"how could she go back? Didn't she see how terrible her life was? Didn't she recognize it would never stop?" (pg.115) Lena St. Clair is the daughter Of Ying Ying and a Caucasian Irish man. Her mother only spoke Mandarin and her father only spoke English, so Lena had to translate for her parents. When Lena was 10 her father got Promoted and they moved to an Irish neighborhood. Next door to their apartment Lena would always hear screaming, and she would picture a little girl getting beaten to death by her mother. Ying Ying got pregnant with a boy, but the baby boy died. This caused Ying Ying to slowly go insane. It was hard for Lena to watch her mother go crazy, so she would always remind herself that she didn't have it as bad as the girl next door. In reality, however, the little girl next door was perfectly happy.
Lena reminds me a lot of myself in this chapter. When ever I am feeling down I always try to remind myself that other people have it a lot worse than I do and that I should be grateful for what I have. When Lena was feeling down she would think about the girl next door that gOt yelled at every night.
A literary device for this chapter is idiom. Ying Ying would always say certain Sayings in Chinese that made since to her, but the literal translation in English made no since at all. Lena would always change her mothers sayings when she translated for her father so they would make more since.
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