Symbol for social status
The woman who appears in the book wears white gloves, something not everyone could afford to have or could take care of. Because they were white, the gloves were extremely hard to maintain. But the gloves are used here also as a symbol, to suggest the idea that the woman was a member of the middle-class and that she had a good financial situation.
Symbol for shame
When the woman goes to buy supplies to pack her things and to put away her belongings, the shop clerk scrubbed almost obsessively a stain that was on his counter. The stain and the idea of the stain appears numerous times in the novel and it is used to symbolize shame. The American people felt ashamed for what they had done but no matter how hard they tried to scrub away their past they were unable to do it.
Lack of freedom
An important moment in the novel is when the woman kills a chicken they have. The author never reveals the place from where the chicken came but it is revealed that the chicken was free to roam in the family’s garden and it was as free as it could be. The killing of the chicken is also a symbolic one because in this context, it represents the freedom the family had and the freedom that was taken from them in such a violent manner.
Killing innocents
A motif in the novel is the idea that the main character kills animals to save them from a cruel fate. The animals however have a symbolic meaning most of the times and they usually mean more than the author lets it be understood. What the author wants to transmit through this is the idea than more than often, the innocents suffer when there is a political conflict between two nations.
Treated with insolence
A motif found in the novel is the idea that the Japanese were not treated like humans but rather like animals. To support this claim, in the second chapter, the girl remembers how after a very long train ride, the Japanese families were put to live and sleep in horse stables. There, they had to deal with inhuman conditions and with the knowledge that they were not considered worthy enough of living in a proper house.
