lady impacted her a bit more than she expected. She talks about the creepy monster in the basement who devours everything that comes in contact with it and talks about how her baby boy was scratching at her in her womb. I can see she is a tad bit insane or extremely over exaggerating. Betty was totally freaked out when the man was running towards her and I can see that she wasn’t even concerned about her screaming daughter. She was more concerned about herself because she hugged herself so tight. Betty is either insane or indescribable.
This chapter had a very confusing conflict, but I believe it is human vs. human and human vs. self. Lena has to deal with her mother’s overly exaggerated superstitious beliefs and her gruesome fears. On the other hand, it was human vs. self because Betty had to deal with all her fears of danger. After exaggerating the loss of her son, she nearly lost her sanity and seemed like a “living ghost” (113). It’s also Lena vs. Herself due to the fact she has to deal with all these images and sounds that are produced in her head to her mother’s warnings.
In this chapter, Amy Tan decides to use a very interesting writing techinique. She has a unique word choice that creates a cautious yet disturbing mood. She uses many similes to describe Lena’s mother. It improves the chapter significantly because I can create a picture in my head of every gruesome scene Lena’s mom puts me through. It was interesting to see the description of the thousand cuts and how she used many similes to describe Betty before she lost her son and after she lost her son.
"Evil Minds"
Chapter: "The Voice from the Wall"
3)When i first started to read this chapter I was only a little confused on why Lena's mother would tell her horrible scary lies. As I kept reading I just kept getting even more confused with the story. Why does Lena and her mom both thinking extremely horrible thoughts? How come the father is so calm throughout the whole story? These questions kept popping into my head throughout the chapter plus the main question that came to mind was, why doesn't the baby the mother gave birth to have a brain? Overall I just didn't understand the message this chapter was trying to get across.
4)In this chapter I find that the most interesting character is Ying-Ying, Lena's mom. Ying-Ying comes across as being very superstitious. She is also scared about almost everything that is around her. For example the following quote shows how strange Ying-Ying thinks, "When something goes against your nature, you are not in balance.This house was built too steep, and a bad wind from the top blows all your strength back down the hill." (108-109)Ying-Ying thinks differently then a lot of people which is why I found her the most unique character in this chapter.
5)The conflict is between Lena and her mother against evil thoughts. This makes the conflict human vs. self. It is hard to tell if the conflict is internal or external because it seems like it could be both. Internal because they both think of of evil thoughts but, the conflict can also be external because both of them say that they see evil things. The conflict was resolved because at the end of the chapter the girl pulled her mother through the wall to escape her from the evilness, "Now you must come back to the other side. Then you can see why you are wrong. ...And the girl grabbed her mother's hand and pulled her through the wall." (115)
6)Throughout this chapter Amy Tan uses the writing technique of imagery to explain the types of evil and awful things that both Lena and Ying-Ying say they see.
1. Spaghetti worms are yummy Mmmmmm :3
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. Okay, well this chapter was just strange, strange. It was pretty dark and scary. I didn't really get the story, or the point, and, really, I was confused throughout the whole chapter. Lena's imagination, no her mind is really messed up. It's really violent, and gruesome; her descriptions are very, well, disturbing. And Lena's mom, what's up with her? I think she's crazy, psychologically messed up. She rearranges all the furniture (Feng Shui??) like everyday, and then has a child with its eyes open and no brain. I really need a thorough explanation about this chapter. I did not get what was going on.
4. Lena St. Clair is a very dark, depressing character with a very dark, depressing mind (I believe that is partly her mother's fault). Her character is revealed at the very beginning of the chapter when Lena's mother is telling her about the beggar who died from a thousand cuts. Lena inquires about the morbid details, revealing her strange imagination and twisted visions her mind often creates. I mean there is really something psychologically wrong with this child. She sees "monkey rings that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space", and tether balls that could splash a girl's head all over the playground" (103-104). Although I do believe Lena is an odd child, I can understand why. She is exposed to her mother's crazy ideas and actions, and she also witnesses the birth a brainless baby. Personally, I'd be pretty scarred by that.
5. I think that one of the conflicts is external Human vs. Society; there is a language barrier that separates Lena's mother and her father. Lena's father "spoke only a few canned Chinese expressions", and her mother spoke to him "in moods and gestures, looks and silences, and sometimes a combination of English punctuated hesitations and Chinese frustrations" (106). When "words [could not] come out", [her father] would put words in [Lena's mother's] mouth. They cannot communicate very well with each other, and this causes misunderstanding and gives the two a very shallow understanding of each other. Ying-ying St. Clair is unable to express and explain her feelings and thoughts to her husband because of this language barrier. I also believe there is internal Human vs. Self conflict. Lena's morbid imagination gives her strange ideas and images. Like her mother who is very superstitious, Lena faces evils that she cannot see. She is psychologically challenged, and traumatized by her own thoughts of the girl next door. I do think that some of Lena's fears are conquered when the girl next door comes over, and she discovers that the girl was never in pain or being killed to begin with. However, the language barrier between her parents is not resolved.
6. I really didn't understand this chapter, but Amy Tan was able to keep my attention through her word choice and imagery. I felt as if i could see all the crazy creatures and images that Lena was seeing. Her descriptions of the dead beggar man, and her descriptions throughout most of the chapter help successfully maintain the gloomy, spooky, and somewhat uncomfortable (for me) mood. Tan uses many similes and metaphors, that really allow the reader to picture the object or scene being described. For example, she uses a simile to describe the beggar's appearance comparing him to "a smashed vase hastily put back together" (102). As a reader, I was also, unfortunately, able to fully picture the baby that was born. Her vivid description and use of a metaphor to compare the child's head to "an empty eggshell" (112) helped give me a clear vision of the scene.
Alvin Lee 4th Period
1. A Thousand Cuts
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. One question that I had throughout this chapter is: What is the meaning behind the pulling through the wall? I think from this chapter, “Voice from the Wall”, that Lena, because of all the stories she heard from her mother, had a vivid imagination of the worst case scenarios. Also, because her mother hid so much from her through little lies, Lena, knowing they were lies, began to see danger in everything like her mother. Hearing the voices of her neighbors through the wall, Lena imagines terrifying forms of torture which, as she finds out, are not true. I believe that it is not healthy to think of what could happen and that Lena’s mother showed her the dangers so that Lena would be aware of what could happen. Overall, this chapter was very confusing to me because of Lena’s awfully horrific descriptions of her imagination.
4. Lena’s mother sees danger in everything and her extreme superstition passed down unto Lena. Lena has horrific descriptions of the dying baby and the events of her next door neighbor as she lies in bed. This leads me to believe that Lena has a very horrific imagination as well as a very cautious personality because she always considers the worst thing that could possibly happen.
5. I think the main conflict in “Voice from the Wall” is that Lena fought within herself to see the dangers in life and the truth to things because she sees devils in a sandbox, that lightning had eyes, the terrifying baby, and the torture of Theresa next door. This does get resolved because she sees differently about what happens next door to Theresa. I believe this conflict is internal and human vs. self between Lena and herself. I know this through Lena’s thoughts and how these thoughts change as she realizes the truth behind what happens between Theresa and her mother next door.
6a. I believe the theme of this chapter is that knowing the worst that can happen enables one to see what one did wrong and avoid it. Also, the theme could be something along the lines of the quote, “Think before you act,” and, “Know your consequences.” The scene in which Lena’s mother breaks down over the dead baby shows that if her mother took care into thinking of her baby, maybe her baby would not have died. Also, the scene where Theresa sneaks back through a fire escape to her house and her argument with her mother shows that, because her mother had been ignoring Theresa, her mother had been wrong.
Knock-Knock, Nobody's There.
(a.k.a. "The Voice from the Wall")
3.
* I don't know if the first paragraph was supposed to be humorous, but I laughed. It began so dramatically and ended with "Either that, or he died of influenza...". I realized that Lena St. Clair has a very big imagination when she began to describe the story of her great-grandfather's death from her own point-of-view.
* Was the beggar really a traitor? What did Lena's grandfather have to do with the death? What is the worst possible thing that can happen to you?
* What was the "thing" in the basement? (I doubt that it was really a thousand-year-old man.)
* I used to sometimes walk around the house with the same big eyes, the "scared" expression, thinking that my eyes would grow bigger, but I don't anymore. It was silly of me to try to change myself.
* Wow, Lena's mother saw danger in everything, just like Lena. I wonder if this is an inherited trait?
* What's with Lena's mom and the dangers of making babies? Was that what happened to her: Lena's dad made Lena's mom have Lena? Maybe so, but Lena's dad seems really nice from what I know. What if Lena's mom got into some sort of trouble on the streets and accidentally got pregnant and was rescued from her single-parent life by Lena's dad?
* Whoa, was Lena's mom afraid of being sexually harassed by a man on the streets or something? She didn't even try to protect her daughter! Just herself!
* Did Lena's mother even want the baby? Why did she keep bumping into corners with her stomach?
* Although Teresa, the neighbor girl, fights with her mom a lot, the arguments are filled with family love and compassion. Lena and her mom have never fought before, but somehow, their relationship is distant and cold, misunderstanding and somewhat unrelated. It's ironically weird.
* Wow, Lena's mother really needs to go see a therapist. She's kind of freaking me out.
* I didn't quite understand the ending. Was Lena imagining her relationship with her mother when she would finally have the courage to "pull her through the wall"?
4. I CHOOSE TERESA! When her mom kicked her out of the house, she simply walks to Lena's house and uses her fire escape to climb back into her room. This reveals that she is, indeed, a rebellious one. Along with that, she is very confident in the fact that her mother will forgive her. She knows the relationship with her mother is strong, that they go through these "fights" just for the heck of it and forgive each other in the end. I admire her strength and self-confidence.
5. I'm not sure of the conflict because my brain was very confused in this chapter, but I think the main conflict is an internal one, man vs. self, Lena vs. her imagination. Lena was born with a big imagination, but it developed and expanded even further as she grew. However, Lena's mind is not filled with unicorns and rainbows but with gore and torture. Throughout the chapter, she struggles with reality and figments of her imagination, where she always makes the worst out of situations, but discovers the not-so-bad truth. I think Lena is afraid of going forward in life; yet, her imagination makes everything worse than they seem. In the end, the conflict is resolved. Her mom leaves her in a state of depression, making reality worse than her imagination...turning her imagination into her savior, away from reality.
6. Otay, I'm going to focus on Amy Tan's writing technique of mood, especially in the beginning. The word choice (sharp, whittle, broken, jagged) made the opening really creepy. I was somewhat scared and confused at the same time, but it made me anticipate the mood of the chapter to be gory and bloody.
Emily Huynh, 4th Period!
Ashes! Ashes! We All Fall Down.
“The Voice from the Wall”
3. The first couple of paragraphs are kind of morbid. Lena is asking her mother how her grandfather had executed a beggar. Lena asks “did they slice off his skin? Did they use a cleaver to chop up his bones? Did he scream and feel all one thousand cuts?” (102) What could possess her to think of these things? She’s only ten too.
What I really don’t understand is when Lena was five and she opened the basement door that her mother had barricaded and then she “immediately fell headlong into the dark chasm”. (102) Her mother then comes to save Lena and tells her that a bad man has been living down there for thousands of years. Why can’t she just tell Lena the truth and why would she faint when the door opened? What is actually behind the door? Lena also says she sees terrible things with her Chinese eyes, but what about good things? I’m not Chinese, but I’m pretty sure there are good Chinese tales.
I’m also curious about how Lena’s parents had met. Did they fall in love or did she just marry him to become a citizen? I think he really wanted a pretty wife and maybe a Chinese one as well so he chose Lena’s mother and fell in love with her, but she may have not felt the same. Being in a new country where she could not speak the language must have been difficult so she probably thought marrying a white guy would make her life easier.
When Lena’s mother is ready to have the baby she has this vision of the baby coming out with an empty skull then rising up and stating to her “how [she] given no thought to killing [her ] other son”. (112) Apparently she had another son that she killed, maybe back in China? That was really confusing.
4. Ying-Ying, Lena’s mom, is extremely superstitious. It goes way too far. She let’s these Chinese superstitions rule her life and make her crazy. She passes them down to Lena, who becomes a morbid child who sees horrific things. I can understand rearranging all the furniture in the house to make it flow better. Feng Shui, right? I understand it’s difficult to loose your newborn baby, but she has to be able to shake it off. I’m guessing something bad happened to her in the past to make her this way. I think she might be a tad insane.
5. I think the conflict is man vs. self with the man being Lena. Lena is somewhat a depressed child who thinks of gore and agony. She has a wild imagination and has difficulties differentiating between what she is imagining and reality. Her imagination keeps her away from simple things like monkey bars and tether balls because they will cause unrealistic deaths. The conflict is resolved when she imagines something charming for the first time. The mother and daughter who live next door are always fighting and Lena would imagine the mother killing her daughter with a sword and blood would be everywhere, but this time she imagines them living in harmony.
6a. This chapter was baffling, but I managed to get one theme out of it. I think the theme is that you can’t let superstitions and fears rule your life or you might live to be very unhappy. This is what happens to Ying-Ying, Lena’s mother. You need to take chances even if it may not work out in the end. Also, nothing is as bad as it may seem. Lena figures this out in the end of the chapter and no longer sees everything around her causing some sort of certain doom.
Hidden Behind the Wall
"The Voice from the Wall"
3. The first few paragrpahs of this short story was kind of disturbing and confusing. I wasn't quite sure how the beggar and her grandfather related to the whole story. Why does it matter how the beggar die? As I read more of the story, I began to become more and more interested. It was interesting how Amy Tan showed that Ying-ying is somewhat mentally crazy. Poor Lena had to deal with her crazy mother and her calm father who didn't know what the heck was happening. However, while I was interested in the storyline, I was also confused! Amy Tan goes from a beggar being killed into a thousand pieces to a miscarriage.
4. Ying-ying St.Claire is very superstitious! She practices feng-shui. Her acts also influence little Lena who began to see terrible things she could not share with others. Ying-ying seems a little crazy to me. What she said to Lena in the hospital room was crazy and a bit disturbing! This gave me a thought that maybe Ying-ying was mentally crazy.
5. I think the conflict of this vignette could be human vs. human. It is hard to tell whether the conflict is internal and external. I think it could be both? The conflict is between Ying-ying and Lena, her daughter. Lena has to deal with her mother's craziness and superstitions! Lena's father is kind of oblivious to everything that Ying-ying says and does. This is a conflict because Lena, a normal child, has to struggle to keep her family together while also living a life that suits her.
6. In this chapter, I noticed that Amy Tan uses great imagery. While describing what Ying-ying looks like, Tan describes her eyes as "if they were carved on a jack-o'-lantern with two swift cuts of a short knife" (104). With this line, one can conclude that Tan is fantastic at using words that can really create a image in the reader's mind, like she did in mine.
Nancy Le from 3rd period
It Runs in the Family
The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter is probably one of the most fun for me to read, although judging by the various reactions above I may be alone in thinking this. For me, the vivid descriptions of morbid things, deaths, and more are intriguing, and really got my attention. I wonder if Ying-ying and Lena's weirdness and preoccupation with death are actually medical conditions, and if they were passed down through the family? Was the baby's head really hollow? It also seems that Lena is accepting of her breaking family life while she thinks Teresa next door has a worse life, so she doesn't do anything to rescue it. However, after meeting Teresa and overhearing that the fights Teresa had with her mother were really expressions of love, she begins hoping, and to look for ways to change the bad things that she sees.
2. Lena's father, an English-Irish man, is depicted initially as someone who just doesn't understand Ying-ying's strangeness, even though he fell in love with and married her. He takes to jumping to conclusions as to what she wants to say, although it is more like what he wants her to say. However, he is shown to really love Ying-ying later on, as he is extremely worried when Ying-ying sinks into her post-miscarriage depression, asking Lena what she is saying and trying to reassure Lena and himself that Ying-ying is just tired.
3. The conflict, while mostly emotionally based rather than confrontational, is man vs. man, or in this case more like man vs. a group of men. Perhaps man vs. society would fit better. The vignette is the tale of how a mother breaks down, and in the process breaks the family down, although the family tries their best to save her. It isn't quite resolved, but we see Lena dreaming of the day it will all be fixed.
4. The imagery is the strongest writing technique in this vignette, which leads it to be a remarkably disturbing and yet fascinating piece. For example, Lena describes her mother as a living ghost, embodying the hollow, quiet way her mother drifts through life, stopping occasionally to break down. Ying-ying also describes the miscarried baby in vivid detail, mentioning 'his tiny legs, his small arms, his thin neck, and a large head so terrible [she] could not stop looking at it' (116). All of these tiny details bring the story into sharp clarity, bordering on uncomfortable, but always interesting.
1. Chop, chop, chop, chop...
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. This chapter was very graphically disturbing. Lena’s mother planted these gruesome, twisted thoughts in Lena’s imagination at a young age. Since the basement incident, Lena began to “see terrible things” as if she was hallucinating (103). The images she saw in her mind were all horrible paranoia about everything. She imagines objects and events to be worse than they really are. Lena’s mother reminds me of my own, who is also paranoid that everything will go bad but thankfully, not as extreme. I think the story is showing us how we have to endure the bad things in life and be optimistic because there will always be something worse. I also think the “pulling through the wall” symbolizes understanding or through different perspectives. I didn’t get the part about the basement and why Lena’s mother sealed it off with so much effort. What was actually in the basement?
4. Lena was strongly influenced by her mother at a young age. She picked up on her mother’s strange imaginations. I also think that Lena felt kind of left out because her father is English-Irish and her mother is Chinese. Her appearance was also a mix between her two very different parents. From her mother, Lena also learned to lie and make up things in order to get by easier. For example, she would lie to her mother about phone calls from school. She would also lie to her father about what her mother was saying in Chinese. Lena’s mother also lies to her often when she asks questions. I think Lena might’ve gotten used to her mother lying about the small questions that Lena asks. Later, when things got worse and more significant, Lena still asked questions but she was “afraid [her mother] would give [her] a true answer” (108).
5. The main conflict in this chapter is human vs. self. Lena, like her mother, wanted to avoid the truth in the events of life. Her mother didn’t talk about her past in China and didn’t answer questions straightforwardly. Lena lied to her father about what her mother was saying in Chinese and turned the often crazy ramblings into words of encouragement and solace. When she asked her mother questions about more important events, she hoped that her mother would lie like before. She didn’t want to hear the true answer. Lena also knew that her family was unhappy and crazy but she still didn’t do anything to try to help it. Instead, she listened to the neighbors’ nightly arguments and wondered if they or she was better off.
6d. Amy Tan used a lot of imagery in this chapter and made the hallucinations and imaginations seem alive and more realistic. The part about the beggar getting cut and Lena’s hallucinations were creepy. Images of the “man looking like a smashed vase,” “devils dancing feverishly,” and “tether balls that could splash a girl’s head” would form in my head as I read. The imagery would make me react to the story more because I would feel disgusted or sickened by the words.
Alice La, Period 4
"Nut-case"
Chapter: "The Voice from the Wall"
3)Reaction: Well, this chapter was extremely confusing and just plain weird. In the beginning, I was really confused about the little myth and what was the deal with the horrible man on the other side of the door? I felt like I was left hanging on a cliff with that part of the chapter, since there was so much suspense and description leading up to what was behind the door and once we uncover the mystery, Amy Tan ceases to explain the significance of that part of the story! Aside from that, this chapter definitely felt as though it had too many hysterical factors to it. I mean, having good local color from Chinese superstition is great, but the scene where she describes the baby's death and the eerie hints that her mom was going crazy were just a little too freaky for me. Lastly, the depressing tone of this chapter was excruciatingly PAINFUL to read through! It was one sad/bizarre event after the next. I don't think the sun ever came out in this chapter.
4. I really admired Lena's father in this character, for it always seemed as if he was having to force
a smile in every scene of the chapter. Having a wife like Ying-Ying, it would be reasonable for him to consequently go insane and lose his mind, but he didn't. He always had a positive outlook on his life and continued to strive to do his best for his family. He seemed like a great father too, for he earnestly cared about his daughter's well being at all time, despite her being traumatized by her crazy mother. He was able to see many of Ying-Ying's crazy antics in a different light as he was able to claim that she was just tired when she was in fact moody and how he foresaw Ying-Ying's new baby during her time of "imbalance". When Lena saw her mom's craziness at the time, she had no idea what was going on, but her father knew exactly what her mother was going through. Lastly, I also felt really sad for Lena's father when the baby died, for it seemed as though a new born entity in their lives would have given them a breath of fresh air, but they still continued to live their lives in sorrow as the baby turned out to be dead at birth.
5.The main conflict in this story has to be between Ying-Ying and Lena. At first, Ying-Ying's caucasian background seemed to keep her sane, but he life was full of hardships and mysterious conflicts as she inherited her mom's "Chinese eyes". In the sense of a "conflict", I believe that Ying-Ying sadly prevents her child from having a normal childhood, since it had seemed to be filled with crazy superstitions, deaths, and solemnity instead of careless fun. A big factor for this is Ying-Ying's craziness! I do not know how her husband puts up with it. She really influences her daughter in a horrible way, since Lena's bizarre visions and perspective on life were only the preliminary effects of Ying-Ying's influence. As Lena grows up, I can infer that she will be just as paranoid as her mother as she will constantly worry about her life in accordance to the Chinese superstitions. Lastly, the presence of a sane mother who will strongly protect her daughter was greatly missing in Lena's life as the conflict of not having a strong female role model in her life played a huge role in her childhood.
6D. Amy Tan truly used some extremely mind-boggling phrases in this chapter! Descriptions such as how the tether ball would smash the girl's head open and how the lady would die from thousands of slits from a sword all presented me with an uncomfortably grueling picture in my head. This was a great literary technique as it truly gave me clear cut images and FEELINGS throughout the story, but it did make the story a little unbearable to read. I almost felt scared and disturbed at some points of the chapter, which is amazing since they are in reality, simply words on a page. Her technique in creating an eerie ambiance throughout the chapter made me picture the setting of the chapter with dense fog, gloomy skies, and old ragged buildings with cramped apartments. But nonetheless, Amy Tan's creative writing was truly phenomenal in this chapter- even if it made the experience a bit disturbing!
"Paranoid"
The Voice from the Wall
I thought this chapter was confusing and creepy. First, it was about the monster living in the basement for thousands of years. Lena St. Clair didn't say what she saw in there, but the things she described afterward was horrific. This shows that she was mentally scarred at a young age. I also didn't like the scene about the baby; I thought it was actually born with a hole in it's head and the brains were oozing out, but it turns out it was just a dream? Their lives begin a turn for the worse ever since they leave Oakland.
In this chapter, Teresa, the girl next door, shows she has major family issues. She is good at covering them up though, because Lena says she looks like a normal, happy 12 year old girl outside of their apartment. Her escapade with the fire escape shows that she is cunning and unashamed. After all she's been through such as the endless beatings and abuse, at the the of the day she still reconciles with her mother by "crying and laughing, shouting with love" (115).
The bad man in the basement of the Oakland house could represent all of Betty(Lena's mom) St. Clair's secret fears. It could also be a way for her to scare Lena to not go down there because it's dangerous. Betty seems very paranoid and she always thinks something is not right or 'out of balance'. These symbols show that she must have had a very traumatic past.
A thousand Cries
“The Voice from the Wall”
REACTIONS: I personally thought this chapter was a bit out of the ordinary and strange because of all the events that took place. I didnt really understand how Lena St. Clair’s father was able to love his wife or even met her in the first place if they couldn’t understand or talk to each other properly. How did they interact in their daily life? The story kept me wanting more because of the suspense which kept me on my toes. Her mother, Betty St. Clair, was probably a bigger mystery to me than the strange voices through the walls. Betty was quiet and usually did everything on her own so it made me wonder what was going through her head. It was also strange how she ended up in the hospital and then just stayed in bed all day. What was her real sickness or problem that caused her to be like this? I felt bad that everything her mom told her, she twisted the words and told her father something completely different. Therefore, they never knew each others’ true thoughts.
CHARACTER: Lena St. Clair is the bridge between her parents because she is the only one who fully understands both people when they talk. However, she translates what her mother is saying to her father in a false manner so that his feelings aren’t hurt since he never really knows what his wife is really saying. Lena is lying to her father to make everyone happy. I think this makes her in denial because she isn’t able to really face the truth and she daydreams about things that aren’t necessary there.
CONFLICT: The internal human vs. Self conflict was presented in this story because Lena had to deal with her crazy imagination and fight against the dangers that she heard. She heard the voices and screams through her bedroom walls which created the dangers that she felt within herself. She didn’t know what to do about the things she heard and was imagining in her mind. This was resolved when she saw the girl vanish out her window and heard that laughter after the yells and screams.
WRITING TECHNIQUES: Amy Tan used a lot of imagery in this chapter to exuberate the terrifying dangers that Lena was imagining. She used descriptive words to bring each screen to life so we could experience the adrenaline rush that was going through Lena’s mind and thoughts.
1) Life in a nutshell. Death in an eggshell!
2) The Voice from the Wall
3) Although this chapter was a bit gruesome and disturbing, I thought it was really interesting! Throughout the chapter, Lena talks about death, blood and beatings. Like mother, like daughter, both, Ying-ying and Lena share the same horrid imagination. Ying-ying and her husband’s marriage also surprised me a bit in the beginning. I kept wondering how the couple communicated to each other, considering the fact that Ying-ying spoke broken English and her husband did not understand Cantonese. Plus, what was the purpose of the old Chinese man? His part in the story seemed a bit useless.
4) In this chapter, I think Teresa really stood out to me. At first, I thought she was a bit crazy! Lena's encounter with Teresa scared both Lena and I!!!!!! The snicker Teresa made afterwards made her seem like a crazy psycho little girl! However, in the end, I have to admit she can be a clever little girl who always seems to find her way around things.
5) I think the conflict in this chapter is human vs. human. Both Lena and her mom try to understand each other. Lena doesn't realize why her mother is so overprotective of her and Ying-ying doesn't understand her daughter's American lifestyle.
6) Amy Tan's word choice and use of imagery really made this chapter seem like a movie! I was able to picture each gruesome scene and it definitely had me disgusted!
Jodie Chan
1)Crazy people.
2)The Voice from the Wall
3)I feel sad for the mother, Gu Ying-ying (Betty St. Clair), because she is so lost in life with no one to guide her and is having a mental breakdown. She loses her real name, her birth date, the ability to communicate with others because of the language and culture difference. Because the mother is so lost, her daughter, Lena St. Clair, is lost too and inherits paranoia from her mother. Lena gets so paranoid (imagining horrible, violent things that can happen like a tetherball smashing through someone’s head) that I am amazed that she does not go crazy. I feel pity for the father too because he is clueless on the happenings in his family. He does not understand his own wife at all. He does not understand why his family is falling apart and he does not know how to make things better. This story is too violent and psychological for my liking. Why does this story keep mentioning a guy getting cut a thousand times? Why does the mother keep mentioning a bad guy putting a baby into someone’s stomach and why is she so scared of everything? I think the mother is being ridiculous.
4)The “father would put words in [Gu Ying-ying’s] mouth” (pg.106) because he does not actually know what she wants. The father interprets what his wife is talking about by her gestures, emotions, and limited English. He does not understand his wife at all; hence he does not realize how unhappy his wife is and does not know how to make her feel better. He just makes his wife feel more lost through innocent mistakes. the father renames his wife, changes her birth date because he did not know her real birth date, makes her live with him in a foreign land where she cannot communicate with anyone, does not try to learn Mandarin for his wife’s sake, and makes his family move into a house with really bad feng-shui, causing his wife to become mentally crazier. Through his actions, he leads his wife into a world where she cannot fit in or express herself and makes her lose her identity, but he does not realize all of this because he does not truly understand his wife. He is clueless.
5)The main conflict for Lena is human vs. self. She battles her fear of bad things and wild imaginations like “devils dancing feverishly beneath a hole [she] dug in the sandbox” (pg. 103) and the girl being killed next door. In the end, she realizes that she was jumping to irrational conclusions when she encountered the girl next door, Teresa, and learned the truth behind all the shouting and fighting that was happening. The main conflict for Ying-ying is expressing herself and fitting into English society. She does not understand what anyone is saying and no one understands what she is talking about, causing her to rely on her daughter for everything. Because she does not understand anything, she is constantly alert and afraid of everything, making her mentally ill. She does not overcome her conflict.
6 D) Amy Tan uses extremely vivid imagery, making the scene come to life and also uses great word choices. For the man who rushed towards Ying-ying and Lena, Tan used words like “red-faced Chinese,” “runny eyes,” “dangerous,” “lunging,” and “wobbling” (pg. 108).
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1. Imagination Gone Wild
2. The Voice From the Wall
3. This vignette was a bit strange. Well I guess people were able to see from the very beginning that Lena has a very wild imagination. It seemed that she inherit that from her mother. I think it was funny that Lena took advantage of her mother, but then again what kind of teenager would she be if she didn’t. I liked Teresa. I think she was funny. I felt really bad for Lena’s father. He seemed really nice and caring, and I felt bad when he fell apart.
4. I liked Teresa. She was different. She was rebellious and very smart. When she got kicked out of the house she was able to get back in her room through a fire escape. That showed that she was thinking outside the box, or that she has done it a lot of times before. She was also confident of herself. She was very confident of the fact that her mother would not be mad at her.
5. I’m not sure what the conflict is, but I thought that it was man vs. self. I thought that Lena was unsure of things and that her imagination made her unsure of things. She was uncertain of the things she heard from her bedroom wall. She was not able to differentiate reality from imagination. I thought the conflict was resolved when she saw her next-door neighbor in person, still alive.
6. I thought that the theme of this vignette was that things aren’t always as bad as they seem. Lena always thought that Teresa had a terrible life because she heard her argue with her mother all the time. She did not realize that Teresa actually had a good life despite the fact that they argued all the time. When Lena heard them crying and laughing, she knew that she had been wrong all along.
Jessica Hartono, Period 4
1. Unbalanced room? More like unbalanced mind.
2. Lena St. Clair : The Voice from the Wall
3. To be honest, I was quite disturbed by this chapter. I could literally feel the goose bumps forming on my arms as I stumbled across each and every page. The beginning of the chapter introduces a gory scene, consisting of a beggar being lashed into 1,000 pieces. This scene is also mentioned at the end of the chapter, so to the best of my interpreting ability, I would say this chapter is trying to tell the reader to put themselves on the other side of “the wall,” allowing them to see both sides. I think this is so because the girl next door and her mother argue for that reason; they never put each other in the other’s shoes. However, overall, I was confused left and right. I really wish I could understand this chapter, but from what I know, the chapter is about a daughter who is paranoid about everything about her due to her mother’s stories, a mother who is emotionally unstable, and a father who has no clue what is going on. My question for this chapter is….what in the world is going on?! Like a miscarriage, I am not successful here.
4. The main character is Lena St. Clair. She is a young girl who imagines the worst in life, literally. The girl hears her neighbors screaming through her bedroom wall, and she is already under the impression a murder took place. She is definitely influenced by her mother, a strange, protective woman who spends the majority of her time laying on her bed, as if her life as been put on pause. Poor Lena must deal with her mother’s unusual acts and her mind failing to see the better things in life.
5. The conflict in this story is man vs. self, and it is internal. Lena St. Clair is caught between her mother’s superstitions and the right of humanity. Everything she does, she explains as gory, violent and sadistic. What I want to know is….how does a young girl think such things? The poor child puts everything she sees into a cruel manner, and it can’t be healthy. However, when she realizes she was wrong about her neighbor next door, she sees that what she thought was beyond false. Is this a turning point for Lena? Is she coming to the reality that life is not always as bad as she sees it? You tell us, Amy Tan! We’re waiting.
6. All I can say is IMAGERY, IMAGERY, and IMAGERY. “If you can picture everything you read, the writer has done their job.” Amy Tan, you exceeded in that portion, by far. I could picture everything I read, as much as I didn’t want to have the brutal images running through my head. Though, there were some imagery that weren’t all that disturbing. For example, when Lena explains the girl next door “as if she had fallen out of bed with her clothes on” (113). I can picture that. I bet you can too. Two thumbs up in that writing technique, Amy Tan.
Linh Vuong
3rd period.
“Disturbia, disturbia, disturbia”
“The Voice from the Wall”
1. This chapter was just… weird. Of all the chapters we’ve read so far, this one was by far my least favorite. The only high point of this chapter was Theresa, whose spunky personality really drew her to me. I disliked everything about this vignette, though. Lena’s father really annoyed me because he took it upon himself to “translate” everything that Ying-ying said when he barely understood a word of Chinese in the first place. What gave him the right to dictate what Ying-ying really thought, anyways? The descriptions about the basement and the ending story about the girl and the mother and the thousand cuts confused me. I’m sure they have some significance, but all I could think about while reading the chapter was how creepy those passages were. What was Amy Tan’s reason behind including all these strange scenes in this chapter? Was it simply meant to emphasize the deep superstitious beliefs of Lena’s mom and how she passed on that paranoia to her daughter?
2. Lena’s father seems like a semi-control freak to me. He renames Ying-ying Betty St. Clair without ever consulting her. He dictates where the family moves. He puts words into Ying-ying’s mouth on a regular basis. And even more than that, he seems completely oblivious to the unhappiness and worries of Ying-ying and Lena. But it doesn’t seem like he does these things with the intention of controlling or hurting them. He honestly seems to love his family, and his actions show that he is a kind-hearted man, just a clueless one.
3. The main conflict in this chapter is the internal conflict of man vs. self, as Lena struggles to come to terms with her morbid sense of imagination. All the terrible things that she imagines – like the man in the basement and the man dying of a thousand cuts affect her life daily as she sees horrible things in the ordinary world around her. This conflict kind of extends to the external conflict of man vs. man as well as Lena struggles to communicate with her parents. Her father is basically oblivious to all of Lena and Ying-ying’s superstitious Chinese worries. Lena’s mother just makes everything worse with her own paranoia and maniacal action.
4. The majority of this chapter made me shudder and cringe in disgust, sure signs of very effective imagery. Amy Tan’s descriptions of the baby “steaming with life” and how it “turned its head from one side to the next and looked right through her” sounded like scenes straight out of a horror movie (112). The vivid and disturbing descriptions of the images conjured by Lena’s imagination were equally well done, and the darker, more haunting tone achieved through this chapter can be attributed to Tan’s impressive descriptive prowess. I might hate this chapter, but I have to give Amy Tan props for her use of imagery.
- Michelle Chan =D
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Oops I did it again.
Chapter: The Voice from the Wall
1) So far, I think this chapter was the most hectic and depressing due to Ying-Ying's sad experience and the strange conflict that the chapter holds. The story of the beggar who was cut a thousand times was a great opening. I liked how in this chapter, Lena is the connection between her parents, a symbol of her Chinese-American heritage. The scene when Ying-Ying goes crazy due to the miscarriage was very intense and chaotic. I think I'll give this chapter a thumb but that's it.
2) Lena's relationship with her parents is like a bridge. She is what connects them together. For example, her father looks to her for translations to what her mother says and needs, while her mother uses her to vent and channel out her own heritage. This relationship breaks at the end when Ying-Ying miscarries because Lena could no longer give Clifford his translations and Ying-Ying is broken minded.
3) In this chapter, I learned some Chinese words that shows feelings. I also learned about a Chinese superstition which makes people rearrange their house because they feel that it is unbalanced.
1.) The Unspeakable
2.) The Voice from the Wall
3.) I thought that this vignette wasn’t written as well as the other vignettes. When I began reading, the first couple sentences really caught my attention but as I began to read further, I was confused and some events are not written very clearly. Though there was a lot of imagination and creativity, this vignette mainly focuses on the hardships of Lena’s childhood with her crazy mother and the family living next door to them. But what I liked about this vignette was how Amy Tan unexpectedly puts a life changing event for Lena which is her mother going crazy and I did not expect that at all. I thought that the beginning about the man in the basement was really weird and how can a man be in Lena’s basement for so long? Is the mom just trying to scare her? I couldn’t really understand this vignette completely.
4.) Betty St. Clair, Lena’s mom, I think is very blunt and superstitious about the events that happen. When Betty tells Lena to go directly to school and back home, Lena wonders why and her mother actually tells her that a man might grab her and kidnap her and so forth. Betty is not like the other mothers that just say “too many questions” and walk away, but Betty actually straightforwardly tells Lena the danger if she disobeys her mother. So Betty is very blunt about things; she also tells Lena of the scary man in the basement that she must never go into because the man might eat her. But Betty can also be very superstitious. When she always rearranges the furniture in the apartment, making sure that there is luck and there is balance in the apartment, it gives you an idea that Betty still holds onto her Chinese ways and also when Betty and Lena go to the market and the man frightened Betty so it makes her even more protective than she already is of Lena.
5.) The main conflict is internal. The conflict is man vs. self when Lena wishes for a happy family as well as a happy life for herself. Because her parents communicate through Lena and she also listens to the family constantly fighting next door, and “it comforted [her] somewhat to think that this girl next door had a more unhappy life,” (113). Internally, Lena struggles to accept the fact that her mother has changed “and yet [she] knew that this, the worst possible thing, would one day stop,” (115). So Lena did resolve her conflict.
6d.) Amy Tan’s descriptive writing is really shown in this vignette. In the beginning she describes how her mother locked the basement door and you can actually see the barricaded door. Amy Tan also describes the apartment they move into and you picture it in your head as being old and the small door with Lena’s family in the middle of the building. Her imagery in this vignette is done amazingly.
Michelle Méndez
4th period
1.Do you believe in ghosts?
2.Voice from the Wall
3. The beginning of this chapter was interesting. The fact that she thinks a ghost might have killed her grandfather, instead of a sickness was believable. This story made her paranoid, however, and her surroundings quickly changed due to her new way of thinking. She saw things that most people wouldn’t, on the daily, and I found that kind of weird but interesting. It was kind of scary at the parts where she had dreams of her next-door neighbor being killed by her mother. Lena’s mother goes through some depression issues due to her recent abortion. I thought it was believable, and because her mother was very superstitious, she began to have visions of bad things happening to her. In the end however, they bring up the same story of the wall, which her mother gets pulled through, just like her grandfather. I didn’t understand what he wall really meant.
4. This chapter was a main focus on Lena St. Clair. Her perspective on the world changes and is damaged due to her past. She sees things that normal girls do not, “I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a hole I had dug in a sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children” which she said her herself “I could see things that Caucasian girls at my school did not” (page 103). Part of this was due to her odd, superstitious mother who felt the same way about the world. Her mother has nightmares, and is vey cautious of her surroundings when she walks about herself. Lena struggles to separate the real world, to what she sees it as.
5. The main conflict of this story is Human vs. self. Lena fights to differ the real world, with what she sees in the dreams. She struggles doing so, because all she sees is the bad in the world. She sees people dying, ghosts, and pain. Part of this is due to her mother who acts just like that, and is very different form everyone else. What I don’t really understand is why her dad would leave her mom the way she is, and not do anything when she undergoes some depression due to a loss of a baby. Lena has another dream at the end of the chapter about her mother getting pulled through a wall just like her grandfather. The conflict doesn’t really get resolved because the chapter ends wither her having another ungrateful picture of the world.
6.While reading this chapter I pictures many things Lena does in the chapter. There were lots of forms of imagery used in this chapter and Tan did a great job making them easy to picture. The chapter was easier to understand with the different pictures that Lena states in the chapter. I understood that Lena was undergoing a difficult time in her life where she is trying to find herself in the world.
Animal Crossing
“The Voice from the Wall”
1. I can officially say that this was my very least favorite chapter. I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel that in some ways, this chapter didn’t have the same ‘feel’ as the other chapters did. The descriptive writing technique is as good as it was, and in fact I actually think that the passage at the beginning of this chapter was one of the best pieces of writing I have seen in the book so far. The chapter was extremely hard to read, and it seemed very, very dull compared to the other chapters, which left me turning the pages again and again. I don’t really get what there is to learn from this either. I know that there are many ways to express love, but what does that mean for Lena and her family? Does it mean that they should try to express there love by trying different mediums as opposed to using Lena to talk to each other? Or does it mean that Ying Ying is expressing her love through her concern and her extreme superstition? I really don’t know what to make of it, but I’ll give the chapter this: I did like the way the story ended. Its bittersweet taste left me in a proper state of content. Also, Amy Tan’s descriptions are as amazing as ever. They shine even brighter in this chapter than they do in a couple of the others.
2. I think that the conflict in this story is related to the family’s matters. They have trouble communicating with each other properly because Ying-Ying and Clifford cannot really understand each other, and need to use Lena to talk to each other. Also, Ying Ying is very clearly a psycho. She is very mentally unstable and is very superstitious and careful. I think the conflict mainly takes place between the family, because of their contrasting personalities and the lack of mental stability of Ying-Ying. There’s probably an internal conflict, too, inside of Lena because of the secrets she keeps from her father by translating her mother’s words inaccurately.
3. I did learn a bit about culture in this chapter. The concept of Feng-Shui showed up during this chapter when Ying-Ying arranged furniture into different positions to bring good luck. It’s a really interesting concept that I first heard about in a game, “Animal Crossing,” and I also had to arrange furniture in certain ways to get good luck in the game. I see it as a very unique take on superstition, because generally, superstitious actions involve avoiding certain things, but the concept of Feng Shui involves moving things around and making decisions in order to bring good luck. I thought this was very neat.
Cody Dang
Period 3
1. Freaky
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. Reading this chapter was quite disturbing. Ying-Ying is paranoid in the sense that she assumes the worst will happen. This stems from her superstitious beliefs. In a way, Ying-Ying is similar to my parents, because they all believe in Feng Sui and how it can balance things out by the arrangement of furniture. Something that stumped me was why did the baby not have a brain when he came out. I lost my appetite reading that section because not only did the baby come out without a brain but also with his eyes wide open. Sounds like a typical zombie huh?
4. From this chapter, and the previous one, “Moon Lady”, it kind of revealed Ying-Ying as a strange/crazy person. As a child, she rubbed turtle blood over herself to cover some fish blood, which is pretty darn disturbing. I mean who in their right minds do that? This may have led to Ying-Ying to grow up to be a very superstitious person. She thinks moving furniture around will bring balance to the family. Having been traumatized so much as a child, she tells strange and dark tales to Lena. When she gives birth to a baby, he dies immediately, finally pushing Ying-Ying over the edge. Ying-Ying ‘s husband was unable to help her because the two couldn’t communicate effectively with one another.
5. I thought the main conflict was Man vs. Self. Lena’s imagination gets the best out of her, as she creates violent thoughts in her head. This might come from her being influenced by her mother’s gruesome stories. Lena imagines that her neighbor is getting hurt by her mother. This conflict is resolved when she discovers her neighbor is perfectly fine and has a better relationship with her mom than she does.
6D. Amy Tan makes use of imagery and utilizes powerful word choice. Amy’s description on the zombie like baby painted a picture of a freakish looking baby in my head similar to that of those you find in horror films.
James Yu
Period 3
1. Exaggeration vs Reality
2. The Voice From the Wall
3. I thought the chapter was confusing when I was reading it, but after finishing the last sentence of the chapter it made more sense. I thought, “Oh I understand some of this chapter.” I mainly understood the theme and how the allegory connected with the story, but the parts where Lena’s mom, Betty, was moody and pregnant were confusing to me.
4. In this chapter, Lena St. Clair sees events and items that occur with more depth than her surrounding peers. I think that made her seem more insightful. Also, when her mom is talking in Chinese in the hospital after her baby dies, Lena lies to her father, because she saw he was already sad. That shows that Lena is a quick thinker.
5. The main conflict in this story is between Lena and her reaction towards her mom’s behavior. I think it is man vs self, because Lena feels that her mom is being secretive towards her and she tries to figure it out, although she does not know what to do and then begins to imagine things inside her head. Also, the allegory talks about how things have to be talked out and get worse before it gets better, so she sees her mothers’ pain and is unable to do anything about it. She has conflicting thoughts within herself and imagines the worse if she would confront her mom, but eventually realizes she should ask her mom what is the matter.
6c. I think the allegory at the beginning of the chapter teaches that in order for someone to fully understand another person, things must get worse before they get better, because the man is cut and killed and later pulls the man across into the same wall. It connects to Lena in the sense that in order for her mom and her to get on the same page, they need to talk it out (which might cause a fight).
1. Superstitions
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. This chapter was very confusing to focus on and follow along. I could not make out the differences between dreams or thoughts that Lena was thinking and the real world things that were going on. The story starts out with a beggar who is killed by a ghost and broken into a thousand pieces. Lena’s mother is very superstitious and she passes that onto Lena, which causes Lena to see things that many other people cannot see because her head is filled with horrible thoughts due to her mother. Lena’s mother speaks little English while her father only speaks English which causes much miscommunication to occur in the home and offers a hectic environment for Lena to live in.
4. Lena’s mother, Ying-Ying is a superstitious woman. She tells Lena many stories of things that she should be careful of and make Lena worry about unimportant things. Because of her influence over her daughter, Lena tends to over worry things and sees things of that which are out of the ordinary. Also, her broken English and lack of bilingual ability causes Lena’s father to assume many things that she is trying to say or explain. It is hard for me to imagine living with my husband like that so I do not understand why they married or even how they fell in love with each other.
5. The main conflict is man vs. self because Lena struggles with the things she sees and she does not understand these things most of the time. It makes her worry and she, like her mother, is superstitious as well.
6. The stories or things that Lena picture really paint a picture in my mind. I could constantly see the things that Tan was explaining, even if I did not quite understand it. I could see the little girl coming into Lena’s apartment and climbing out the window the scare her mother. This chapter, like the other chapters, was easy for me to imagine.
-Allison Olkie Period 3
#1:wait...What?
#2:The Voice from the Wall.
#3:This chapter is probably the most confusing chapter that I have read. I was confused as to why Lena's mom would make up a story to Lena about her great-grandfather's death, saying that a ghost killed him even though he was just really sick. It was confusing that Lena's father was not even phased by anything that happened (or is he pretending?) like the baby dying, which was disgusting. How does a body with no brain move?
#4:Lena's mother is superstitious, crazy woman. She does Feng Shui and tells Lena to only walk from home to school and vice-versa to avoid being kidnapped, raped, impregnated, imprisoned for killing a baby, and dying in prison. Unfortunately, her superstitious trait is passed onto Lena.
#5:A conflict of this chapter is human vs. human. Since Ying-Ying does not speak english, her husband has to, incorrectly, put words in her mouth. Another conflict is human vs. self. Lena has nightmares about a girl being murdered but then coming back to life over and over.
#6:This chapter has lots of gruesome imagery. An example is the baby that died. The baby had no brain and its head was open was it was born, Lena looked into the baby's head and saw that nothing was there. Even though it was dead, the baby looked around and stared at Lena.
By Wai Chan
period 3
1.Frightening Conclusions
2.The Voice from the Wall
3. I understood parts of the story, but the beginning as well as the ending was confusing. This chapter is about Lena ST. Clair a mix of Chinese and European growing up with a terrifying imagination of death. “Then you must die a thousand cuts. It is the only way to save you” (page 115): this quote is mention a few times through out the vignette, but I do not understand what it means. There is a scene of the mother and daughter using that line at the end, but I could not comprehend in addition to picturing that particular scene. In the vignette I could catch the contrast of the relationship of the anger and love portray in a daughter and mother. The emotions along with the hidden answers that tend to reach out for the two to find together. This relationship shares the characteristics of the two in bedded between them. How the Chinese knew there was more to view than of the obvious laid in front of us.
4. The protagonist and dynamic character of the vignette is Lena ST. Clair. Lena born as a mix of Chinese and European cultures views life as a frightening world from a lost memory of her great-grandfather’s death. She distinguishes the possibility of anything resulting in death like her mother is somewhat aware of the dangerous world of her hometown. The antagonist- Lena’s mother- is frightened about everything because of the treacherous and challenging life she spent on Angel Island. After the death of her son after giving birth she finds her life falling apart. As Lena’s mother starts to crumble so does the rest of the family, even Lena herself, until she meets the girl from next door, Theresa. When Lena goes asleep she listened to the loud arguments of Theresa and her mother all night long. When she finally meets Theresa she finds out that even though Theresa does not agree with her mother there is still love. Even though arguments pull anger between the two loved is always there to mend the broken fights. There is always laughter and crying coming after these brutal fights.
5. The main conflict is the understanding of Lena’s mother shared with the negatives of imagination invading the way Lena’s perspective of the living world. Since Lena’s father told her mother to speak English her language is a mix of Chinese and English. When there are no words to express Lena and her father would fill in the gaps of her sentences. Lena has a strong imagination that tends to go overboard because of the distant memory of picturing the unknown death of her great-grandfather. Without the answer Lena ends up seeing the world with caution because one will not know that an argument could lead to death.
6. The theme of the story is that even though life is portrayed in such different matters it is still connected to the heart of love. This could be false since I am terrible with theme. When Lena met Theresa, after listening to the arguments of Theresa and her mother, she thought she was a ghost thinking that her mother killed Theresa. Then Theresa met Lena at her doorstep and went directly to her room to climb out the window. Lena questioned whether her mother would be upset finding Theresa in her bed than lost, but soon that night she found out. The result of sudden bursts of sobbing and laughter lifted the argument into a clinging sensation between mother and daughter. These two put their differences aside and came together to share the love.
1. "Is The Grass Greener on the other Side?"
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. This chapter was really, really creepy. At first, I was wondering why the mom would tell her daughter such scary stories and lies. Then, the part with the old man running towards her seemed comical at first, but then YingYing seemed troubled by it. I guess she was just worried for her baby. Then came the hospital part, and when she described the baby's death, I kept picturing gruesome images of the dead baby (good imagery? yes. scary? definitely). I kind of understand that the dad doesn't know a lot of Chinese so he doesn't get all the superstitions and the crazy things YingYing says, but why does he seem so unaffected by everything?
4. I think the most interesting character is YingYing. The way she is described, she seems like a brain-dead person. She is completely overprotective of her daughter and doesn't want her to do anything except go to school and go home, and she would tell many superstitious lies to get what she wants. I believe that this could be an effect of her earlier childhood memories, such as when she fell into the water and was separated from her family.
5. The conflict in this story seems to be man vs self, as YingYing goes through the hardships of losing a child. After the death of her baby, she seemed to have gone crazy. Eventually, she ends up in bed, almost like a dead person.
6. The theme is that the grass may not always be greener on the other side. Lena listens in on Teresa's family and their many arguments, and she wonders if their life is better than hers.
1. And the green grass grows all around, all around…
2. Lena St. Clair: The Voice from the Wall
3. I think that this chapter was very disturbing and left me kind of confused. I don’t understand what this vignette is supposed to do for the audience besides show us that the St. Clair family is sort of crazy and out of whack. Or was that the point? It showed Lena’s mother who’s obviously not all there, Lena, who always envisions death in her mind, and Lena’s father who is quite oblivious to all of this!! He might as well be blind and deaf! In the beginning of this chapter, I thought Ying-Ying was utterly insane, but then I came to a realization that she was the same Ying-Ying that thought you could cover up little specks of blood by smearing blood all over and use it as a sort of dye. After, things kind of made more sense. I think both Lena and her mother suffer from being traumatized at a young age. A question that came up was why does Ying-Ying tell her daughter that a homeless woman has rotting body parts because of an unwanted baby? And why does Ying-Ying tell Lena that there is a thousand year old man in the basement who would plant babies in her body and eat them all up? Ying-Ying continuously puts crazy thoughts into Lena’s mind; no wonder she can only picture gruesome things! Of course my mom cautions me not to have kids at a young age, but Ying-Ying is absurd! As for Lena’s dad…well I just think he’s a total and complete moron. He tries to translate Ying-Ying’s mandarin phrases, but usually ends up putting words in her mouth. I find it inconsiderate. Also, he put the wrong birth year for his own wife! COME ON! How can you marry someone that you can’t even communicate with or know much about?!
4. One character that really caught my attention was Teresa. She came off as a rude, snotty girl who always disobeyed her mother at first, but when she knocked on Lena’s door and found a way to get back into her own room, I changed my mind about her. I then thought she was a clever, confident girl who seemed to know how to get her way and avoid obstacles.
5. I would say the conflict of this chapter would have to be man vs. self. Lena has to determine what’s right and what to believe…her mother’s superstitions or the ways of humanity. She also has to deal with the bizarre and gruesome things she pictures in her mind and the noises she hears.
6. One word, IMAGERY! I think Amy Tan did an outstanding job of describing each item. I could really picture everything even if I didn’t want to. Everything seemed to come to life as I read and the use of imagery kept me interested in the story, always wanting more
Melani Cabanayan, Period 3
On the Other Side
"The Voice from the Wall"
My goodness...there really are crazy things going on in this chapter. Starting with Lena St. Clair's visions of lightning, beetles, and "devils dancing feverishly beneath a hole [she] dug in the sandbox...[she] could see things that Caucasian girls at school could not." (103) First of all, what does this have to do with being Chinese? I think that her mother Ying-Ying's superstitious ways probably influenced Lena so much that she had become unstable. Shouldn't she be seeing a therapist to talk about these creepy things? T_T
One character that seems interesting to me is Lena's father. It seems like he never fully understands his wife, not like Lena did. Also, I wonder how he and Ying-Ying even got married since he was American and "she spoke in moods and gestures" (106), and the fact that he doesn't even know how old she is!
Even so, he remains loyal and supportive to Ying-ying even through her state of depression.
The main conflict in this chapter is probably human vs. self. Lena is conflicted by her thoughts as she listens to the neighbor girl and her mother fighting. "I could no longer see what was so scary, but I could feel it." (113) She compares her quiet fear to the images of destruction on the other side of the wall, as she listens to her neighbors fighting. Yet when Teresa pays Lena a visit, she sees the truth: that even though Teresa and her mother fight, they still love each. I think the conflict is mainly her dealing with the thought that "things aren't always as bad as they seem," which is what she wants to tell Ying-ying in the end of the chapter.
As usual, Amy Tan ends the chapter with the same concept that she used to begin it. It was about dying "the death of a thousand cuts." Instead this time, Ying-Ying plays the role of the beggar and her daughter Lena executes her. That is when they both realized that "the worst is on the other side." I think this translates to the fact that no matter how bad things may seem at the moment, just remember that there are worse things out there to endure, like being sliced to death with a sword.
Raymond Glassey, Period 3
1. Apparently, despite all the yelling, your parents DO love you.
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. I didn’t particularly enjoy this chapter, as it was remarkably confusing. I didn’t understand the meaning behind the whole “thousand cuts” story even though it was mentioned at the beginning and end, and the scene where the baby was born (and died) confounded me. Another reason for my distaste generates from the fact that Ying-Ying appears in the chapter and she is, as usual, crazy. The whole deal with her Chinese mysticism irritated me along with her bizarre abstract way of explaining rules or concepts. Inside this chapter, the father doesn’t seem particularly intelligent either with his complete unconcern for Ying-Ying’s welfare until later. Lena’s imagination of what’s happening behind the wall makes the chapter even more muddled as she believes that some girl is being punished and killed, only to be proven wrong when she sees the girl in person.
4. Lena’s father, to me, is a rather odd character. For instance, the fact that he married Ying-Ying even though he can’t speak or understand her seems quite strange, but he obviously cares about her because he shows concern when she loses the child, and as her state of mind deteriorates, so does the father’s. Obviously, he must have an optimistic attitude about everything, because constantly the words he puts into Ying-Ying’s mouth have a positive attitude on whatever he thinks she’s talking about. Then, after the father is finally unable to create words for Ying-Ying, he stops being optimistic about everything and maybe Ying-Ying’s true personality is revealed with her silence, despite Lena’s lie to him after Ying-Ying gave birth.
5. The conflict in this chapter is internal Man vs. Self for both Ying-Ying and Lena. Lena has the issues of dealing with her increasingly chaotic family of a befuddled father and mentally deranged, mysticism obsessed mother along with imagining horrible gruesome images of the family across the wall. Ying-Ying on the other hand, has to deal with her remarkable superstition and the death of her baby, the combination of the two driving her to insanity.
6. The imagery in this chapter, while disgusting and horrid, displays amazing ability in writing on Amy Tan’s part. The most vivid descriptions were probably Ying-Ying’s description of the baby, which sounded like something out of a horror film, and Lena’s imagination of what went on behind the wall, of the murders taking place there. Tan’s use of imagery makes the story far more powerful than it would be otherwise and, in my opinion, making up for the story’s lack of logic.
The Other Side
The Voice from the Wall
1. This chapter was really weird, especially because of the people suffering and ghosts and then the red-faced chinese man approaching Lena and her mother. I was also a but confused when the chapter got to the part about the miscarriage.
2. Lena's mother always has crazy stories to tell Lena, often frightening her. Although she tells these stories to protect Lena from the evils of the world. Although she is married to a white man, she still practices her chinese culture and speaks chinese.
3. The main conflict of the story is Lena having to deal with all the craziness and superstitions of her mother, Betty. As a result of this, Lena never really believes what her mother says anymore and compares her life to Teresa, her neighbor.
4. Amy Tan put in a lot of imagery into this chapter and allowed me to picture a lot of the disturbing scenes.
-Eric Tam, Period 3
1. “The Other Side”
2. “The Voice From the Wall”
3. This was a really strange chapter, bordering on creepy. It begins with Lena’s great-grandfather sentencing a beggar to death in the worst possible way. He dies soon after either because of the ghost of the beggar or influenza. Lena tries to figure out what was the worst possible thing and constantly asks her mother, an uber believer in Chinese superstitions. With many different warnings and stories told to Lena to protect her from the world, her mother eventually goes crazy with the loss of her baby.
4. Ying-Ying is super superstitious. She lets these superstitions control both her life and her daughters. She tells her daughter many things that make Lena see the absolute worst in things. At first, only to protect Lena but then things get out of hand. There was also that confusing scene with the baby and the empty skull. Possibly because of the moon lady is why Yin-Ying is like this.
5. I think that the conflict is man vs self. Lena is constantly seeing and imagining horrible things because of her mother. She lets these images in her mind control her also like her mother. She thinks about what could be the worst possible thing, extremely hazardous playground things, and a very abusive mother who stabs her daughter everyday. It turns out that Lena’s imagination had run a little too wild because when she sees the girl next door; she has absolutely no wounds whatsoever.
6a. The theme, after much thought and pondering, is probably that you must not imagination get the best of you. Superstitions are born from imagination right? So this goes for both Lena and Ying-Ying.
Bryan Bui
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1. Family Problems
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. I didn't really like this chapter because it reminds me of how I argue with my parents all the time. When Lena St. Clair hears Teresa Sorci arguing with her mother next door, she thinks that Teresa is being beaten or killed, but if Teresa was being killed, why would there be any noise? Just thinking about one of my neighbors being killed is pretty creepy.
4. When Ying-ying miscarries her baby boy, Lena tells her father that Ying-ying was still full of hope, while truthfully, she blamed herself because of a son she killed in the past. This time, as well as every other time, Lena puts words into her mother's mouth. This shows that Lena is peaceful and doesn't like unnecessary conflicts. It also shows that Lena just wants her family to be happy, even if it is not true happiness.
5. The main conflict in this story is probably human vs. self. Ying-ying isn't happy and can't even talk to Clifford without tranlation from her daughter. She is always speaking with gestures and hand signals. Ying-ying eventually becomes pregnant and isn't excited about giving birth, as a matter of fact, she is saddened. She becomes emotionally unstable after her miscarry of her first baby boy. The conflict is never resolved, and ying-ying starts to fall apart psychologically.
6. The theme of this chapter is to get along with your family, even when they are being problematic.
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Schizophrenia
“The Voices from the Wall”
Wow this is the earliest time I have heard mention of interracial couples involving Chinese. So is this the only half-Chinese daughter in the story, or will there be more? :O Besides from that, I didn't really understand why Ying-Ying, the mom, was acting so weirdly until the book actually said “the baby...” Yeah, that bit was confusing. Also, why was she scared of a red-faced Chinese man? That didn't make any sense to me either. And oh gosh, the re-arranging of furniture to keep the balance of things... That has been mentioned so many times.. and not in JLC either, like in general American culture...
4 Character-wise, Lena St. Claire didn't do much while her father did nothing but talk, so Ying-Ying remains the interesting one. She was 'rescued' from China from a 'horrible fate', but in America she was 'displaced'. Her clothes were mismatched, a Chinese dress with a padded Western jacket. And when her baby boy was coming, she kept on rearranging the furniture, saying the balance was.. unbalanced. They baby itself was “stuck between the crib and her womb”. And the title itself is “Voices from the Wall” so Ying-Ying is stuck between her two lifestyles, her past Chinese and present American ones. While she lives in the present, the ghosts from her Chinese past continue to haunt her. Talk about skeletons in the closet.
5 This chapter I did not understand the point of, but the conflict is I think, man vs himself as Ying-Ying deals with herself and the death of her unborn baby. The story at the beginning and the end of the chapter proves this as the woman says “I have already experienced the worst . After this there is no worst thing.” So the events of Ying-Ying have already traumatized her and so she is fearless of the death.
6d Oh gosh there were lots of uses of imagery, such as the creepy baby with a hollow head and no eyes staring at Ying-Ying. Also there was that scene how the Italian girl came to the St. Claire household to escape back into her room, and start a new argument with her mother, only to dissolve in tears, sobbing and laughing. A whole 'lotta love in that family, which draws distinct contrast St. Claire household, with its lack of the stuff. And that Italian household reminded me of that story we read with the minestrone soup.
~El Schelonai, AKA Nicholas Lee, Period the 4th
1. “Should We Call Ghostbusters?”
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. The title definitely doesn’t do the chapter enough justice in showing how creepy it is. The imagery and descriptions that Amy Tan put in is quite disturbing. With all of Lena and Ying-ying/Betty’s crazy thoughts, it was pretty confusing to differentiate what’s real and what’s just their imagination. Ying-ying is a really strange character; I don’t understand why she’s so paranoid, afraid and just lunatic with her wild thoughts, especially the time she sees her baby without a brain. It also bothers me how Lena’s father is so controlling. He changes Ying-ying’s name, moves the family and constantly puts words into Ying-ying’s mouth as if he has the right to think for her. It’s a wonder how the mother and father ended up together. I did like Teresa’s cunning character, as she seems to have everything planned out, sure of her mother’s reactions and emotions. It is overall a disturbing chapter.
4.The character that really caught my attention is Ying-ying. She definitely has a bizarre imagination, which is clearly shown when she tells Lena that her baby came out with an empty, cracked head with no brain. She is also extremely paranoid and superstitious. Ying-ying is particularly protective of Lena and frequently warns her about dangers, always keeping her close by her side. She also has many worries that things are “unbalanced” and tries to move everything to makes it “right.”
5.I think the conflict in this chapter is man vs. self. After all the influences from her mother of being superstitious and crazy with imaginations, Lena begins to hear voices and starts to imagine horrifying things herself. Not only does she have the terrible thoughts, but she begins to feel them as well, which frightens and worries her. Lena has to endure all the unpleasant thoughts herself and overcome them, which she eventually does. She finally stops the disturbing images as she realizes that the voices aren’t because of violence or death, but about arguments that are resolved with love and comfort that is always present and unconditional.
6d. The writing technique that really draws me in (and disgusts me) is Amy Tan’s use of imagery. Just reading the chapter makes me cringe and shudder. For example, she includes a woman on the streets that Ying-ying wants to avoid and describes her as “old and young at the same time, with dull eyes as thought she had not slept for many years. And her feet and hands – the tips were as black as if she had dipped them in India ink” which probably would make her a little unapproachable (105).Another vivid description Amy Tan adds in is when she writes about Lena’s imagination of the voices from the wall: “A mother had a sword high about a girl’s head and was starting to slice her life away, first a braid, then her scalp, an eyebrow, a tow, a thumb, the point of her cheek, the slant of her nose, until there was nothing left, no sounds” (110). I really wouldn’t want to die a death of a thousand cuts. Another part that I think is one of the strangest is when the mother describes her dead baby: “His tiny legs, his small arms, his thin neck, and then a large head… The baby’s eyes were open and his head – it was open too!... No brain… The head turned to one side, then to the other. It looked right through me” (112). I could’ve definitely lived without the images, but it made the chapter just a little more interesting.
Kathy Nguyen Per 4
1. "My mother needs a therapist!"
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. I did not get this chapter at all, because the "thousand cuts" mentioned in the beginning of the chapter and end did not help me understand it at all. The descriptions of Betty (Ying-ying), and Lena's imaginations pretty much creeped me out. Betty, having all these superstitions and rubs off on Lena, sadly. Lena's father seems to be oblivious of the fact Betty St. Clair is having some internal problems.
4. Lena's father brings my attention because of how ignorant he is about his wife. I mean, can't he see she's been bothered with something the day they met? He is always optimistic of the situation. Whenever Lena is not sure what is wrong with her mother, her father would just put in positive words to not make the situation negative. I am sure he does have concern for her, but he probably is not sure how to fix it. The only solution, taking over and putting in positive words.
5. I think the conflict is an internal conflict, human vs. human and human vs. self. The internal conflict would not just be Lena's, but also Betty St. Clair's. They both believe in such superstitions and see things around them. Human vs. human, would be Lena and Betty. Betty rubbing off the superstitions she believes onto Lena, and Lena suffers to be able to imagine such things. Human vs. self, Lena imagines plain monkey rings becoming "split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space. [And] tether balls that could splash a girl's head all over the playground in front of laughing friends." (103-104). Also, the Sorci and their arguements Lena would hear every night. Lena imagining how badly beat Teresa would be, only to be proven wrong when Teresa comes by one day to sneak back into her room. The conflict is resolved Lena hears the Sorcis laughing, after their nights of arguing.
6a. The theme of this chapter would be, after experiencing the worst of things, the brighter side will unfold. Lena always "saw bad things in [her]mind, she "now [has] found ways to change them" (115). The "thousand cuts" scene in the end of the chapter, after the daughter had cut her mother up, the mother was not bleeding, for she has experienced the worst already. The Sorcis, always arguing every night, had ended with laughter afterone night.
1.The mom is crazy
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. This chapter was just plain weird. It started getting unusual when they moved into the new apartment and the mom started rearranging all the furniture because it wasn't balanced. Although, she makes a good explanation as to why she did it when she says that the place isn't balanced and that she had to fix it. Then, some drunk (or crazy) guy rushes Lena's mom like he's going to rape her but gets stopped by two other guys. I think this makes Lena's mom over proctective of Lena but then that all stops when she gives birth to a baby who's alive... but it has small arms, legs, and a body with a big head but no brain, but it's still alive. Yeah, I had no clue as to what this story was trying to get at until I read it over again.
4. Lena's mom, Betty, seems to have some kind of mental illness or something. First she starts rearranging the whole house for reasons such as "The kitchen is facing the toilet". Then, she gives birth to a deformed child I'm guessing then she becomes very depressed and seems to mentally recede from the real world as she starts randomly crying.
5. I think the main conflict in this story is man vs. self because Lena tries to understand why she has so many horrible and violent thoughts in her head. It could also be man vs. man as Lena struggles to communicate with and understand her mother.
6a. I think the theme is that you shouldn't allow superstition to get the best of you. Look what it did to Lena's mom...
1) Disturbia?
2) “The Voice From The Wall”
3) This chapter was… disturbing. A lot of things didn’t make sense to me, and the whole thing just made me feel kind of uneasy. I didn’t like how Ying-Ying put all these gruesome images and scary thoughts into Lena’s mind, either. When it comes to children, you just don’t do that. Things like that infect their minds and they usually believe every word of it, and that’s exactly what happened to Lena. Every single night, she imagined hearing the death of her next-door neighbor, Teresa, through the walls. She heard her being cut and slashed a thousand times, but it wasn’t even really happening. The poor girl had practically gone insane! And it’s all because her mother had planted these horrifying things into her mind. Oh, and then there was Lena’s dad. He just bugged me. I didn’t like how Ying-Ying and him were married, because they didn’t even speak the same language and their relationship was based off of what Lena’s dad “thought” Ying-Ying was saying. And he was so oblivious! Lena and Ying-Ying were both seriously disturbed and he just made it seem like everything is fine and dandy. You’d think he’d notice and get them a therapist or something.
4) I thought Teresa was an interesting character. When Lena was following her down the street, Teresa came off as a snobby girl who disrespected her mother. When they had their second encounter in Lena’s house, though, I realized she was more of a rebellious yet courageous girl. She was very confident, too, sure that her mother wouldn’t be mad when she sneaked back into her room. And it turns out her mother and her had a much better relationship than Lena thought. Lena was imagining Teresa’s mom killing Teresa every night, when in reality, they loved each other very much. It shows how deranged Lena’s mind was.
5) The main conflict in this chapter was probably human vs. self. Lena was a disturbed child due to her mother’s deranged and constant superstitions. It didn’t seem like Lena had the ability to see anything good in life, which was definitely a problem. She only had murderous, gruesome thoughts in her mind and was on-edge the entire chapter, always expecting the worst.
6) I have to give Tan props for the imagery in this chapter. It was pretty amazing how well I was able to picture all the grotesque things that were described. When it was the scene of Ying-Ying in the hospital describing to Lena how her baby had “no brain”, in my mind was a clear image of a lifeless baby with a hollow head. It was pretty horrific.
1. FREAK
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. This chapter was insane! It's also quite confusing how it starts with a beggar getting whacked and then to Lena's life. Lena has a weird mother named Ying-Ying who is very stuck with her Chinese ways and tells her the story of her grandfather getting killed by a ghost...strange...crazy...Anyways, this chapter was just very confusing and I guess it wasn't that appealing to me.
4. This chapter was mainly about Lena St. Clair. Her life is affected strongly by her past and her mother who is a little crazy. “I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a hole I had dug in a sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children” (page 103). Here it shows that she sees things that normal girls don't see. Lena struggles to see what the real world is.
5.Due to the chapter's "confusingness" I would say that the main conflict was human vs. self. Lena goes against her own superstitious thoughts. It was shown throughout this whole chapter. The beginning portrayed her grandfather and the beggar with his thousand cuts. Towards the middle, it described the violent scenes that Lena saw but kept secret. In the end, it presents a nightly audio of the next door neighbor and her daughter with the thousand cuts. Her crazy thought always gives the feeling that it could be the worst possible thing and Lena learns that the worst possible things are actually on the “other side” (121).
6. Amy Tan uses imagery to let the reader picture what is happening and what Lena and her mother imagine. Her descriptive writing allows us to picture, for example, the torture scene which as pretty disgusting.
~~becca!(period 3)
1. Fear is Born
2. “The Voice From the Wall”
3. This chapter was very hard to understand because of all the things happening. I don’t understand why Lena St. Clair listens to voices from the other side of her wall of a mother and daughter constantly fighting. Why did Amy Tan include this? It must be very important since the chapter’s name is The Voice From the Wall. I feel like Lena doesn’t know her mom very well and doesn’t respect her much. She is constantly translating for her mother and making up stuff instead of saying what she really said. I feel kind of bad for her mother because everyone is “putting words into her mouth” and her own daughter just believes she is insane. Why is her mother so paranoid? Her mother is constantly living in fear of everything and waiting for things to happen. She scares her daughter by making up stories of bad things that have happened to people. I find this kind of cruel because she shares so many negative thoughts and feelings with her daughter. Lena seems to brush it off and just thinks she is crazy with her Chinese superstitions. I don’t think Lena wants to be Chinese because she talks about how she tried to make her Chinese eyes rounder by opening them as wide as she could. She really doesn’t understand her mother and it doesn’t seem like she wants to understand her.
4. Lena’s mother is nervous wreck after her newborn baby dies. This shows how she is always waiting for things to happen. She now thinks that there is probably worse things that could happen to her than this. In reality, the worst is probably over and she is just living in fear. It really also shows that Chinese superstition plays a big role in her life because every bad thing that happens has to mean something.
5. I think the conflict is internal and is human vs. self. Lena struggles to understand her mother. She just thinks she is crazy. When Teresa comes over Lena thinks she will be in more trouble than she has ever been. She thinks all they do is fight and she was expecting the worse. When Teresa’s mom discovers that Teresa was okay they hugged and kissed because she was just glad her daughter was alright. The worst was over after all those fights, there wasn’t anything worse than that but Lena was expecting it. The conflict was resolved when she realized her mom was thinking the same exact way. Her mom was waiting for worse things to happen but she had already experienced the worst.
6. The theme of this chapter is to not wait for the worst to happen because sometimes you have already gone through with it. This is shown with the mother and the daughter through the wall. On the last page of the chapter is also talks about how the worst has already past.
-Taylor Gralak
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1. My Eyes Are Opened
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. I thought the chapter went too fast. At some points I felt that I did not understand parts of the text. After Lena’s mother gave birth to a dead baby, Lena’s mother’s actions seemed natural. Later it seems as if she lost her life and failed and starts to slowly fade away. Through the book, I wondered why Lena’s mother was always so afraid. I also wondered how did she become like this and how did she learn to see the world in another perspective.
4. Lena’s father seems to be a very relaxed person. He seems to be mentally blind because he cannot see the problem, but his wife can. He also seems to not listen and is not aware of his surroundings when he incorrectly writes his wife’s birthday and name. Lena’s father cannot process information from his surroundings.
5. The main conflict is Lena’s mother being able to see things in another perspective, while the whole family cannot. The family seems to find nothing wrong with the furniture or how things are arranged, but Lena’s mother can. Whenever Lena’s mother seems to sense a problem, the rest of the family seems to not even detect it. The conflict seems to be human vs. society due to the fact it is one person against many others because one can see it but the rest cannot.
6. A lesson the chapter seems to teach is that after a fall, you can get up and try again. This is shown when Teresa, Lena’s neighbor, constantly argues with her Teresa’s mother. After they fight, they are able to love each other again. After a mistake, the mistake is forgiven. Lena’s mother may have experienced something that makes her fear everything or allows her to see things in a dangerous way, but she can still live normally without worry. The event may have been her fall, but she could of gotten back up and tried again. She may never see things the same way, but she can adapt and learn to live with it and maybe enjoy it.
Benjamin Ly
1. Fear
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. I thought this chapter was really crazy and strange. Specifically, I didnt get when the beggar was chopped into a thousand pieces or something like that. Also I thoght that Ying-Ying was the craziest and more paranoid person I know, like when she told the story of the man living in her basement. I also found it hard to believe that Ying-Ying and Clifford have been married thus far, even if he did save her life. Both of them can't even communicate with each other. When they do, its in vague gestures.
4. When St. Claire moves to her new home in Oakland, she overhears her neighbor, Theresa, and Theresa's mother arguing. In St. Claire's mind, she imagines Theresa being beaten senseless or even being killed by the mother. This reveals how paranoid and scared Ying-Ying has made her daughter.
5. The conflict is internal, human vs self. Because of her mother's influence, St. Claire sees the world in a morbid and fearful way but tries not to.
6. Like the allegory in the beginning of the section, both show a conflict between parent and child where the parent is over cautious to the point where it is harmful or counterproductive to the child.
-Vincent Nguyen, Period 3
1. The Other Light
2. " The Voice from the Wall"
3. This story at first caught my attention with the superstition that their ancestor was cursed because he killed a man with the worst torture. Then it got a little weird for me because the story moved around. First it was talking about how her mother lied about stuff to teach her life lessons. Then how her mother became a bit paranoid and had a miscarriage then went crazy. Afterwards, the daughter could hear the next door neighbors yell at each other. This story confused me a bit, but I still understood the lesson.
4. Lena’s father doesn’t understand Chinese so he asks Lena to translate. When she translates, sometimes she lies so things won’t be bad for them. Like when she tells her dad that her mom said that she regrets to have a miscarriage and they should have dinner and try again next time instead of how much her mom wanted to kill her son. Lena is very considerate is very aware of what’s best.
5.I think this is a internal problem with human vs human. Her mother is scared of those who are “dirty” to her or poor like when a man suddenly rushes to them. She regrets that she wasn’t able to protect Lena, and is still traumatized.
6. The lesson of the story is that you would never know what it’s like on the other side until you experience it yourself. Some lines that represent it is when the great grandfather hits a man a thousand times and the ghost took him to the other side of the wall to show him the pain.
-Diana Li
1.Mentality
2.“The Voice From the Wall”
3.This chapter was confusing. Lena’s thoughts of what is happening kind of interfering of what’s really happing in the story. Like when Teresa was screaming back to her mother, Lena thought something super bad was going to happen but nothing really bad did happen. That also further confuses me with this chapter. Also when they moved, the wall speaker changed right? And what’s with the mom?
4.Teresa seems like a bad child, disobeying her mother doing what ever. But when she goes into Lena’s house she is a child that knows what’s she’s doing, and somewhat clever for planning to go back into her room by the fire escape.
5.Human vs. Self Lena has issues, like when she thought she saw kids getting killed in various sick like ways. Human vs. Human Mom vs. Dad kind of because of the translation issues.
6.D imagery, this chapter would have not been as sick like, like Lena’s thoughts of some kids being killed, the beggar in the beginning, the baby being born, it has a head of hot air!?!, what would happen to you if you took alternate path to go home or school. Also the first? Wall crazy stuff. This chapter wouldn’t been as dark or sick or mind breaking.
?
1. "The Lurking Fear"
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. I really liked this chapter. I cannot say why exactly, but I suppose it's because I have a penchant toward stories of a more morbid sort. I enjoyed the exploration of the paranoia and frail nature of Ying-Ying and the duality between the St.Clair's and the Sorci's situations. Overall, I'd say this chapter is one of my favorite.
4. Ying-Ying is a neurotic woman who is seemingly in a state of constant paranoia not only for herself, but for her daughter. She always warns and cautions her daughter to for her to be safe. When she is confronted by something beyond her control, like the red-faced man who charges her and Lena, he own fears overcomes her want of safety for her daughter and let's go of her hand to defend herself. She may have been scared for her loved ones, but for herself more so.
5. I'd say the conflict is a bit of human vs. human, human vs. nature, and human vs. nature, though I cannot say this with a certainty. Lena lives in worry of an unknown terror that has been imposed onto her by her mother. I'm not really sure if the conflict is resolved or not because I, quite frankly, am not really sure of what happened at the end.
6.C. This chapter relates to the allegory since both mothers are warning their children of things and cannot explain why exactly they are telling them so, save for a feeling in their guts. They worry without fully explaining why so, but there is truth in their words.
-Nolan Tran
jackie chen period 3
1) paranormal activity
2) The Voice from the Wall
3) This chapter was very strange and scary. The first part that caught my attention was the crazy man in the basement. It was creepy and confusing because I didn’t know who the man was and why he was imprisoned in their basement. I also think that Ying-ying is sort of crazy and scares her daughter Lena.
4) One of the main characters of this chapter is Ying-ying St. Clair. She is a strange woman who is always paranoid. She is also very superstitious for example, when they moved to the new house; she was constantly changing the furniture around. She believed that things were unbalanced in the house.
5) I think the main conflict of the story is an internal conflict between Lena and herself as well as ying-ying and herself. They are both superstitious and always hearing or seeing things. Lena sees strange things going on at school and it scares her. Ying-ying goes crazy because she is so paranoid of everything around her.
6) I think Amy Tan used really good word choice and imagery in this chapter. She made the chapter scary and eerie, which made the story more interesting.
Jessica Lee
Period 4
1. Anencephaly – congenital brain condition; the absence of all or a part of the brain and part of the skull at birth, infants of this condition are either stillborn or die within hours or days.
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. I thought that this chapter was just really weird and sad. I think that Ying-Ying’s crazy thoughts and superstitions were because of her childhood, like in The Moon Lady “the five evils”. And Ying-Ying passed these thoughts over to Lena. I think those thoughts made Lena fearful of everything unknown and isolated because she never told anyone else her thoughts like “monkey rings that would split in two and send a swinging child hurtling through space” (pg103). When Ying-Ying becomes pregnant with Lena’s brother and goes through “nesting” by rearranging her house, it reminded me of the book Shopaholic and baby by Sophie Kinsella. And of course, the main character goes through her nesting phase by constantly shopping. The freakiest part was when Lena’s brother was born; the way Ying-Ying describe his birth was stomach-turning. From what Ying-Ying describes, I think that Lena’s brother had anencephaly and probably died within hours because Ying-Ying saw him move. That part was the sad part to me; I thought that Lena’s parent’s friends would take her to see her newborn baby brother that was healthy, so Lena’s brother’s death was a big shock.
4. I think that Lena’s dad was a rather strange character. I really wondered how he can communicate with Ying-Ying, she could speak a little English and he can’t understand Chinese at all. Lena would say that her father would “put words” into her mother’s mouth. I guess they need Lena to translate back and forth. I also wondered why he changed Ying-Ying’s age and name. I suppose that her name was changed to Americanize her. And I think that Amy Tan had Lena’s father change Ying-Ying’s age because then her Chinese zodiac animal and that would have been symbolic. Tigers are supposed to be fierce and strong, but dragons are only mythical call creatures completely unreal like Ying-Ying’s hallucinations and thoughts.
5. I think the conflict is human vs. human and human vs. self. Ying-Ying vs. Lena because Lena feels as though her mother doesn’t see her and would rather they fight all the time like Mrs. Sorci and Teresa then not talk at all. And human vs. self because Ying-Ying feels that it was her fault that her son died, that she knew something bad was going to happen yet she didn’t try to stop it.
6.d) In this chapter there are things that remind me of the Amy Tan interview. Like Amy Tan used to imagine things that weren’t real and she wrote that into her book. And she said that her family moved around San Francisco, going up and up, moving to wealthier neighborhoods. And so did Lena’s family they moved too, “We’re moving up in the world”(Lena’s father, pg107). Although the hallucinations Lena has are confusing, they also make the story more interesting because that was your have to pay close attention to decode what’s real and what isn’t.
Predictable Prescience
The Voice from the Wall
1. The opening of the chapter frightened me, with the description of the “death by a thousand cuts.” I once saw a Chinese drama that had a scene in which the protagonist’s father, a corrupt Ming government official, was sentenced to this kind of “torture-death,” except I felt that this type of death penalty was equivalent to dying a thousand times. Therefore, I began to hope that the rest of this chapter would not be so morbid. As I read this chapter, I began to ask myself: why does Ying-Ying and her daughter Lena possess such strange powers of foreseeing the future? In Chinese society, predicting the future is not always a good omen; it sometimes implies that the person who has these revelations is actually mentally unsound, somewhat like a fanatic. However, both Lena and her mother seem mentally healthy, although Ying-Ying in particular has interesting idiosyncrasies. Lena’s mother is constantly obsessed with the concept of chi and fen-shui, that achieving a balance would help preserve the sanctity and safety of her home. I feel that while this desire for harmony is an inherent part of many Asian households, Ying-Ying takes this concept to the extreme as she is obsessed with every small detail of her life, such as the location of furniture and the location of their house.
2. The main character of this chapter is Lena St. Clair, who is the daughter of an Englishman and a Chinese housewife. Lena finds that she has inherited her mother’s eyes, because while her eyes look Chinese just like her mother’s, she can see the dangers that her mother sees as well. This causes Lena to be paranoid about her surroundings, since she sees danger in mundane things such as swinging on monkey rings or even walking down street. Because of this, Lena grows up surrounded by fear and adversity as she witnesses her mom degenerate into a collapsed, mentally defeated soul.
3. The main conflict of this chapter can be described as internal, human vs. self, and the conflict involves not so much the protagonist but her mother, who is increasingly degenerating into a state of self-despair. Even so, Lena feels that she can vicariously experience her mother’s pain and suffering, which is why Lena is emotionally wounded when she learns of her mother’s sufferings such as the miscarriage of her premature baby brother.
4. One theme of this chapter could be interpreted as hope ultimately allows oneself to triumph over all adversity. Lena realizes this truth about life after she witnesses how her Italian neighbors, the Sorcis, turn seemingly impossible conflicts into opportunities for family bonding. Lena describes the Sorcis as a truculent family whose heated arguments have always caused her to wonder why their daughter had not been beaten to death yet. Lena dreams about the possibility of rescuing her mother from her mental degeneration by showing her that the worst of her life has already passed, that she must gather up her strength to live on.
-Albert Li
1) The Voice.
2) The Voice from the Wall.
3) I thought this chapter was kind of scary, especially when Lena’s mother tells her about the baby with the empty head. What was also weird was how the story of the cut up beggar related to anything. Maybe it was saying how when we experience something really terrible, we wouldn’t see life as painful anymore. I thought that Lena is one crazy girl, and that her father is a pompous person for trying to insert words into Lena’s mother. Maybe Lena’s father should think about learning Chinese if he truly loves his wife. I don’t know how the baby with an empty skull is supposed to mean anything, or why Lena’s mother should be so weird when she gets pregnant.
4) Lena is sort of crazy I think. She must be a hot hybrid, according to the way Tam describes Lena. I kind of feel sorry for Lena though, to have to see scary thoughts at such an early age. It must be the fact that she broke her nose and her mother told her scary stories. Maybe Tam is trying to reveal the insight that Lena truly possesses, her ability to see things kids her age can’t.
5) The conflict is human vs. self. Lena wants to find out who she is.
6) The theme of this story is that humans must constantly try to overcome their obstacles. At the end of the chapter, Lena tries to overcome her grief over her dead brother by trying to “kill” herself a thousand times, only to be reborn and start a new life. Just like how Teresa and her mother fight, and every time afterwards, Teresa and her mother start a brand new relationship.
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1. "The Walls have Eyes"
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. First off, I would like to say that this chapter reminded me of the movie, "The Hils have Eyes". So I thought this chapter was sort of like the Moon lady chapter because it was kind of confusing and misleading. The chapter was creepy too. The scene where the grandpa person dies creeped me out. I honestly hope there are more chapters like this because I liked how Amy Tan described them. Except I kind of wish they were more easy to understand.
4. I found the two female characters in the chapter to be pretty believable. They are both extremely superstitious and will pretty much think of the worst for every superstition. I think that the mother in the chapter was too overprotective and is selfish because of how she has influenced her daughter. Now her daughter is messed up in the head too.
5. I definently think that the main conflict in the story is Human vs Self because of how Lena is all messed up in the head. She has been influenced by her mother, who is in her own, safe little world without any danger, and has passed this on to her daughter through superstitions.
6. In this chapter, I noticed that there was a lot of imagery used. Like the death of the grandpa person and how Lena's mom is crazy. I also noticed that she uses good word choice to really bring life to these scenes. The word choice in the chapter really make the chapter more interesting.
1. “Disturbing”
2. “The Voice from the Wall”
3. I thought it was strange that Ying-Ying would marry a person she can’t seem to understand. Lena serves as a translator for her parents. Lena is influenced by the eerie and strange stories her mother tells her. She becomes paranoid and forms frightening thoughts about her neighbor being killed. I also pondered as to why the baby came out as it did. I’ve never heard of a case where the baby is born without a brain, aside from this chapter. On top of that, the baby comes out with his eyes wide open which isn’t normal. Another question that came across my mind was why did Clifford act the way he did? Was he really so unaware of what was happening to his family?
4. Ying-Ying is portrayed as a disturbed and crazy person. She also seems to be able to see things other people in her family can’t. Ying-Ying rearranges the furniture to bring balance to the household while Lena and Clifford don’t see this. Since Ying-Ying can’t speak English, how is she supposed to tell Clifford her problems? Clifford in turn, can’t help Ying-Ying. This being the case, why did the two get married in the first place? Ying-Ying falls apart when she gives birth to a baby boy that is dead. This makes Ying-Ying even more psychotic than she already was.
5. The conflict of this chapter is human vs. self. Lena concocts violent and horrific images in her head. She is paranoid and assumes the worst. When she finds that Theresa is actually unharmed, she wishes that her family situation is worse than her own. However, after hearing Theresa and her mother make up after a quarrel, she has hope that her family can be like theirs.
6. Amy Tan weaves in imagery very nicely and incorporates lots of details as well. Her powerful word choice really makes the reader see what is going on such as the scene when Lena is imagining what’s happening with her neighbor. The baby is gruesomely described as an “empty eggshell” (112).
Brian Yang
Period 4
1. Schizophrenia
2. The Voice From the Wall
3. The first thing I want to say about this chapter was that it was extremely creepy and really kind of surprised me. I mean, a girl who hears voices from walls? If I were her, I would really get that checked out. Much of the word choice used in this chapter conveyed a lot of gruesome images in my mind.
4. The character I would really like to focus on is Ying-ying. Many events throughout the chapter really highlight her uncomfortable stance. Even after having lived in and adjusted, physically, to the environment that she lives in, one can tell, that, psychologically, she never got over the loss of her child in the miscarriage.
5. The main type of conflict in this chapter was human vs. self. Both Lena and Ying-ying have internal and mostly unresolved conflicts festering inside of them. In Lena's case, this is proved by the fact that she hears voices that are seemingly unreal. In Ying-ying's case, she can't get over many obstacles in her life and I would say that uses her superstitious beliefs to hide this fact.
6. I would say that the theme/life lesson of this story is to get along with your family. If it isn't right at home, then it won't be right in your life. There are certain things that everybody needs to settle at home before they can live a healthy normal life. Throughout the chapter, we can see this through the fact that Lena and Ying-ying need to communicate more and on a deeper level than they have been.
-Calvin Ho
Period 4
1. It’s a crazy world
2. The Voice From the Wall
3. I thought this chapter was very unusual and gruesome. It was disturbing to know that Ying-ying made Lena believe all the things she said. Lena believed she could hear the death of her next door neighbor. She thought she could hear the cutting and slashing even though there was nothing there. I believe her mother was crazy to tell Lena those things. I don’t understand whether it was of superstition of over protectiveness.
4. Lena St. Clair is deeply influenced by her mother. Although she is young, she has already sees the worst in life. She imagines the most unusual things. “I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a hole I had dug in a sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children” (page 103). She is somewhat crazy like her mother.
5. The conflict in the story is an internal struggle with Lena and herself. Her mother influenced her to think in a cruel manner. She can’t seem to get things out of her imagination.
6. Amy Tan uses a lot of description in this chapter. In this chapter, you can imagine most of the things she describes. Like the barricaded door.
1. Neighbors
2. The Voice from the Wall
3. This chapter confused me a lot. It was very descriptive, especially when they were talking about 1, 000 cuts that killed a man and about the fear Lena and Betty St. Clair saw, that others could not. I didn’t like this chapter as much as others though, it was hard for me to follow.
4. Betty St. Claire would make up these lies for Lena so she wouldn’t have to bear the truth, which I could understood, but at the same time I think she should have shown her daughter the realities of bad behavior and what not.
5. I think the conflict was human vs. self for Betty St. Claire because of those days she would just lay in bed not knowing how to keep her balance and not wanting to do anything, she needs to fight that.
6. The used crib was a symbol because after all the rearranging that is how Lena knew her mother was expecting a child.
-Jahana Kaliangara
Brandon Lam
1. Meat
2. "The Voice from the Wall"
3. I believe the chapter was something about superstitions and gruesome deaths. A man being cut into a thousand pieces, voices through a wall, and someone dying over and over again were some of the things I got out of the chapter. Other than those stated, I had a difficult time picking through her assortment of sentences. This chapter was confusing and hard to understand.
4. Lena's mother is insane about protecting her daughter about the truth of life. Being superstitious, she tries to "scare" Lena into believing what she says. Doing so, Lena's mother tries to teach Lena about life. I believe that this is a poor way to teach your children about life. Eventually they would grow-up being to "soft" for the world, or mentally scarred.
5. The conflict is Man vs. Self. Being that Lena battles with her unconscious mind. She has nightmares and visions about horrid things that hinder her judgment in her everyday life. Her mother also suffers from these symptoms.
6. I think the theme is not to be too superstitious. It seems that its never bad to be too careful, but letting your fears, or your need for protection take control of your daily functions is going to far.
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