"And then one evening, after I had begged her to buy me a transistor radio, after she refused and I sulked in silence for an hour, she said, 'Why do you think you are missing something you never had?' And then she told me a completely different ending to the story. 'An army officer came to my house early one morning,' she said, 'and told me to go quickly to my husband in Chungking..." Amy Tan uses this frame device to tell the story of Jing-mei Woo's mother and to give the reader insight into the relationship between mother and daughter.
In this chapter the reader learns that Jing-mei and her mother never really saw eye to eye. "I had always assumed we had an unspoken understanding about these things: that she didn't really mean I was a failure, and I really meant I would try to respect her opinions more. But listening to Auntie Lin tonight reminds me once again: My mother and I never really understood one another." In this the reader finds the specific problems in Jing-mei and her mother's relationship: communicating with and understanding one another.
Today mothers and daughters seem to have the same dilemma. One never knows what the other is trying to say. It is one of the major problems in families and society in general: parents and children lack the ability to actually understand one another. This same problem is repeated over and over every generation. It happened with Rock and Roll and with the hippies in the 70s. It seems like a problem that can not be fixed.
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