Mr. Shi has complicated feelings about the ways in which his daughter has grown up to be like him: they both had similar extramarital affairs, both feel very dedicated to their work, and both accuse each other of being too quiet when they are trying to conceal their feelings. Mr. Shi is particularly upset with her not only because she is his child and because he is angry at himself for the same behavior, but also because she is a woman and therefore he holds her to different standards. Li demonstrates that while fathers can become angry at any child for the ways they replicate their mistakes, in the case of a daughter, a father’s disappointment can be inflected with the rigid expectations applied to women’s conduct. For example, Mr. Shi sees marriage as the ultimate goal for his daughter, describing her as a lychee that is past its prime. He believes that her divorce must be her fault because she was a bad wife, and believes that when she asks him questions she is too direct and ought to be more deferential. Mr. Shi therefore struggles to come to terms with his influence on his daughter because his judgment is clouded by his traditional ideas of how a daughter, wife, and woman is supposed to behave. He is not able to see the contradictions in how he understands his own behavior because of these double standards.
Mr. Shi tells Madam that good relationships between fathers and daughters are especially difficult to achieve, believing that they require a thousand years of good prayers. But he explains his strained relationship with his daughter by blaming her, suggesting that she considers him a “nuisance” and prefers that he remain silent. This inability to understand his daughter’s feelings indicates Mr. Shi’s double standards: he cannot clearly investigate how his own conduct has harmed their relationship. At the end of the story, when Mr. Shi leaves to go on a tour, while he and his daughter have finally been honest with each other, they have not resolved their conflict. This conclusion suggests that fathers will always struggle to understand their daughters and their own impacts on them as long as gendered double standards are in place.
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Fathers and Daughters Quotes in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
America is worth taking a look at; more than that, America makes him a new person, a rocket scientist, a good conversationalist, a loving father, a happy man.
Women in their marriageable twenties and early thirties are like lychees that have been picked from the tree; each passing day makes them less fresh and less desirable, and only too soon will they lose their value, and have to be gotten rid of at a sale price. Mr. Shi knows enough not to mention the sale price. Still, he cannot help but lecture on the fruitfulness of life. The more he talks, the more he is moved by his own patience.
Her eyes behind her glasses, wide open and unrelenting, remind him of her in her younger years. When she was four or five, she went after him every possible moment, asking questions and demanding answers. The eyes remind him of her mother too; at one time in their marriage, she gazed at him with this questioning look, waiting for an answer he did not have for her.
He feels disappointed in his daughter, someone he shares a language with but with whom he can no longer share a dear moment. After a long pause, he says, “You know, a woman shouldn’t ask such direct questions. A good woman is deferential and knows how to make people talk.”
Truly it was his mistake, never establishing a habit of talking to his daughter. But then, he argues for himself—in his time, a man like him, among the few chosen to work for a grand cause, he had to bear more duties toward his work than his family. Honorable and sad, but honorable more than sad.
He listens to her speak English on the phone, her voice shriller than he has ever known it to be. She speaks fast and laughs often. He does not understand her words, but even more, he does not understand her manner. Her voice, too sharp, too loud, too immodest, is so unpleasant to his ears that for a moment he feels as if he had accidentally caught a glimpse of her naked body, a total stranger, not the daughter he knows.
“Baba, if you grew up in a language that you never used to express your feelings, it would be easier to take up another language and talk more in the new language. It makes you a new person.”
“It is what we sacrifice that makes life meaningful”—Mr. Shi says the line that was often repeated in their training. He shakes his head hard. A foreign country gives one foreign thoughts, he thinks. For an old man like him, it is not healthy to ponder too much over memory.
