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Setting
Definition of Simile
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like" or "as," but can also... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often use the connecting words "like... read full definition
A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two unlike things. To make the comparison, similes most often... read full definition
Part 1, Chapter 1: The Joy Luck Club
Explanation and Analysis—Elephant and Fish Hills:
Though Suyuan dies two months before Jing-Mei’s narrative begins, the novel’s use of imagery keeps her memories alive. In Part 1, Chapter 1, Jing-Mei recounts the pre-war China of Suyuan’s early adulthood, initiating her reader into a lush world that surpasses dreams:
When I saw the hills, I laughed and shuddered at the same time. The peaks looked like giant fried fish heads trying to jump out of a vat of oil. Behind each hill, I could see shadows of another fish, and then another and another. And then the clouds would move just a little and the hills would suddenly become monstrous elephants marching slowly toward me!
Made possible by colorful metaphors and similes, the vivid imagery makes Suyuan’s “poor thoughts” seem pale by comparison. It honors the landscape’s beauty, by turns whimsical and imaginative; the imagery assembles a realm of fantasy that shifts and spellbinds. Gwilin’s hills resemble “fried fish heads” in a vat of oil, only to transform into “monstrous elephants” a sentence later. Hills turn into food and then marching animals. Suyuan’s storytelling gives the city an otherworldly beauty and lifts it off the novel’s pages.
Imagery strengthens the novel’s fantastical suggestions. Mothers forecast doom and sense elemental imbalances, mingling reality with the supernatural. These resonant descriptions showcase the compelling power of these stories, making them instruments of awe.
Related Themes:
Part 1, Chapter 3: The Red Candle
Explanation and Analysis—Blind and Seeing:
Lindo Jong’s marriage ceremony weds a paradox with simile. Dressed in red, she approaches Tyan-yu in Part 1, Chapter 3 with resignation and new strength:
Someone took my hands and guided me down a path. I was like a blind person walking to my fate. But I was no longer scared. I could see what was inside me.
Lindo expresses the strangeness of her experience through a pairing of paradox and simile. Guided down the aisle, she compares her helpless, feminine state to that of a “blind person.” Lindo has neither agreed to marry Tyan-yu nor truly wishes to, forced to accept her fate as she gets hand-held to an unhappy union. But the moment allows her to see what lies within herself—“I could see what was inside me,” Lindo observes, in a paradoxical pivot from her earlier comparisons to blindness. Her handicap has become an unexpected reservoir of self-resolve. The degrading treatment at the hands of her in-laws merely strengthens her will to defend the “genuine thoughts” that “no one could ever take from me.” In a sudden stroke of new wisdom, Lindo breaks free from the gender conventions that had condemned her to household drudgery and servitude. She holds onto her sanity and in turn outwits Huang Taitai.
Related Themes:
Part 4, Chapter 1: Magpies
Explanation and Analysis—Like Stairs:
The simile—which draws out the similarities between two objects—is a fitting literary scaffold in a story about mothers and daughters. In An-Mei Hsu’s final chapter, Part 4, Chapter 1, she turns to this device while watching her daughter work through the wreckage of her marriage:
And even though I taught my daughter the opposite, still she came out the same way! Maybe it is because she was born to me and she was born a girl. And I was born to my mother and I was born a girl. All of us are like stairs, one step after one step after another, going up and down, but all going the same way.
“Like stairs,” the fates of An-mei, her mother, and her daughter are destined to repeat each other. An-Mei’s simile articulates the intergenerational forces that bind her to Rose and the past. The staircase steps “all [go] the same way,” which is what mother and daughter all find themselves doing. In almost every one of the four narratives, the novel draws attention to the ways in which mother and daughter share the same flaws or retrace their own paths. Ying-Ying loses her “chi” to a husband who leaves her still bearing a child; Lena swoons over Harold and offers money to support him. Lindo escapes a toxic arranged marriage, striking for America anew; her daughter, Waverly, undergoes its modern equivalent through divorce. An-Mei loses her brother upon leaving with her mother for Tientjin, while Rose parts with Bing through a tragedy at the beach. Like Waverly’s “uncanny” resemblance to Lindo, the novel’s children encounter similar difficulties and dilemmas as those of their parents. However they may try to define themselves apart from their parents, their stories build, stair-like, upon the ones that came before.
Related Themes:
Part 4, Chapter 4: A Pair of Tickets
Explanation and Analysis—Mutant DNA:
Jing-Mei’s trip to Guangzhou brings Suyuan’s journey full circle—she returns to the land where her mother could not—but also awakens a deep cultural identity within. As she braces herself to enter China for the first time, she reflects upon the ways in which the trip has transformed her:
And when she said this, I saw myself transforming like a werewolf, a mutant tag of DNA suddenly triggered, replicating itself insidiously into a syndrome, a cluster of telltale Chinese behaviors, all those things my mother did to embarrass me–haggling with store owners, pecking her mouth with a toothpick in public, being color-blind to the fact that lemon yellow and pale pink are not good combinations for winter clothes.
Placed in the novel’s final chapter, Jing-Mei’s imaginative simile strikes a rare equilibrium that pays fitting service to the novel’s sense of closure. She compares her Chinese identity to a “syndrome” caused by a “mutant tag of DNA,” inserting an empirical valence in a novel so defined by fantasy and fables. She counterbalances the force of her mother’s storytelling abilities with the products of Enlightenment ideals. In a story filled with stories, the simile adds a touch of science.
Jing-Mei does not completely abandon her ties to her mother, though. The account itself is a meditation on the ways in which she follows her mother—the toothpicks, haggling, and strange fashion choices—and the telltale feeling that lies “below” her skin. To that end, her narration adds a separate, fantastical simile that compares herself to a “werewolf” and places magic beside rational thought. Jing-Mei brings her mother’s stories into conversation with western thought, and the result reads like a reconciliation of sorts. Having struggled to both free herself from her mother’s expectations and connect with her cultural roots, Jing-Mei has at last come to terms with her own identity.
Related Themes:
