Fate and Faith

Whammo Blammo is still reading Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club, and in the chapter Half and Half, Tan kicks us in the heart with a story about a daughter's failed marriage and a mother's apparent loss of faith in God after her four-year-old boy, briefly unattended by the daughter, drowns on a family trip to the beach.

Rose Hsu recounts her 17-year-old relationship with Waspy Ted Jordan, a dermatologist whose family sees Rose Hsu as not right to be a doctor's wife--"Ted was going to be in one of those professions where he would be judged by a different standard, by patients and other doctors who might not be as understanding as the Jordans were" (p. 118). In a nutshell, she suffers from not being white. They carry on together, and Ted becomes the couple's decision maker. However, his confidence unwinds after he loses a malpractice suit for damaging nerves in a woman's cheek--he makes her smile slump. Soon after, their marriage unravels, too.

Rose Hsu's mother firmly believes in The Twenty-six Malignant Gates, an index of childhood dangers that hinge on the child's birthdate. The mother is forced to worry about all the perilous gates, because she can't reliably translate the Chinese calendar into the American one. Omens abound, and a fourteen-year-old Rose is given charge of her younger siblings, who are named after New Testament evangelists. As Rose tries to pull two fighting brothers apart, little Bing slips away, and she sees him fall into water and disappears into the water near a place called Devil's Slide. A police search turns up no body, and the next morning, Rose's mother takes her back to the beach to find the boy's body. On the shore, she prays to the Christian god while also making offerings to soothe the wrath of Chu Jung, the three-eyed god of fire, so Bing may be returned. He is not returned, and the ensuing loss of faith leaves the mother using the Bible to prop up a short leg in the kitchen table.

Rose tells the reader: "I think about Bing, how I knew he was in danger, how I let it happen. I think about my marriage, how I had seen the signs...and I think now that fate is shaped half by expectation, half by inattention. But somehow, when you lose something you love, faith takes over" (p. 130-131).

The mother's loss of faith may be for show. Early in the chapter, Rose tells us that the Bible props up the table to "correct the imbalances of life," and when visitors to the apartment see the sacrilegious sight, the mother says "a little too loudly" that she forgot it was even there (p. 116). At the end of the chapter, Rose opens the book to find Bing's name written "lightly in erasable pencil," (p. 131) in a section called Deaths, located between the Old Testament and New (which begins with the Gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John--the names of Roses's surviving brothers).

Tan is writing about her character's being between states. Rose and Ted's marriage is between cultures; Bing's name is written between Old and New Testaments; and the title itself, Half and Half, implies a split.

The most complicated relationship may be the one between faith and fate--made more loaded because the mother pronounces the word "faith" like "fate," because she can't say the "th" sound in faith" (p. 121). Rose goes on to tells us that her mother "said it was faith that kept all these good things coming our way...and later, I discovered that maybe it was fate all along, that faith was just an illusion that somehow you are in control."  Rose has this revelation the day Bing dies, the day her mother supposedly loses her faith in God. "She found that things of unquestioned certainty could never be trusted again."

By the end of the chapter, it seems Rose changes her mind, or perhaps has a second revelation on the subject. Here she equates faith with attention, with the active, while fate is half inattention and half expectation--the passive. Inattention leads to Bing's death, and though attention the next morning doesn't bring him back, it doesn't let him slip further away.

Maybe the mother previously treated her relationship with God as kind of fate--a Bible kept in a drawer. Now the mother's Bible, though kept below a table leg, is something she pays attention to. People ask about it; she sweeps below the kitchen table every night, "and after all these years that Bible is still clean white" (p. 116). She was confusing fate with faith; now she's gotten it right.