44 pages • 1 hour read
Amy TanThe Valley of Amazement
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “Fata Morgana”
In 1897 San Francisco, Lu Shing announces his plans to return to Shanghai. Lulu formulates the desperate plan to follow him there. She wants to escape her suffocating, conventional life at home. Lulu says of Lu Shing, “He was from the fairy tale in my childhood, someone would save me and love me. I became infatuated with the painter, who could paint a place for me to live” (707).
Lulu and Lu Shing become lovers. The two accompany the Minturn family on an excursion to the Farallon Islands. While the others retire below decks because of rough weather, Lulu and Lu Shing discuss the future. Lu Shing seems taken aback by Lulu’s plan to relocate to Shanghai. He tells her that he is supposed to be married upon his return home. As a violent wave hits the boat, Lulu is nearly washed overboard, while Lu Shing falls and breaks his leg.
Lu Shing’s trip to Asia is postposed because of his injury. He returns to the Minturn house to recuperate for three months, during which time he and Lulu resume their love affair. He confesses he loves her but seems unwilling to change the plans his family has made for his future. By the time Lu Shing is ready to return to China, Lulu discovers she is pregnant. Her family is appalled by her pregnancy and her travel plans. She accuses her parents of never loving her and alienates the entire family before her departure. Onboard the ship, Lu Shing and Lulu meet infrequently because of the separate accommodations reserved for Chinese and Westerners. Lulu extorts a promise that Lu Shing will write to tell his family about her.
When they disembark in Shanghai, a family group is waiting to take Lu Shing away. His father is furious at the sight of Lulu. Lu Shing pleads with her to let him handle the matter in his own way. He tells her to wait near the dock for him. Accompanied by one of Lu Shing’s servants, Lulu sits on her luggage under a tree and falls asleep. She recounts: “I waited for hours on end, sitting on that ridiculous settee. Pride withered, my erect posture melted. My eyelids had a will of their own. I lay down and let sleep arrive and carry me away” (750).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Shanghailanders”
In September 1897, Lulu is stranded in Shanghai. After 18 hours, Lu Shing returns and takes her to the home of an American named Danner, where she can lodge. While there, she meets another lodger named Golden Dove, a former courtesan, noting that her face is “slightly askew”—the result, she learns, of a jealous suitor who broke her nose and jaw two years earlier. Lu Shing’s father is still angry and refuses to allow Lulu to join the family.
For months, Lu Shing and Lulu continue their love affair under Danner’s roof. Lu Shing suggests that if Lulu gives birth to a boy, this might soften his father into acknowledging Lulu as Lu Shing’s second wife. While at Danner’s, Lulu learns that Lu Shing spent hours as a child copying the works in Danner’s gallery—among them, The Valley of Amazement, a work by an obscure German artist that Danner bought cheaply in Berlin. Lulu thus discovers that all of Lu Shing’s paintings are copies of other artists’ works.
When Violet is born, Lu Shing tries to hide his disappointment that she is a girl. Meanwhile, Danner has become a friend of Lulu’s and marries her in order to give Violet automatic American citizenship. Lulu soon becomes pregnant again. This time the baby is a boy. Lu Shing is overjoyed because he thinks the infant will provide leverage to win his father over. Lulu allows him to take the baby to its grandmother. A few days later, Lulu learns that Lu Shing’s parents have taken the boy and will not give him back.
Lulu wants to press kidnapping charges, but Danner never registered the boy’s birth, so they have no legal claim to the child. Instead, Lulu changes her name and focuses all her attention on raising Violet. Danner dies suddenly, leaving her all his property. Lulu and Golden Dove decide to go into business for themselves. They first start a pub for Westerners that grows into a high-toned social club for foreign businessmen. The two then buy a first-class courtesan house, which Golden Dove manages while Lulu focuses on the social club next door. The two establishments merge: “We named it The House of Lulu Mimi in Chinese and Hidden Jade Path in English. The path was where both sides met in the middle” (807).
Lulu picks up her story 14 years later when she boards the ship for San Francisco that Fairweather tricked her into taking. She is beside herself thinking that Violet must believe she never loved her. She returns to her family home, where her parents welcome her back. When Lu Shing writes to attempt a reconciliation with his family, Lulu rejects the idea. She says she has only one child—Violet. The tragedy of her life is that Violet will never know how much her mother really loved her.
Chapters 13-14 Analysis
This segment mirrors Violet’s experience with Perpetual in that it focuses on counterfeit artists and the search for ideal love, but the story is told from Lulu’s perspective and centers on her relationship with Lu Shing. His painting The Valley of Amazement has seduced her into believing that he is her soulmate and that he will magically create a love-filled life for her in an exotic location. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lu Shing fears his family’s reaction to Lulu. Rather than defending their relationship, he allows his father to browbeat him into accepting his arranged bride. He proves himself to be the same kind of sham artist as Perpetual, since false pretenses rule his life as well as his art. Not only does he betray Lulu, but he neglects Violet because she is a girl. Worse still, he passively allows his parents to take his son away from Lulu. Lulu’s loss of her baby boy through the machinations of others mirrors Violet’s loss of Flora by the same means.
Lulu’s obsession with finding perfect love also parallels her daughter’s. Lulu rejects her own parents because she feels just as unloved by them as Violet later will feel about her. Lulu idealizes her relationship with Lu Shing in the hope that it will rescue her from a sense of being unloved. Violet does the same with Loyalty, Edward, and Perpetual.
The entire dismal cycle of love, betrayal, and abandonment repeats itself when Lulu trusts yet another unworthy counterfeit. Fairweather possesses a counterfeit name and counterfeit charm. His only known occupation is to act as a go-between to pass counterfeit documents from a forger to people who need them. By trusting Fairweather to make travel arrangements for Violet and herself, Lulu dooms her daughter to suffer the same abandonment that Lulu experienced all those years earlier when Lu Shing continued his life without her.
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By Amy Tan
