52 pages • 1 hour read
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
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Symbols & Motifs
Poetry
The motif of poetry recurs throughout the novel and is often a marker of love. As the source of the epigenetic memories, Afong Moy’s experience loving a poet establishes the motif. As Nanchoy assumes the role of her abuser, “She understood […] why Chinese folk tales about love always ended in tragedy. Maybe that is why she still cared about Yao Han. His stories were the hopeful opposite of poems like ‘The Everlasting Sorrow’” (127). Holding onto memories of Yao Han and his association with hopeful poetry becomes an anchor for Afong while poetry itself becomes a motif. Dorothy Moy is the poet laureate of Seattle, and she names Annabel Moy after a poem by Poe. Faye Moy reads poetry to John Garland, including “Annabel Lee.” Mrs. Bidwell gives Zoe Moy a volume of Sappho that becomes Zoe’s most prized possession and her connection with her beloved teacher. The last lines of Greta’s narrative (prior to Dorothy’s intervention) are lines of poetry: Greta Moy realizes that Sam purchased a whole stack of poetry that she recommended to him. Lai King Moy boards the boat to Canton as the captain quotes Whitman. The novel ends with Annabel attending a writing workshop and connecting with a handsome young man through the lines of “Annabel Lee”: “[W]e loved with a love […] that was more than love” (349). Throughout the novel, poetry and allusions to specific poems and poets enrich the text and help the daughters of Afong Moy make connections and process their lives.
Oceans and Storms
Throughout the text, a motif of water—manifested in rain, oceans, seas, and imagery of sinking and drowning—conveys characters’ deep emotions. Once again, the motif originates with Afong. As she leaves the last boarding house the Hanningtons booked for her, “She [finds] her way down the stairs […] out into the street where rain [is] pouring from the sky. She limp[s] away, soaking wet, freezing, sinking beneath the waves, drowning again, extinguishing once and for all the flickering candle of hope” (144). Though it’s not literally possible to drown in rain, Afong experiences her departure as a mental sinking, the rain symbolizing the loss of hope.
Dorothy’s life in a Seattle plagued by climate change creates ample opportunity for rain and troubled waters, which the text associates with her epigenetic visions (further linking her to Afong and her other ancestors). As she leaves one session, the text states, “Standing in the rain, Dorothy felt a bit better. She felt unmoored but adrift on a calm sea” (146). While feeling unmoored is unsettling and undesirable, the “calm sea” is reassuring and demonstrates that the epigenetic treatment is helping her heal. When Dorothy later seeks refuge from a typhoon in a Buddhist hondo, Xi says, “Calm your ocean” (306). This is the last piece of encouragement she needs to seek out healing, and it is significant that the nun encourages her by mentioning the ocean—a vast, churning body of water that represents all of Dorothy’s turbulent feelings. In “calming” this, she fulfills her responsibilities to herself and her family and finds healing.
Though not always so pronounced, the water motif appears in association with all of Afong Moy’s daughters. Zoe’s story begins with her leaping into a deep pool. Much of Lai King’s story takes place on the docks or on a ship. As Annabel becomes subject to epigenetic visions of Lai King’s experiences, she riskily seeks the bow of a ship in a rainstorm. Like Dorothy, Faye finds a Buddhist hondo in the midst of a rainstorm, which leads to enlightenment and peace. When Greta meets Sam, he says, “I’m more of a share-an-umbrella-in-the-rain kind of guy,” and she thinks, “too bad it’s not raining” (165). Later her mother calls her “my perfect raindrop” (170). Even though Greta’s story occurs in the midst of sunny skies, she retains the connection to rainwater and sinking that links the daughters of Afong Moy.
Ghosts
Ford employs a common symbol in Chinese culture—the ghost—to develop themes of trauma and loss. In two instances, Lai King intentionally uses this terminology to process her trauma. When her father is inoculated, she describes the Health Department officials as “ghost men” (202-03). This may be a reference to their skin color, but the word choice also highlights Lai King’s powerlessness as she watches her father receive an experimental treatment that she and her mother view as “a small amount of death” (204)—something her father’s later contraction of the plague seems to confirm. Later, as her ship is leaving San Francisco, the image recurs: “Lai King bit her lip, trying not to cry as she thought about her father. He’s become a ghost hero” (211). Whether the inoculation saves him or kills him, Lai King has lost her father by leaving for Canton. In branding him a “ghost hero,” she honors him and processes the trauma of this loss.
Afong’s association with ghosts is even more traumatic. When she is young, her grandmother dies, and Afong has a disturbing encounter with the body:
[W]hen [Afong] touched her arm her grandmother’s eyes opened. Afong ran to the window and shouted for her ah-ma, who came running, but by the time she arrived the old woman’s eyes had closed halfway and she continued to stare at the spot where Afong had been. That is when she learned that the dead never really leave (31).
The scene also establishes a strong connection between Afong and her grandmother. It is Afong’s touch that seems to wake her, and when she recedes back into death, “she continue[s] to stare at the spot where Afong had been” (31). In this moment, Afong claims her grandmother’s ghost as her own personal symbol of death, which recurs as she faces the psychological trauma of being raped by Nanchoy: “[S]he was her yin yin [grandmother], lifeless, vacant, eyelids half-open” (130). The moment indicates both Afong’s dissociation and the moment’s traumatic impact: Afong becomes her grandmother, a ghost, as though Nanchoy has not only raped but killed her.
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By Jamie Ford
