About Andrew McCarthy's character and his wife.....

He had an affair. There is a scene where she's looking out the window, and she demands to know her (the mistress) name. He says something to the effect of "It doesn't matter, she's not the reason."

I believe that it was implied that he had the affair because he was unhappy with their life together. To him, it was bland and colorless. In another scene, he is telling her "You used to have an opinion, we used to argue!" It's clear from this point on that he is unhappy with the relationship.

I think one of the best clues is to consider why he ended up staying. Also, the mother and daughter stories are tied in, and the mother's story is a flashback of her childhood in China where her mother was a Fourth wife, so a subservient doormat who did not know her worth. The mother even explains, I brought you up to be different and you became just like her. So the problem with the marriage was not that A. McCarthy became bored, but that his wife changed from a self-confident, independent American woman into the traditional asian model of subservience to her husband. He loved the woman that she was when they met, but was unhappy with the person who became his servant and bent over backwards to accommodate to him. In behaving this way, she actually lost her true self, and he fell out of love with her. What saved the marriage in the end is that her mother talked to her and made her realize what she had done wrong. So when A. McCarthy comes to sell the house, she has transformed and become the strong woman again who knows her worth and stands up for herself. She tells him to get out of her house, he is not selling it and not taking her daughter. She was back, so he stayed.

Amy Tan doesn't even know about Chinese culture but pretends to. She grew up in the US and her Chinese phrases and cultural hints are wrong and come off as if she writes what she *thinks* Chinese people were like (in order to please Western readers and their superiority complex ideas about China).

Most of her books depict Asian men in a poor light and simultaneously write her Asian women with White saviors ('White Knight Syndrome'). She is basically an Uncle Tom author who kisses butt to White people in order to make money, trashing her culture and her people along the way.

Amy Tan writes crappy books to depict Asian men as these evil sexist misogynists. Anyone who knows a Chinese family well knows how the wife/mom bosses the husband and kids - they have absolute power in the family. Asian feminists who buy into Amy Tan's crap propaganda abandon Asian culture, and flee to specifically White men under 'White Knight' syndrome. White men suppressed women as well, would use them as marriage objects for political alliances, had metal chastity belts and corsets, and even to this day there are more stay-at-home moms per capita in the US than in China.

Some Asian women who have self-hate and a White fetish, like to bash Asian men to mask their true intentions, which is to be a complete sell-out. They are easy to spot, because they do not consider American men of any other race, only White men (like Amy Tan and Lucy Liu).

I think she ceased to be an individual. While some men (my husband!!) would love that...evidently McCarthy's character wanted the strong and opinionated woman that he fell in love with...not the servant without a mind of her own that she'd become.


Dawn
www.myspace.com/talesfromthetrenches

I still think that he was a total jackass. His wife loved him deeply, and if she became subservient, she did it BECAUSE she was afraid of losing him!

The way he dealt with it (not discussing it at all & having an AFFAIR) was despicable.
I would have divorced him yesterday. Some people never know what they have.


"I'd say this cloud is Cumulo Nimbus."
"Didn't he discover America?"
"Penfold, shush."

I think it was the pressure the McCarthy character was having, being married to a Chinese person. They did reconcile though.

It's in the scene where she asks what he wants to eat. He says he wants to her what she wants and stops what he's doing. The look she gives him is like a deer in the headlights, she just keeps asking him what she wants. They couldn't even have a conversation anymore.

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