Why was waverly so anxious that her mother was the queen while she, waverly, was the pawn?

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The daughter probably sees her mother’s gift of a second mirror as another infringement upon her ability to assert her own preferences and taste. Yet, when the mother claims that her future grandchild is visible in the mirror, the text affirms the mother’s words, with the phrase, “There it was.” There may indeed be some truth to the grandchild’s presence in the mirror, because the grandchild will, in many ways, be a reflection of the daughter, just as the daughter reflects many of her own mother’s qualities. It seems that perhaps the daughter, who is impatient with her mother’s superstitious beliefs, has underestimated her mother’s insight. In any case, what does shine clearly from the mirror is the mother’s deep love for her daughter.

The stories in “American Translation” explore superstition: its irrationality, the annoyance and even harm that it can cause, its occasional intersections with deep wisdom. The stories also examine notions of other cultural barriers between mother and daughter—often in the form of taste—and the ways in which, despite the barriers that seem to differentiate them so markedly, daughters nevertheless resemble and reflect their mothers.

Ying-ying’s unexplained, superstitious fears and constant anticipation of tragedy have contributed to a similar, “reflected” attitude of fatalism in Lena. When Lena was young, her mother’s warnings about her failure to finish all her rice engendered a sense that she lacked all control over her life and whom she would marry. This in turn led to Lena’s attempts to gain control. At first, she manipulated her eating so as to “kill” Arnold and avoid marrying him; later, even after she had forgotten all about Arnold, she tried to maintain control by restricting her eating more strictly, to the point of anorexia. Yet she remains convinced that she lives in a world of forces that exceed human control: this causes her to passively accept the imbalance and lack of fulfillment in her marriage as her fate, rather than trying to speak up for herself.

Lena is blind to the factors that contributed to her fatalism. Clifford used to speak for Ying-ying, and Lena similarly allows Harold to define what “equality” in their marriage means. In effect, he is a partner in the marriage, but she is an associate—just as she is in the architecture firm. Harold states their marriage is stronger because it is based on equality rather than money. However, because his idea of equality is based on money, the marriage is as well.

Ying-ying uses Harold’s wobbly table, a project from his days as an architecture student, to show Lena that her marriage is wildly out of balance. She wants Lena to do something about the imbalance rather than silently accept it as fate. After years of suffering, Ying-ying finally knows that expressing one’s wishes is not selfish, as her Amah had told her. She does not want her daughter to make the same mistake of remaining passively silent. The interchange over the toppled table exudes double meaning: Lena says she knew it would happen, and Ying-ying asks her why she did nothing to prevent it. The “it” here refers not only to the shattering of the vase but to the shattering of Lena’s marriage.

Waverly’s story examines a mother’s place in her daughter’s life. As Waverly comes to see her mother as an invincible opponent in life, she focuses too much on her metaphoric chess match against Lindo, neglecting her actual chess matches. She intends to attack Lindo by sacrificing chess, but her move only hurts herself, and Waverly believes that Lindo has planned it this way. In the heat of battle, Waverly loses sight of her original goal of persuading Lindo to allow her space and independence. When Waverly declares her intention to return to chess, she thinks that with this simple move she can placate her mother and heal all wounds. But, as Lindo tells Waverly, “it is not so easy.” While she is referring to Waverly’s capricious and ungrateful treatment of her talent for chess, Lindo also means that the mother-daughter relationship is not so easily patched—that Waverly cannot expect to turn her mother into a pawn.

When Waverly returns to chess to find her prodigy gone, she realizes that part of what sustained her had been her mother’s love and support. Although she believed that the talent was all her own and that her mother was taking undue credit for her successes, she now sees that her achievements always depended in part upon her mother’s devotion and pride in her. Now a mother herself, Waverly has come to understand the nature of a mother’s inviolable love. She sees that this is what Lindo was expressing all those years, even in her criticism and nagging. Here again the motifs of the parable reemerge. Waverly sees herself in her mother as she develops her relationship to her own daughter; she recognizes more fully the power of maternal love.

The cultural tensions seen in the opening parable also shine through in Waverly’s story. Waverly anticipates that Lindo will dislike her white boyfriend, Rich, but Waverly cringes as much as anyone else at Rich’s culturally ignorant series of faux pas at dinner. She comes to realize that for years she projected her own anxieties through her mother, turning her into a spiteful, critical, and uncompromising woman. When she finally speaks to her mother openly about Rich, she realizes that Lindo’s criticism only expresses her deep concern for Waverly’s well-being, her profound desire for her daughter to know the happiness of marriage that she was deprived of for so many years in China.