Analysis—“Scar,” “The Red Candle,” & “The Moon Lady”
An-mei’s, Lindo’s, and Ying-ying’s stories of their childhoods in China deal with the maternal figures who influenced them and with the societal role of Chinese women in general. All three tell of how they learned of the expectation that they would sacrifice themselves for their husbands. An-mei suffered because her mother had been disowned for choosing to become a concubine rather than remaining as a widow—for refusing to sacrifice herself for her husband even after his death. Lindo lived a life of near enslavement to her future husband and mother-in-law, and then endured a marriage of further degradation, in which her bed became a kind of “prison” because she wasn’t fulfilling her wifely duty of giving birth. Similarly, Ying-ying’s lifelong reticence traces back to her Amah’s assertion that girls should not think of their own needs, that they should “only listen” to the needs of others. On the day of the Moon Festival, Ying-ying “loses herself” not only by becoming temporarily lost from her family but by learning to stifle her own desires.