Amy Tan - Half and Half

Half and Half was an interesting story to me. Amy Tan gave us all a new perspective in racial prejudice. We usually do not think of inner racial marriages that do not just pertain to black and white couples. In this story, we see a family who is Chinese and they have 7 children. The narrator is talking about her life as a child and as an adult with her husband. As a child, she tells of a story when they go to the beach and with her being a middle child, she is asked to watch the younger children. While her father is out on the rocks fishing, there is a moment of turmoil and one of her brothers, Bing, slips and falls into the water and just vanishes. Her mother, Janice, searches and searches for her son, but it as if he just disappeared. This causes her mother to lose her faith and start using her Bible as a placement under the table to keep it level.
The narrator has come back home to see her mother and tell her that her and her husband Ted are getting a divorce. She knows her mother will be against it. Her husband use to be a man in control of their entire marriage and lives. After he is sued for malpractice, he loses faith in himself and has begun to lay every responsibility of their marriage on his wife and this has been the root of their troubles. The doubt in her stems from the death of Bing. She has been responsible for him and she blames herself and with this, she doesn’t want such a major responsibility. During this visit, she realizes that all these years that she has thought her mother was saying ‘fate” she was actually referring to “faith. “ There is a show of irony here. As the Bible is referred to as being white, it also kept clean and is the piece needed to keep the table balanced.
I really enjoyed this story. I did think the title being “Half and Half,” I assume it was a title involving her race, but as I read it, I think it is referring to being half cold and half hot.