Be the Change; Pick your Own Destiny

2. The Rice Husband

3. I thought this chapter was particularly distressing. I didn’t like the marriage between Lena and Harold. It wasn’t what I’d call a marriage; it was more like a business agreement than a loving relationship. In this chapter, there was not a lot of description about the feelings they had between each other; it was mostly talking about Lena’s frustration and what she had to go through while being married to Harold. The scene where Lena said that Harold made about seven times as more than her really annoyed me. If they’re married and they both thought of the idea of making a business together, they should be business partners and not a wife working for her husband. If they are partners together in life, then they should be business partners as well. I also did not like how Harold didn’t give Lena the credit she deserved when she came up with all these brilliant ideas while he just plagiarized them. He also seemed to take advantage of Lena a lot, although she dismissed it, and said she didn’t mind. The fact that she was the one paying for meals was very ungentlemanly of him and it bugged me to no end. Lena’s mother, Ying-Ying, was very right to ask her all these questions about why she was allowing herself to be treated this way. No mother should allow their daughter to be treated so badly by someone who hardly deserved to be married to her.

4. The relationship between Lena and her mother, Ying-Ying is an interesting and peculiar one between a parent and a child. Normally, parents would be furious that their daughter was being mistreated in her marriage and try their best to convince them to leave their ungrateful spouses and find someone more suitable; but Ying-Ying did nothing like that. While visiting Lena, she noticed all the things troubling Lena, but she didn’t nag at Lena or force her to admit that she was unhappy with her marriage. All she did was ask her a few questions about the strange things that her and Harold do. Even if Ying-Ying didn’t interrogate her daughter, she still had good intentions. Her questions affected Lena strongly and made her realize how unhappy she was, which was, in my opinion, much more effective than nagging.

5. I noticed that Tan used the useless and unstable table as a metaphor. The metaphor is that the table is useless, ugly, and unworthy of space, similar to Lena’s marriage with Harold. When the table breaks, Lena new that it would happen, but she does nothing to prevent it. Exactly like her marriage with Harold. The table probably once seemed beautiful to Harold, but now that it was many years later, the table was awkward and ugly. Lena’s marriage also once seemed beautiful and amazing, but now it was falling apart. One day, the marriage will break, and Lena would have done nothing to prevent it, because she dismisses her feelings and ignores her thoughts to make Harold happy.

6. The theme of this chapter is if you see something useless and falling apart, do something about it, and prevent it. During the entire chapter, Lena was miserable about her marriage and she wanted things to change. She did not change anything and she pays the price by getting into a fight with Harold and questioning her once-happy marriage. In the beginning, Lena wanted to change her fate and marry someone decent, so she left food on her plate to do a sort of voo-doo technique on Arnold and killed him. Because she decided to change her fate, she didn’t marry a pock-faced man; she married someone else that she liked much better than Arnold.