Writers have long used this literary device to probe conflicts within characters, struggles that the characters may not even know they are having. In Dostoevski's The Double, for example, a poor clerk sees his double, a man who has succeeded — in contrast to the clerk, who has failed. Conrad's The Secret Sharer is also built around the notion of a doppelganger. One dark night, a young sea captain rescues a murderer — his double — from the ocean. The captain hides his double and has visions of his own darker side. The narrator of Poe's "William Wilson" is hounded by his double, a man who speaks only in a whisper. Here, Ying-ying is torn between her antithetical desires for both independence and belonging. Like the Moon Lady, she feels as though she doesn't belong anywhere: "In one small moment, we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back."
A number of symbols in this section serve to reinforce Tan's themes. First, there is the shadow. "A girl should stand still," Ying-ying's mother admonishes her: "If you are still for a long time, a dragonfly will no longer see you. Then it will come to you and hide in the comfort of your shadow." Later, Ying-ying discovers her shadow, "the dark side of me that had my same restless nature." The shadow here is symbolic of Ying-ying's being pulled between obedience, which leads to her being part of a group, and independence, which leads to isolation. The image of a shadow also echoes the phenomenon of the doppelganger.
In some ways, Ying-ying is like the bird with the ring around its neck, but she is shackled by psychological rather than by physical means. Ying-ying has repressed her identity for so many years that she is unable to communicate with her daughter. This shackle of communication, ironically, yokes the two women, despite the fact that the daughter blocks out her mother's voice by using a mechanical device. She physically closes her ears to Ying-ying's voice with her Sony Walkman and cordless phone. "We are lost, she and I," Ying-ying realizes, "unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others." Like the bird, Ying-ying's throat is constricted.
