Summary—Rose Hsu Jordan: “Half and Half”
Rose Hsu Jordan begins by describing the Bible belonging
to her mother, An-mei. Although An-mei carried the white leatherette
volume with great pride for many years, the Bible now serves to
prop up one of the kitchen table legs in her apartment. Rose sits
at her mother’s kitchen table, watches her mother sweep around the
Bible, and wonders how she will break the news that she and her
husband, Ted, are getting divorced. Rose knows An-mei will tell
her that she must save the marriage, but she also knows that an
attempt to do so would be hopeless.
Rose remembers when she first began dating Ted. At that
time, both An-mei and Mrs. Jordan, Ted’s mother, had been opposed
to their relationship. As a result, Rose and Ted clung to one another. Ted
made all the decisions, and Rose enjoyed playing the part of Ted’s
maiden in distress, whom he would always save. However, after they
married, Ted, a dermatologist, lost a serious malpractice suit;
he lost his confidence and began forcing Rose to make some of the
decisions. He became angry when she resisted, accusing her of shirking
responsibility and blame. Soon afterward, Ted asked for a divorce,
to Rose’s utter shock.
This meditation leads into a narration of another such
emotional blow, an event from Rose’s childhood that scarred her
and engendered An-mei’s loss of religious faith. The family had
taken a trip to the beach, in what Rose describes as an attempt
to act like a white American family. An-mei instructed Rose to watch
over her younger brothers, and because Matthew, Mark, and Luke were
only a few years younger than Rose and could play together self-sufficiently, the
four-year-old Bing became Rose’s main responsibility. At one point
during the day, Bing asked if he could walk out on the reef to where
their father was fishing. Rose gave him permission, but watched
him nervously as he made his way out along the crashing waves. Suddenly,
Mark and Luke started a fight, and An-mei called to Rose to separate
them. Rose looked up just in time to see Bing fall into the water
without leaving a ripple. She stood motionless, in shock, but her
sisters, returning at that moment from another stretch of the beach,
instantly noticed Bing’s absence. The family rushed to the water
in panic. They called state authorities, but the search for Bing’s
body lasted hours with no success. Each person felt responsible
for the accident.
Refusing to accept their fate, An-mei drove with Rose
to the beach early in the morning, although to Rose’s knowledge
her mother had never driven before. An-mei took her Bible with her
and stood on the shore, offering prayers to God. She also attempted
to appease “the Coiling Dragon,” whom she said had stolen Bing because
one of their ancestors once stole water from a sacred well. To the
Dragon, An-mei made offerings of sweetened tea and a watery-blue
sapphire ring, both of which she tossed into the ocean. She also
voiced to Rose her belief that her nengkan, her
“ability to do whatever she put her mind to,” would bring Bing back.
Only after she threw a rescue tube into the ocean and saw it sucked
away and turned to shreds did An-mei give up her search for Bing.
At the time, Rose thought that her mother had yielded
to the realization that faith could not change fate. Yet Rose comments
that she now realizes “fate is shaped half by expectation, half
by inattention” (hence the title of the story, “Half and Half”).
Just as she believes her inattention caused Bing to drown, she thinks
that her inattention to signs of her marriage deteriorating resulted
in Ted’s request for a divorce. Rose ends her story on an optimistic
note, by emphasizing the “expectation” side of fate. She concludes
by returning to the Bible under the kitchen table, saying that she
once flipped through it and saw her little brother’s name written
in the “Deaths” section, “lightly, in erasable pencil.”
Summary—Jing-mei Woo: “Two Kinds”
In the section’s next story, Jing-mei speaks again. She
describes her childhood, which was full of pain and resentment linked
to having never become the “prodigy” that her mother desired her
to be. Suyuan felt certain that Jing-mei could become a prodigy
if only she tried hard enough, and at first Jing-mei eagerly complied,
trying her skill at a wide range of talents. As Waverly Jong won
championship after championship in chess, with Waverly’s mother,
Lindo, bragging day after day, Suyuan became ever more determined
that she would find her daughter’s hidden inner talent. But Jing-mei
always fell short of her mother’s expectations, and as she looked
in the mirror one night, she promised herself that she would not
allow her mother to try to twist her into what she was not. However,
after seeing a nine-year-old Chinese girl play the piano on The
Ed Sullivan Show, Suyuan made Jing-mei take lessons from
their neighbor, a retired piano teacher named Mr. Chong. When Jing-mei
discovered that Mr. Chong was deaf, and that she could get away
with playing the wrong notes as long as she kept up the right rhythm,
she decided to take the easy way out. As long as she kept time,
she did not have to correct her mistakes.
