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Definition of Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved directly or indirectly, by making... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the story. Foreshadowing can be achieved... read full definition
Foreshadowing is a literary device in which authors hint at plot developments that don't actually occur until later in the... read full definition
Part 1, Chapter 4: The Moon Lady
Explanation and Analysis—Trailing Shadows:
Personification and foreshadowing follow Ying-Ying throughout the Moon Festival. After nearly drowning in the lake, Ying-Ying returns to land in Part 1, Chapter 4, accompanied by her “shadow”:
On the dock, with the bright moon behind me, I once again saw my shadow. It was shorter this time, shrunken and wild-looking. We ran together over to some bushes along a walkway and hid. In this hiding place I could hear people talking as they walked by.
Ying-Ying’s shadow bridges the realms of childhood and adulthood. Almost every child marvels at their shadows, and the personification’s imaginative flourish—a “running” shadow—shows a youthful imagination still intact. Like the “snake” incense and fish-catching birds, Ying-Ying’s silhouetted companion provides another instance of innocent playfulness. But her personified shadow implicitly foretells her future fate as well. “I lost myself,” she recalls at the end of the night, prefiguring her future sorrows. Ying-Ying becomes a literal “shadow” of herself after she kills her newborn son and loses another as a stillborn. “I willingly gave up my chi, the spirit that caused me so much pain,” she explains. In America, she lingers ghostlike around the silently grieving house. Decades before this, though, her shadow has provided a fading glimmer of her childhood and a preview of what she will become.
Related Themes:
Part 3, Chapter 1: Rice Husband
Explanation and Analysis—Marrying a Bad Man:
Ying-Ying St. Clair is a powerful, prophetic presence in Lena’s home. From childhood, Lena recounts how her mother foresees her brother’s stillborn death, the bank closure down the street, and her father’s death. In Part 3, Chapter 1, she reads her daughter’s failed marriage in the rice bowl:
My mother had looked in my rice bowl and told me I would marry a bad man.
Whether the warning is merely an elaborate means of avoiding food waste or an act of genuine foresight is somewhat unclear. Like many of Ying-Ying’s other prophecies, it is uncanny because of its seeming absurdity and eventual truth. Frightened by the remark, Lena skimps on “creamed corn, broccoli, Rice Crispies, or peanut butter sandwiches” to avoid marrying a neighborhood bully, Arnold.
Lena seems to evade her fate by “killing” Arnold, who eventually dies. But she cannot outrun her own mother’s forecasts. She falls for Harold, a colleague at her architecture firm, stammering out her love for him and accepting his outrageous pay inequalities as he begins his own venture. Harold splits all his expenses with her, quibbles over the cost of the flea exterminator, and buys ice cream for himself. Lena realizes that she has escaped the man with pockmarks but doomed herself to a life with a pinchpenny.
Ying-Ying’s foresight riffs off the saying that “mothers know best.” Her wacky future-telling gives her an authority that Lena at once defies and defers to. She tries to prove her mother wrong—starving herself, finishing the rice, smoothing over her troubles—but finds herself oddly fulfilling the very fate she tried to avoid. Lena’s failed love life plays into the fraught relationship between mother and daughter.
Related Themes:
