Quote 10
And after that I began to see terrible things. I saw these things with my Chinese eyes, the part of me that I got from my mother. I saw devils dancing feverishly beneath a old I had dug in the sandbox. I saw that lightning had eyes and searched to strike down little children...And when I became older, I could see things that the Caucasian girls at school did not. Monkey bars that would split into two and send a swinging child hurtling through space. (II.2.8)
Lena sees part of her identity as handed down from her mother. Part of this identity includes her "Chinese eyes," which see freaky things…Lena’s intense and dark imagination comes from her mother’s side.
Quote 11
And I think that feeling of fear never left me, that I would be caught someday, exposed as a sham of a woman. But recently, a friend of mine, Rose, who’s in therapy now because her marriage is falling apart, told me those kinds of thoughts are commonplace in women like us.
"At first I thought it was because I was raised with all this Chinese humility," Rose said. "Or that maybe it was because when you’re Chinese you’re supposed to accept everything, flow with the Tao and not make waves. But my therapist said, Why do you blame your culture, your ethnicity? And I remembered reading an article about baby boomers, how we expect the best and when we get it we worry that maybe we should have expected more, because it’s all diminishing returns after a certain age." (III.1.45)
Rose and Lena share the idea that they’re not good enough; Rose blames it handily first on Chinese culture, and secondly on generational expectations.