To regain her spirit, Ying-ying is going to confront her past. This pain will free her spirit so she can cut her daughter's spirit free. Like a tiger, Ying-ying sits and waits for her daughter.
The Joy Luck Club has been lavishly praised for its literary techniques. One of the most successful aspects of Tan's techniques is her use of multiple points of view. Notice how Tan retells each story from the mothers' and daughters' points of view. This interweaving of viewpoints underscores the difficulty that the mothers and daughters have communicating with one another. How could they fully understand each other when each is getting only half the story? Shifting viewpoints also serves to unify the book, develop themes, and heighten reality.
This story alludes to Lena St. Clair's "Rice Husband." There, the narrator is Lena. She opens her story with a description of her mother's ability to see things before they happen. This foreshadows Ying-ying's discovery of Lena's misery. Like Ying-ying, Lena has become a ghost. Both women are suffering from a secret sorrow — the same sorrow. They have made miserable marriages. Ying-ying lost her beloved first husband to another woman and was able to love her second husband only after he died. Lena has subordinated her spirit to her husband and bitterly resents his domination.
Ying-ying sees her daughter's misery; Lena's husband Harold does not. Lena is similarly blind to the reality of her mother. She has no idea of her mother's past. She does not suspect that her mother was once married to another man; she has no inkling that her mother had an abortion. She believes that her father rescued her mother from a poor village; she never imagines that her mother was raised in great wealth. She sees only a frail old lady, not a vigorous, clever tiger. Both stories end the same way, with the poorly balanced table, a symbol of their lives, crashing to the floor.
