The Downstairs Girl

Jo and Old Gin live in a basement under the house of the Bells, a space which was once part of the Underground Railroad. The basement is a symbol for the hidden, limited space the novel’s sociopolitical milieu affords people like Jo and Old Gin. It simultaneously represents the pair’s resourcefulness, as well as the injustice which causes them to resort to such resourcefulness.

The novel’s title The Downstairs Girl itself refers to the space of the basement. “Downstairs people” is a phrase referring to the poorer classes and household help, who in a wealthy home often lived in the downstairs portion of the mansion. “Upstairs folk” refers to the upper class and homeowners. Jo is a downstairs person in more than one sense of the word: not only is she poor, she is also Chinese American, with no clear rights in the social hierarchy. Thus, she and Old Gin are confined to a level even lower than the downstairs, forced to go underground. In this sense the basement represents the case of those who suffer biases of not just class, but also race.

As a former sanctuary for people escaping enslavement, the basement is also a space where people like Jo can be themselves. The basement was shown to Old Gin by Robby’s mother, a Black American woman. Thus, the basement is a symbol for the shared experience of discrimination between different minorities. At the end of the novel, Old Gin and Jo do not move out of the basement, choosing to renovate it instead. This shows that the basement exists as a safe space where they can be autonomous. At the same time, the renovated basement offers a realistic dénouement: Jo and Old Gin cannot yet move out of the basement, given their social context. However, they can claim and maximize every inch of real and figurative space it offers.

Peaches are a prominent motif in the text, with Jo often fantasizing her mother would smell of summer peaches. Tellingly, the Payne house is on a street called Peachtree Street. The jade snuff bottle belonging to Graceful Moon, Old Gin’s late wife, is shaped like a peach. Thus, in the text peaches are associated with mothers, fertility, life, and feminine nurture. In Chinese tradition, the peach stands for spring, luck, and a long life. The motif of peaches in the text shows the importance of Chinese culture and mythography in the life of not just Old Gin, but also Jo. Though Jo is half-white and an American, she is rooted in the Chinese context as well.

In Chapter 12, Old Gin tells Jo a puzzling story she partly solves much later in the novel. A farmer sent his son to buy peaches to attract the “bats of good fortune” so his yet-to-bloom crop would blossom. The son finds a great peach but, on the way home, gets entranced by a water nymph in a lake. The beautiful nymph asks him for the peach in exchange for a kiss. Jo cuts Old Gin off, assuming the story ends with the son giving the nymph the fruit and the father’s crops dying, but Old Gin suggests there is more to the story. As the plot unravels, the reader can infer the story is a metaphor for Jo’s parentage. Perhaps the nymph is Mrs. Payne and the foolish son who gave her his luck and heart—symbolized by the peach—is Shang.

However, the meaning of the story could be deeper, as Jo realizes after her disastrous encounter with Billy Riggs. After she sees the setting sun, it reminds her of a peach floating on a lake, and in turn, Old Gin’s story. She has the epiphany that the story doesn’t end with the loss of the peach. Father and son still have to live, and plant another crop. They have to go on. The point of Old Gin’s story may have been that the two of them—grandfather and child—have to keep living and trying. The peach of life and the bats of good fortune will return or may even have been there with them all along.