Part 2, Chapters 7-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Amy”
Wednesday, May 4
Amy arrives in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Willem, Helena, and Lukas meet her at the baggage claim, and she struggles against her fatigue and the disorientation of being in a foreign airport for the first time. Lukas strikes her as unkempt, although she supposes this is typical of photojournalists. She meets Estelle, a childhood friend of Sylvie and Willem’s who is at Schiphol because she is a pilot. Estelle invites Sylvie to lunch the next day. Helena and Willem are in a hurry: Although it is a national holiday, they run a large Chinese restaurant and must return to work.
Helena, Willem, and Lukas live in a village about 30 minutes outside of Amsterdam. On the drive home, the three reminisce about Sylvie as a child. When they arrive, Amy is still nauseated and disoriented, and she feels uncertain about Helena, who seems to approve of how different Amy is from Sylvie. Amy learns that Sylvie had been learning to play the cello. Confused, Amy protests that Sylvie isn’t musical at all, and Helena insinuates that Sylvie had only taken lessons because the teacher was handsome. Even more confused, Amy protests that Sylvie had been married. With a look on her face that Amy cannot parse, Helena tells her to be careful to not get taken advantage of, given her innocence.
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Sylvie”
Saturday, April 2
One Month Earlier
On her way back to the Netherlands for the first time since she left as a child, Sylvie recalls her last day there. She’d lost her beloved doll, Tasha, made for her by her Grandma. She and Lukas looked and looked, but to no avail. Willem gave her a pair of earrings that he claimed were crystal, but turned out to be real diamonds set in platinum. Sylvie remembers how angry Helena was and how jealous Helena had always been of Sylvie and Willem’s relationship.
At the airport, which Sylvie finds “gorgeous” and efficient, Lukas meets her. Although he tells her that she is unchanged, she does not recognize the boy he was in the man that he has become. The pair decide to take the train to their village, and on the way, Sylvie studies Lukas’s face. She finds echoes of Lukas as a child, and she recalls the excitement of past train rides. They had been so close as children; it pains her to realize that she has not seen him in so many years. Although she loved him and her Grandma, she had not returned to the Netherlands because of her strained relationship with Helena.
When they arrive at home, Sylvie is emotional. The décor and furniture have been updated, but much remains the same. She recalls Helena’s hatred for her, and through her inner monologue shares cryptic, half-memories of her “twisted” relationship with Willem.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Ma”
Tuesday, May 5
Ma recalls her certainty that she had to get Sylvie, or “Snow Jasmine” (Sylvie’s first name, the one Ma originally gave her), back. However, as the years passed, Ma never gained the money to fly to the Netherlands or to feed another mouth. When Sylvie did return, she left a portion of her “spirit” in the Netherlands, and Ma felt a distance between herself and her elder daughter. Sylvie only seemed to truly love Amy, and Ma recalls how well Sylvie cared for her younger sister while her parents were working. Amy was boisterous and happy, but Sylvie was a studious, driven child who divided her time between her duties caring for her sister and her schoolwork. Initially she spoke only Chinese and Dutch; Ma realized that her own mother had preserved in Sylvie a connection to China that she had not managed to nurture in Amy. Still grieving the loss of her mother, Ma thinks about Sylvie’s unexplained absence and begins to weep.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Sylvie”
Saturday, April 2
Sylvie and Lukas arrive home, both understanding that his parents declining to accompany him to the airport was a slight. Helena has brought home a takeaway Chinese feast, but each dish contains seafood. Sylvie is allergic, and although Helena pretends to have forgotten, Sylvie and Lukas see the passive aggressive gesture for what it is. Sylvie pretends to have been well fed in first class, and Helena seems upset that her attempt at hurting Sylvie has failed. Willem is happy to see Sylvie, but she finds in his greeting too much happiness and desire for physical contact.
After they eat, Lukas shows her his photography in the garage apartment that he rents from his parents. Their childhood closeness returns: He knows she must be hungry because she is too frugal to have purchased a first-class ticket. She was merely saving face. Sylvie shares with him her marital troubles, and he is upset with himself for never having truly moved out: If he had his own home, she would have had somewhere to return to where she would have to face Helena.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Amy”
Friday, May 6
At breakfast, Amy tries Dutch food and feels out of place in the Tan family home. She misses her parents and Sylvie. Willem is busy building a three-dimensional origami dragon, and Helena prepares a bowl of fish for Lukas’s cat, Cous Cous. The police send two officers to address the case. Lukas tells them that Sylvie had been an outsider in the village and that all Chinese immigrants felt that way, but the police cannot quite believe that there is racism in Dutch society. Helena brings up crime and mentions that their family fortune, jewels belonging to her mother, had disappeared a few weeks prior. The police remind her that, when she filed a report, she had been unable to prove the existence of the jewelry. They question the family about Sylvie, and Amy is surprised at Helena’s judgmental, dismissive, and angry tone. Amy cannot believe that this is the woman who raised her sister and openly (although confusedly) disagrees with Helena’s characterization of Sylvie as a secretive, uncaring woman. Amy is also shocked to learn that Jim had traveled to the Netherlands, that Sylvie thought he was stalking her, and that the two had an argument during which Lukas overheard Jim threatening Sylvie. Amy cannot reconcile this story with the staid, laid-back Jim that she knows. Without evidence of a crime, there is little that the police can do. Dismissively, Helena remarks that she is sure that Sylvie is fine. Amy is not so sure.
Part 2, Chapters 7-11 Analysis
In this set of chapters, suspense builds as cracks begin to appear in the façade of several understood “facts,” pushing Amy toward accepting that does not, in fact, know her sister well. The chapters alternate mainly between Amy’s experiences in the Netherlands, where she has flown to investigate her sister’s disappearance, and Sylvie’s experiences in the past, during her own earlier return to the Netherlands. Ma’s chapters fill in detail about Sylvie’s childhood return to the United States, complementing the sisters’ chapters with backstory that sheds light on their decisions and behavior.
The motif of Buddhism continues in Part 2, complemented by two important new symbols that emphasize the novel’s interest in The Cultural Dissonance of Immigration: the doll, Tasha, and the Lee heirloom jewelry. In one of the opening scenes in Part 2, as Amy rides back from the airport with the Tan family, they share a story about Sylvie having rescued an injured bird when she was a child. This story offers a parallel to Amy’s rescue of a small snail in the previous section. Both women, although not practicing Buddhists, have absorbed enough of their parent’s religious teachings that they nonetheless embody one of Buddhism’s core values: compassion toward all living creatures. Even as first-generation immigrants, they carry on some traditions of their parents’ home country. This kind of representation, which is typical of immigration narratives, puts this text in dialogue with other works of its genre. In this context of how cultural heritage carries forward for immigrants and their children, both Sylvie’s rag doll and the heirloom collection of gold and jade are embodiments of how culture is passed down from one generation to the next. Both objects represent a connection to the home country and one’s ancestors. Both are also fragile and often endangered. Sylvie recalls Tasha’s disappearance right before she left the Netherlands, and Helena brings up the stolen jewelry when the police come to speak to the family. The nature of these objects, in turn, is symbolic of the tenuous nature of cultural transfer. This symbolism will continue to build throughout the rest of the novel.
As Amy struggles to adjust to the Netherlands, her physical disorientation and nausea reflect her emotional reaction to confronting some of the gaps and flaws in her perspective. Helena emerges as an early protagonist in the story with Sylvie’s chapters in this section, as her antipathy toward Sylvie is a major focal point. For example, Helena bringing home a feast to celebrate Sylvie’s arrival, only for each dish to contain fish or shellfish, which Helena should know Sylvie is allergic to, is a straightforward metaphor of Helena’s brand of maternal care. In this moment, Lukas’s conflicting allegiance to both his mother and his cherished cousin illustrates the complexity of familial bonds for both the Lees and the Tans. However, the theme of Flawed and Incomplete Perspective gains even more force once Amy arrives. Evidence of the reality of Sylvie’s life forces Amy to reconfigure her perception of her sister. Sylvie had been taking cello lessons, which shocks Amy, who believes herself to be the only one in the family with musical talent. Amy cannot reconcile music lessons with the Sylvie she knows. Moreover, Helena is hardly the elegant and refined maternal figure Amy imagined, and Jim is hardly the empathetic husband he portrayed himself as.
The issue of The Harm of Everyday Racism and Prejudice is also explicit in this section, with a striking example of how white-majority institutions enable it. Namely, when the police visit the family, they struggle to believe racism exists at all within Dutch society. The ignorance of the police in this regard reflects their inability to help the families with finding Sylvie.
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