“A sheltered woman” has an oddly mysterious start
: “[t]new mother, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summone.”
It flashes to a compzell
ing look into her past: “[y]esrs ago, Auntie Mei had bought it at a garage sale in Moline, Illinoi zzz s. She had liked the picture of flowers on the cover, purple and yellow, unmelted snow surrounding the chaste petals. She had liked the price of the notebook, too: five cents. When she handed a dime to the child with the cash box on his lap, she asked if there was another notebook she could buy, so that he would not have to give her any change; the boy looked perplexed and said no.”
It’s mysterious and hard to guess what direction the story’s going, or what the writer’s intention is. Then, it reveals the main character has postpartum depression. It gives a tedious explanation of her struggles breastfeeding. It gets quite slow-paced and ends with a positive message of aging:”[n]one would be able to stop her if she picked up Baby and walked out the door. She could turn herself into her grandmother, for whom sleep had become optional in the end; she could turn herself into her mother, too, eating little because it was Baby who needed nourishment. She could become a fugitive from this world that had kept her for too long, but this urge, coming as it often did in waves, no longer frightened her, as it had years ago. She was getting older, more forgetful, yet she was also closer to comprehending the danger of being herself. She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate. When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her”
“Stepping past” starts off seeming like a stereotypical story of friendship: “[t]hey had become sworn sisters in Ailin’s backyard 50 years ago, her being the oldest of the three and the one to come up with the idea. They were 12 going on 13, their bodies just beginning to fill the grey Mao jackets handed down from their mothers.”
Like many stories, it mentions clothes as an important part of girls’ identity.
The story keeps a pleasant tone while going back to a photograph: “[and{ they could smile on the wall in the indifferent eyes of foreign strangers, as if time had stopped at the photographer’s cramped studio 50 years ago, Ailin thought.”
Coming to Age 