Lena St. Clair has put her mother in the guest bedroom, the smallest room in the house. Mrs. St. Clair is upset because her daughter does not understand that the guest bedroom should be the best one in the house. To Mrs. St. Clair, her daughter's house looks as though it will break into pieces.
Mrs. St. Clair recalls that she was a wild girl in her youth. Her mother said that she would bring shame to their house, but Ying-ying disregarded these warnings. Her family was one of the richest in Wushi, but the wealth meant little to young Ying-ying. She played on the street with a priceless jade jar, treating it like a toy. When she was sixteen, her aunt married. After the festivities, a male friend of the family humiliated Ying-ying by plunging a knife into a watermelon, a crude symbol suggesting the loss of virginity. Six months later, Ying-ying married this man and fully understood his cruel taunt.
The night of her aunt's wedding was also important to Ying-ying because it was then that she first began to know about things before they happened. It was then that she knew that she would marry the crude man who plunged the knife into the watermelon. Ironically, after they were married, Ying-ying began to love him. It happened one afternoon when he said that she had tiger eyes. Soon afterward, she became pregnant — and discovered that her husband had left her for an opera singer. She had an abortion, and in her grief, she went to live with a second cousin's family. They were terribly poor, but she stayed ten years amid the squalor. Then she moved to the city and became a shop girl. There, she met Clifford St. Clair; she knew at once that they would marry. For four years, he courted her, buying her little trinkets, which meant nothing to her when she set them against the riches she had known. But, nonetheless, she saved the baubles because she knew that she would marry St. Clair. One day, she received a letter saying that her husband was dead, and she decided to let St. Clair marry her. On the day that her daughter was born, she brought out the trinkets he had given her. He adored her, but she loved him only as a ghost would love, without feeling. She had lost her chi, her spirit.
