Waiting Between the Trees

“This was a man so bad that even today I cannot speak his name. Why did I marry this man? It was because the night after my youngest aunt’s wedding, I began to know a thing before it happened.” This is an example of foreshadowing. Through this passage, the reader knows that later on in the story, Ying-Ying will marry the bad man. They can also tell that the man will do something bad to Ying-Ying.

“I took this baby from my womb before it could be born. This was not a bad thing to do in China back then, to kill a baby before it is born. But even then, I thought it was bad, because my body flowed with terrible revenge as the juices of this man’s firstborn son poured from me.” Ying-Ying aborts her baby because she wants to get back at the bad man for leaving her for another woman. She does something bad for revenge but really ends up hurting herself. The child she killed was her son as well as the bad man.

Today, many movie and book plots revolve around people getting revenge. A lot of the time, after the people have gotten their revenge, they do not feel satisfied. They realize that they only hurt themselves or that seeing another person suffer doesn’t feel as good as they thought. In Ying-Ying’s case she hurt herself trying to get revenge by aborting her baby.