Amy Tan's "Half and Half"

I found Half and Half to be an enlightening cultured read from the standpoint of the difference views of faith and commitment. I wasn’t sure my interest would be met with a story concerning a Chinese family but there was enough plot and American twists that I enjoyed the narrative. Being a mother myself, I found it interesting Tan writes quite a bit concerning the “anguished experiences of mothers….and their daughters living in today’s America”. There is normally an abundance of material one could write about involving painful experiences concerning the mother/daughter relationships. I am thankful I have never had to endure anything as excruciating as the experience of the mother and daughter in this story. My heart would go out to anyone ever experiencing such a tragic event.

It does sadden me to read the mother lost her faith as a result of the death of her child. It is vital at such a time to gain strength from your faith. However, with the Chinese beliefs that she had, it would have been hard for her to trust when everything she knew should have brought her son back failed. It also pains me to think of her Bible as a wedge for her table. I appreciate the explanation the daughter gave as a correction to the imbalances in her life and the fact that she keeps it clean, but the Bible is what it is, THE BIBLE: handled with the most reverence!

I love the commitment of the mother concerning her desire to save the things which are important: she hardly was able to give up on finding her child and even the attempt to retrieve the body but also the marriage of her daughter. The daughter knew her mother would insist she “save it”. Even though the mother had not approved of the marriage from the beginning, once the couple had taken their vows, it became sacred, a commitment to be honored.

At first I wasn’t sure of the significance of the two stories, the divorce and the death of the child. But I believe Tan was writing about losses. In the story she talks about “when something that violent hits you, you can’t help but lose your balance and fall.” I believe this is what happened to her husband and also her mother. I do agree with your statement that you can’t trust anyone to save you to some degree: part of survival comes from finding the inner strength to deal with losses. However, I do disagree with the part that others can’t help you and especially the idea that God can’t. I am witness personally how God can lift you from the darkest places and can be fully trusted to restore one’s balance. As a Christian, this aspect of the story was hard to handle. We can’t just believe in God when everything goes smoothly all the time, we have to trust and have faith in him even when the hard times come along.

It would be hard to understand the death of a child such as Bing, and one might believe it was fate. We could discuss the “what-ifs” of the day’s happenings but nothing will change the facts of what happened. I also don’t believe it had anything to do with luck, as the family had believed “their luck would never run out, that God was on their side, that the house gods had only benevolent things to report and our ancestors were pleased, that life-time warranties meant out lucky streak would never break”. The only thing anyone is sure of in life is that one day they will die. Other than that, there are no warranties. We have to live with the faith that whatever happens there is a plan in it for God’s glory which is why we are here in the first place.

I think the title of the story comes from description of the cove “like a giant bowl, cracked in half”. One half was clean and safe, protecting the beach from the surf and wind. The other half was jagged, pitted with crevices. This was a good description of life: there are places where we can be protected but then we can wander into the other half where the crevices can be “full of wet shadows… and specks... (that) made it hard for us to see the dangers”. The dangers in our lives sometimes lie in the strangest and most invisible places. If one believed in fate, it would seem in abundance that day: the tug of the father’s fishing line at just the right moment, the confusion with the fight between the older boys, and the slip of Bing’s feet on the reef all within seconds of each other.

The love of the family was strong and evident as each one began to take the blame for what happened; even though it truly was no one’s fault. Just as things happen in our lives, as Bing disappeared into the water, as the daughter had seen her marriage falling apart, we find it hard or impossible to fix things or try to save things before they are too far gone to rescue. We have to find a way to live with the events that happen in our lives and try to maintain a strength to carry us through, because there will surely be more storms to weather.