Week 16 Part B The Joy Luck Club -Queen Mother of the Western Skies- Between the Trees

Week 16 Part B The Joy Luck Club -Queen Mother of the Western Skies- Between the Trees

• In this chapter Ying-ying St Clair, one of the Chinese mother from The Joy Luck Club. She talks about her daughter Lena, putting her and her husband in her guest room. What Lena did not know, guest room is the best room. Ying-ying realized that Lena is part of her and part of her mind that is part of mine.
• Ying-ying noted to her daughter not to put her child in that room because the room has ceiling that slope downward toward the pillow. But Ying-ying aware that her daughter will not listen because she and her husband decided not to have a baby. Their too busy drawing places that someone else will build and someone else will live in it.
• What Lena did not know, her mother married young in China and aborted her baby because she found out her husband has been cheating since before the marriage begins. Ying-ying was raised in a very wealthy household. When she was sixteen, a rich older man who was a friend of the family began to show interest in her. Although he repulsed Ying-ying, she instantly felt that she was destined to marry him. The marriage was arranged, and Ying-ying soon came to love the man, as if against her own will. She tried to please him in every way, and she conceived a child that she knew, in her almost telepathic manner, would be a son. Several months into the pregnancy, her husband left her for an opera singer, and Ying-ying learned that he had committed infidelities throughout their marriage. In her rage and sorrow, she aborted her unborn son.
• Ying-ying explains that she was born in the year of the Tiger. The Tiger spirit has two spirit the golden nature is fierce, and the black nature is cunning and crafty, waiting between the trees. Ying-ying explains that only after her husband left her did she learn to use the black side of her spirit. She lived for ten years with relatives before she decided to get a job in a clothing shop, where, one day, she met an American merchant named Clifford St. Clair. “Saint,”
•  Ying-ying calls him, courted Ying-ying for four years, but she waited for news of her renegade husband’s death before marrying Clifford. Clifford believed she was a poor village girl and had no idea that Ying-ying had grown up amidst an opulence greater than any he could provide. She did not tell him of her former life until many years after they were married. The first marriage had already drained her spirit to such an extent that as soon as she stopped having to struggle to live, she became the ghost of the tiger she had once been. Ying-ying has decided to make a change, because she is ashamed that Lena, her daughter who was also born under the sign of the Tiger, also lacks the spirit that should be hers by right of her birth year. She resolves to share her painful, secret past with Lena in order to cut her Tiger spirit loose.