The Joy Luck Club Lena St. Clair Quotes

My father, who spoke only a few canned Chinese expressions, insisted my mother learn English. So with him, she spoke in moods and gestures, looks and silences, and sometimes a combination of English punctuated by hesitations and Chinese frustration: "Shwo buchulai" – Words cannot come out. So my father would put words in her mouth. "I think Mom is trying to say she’s tired," he would whisper when my mother became moody. (II.2.21)

I often lied when I had to translate for her, the endless forms, instructions, notices from school, telephone calls. "Shemma yisz?" – What meaning? – she asked me when a man at a grocery store yelled at her for opening up jars to smell the insides. I was so embarrassed I told her that Chinese people were not allowed to shop there. When the school sent a notice home about a polio vaccination, I told her the time and place, and added that all students were now required to use metal lunch boxes, since they had discovered old paper bags can carry polio germs. (II.2.32)

I could not tell my father what she had said. He was so sad already with this empty crib in his mind. How could I tell him she was crazy?

So this is what I translated for him: "She says we must all think very hard about having another baby. She says she hopes this baby is very happy on the other side. And she thinks we should leave now and go have dinner." (II.2.76)

My mother has a wounded sound in her voice, as f I had put the list up to hurt her. I think how to explain this, recalling the words Harold and I have used with each other in the past: "So we can eliminate false dependencies…be equals…love without obligation…" But these are words she could never understand.

So instead I tell my mother this: "I don’t really know. It’s something we started before we got married. And for some reason we never stopped." (III.1.84)

I was still screaming after two laughing men grabbed this man and, shaking him, said, "Joe, stop it, for Chrissake. You’re scaring that poor little girl and her maid." (II.2.38)

"Lena, you’re really extraordinary," Harold said after six months of dinners, five months of post-prandial love-making, and one week of timid and silly love confessions. We were lying in bed, between new purple sheets I had just bought for him. His old set of white sheets was stained in revealing places, not very romantic. (II.4.20)

"So really, we’re equals, except that Harold makes about seven times more than what I make." (III.1.67)

At home, my mother looked at everything around her with empty eyes. My father would come home from work, patting my head, saying, "How’s my big girl, but always looking past me, toward my mother. I had such fears inside, not in my head but in my stomach. I could no longer see what was so scary, but I could feel it. I could feel every little movement in our silent house. And at night, I could feel the crashing loud fights on the other side of my bedroom wall, this girl being beaten to death. In bed, with the blanket edge lying across my neck, I used to wonder which was worse, our side or theirs? And after thinking about this for a while, after feeling sorry for myself, it comforted me somewhat to think that this girl next door had a more unhappy life." (II.2.81)

I lay down on my bed waiting to hear the screams and the shouts. And late at night I was still awake when I heard the loud voices next door. Mrs. Sorci was shouting and crying, You stupida girl. You almost gave me a heart attack. And Teresa was yelling back, I coulda been killed. I almost fell and broke my neck. And then I heard them laughing and crying, crying and laughing, shouting with love. (II.2.99)

And after that I began to see terrible things. I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me that I got from my mother. I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a old I had dug in the sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children...And when I became older, I could see things that the Caucasian girls at school did not. Monkey bars that would split into two and send a swinging child hurtling through space. (II.2.8)

And I think that feeling of fear never left me, that I would be caught someday, exposed as a sham of a woman. But recently, a friend of mine, Rose, who’s in therapy now because her marriage is falling apart, told me those kinds of thoughts are commonplace in women like us.

"At first I thought it was because I was raised with all this Chinese humility," Rose said. "Or that maybe it was because when you’re Chinese you’re supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves. But my therapist said, Why do you blame your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it’s all diminishing returns after a certain age." (III.1.45)