Part 1, Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Amy”
Monday, May 2
Amy watches her parents leave their apartment in Queens for work. Although she has completed a master’s degree, she has yet to find a real career and is living with her parents while planning to obtain a teacher’s license. Her parents, originally from Guangdong, China, work long hours. Her mother is employed at a local laundromat, and her father works at a fish market. Amy’s grandmother has just died, and Ma is noticeably bereft.
Amy has an older sister, Sylvie, who is 33. Amy thinks that “dazzling” Sylvie got the beauty and the brains. While Amy is drifting through life, Sylvie is firmly anchored in her career as a management consultant after finishing a bachelor’s at Princeton, a Master in Chemical Engineering at MIT, and an MBA from Harvard. Amy loves Sylvie but is envious of her sister’s beauty, intelligence, and success. Amy also believes that Sylvie’s early life in the Netherlands, where Sylvie lived with Ma’s cousin, Helena, until age nine, was “glamorous.”
Sylvie is back in the Netherlands both for a work assignment and because of their grandmother’s illness. While browsing in a local music store, Amy gets a call from her cousin, Lukas, Helena’s son. He is looking for Sylvie. Contrary to what everyone in the family thinks, Sylvie has apparently left the Netherlands and flown home. Amy visits her mother at work to ask if she knows where Sylvie is, and Ma does not. Worried, Ma asks Amy to go to Sylvie’s apartment to see if Sylvie has indeed returned.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Ma”
Monday, May 2
Ma recalls her early days in the “Beautiful Country” of the United States. She and Pa were so poor that they could not afford meat or vegetables to eat with their rice. As Ma was pregnant with Sylvie, no one was willing to give her a job. Eventually, Pa found work at a fish market, but even after Sylvie was born, Ma struggled to find employment. Not long after Sylvie’s birth, Ma’s distant cousin, Helena, wrote from the Netherlands, where she had immigrated. Helena reported that Ma’s mother had come from China to help Helena raise her own new baby, Lukas. Helena asked Ma to send her daughter, knowing how difficult their life was in the United States. Although Ma didn’t want to, she knew that Helena had more money and more space. Ma reluctantly agreed, hoping to retrieve her daughter within the year.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Amy”
Monday, May 2
Amy tells herself that Sylvie is fine, but she still worries on her way to Sylvie’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights. The apartment was a wedding present from Jim’s affluent parents, and Amy recalls her shock when her sister shared news of the gift. When Amy arrives, the apartment is empty, and although Sylvie and Jim are messy housekeepers, it is clear that no one has been there in months. As Amy realizes that none of Jim’s clothing is there, her worry increases.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “Sylvie”
Saturday, March 5
Two Months Earlier
Sylvie reflects on her early days at Princeton, when she and Jim had only just met and begun their relationship. She found him attractive right away: Beyond his physical desirability, his personality was magnetic. His affluent background, so different from that of her parents, only added to his charm. And for Jim, too, Sylvie represented an ideal. Having come from a world of wealth and nepotism, Jim was drawn to a student who gained a place at Princeton based entirely on merit. Sylvie wonders now if they truly loved each other, or if each had just seen in the other a chance to escape their past.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Amy”
Monday, May 2
Confused, Amy heads to the school where Jim works as a guidance counselor. At first, Jim seems to be avoiding her, but when Amy catches his eye, he sheepishly says hello. Amy asks about her sister, and he tells her they separated in March.
Later, at home with Ma and Pa, Amy is unsure how to talk to her parents about Sylvie. Amy recalls their last Christmas together, thinking how important it had always been to Sylvie to celebrate “real” American holidays. The Lunar New Year was a much more important holiday to their Chinese parents, but in a country where no one around them celebrated the day, it was hard for the girls to appreciate it. Sylvie had always wanted to be American, and Pa had resented her for it: Amy was his favorite. Still, when Amy tells her parents of Sylvie’s disappearance, they are terrified. Not wanting to reveal her sister’s separation, she tells Ma and Pa that according to Jim, Sylvie may just be taking some time off “for her career” (31). They seem to believe her, and Amy feels terrible for lying.
Amy contacts the company where Sylvie works and learns that Sylvie no longer consults with them and has not been sent to the Netherlands. Amy’s efforts to ask around about Sylvie online similarly fail. Everyone seems to agree that a highly competent woman like Sylvie must be just fine, but Amy is panic-stricken. She heads to the Netherlands to search for her sister.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Sylvie”
Friday, April 1
One Month Earlier
Sylvie is at JFK airport, on her way to the Netherlands to see her dying grandmother. Having spent the first nine years of her life with the woman, Sylvie considers Grandma more a mother than Ma. When Sylvie tells Ma and Pa of her intent to travel to see her grandmother, she fabricates a coinciding work trip to the Netherlands, knowing that the two would object otherwise.
Dutch was Sylvie’s first language, and the Netherlands her first country. Sylvie still thinks of it as “home.” As a young girl, though she longed for her “real” family, on arrival in the United States, she longed to return to the Netherlands. She missed her cousin, Lukas, and faced teasing from children at school, who mistook her Dutch accent for Chinese. She still dreams in Dutch, which she considers the language of her soul. At Princeton, she ate meals with a group of Dutch speakers, and although her work ethic and drive to succeed aligned culturally with the United States, her longing to return to the Netherlands never went away. She never felt truly at ease even with Amy, who she assumed to be the favorite child and viewed as a more genuine and likable person than herself.
Part 1, Chapters 1-6 Analysis
Part 1 grounds the novel within the framework of immigration narratives in part by establishing its structure. Kwok adopts three point-of-view characters, namely Amy, Ma, and Sylvie, who alternate as narrators by chapter. In each case, their point of view allows for a more thorough understanding of each character’s interior state of mind. Ironically, though, despite the multiple perspectives, the theme of Flawed and Incomplete Perspective is already at work. Every actor in these chapters of the novel, even the reader, is at all times operating on less than complete information.
Although the unreliability of many of these early pieces of narration will not be revealed until later in the story, this first section still uses the missing information to drive the plot forward. The back-and-forth between the three narrators becomes an important device in this literary thriller, serving to build suspense and create an atmosphere of anticipation and mystery. It also calls the reader’s attention to the importance of perception thematically. The two main characters make poor decisions and draw faulty conclusions, even about themselves, based on failures to see reality. Most markedly, Amy describes herself as a young woman adrift, viewing her sister as nearly perfect: to Amy, Sylvie is beautiful and driven. Her older sister, at just 33, seems to have found career success and, to Amy’s knowledge, is happily married. In fact, Ma and Sylvie admire Amy, appreciating her warm personality and energy, and Sylvie and Jim have separated. The references to eyes in these early chapters support this theme as well: Amy dislikes her thick glasses and the work of putting contacts in, so she often goes out into the world with blurry vision. Similarly, the one flaw Amy notes in Sylvie is a lazy eye that even today sometimes drifts if her sister is tired. In short, vanity and exhaustion work together to undermine the sisters’ vision.
Much of this section also focuses on establishing the theme of The Cultural Dissonance of Immigration. Ma and Pa’s early experiences as immigrants in New York City and their story overall places this novel in dialogue with a broader tradition of immigration narratives as well as the specific Chinese American literary tradition. Ma and Pa work long, hard hours in jobs that exploit them for their labor. Despite their hard work, they still struggle to make ends meet. Ma recalls having only soy sauce to put on top of their rice; they were too poor for meat or vegetables. They are so under-resourced that Ma feels forced to send her infant daughter to their wealthy relatives in the Netherlands. In the midst of this struggle, Amy and Sylvie grow up, each imbued with fragments of her heritage while simultaneously immersed in the culture of a country that doesn’t quite fully accept her.
Kwok, drawing on her insider knowledge as the Chinese American daughter of immigrants, weaves these threads together to form a story of the complex and challenging circumstances that Chinese immigrants face in New York City. Much of the detail in these passages mirrors the experiences of Kwok’s own family; although this fiction novel is not an autobiographical text, Kwok has drawn from her own experiences substantially in this portion of the narrative. Kwok’s personal experiences emerge in particular in the role that Sylvie plays within this exploration of cultural dissonance as a result of immigration. As Kwok once was, Sylvie is a high-achieving Chinese American female student from a poor family amid white, affluent students, which makes her no stranger to The Harm of Everyday Racism and Prejudice.
The importance of the Netherlands also becomes apparent in these chapters, as Sylvie returns for the first time since childhood. On her return, she realizes that there is a part of her that will always feel more at home there than in the United States. This realization is also an important part of her feeling of alienation and cognitive dissonance. Sylvie is torn not just between American and Chinese culture, but also between her roots in the Netherlands. She thus manifests in many ways the profound disorientation an individual may feel when torn among multiple homelands.
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