The story opens as the girls’ mother, who has died from an unspecified illness, has been cremated as part of a Buddhist ceremony. The older daughter is furious at what she sees as her father's tardiness in turning to Western medical treatment and blames him for the death of their mother. As her father enters, Emily ridicules his Chinese customs of mourning the dead by burning paper money for their ghosts and makes him go away.
The fact that her mother's ghost does not appear to her as foretold by her parents’ beliefs serves as a ready proof for the superiority of her seemingly more rational attitude of rejecting religion.
The story implies that Emily subconsciously tests the powers of the old beliefs when she continues to defy their rules. Nothing happens to her when she goes out during Gujie. Once she turns eighteen, she can leave home against her father's wishes, and nothing disastrous comes of it. Even cutting her hair does not bring forth ancestral retribution. Only at the end does the story reveal how much Emily is still a child of her parents’ culture and religion. It is her, and not the dutiful Claudia, who is visited by her father's ghost. In Chinese custom, ghosts appear to those with whom they have some unfinished business.
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