Whiteness
The word “white” quite possibly recurs more often in this novel than in Moby-Dick. Usually that appearance is situated within a negative context. As imagery, the insinuation is clear just from a handful of examples and this becomes especially apparent whenever whiteness is juxtaposed against the vibrant hues of various colors.
“Did they really think that new whitewashed names would make the world outside see that yellow Rose was just as radiant a flower as white Daisy?”
“we pored over the details of how exactly our new house was to be built…in muted hues of cream and white.”
“Stupid white ghosts don’t understand bug- ger-all about real people, about the need to be protected.”
Gold
In this instance, gold is not used as imagery in the sense of being one of those colorful alternatives to the cultural sterility of whiteness, but refers instead to gold the mineral; the precious metal that signifies wealth around the world. While gold is indeed a universal emblem of affluence, its significance as imagery has a quite specific provenance in the novel. The family at the center immigrated to Australia from Cambodia and their life their coincided with the brutish regime of Pol Pot. Of the many questionable decisions made by that dictator, one was the radical move to shut down the country’s banking system. Overnight, currency literally became not worth the paper it was printed and gold became the signature of wealth. The lineage of this social upheaval is realized long afterward in Australia in images that call to mind the psychological impact. The narrator’s grandmother calls her welfare stipend “old people’s gold.” Stories are told of going back to post-Pol Pot Cambodia to search for gold that was buried in yards before emigrating to another country. The family business is even goldsmithing. Gold as imagery is cemented as the novel’s primary symbol of financial security.
Turns of Phrase
Not all the novel’s use of imagery is of the pervasive type. Many sparkling individual examples of imagery punctuated the story in a way that demonstrates the writer’s literary gifts without calling vulgar attention to itself:
“I could tell her heart wasn’t really in it because her handwriting tumbled down the blue lines like Kamikaze pilots.”
“She thinks about the ones back home who are unprocessed and waiting to be processed, unlike the meat that is stacked in tins of twelve in front of her.”
“there is only so much the camera can catch. It does not capture the times when she laughs, her head flung back, nostrils flared, like a happy hippopotamus with squinched-closed eyes and blunt teeth, a few of them missing”
Storytelling
Throughout the narrative can be found references to language and words and the sum that is produced when added together: stories. The spotlight is especially bright on the figure of the narrator’s grandmother who is portrayed as the progenitor of her own talent for telling a tale:
“my grandmother was possessed of a form of magic, the magic of words that became movies in the mind.”
The past comes into conflict with the future in the family tradition, however, when the narrator develops a reputation for a particular kind of storytelling looked up negative: word-spreading. Word-spreading is telling stories that are not meant to be retold. The movies made through the magic of words are not intended to be documentaries, in other words.
“my word-spreading is also the only way to see that there was once flesh attached to these bones, that there was once something living and breathing, something that inhaled and exhaled; something that slept and woke up every morning with the past effaced, if only for a moment.”
