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.
Symbols & Motifs
Counterfeit Art
Both Lulu and Violet are susceptible to the same temptation. They have imaginative temperaments and can be deeply moved by works of art. Lulu’s attraction toward Lu Shing intensifies after she views his painting. She projects her own identity onto the painted landscape and sees herself reflected back from it. This narcissistic mirroring causes her to believe that Lu Shing is a deep thinker with a profound knowledge of her heart.
Her ill-fated decision to follow him to Shanghai stems from her reaction to his painting. It isn’t until later that she learns his work is a reproduction of a German painting. Lu Shing essentially paints the same scene repeatedly for various customers and varies the coloring and details of the landscape to suit their tastes. As he admits to Lulu, he is a fake artist with shallow emotions. Lulu’s real awakening to his inauthenticity comes after he paints her portrait. When she sees the result, the face he captured is a stranger to her. At that moment, she realizes that Lu Shing doesn’t know her at all. He is incapable of seeing her depths because he has none of his own.
Violet makes much the same mistake with Perpetual. The first poem he recites to her is profound and lyrical. It moves her to tears, and she believes its creator is a gifted artist of the written word. Like Lu Shing, Perpetual proves to be a fake. He plagiarized all his best poems from another writer. Those he composes himself are mundane and dull. Perpetual’s life is as much a sham as his poetry. He comes from a disgraced family of poverty-stricken literati and proves himself a thief and an abuser of women after Violet mistakes his poetry for genuine art.
Written Communication
Letters fly back and forth throughout the characters in The Valley of Amazement. This happens not only because the people in question are separated by great distances, but also because the correspondents are estranged from one another and can only communicate their true feelings in writing.
Lu Shing tries to reconcile with Lulu via letter and is repeatedly rebuffed. Years later, Violet receives a letter from him apologizing for his poor treatment of her. It is only because of Lu Shing’s written confession that Violet learns her mother’s true feelings on the day Violet was abandoned. Lulu’s guilt and remorse convince Violet that her mother didn’t reject her because of her baby brother. Violet follows in her mother’s footsteps by rejecting future communication from Lu Shing. Years later, she reads his other letters and learns of her inheritance from him.
When Violet is finally ready to open the lines of communication again with her mother, she asks Loyalty to track down her address. The initial correspondence is stilted, but confessions pour forth on both sides. By the time the two women finally meet again in Shanghai, they’ve repaired their broken relationship via a series of letters.
Loyalty’s letters to Flora open the door to communication with the next generation of Minturn women. Minerva’s concealment of Loyalty’s letters and gifts inadvertently begins the next cycle of reconciliation. Enraged by her stepmother’s lies and interference, Flora asks Loyalty to put her in touch with her birth mother. In all these instances, letters offer distance and detachment to defuse raw emotions that could never be safely expressed in face-to-face encounters.
Wayward Flowers
Lulu gives Violet her floral name for a reason. Violets are Lulu’s favorite flowers because they possess an unruly quality. When she planted them in her San Francisco garden, her own mother complained that they resembled weeds. Lulu recalls, “My mother called them Johnny-jump-up weeds, and she would have pulled them out if I had not reminded her that she had allowed me to plant them, and so they were mine” (681). When Danner befriends Lulu and gives her a place to live, she tells him about her violet garden. He expresses a love for the same flower and immediately sends out for some specimens to plant in his own garden.
The association of violets and weeds carries through to the other connotation of the word “flower.” This term is used to describe the courtesans in Shanghai. They are known as flower beauties. Violet herself draws an analogy between the flower beauties and weeds: “The world of flowers was full of Eurasian weeds—half-American, half-English, half-German, half-French—50 percent of a hundred varieties” (337).
Edward chooses the name Flora for Violet’s baby. Violet winces at the choice because of its associations with the sex trade. She says:
I was secretly stricken. In courtesan houses, we were known as ‘flowers.’ I had had mixed feelings all my life about my name. Violets were the flower my mother loved, a meager-faced one, easily trampled, that grew with little care (422).
After Edward dies, Violet buries him in the backyard of Lu Shing’s mansion and plants violets over his grave. Once Violet reconciles with Flora, the two visit Edward’s grave, where the violets are still growing more than 20 years later.
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By Amy Tan
