Ying-ying, as a child, was a spoiled and wild girl. She was the daughter of a rich man's first wife, so she received the best treatment. She was carefree and knew no pain or loss, and she took her lifestyle for granted. Her house was filled with many riches, but she thought nothing of them: once, she and her brother took a jade jar and played in the mud with it, and Ying-ying reflects, "But when I think back on that house, which is not often, I think of that jade jar, the muddied treasure I did not know I was holding in my hand." When she was a child, she took the jade jar for granted, as she did everything else in her life--her Amah, her riches, her easy life. However, there was one instance when she knew suffering and loss like everyone else. When she was four years old, she fell off the boat during the night where her family was celebrating the Moon Festival. Some village fishermen found her and left her on the shore, where she saw a reenactment of the Moon Lady's story. As she listened, she understood the Moon Lady's suffering and loss, for the first time knowing what sympathy and pain were. Ying-ying says, "Even though I did not understand her entire story, I understood her grief. In one small moment, we had both lost the world, and there was no way to get it back." You would think that after this experience, Ying-ying would have realized how lucky she was to have such a sheltered life, but as a small child does, she forgot many things that happened that night, but she was changed in some way by that experience.
Ying-ying's wish to the Moon Lady was to be found, a wish that later needed to be granted when Ying-ying lost herself again, although this time she was lost spiritually, not physically. She has the mysterious ability to see things before they happen, and she first discovered this ability when she forsaw her marriage to a friend of her aunt's husband. She did not know why she married him, no matter how hard she tried to avoid him, but somehow she knew that it was her fate, and she could not change it. Ying-ying "became a stranger to herself," because she did everything she could to please him, without any regard to her own wishes. Then she found out that the man she adored so much was cheating on her, and her love turned into hate, causing her to abort her first son. (Ying-ying's story is the precursor to Winnie's story in The Kitchen God's Wife.) She knew she had no future left, so she lived like a ghost, not caring about anything; she had lost herself.
Ying-ying had lost herself after she left her ruined marriage, but she was not completely lost. She lived like a ghost, and still does after giving birth to Lena, but she calls this using her "black side" Because she was born in the year of the Tiger, Ying-ying has a gold side, "leaps with its fierce heart," and a black side, which "stands still with cunning, hiding its gold between trees, seeing and not being seen, waiting patiently for things to come." When she was young, she only knew how to use her gold side, her fierce and headstrong side. But after she killed her son, she had to learn to use her black side. For years afterward, she survived using her black side by "waiting between the trees" and using her cunning. She met St. Clair, her second husband, when she was working as a shopgirl. Ying-ying knew she would later marry this man, and when she did, she truly lost herself and was no longer a tiger, but a "tiger ghost," an unseen spirit. She did not really love St. Clair, and she lost her chi, her spirit and her will, so she no longer cared about anything anymore.
Since Ying-ying became so withdrawn and apathetic, she raised Lena, "watching her from another shore," and did not care that Lena grew up with American ways. Now, sitting in the guest room upstairs in her daughter's house, Ying-ying realizes that she must tell her daughter everything, that "she is the daughter of a ghost,", that she was born without any chi. Ying-ying knows that in order to bring back her own tiger self, she must first release her daughter's tiger spirit by telling her the story of her past, her past in China that Lena never knew existed. Ying-ying knows that her daughter's life is falling apart, and the only way to save Lena is to bring out the tiger spirit in her. "She will fight me, because this is the nature of two tigers. But I will win and give her my spirit, because this is the way a mother loves her daughter."
