For both Mr. Shi and his daughter, intimacy with and love for a person who is not their spouse come into conflict with their marriages. Intimacy is inherently tied to communication: only characters who can talk to each other freely and feel that they understand each other in the story achieve true intimacy. Mr. Shi’s daughter, for example, feels intimate with her lover because they can speak English together, while she never wanted to talk to her ex-husband. Likewise, Mr. Shi felt intimacy with coworker Yilan because they could speak freely with each other, while the government prevented him from speaking about his work, which took up most of his life, with his wife. Communication itself therefore becomes a form of love and intimacy that transcends physical bonds.
Despite this overlap in their respective experiences of intimacy, Mr. Shi and his daughter have different values about marriage, his more traditional and hers more modern: Mr. Shi considers marriage to be a bond one must maintain because of duty, even when he felt more intimate with—and loved—a woman who was not his wife. Even as he upholds this view of marriage, Mr. Shi lives with regret, missing Yilan and wondering whether his sacrifice was worth it. At the same time, Mr. Shi is angry at his daughter for ending her marriage and assumes that it must have been her fault. Mr. Shi’s daughter, who is of a later generation and has been influenced by American cultural norms, prioritizes intimacy over the structure of marriage, and leaves her husband for her lover with whom she feels she can communicate. Li therefore suggests that it is perhaps more important to find meaningful love and intimacy with someone than to adhere to the bonds of marriage out of duty.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Love, Marriage, and Intimacy ThemeTracker
Love, Marriage, and Intimacy Quotes in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
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.
“In China we say, Xiu bai shi ke tong zhou,” Mr. Shi says when Madam stops. It takes three hundred years of prayers to have the chance to cross a river with someone in the same boat, he thinks of explaining to Madam in English, but then, what’s the difference between the languages? Madam would understand him, with or without the translation.
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.”
“Talking is like riding with an unreined horse, you don’t know where you end up and you don’t have to think about it. That’s what our talking was like, but we weren’t having an affair as they said. We were never in love,” Mr. Shi says, and then, for a short moment, is confused by his own words. What kind of love is he talking about? Surely they were in love, not the love they were suspected of having—he always kept a respectful distance, their hands never touched. But a love in which they talked freely, a love in which their minds touched—wasn’t it love, too?
“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.
