Waiting Between the Trees

"Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"
(a.k.a. Waiting Between the Trees)

3. Whoa, Lena and Ying-Ying really need to communicate more. They refuse to think based on what they think the other is thinking, which is totally complicated and it'd be much easier to just say their feelings to each other. They're mother and daughter for goodness sakes! And Ying-Ying doesn't want to talk because Lena pays for her "so-so" security?! What was the jade jar symbolic of? I couldn't fathom its significance. Ew, Ying-Ying married a guy old enough that she called him "Uncle"!? Gross. I can't believe she killed her son to get revenge for an idiotic man who cheated on her. Why take your own child's life when you could have taken the husband's life? ;) & it serves him right; he finally got killed by one of his women! Yay! Aw, Mistah St. Clair sounds like a sweet man, like he really wanted to impress Ying-Ying in such an innocent way. Did he become "a ghost" when Ying-Ying told him about her past?

4. Ying-Ying waited until her husband died to remarry St. Clair. This shows that although her husband was a jerk, she still respected their marriage and did not violate the Chinese traditions of her heritage. By remarrying, she also somewhat got revenge against her defeated past husband, becoming another man's wife like that. Although strong and bitter like so, she also trusted herself to purposely weaken herself to fade away her pain and give St. Clair the opportunity to make his approach. She isn't afraid of the future and she is sympathetic for giving St. Clair the chance to win her heart.

5. The main conflict in Ying-Ying's childhood memory should be herself vs. overcoming her past to move onto the future (internal: man vs. self). After that jerk of a husband, she spends a long while trying new things, pushing herself out of her comfort zone, to become a new person. I know, because she tried going from a high-class, spoiled rich girl to a lowly farmer's countryside cousin's place to stay. After ten years of that, she also left for the city to try becoming a shopgirl and this resulted in meeting St. Clair. By the end, I believe it is resolved, because most of her upsetting past was caused by [Insert his unworthy name here] and he finally died by one of his lovers, so I will conclude that he took with her the past of their love/marriage. She finally was able to move on, to find the strength, to let Clifford St. Clair marry her.

6. One of the most significant symbols in the story was the watermelon, of course. When "Uncle" [Jerkface] drunkenly sank a knife into a watermelon, roaring with laughter as he did so, and said "Kai gwa?" At the time, it translated into "Open the watermelon" for Ying-Ying, but later on, she would learn that it had something to do with reproduction. The watermelon represented her innocence and virginity, and he pierced right through it, cracking through its perfection, hurting Ying-Ying every step of the way.

Emily Huynh, Period 4