The Joy Luck Club: Waiting Between the Trees Summary & Analysis

As Ying-ying visits Lena’s new home, all she can see are bad omens, including the rickety end-table that breaks in “The Voice from the Wall.” Lena’s failing marriage reminds Ying-ying of her first marriage in China. Back then, Ying-ying was wild and loud, spoiled by her family’s wealth. When she turns sixteen, she meets an older, coarser man who initially disgusts her with his lewd humor. However, she has a premonition that she’s meant to marry him, and soon learns that a marriage is being arranged between them.

Ying-ying bitterly notes that Lena has no idea about Ying-ying’s first marriage, or how beautiful Ying-ying once was. Her first husband praises her for having “tiger eyes,” which “gather fire in the day” and shine golden at night. She childishly falls in love with his compliments, and wants only to please him. The night she conceives his child, Ying-ying immediately knows it’s going to be a boy. Her husband starts taking long business trips after the pregnancy announcement, and runs off with an opera singer a few months before Ying-ying is supposed to give birth. Enraged by his abandonment, Ying-ying aborts the unborn baby.

Ying-ying then explains that she was born in the year of the Tiger, and thus has a Tiger’s spirit. A Tiger has a gold side to its spirit, leaping with a fierce heart, and a black side, devious and cunning. She channels the black side of her nature for ten years after her husband leaves her. No longer an innocent girl, Ying-ying moves to the city and works in a clothing shop, where she meets an American, Clifford St. Clair. Clifford, taken by Ying-ying’s beauty, tries to woo her with cheap gifts, and Ying-ying pretends to be impressed, even though she knows how worthless the trinkets are.

Lena thinks that her father saved her mother from China, but Ying-ying actually made Clifford wait for four years “like a dog in front of a butcher shop.” One day, Ying-ying receives a letter saying her first husband is dead. Something “strong and bitter” flows through Ying-ying, and she takes the letter as a sign to marry Clifford, even though she does not love him. She becomes “pale, ill, and more thin… a tiger ghost.” She goes to America with her new husband and raises a daughter, but lacks any spirit. Though Clifford loved her, Ying-ying was too much of a ghost to love him back.

Ying-ying says her greatest shame is raising her daughter, also born in a Tiger year, without any spirit. But now, with Clifford deceased and Lena on the brink of divorce, Ying-ying is finally ready to embrace her fierceness again, and tell Lena about her painful past that has been buried for decades. By freeing all her memories, Ying-ying will be able to pass her powerful Tiger spirit to Lena, because “this is the way a mother loves her daughter.”