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54 pages 1 hour read

Emily X. R. Pan

The Astonishing Color of After

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2018

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Important Quotes

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“My mother is a bird. This isn’t some William Faulkner stream-of-consciousness metaphorical crap. My mother. Is literally. A bird.” 


(Chapter 1, Page 1)

These first sentences establish the premise that Leigh’s mother is a bird. The short sentences create a blunt rhythm that highlights the factual nature of Leigh’s assertion, while the division of the phrase “my mother is literally a bird” into three separate sentences indicates Leigh’s own incredulity at the marvelous fact.

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“Axel’s hands stretched around my back and unlocked me. I was melting, he had released my windup key, and I was kissing back hard, and our lips were everywhere and my body was florescent orange—no, royal purple—no. My body was every color in the world, alight.” 


(Chapter 1, Page 3)

This passage, describing Leigh’s kiss with Axel, demonstrates her tendency to experience strong emotions in color. Here the feeling of “every color in the world” indicates that Leigh is in a state of exhilaration. This cements the importance of color in the novel while simultaneously revealing its importance to Leigh as an artist.

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“My eyes took in her size: nothing like the petite frame my mother had while human. She reminded me of a red-crowned crane, but with a long, feathery tail. Up close I could see that every feather was a different shade of red, sharp and gleaming.” 


(Chapter 3, Page 9)

Dory’s appearance as a bird sharply contrasts with her human appearance. As a human, Dory was petite and delicate, but as a bird, she is enormous and magnificent, signaling that she has reached an expanded if supernatural state of being. In Chinese culture, the red crane she resembles is a figure symbolizing wisdom and nobility.

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“The sky in Taipei is the kind of purple that makes it hard to tell whether the sun just came or went. Dad says it’s evening.” 


(Chapter 13, Page 46)

This passage, which announces the Sanders’ arrival in Taipei, indicates that they have arrived in a profoundly different place than their point of origin. Leigh’s inability to tell whether it is dawn or dusk illustrates her jet lag and indicates that she is unable to read and interpret events in her mother’s ancestral home.

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“She towels off my hair, blows it dry, the air pouring hot and fast. How strange it is to have her fingers against my scalp, so gentle and certain. With my eyes closed, they feel just like my mother’s hands.” 


(Chapter 16, Page 63)

While Leigh’s estranged grandmother fusses over her hair, she has the uncanny sensation that her grandmother’s hands have the same touch as her mother’s. This simple experience makes Leigh feel that she has traveled all the way to Taipei to be closer to her mother.

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“My thumb and index finger are pinching together so hard it hurts. I look down: The stick of incense is gone. I click on the lamp to make sure: No trace of it anywhere. No ashes. It simply vanished.” 


(Chapter 18, Page 75)

Passages like this one, which describes the incense stick vanishing into thin air, remind the reader that in her journey to discover the truth about her mother, Leigh is dealing with supernatural forces that are unexplainable through human logic. Leigh’s measures of switching on the light and searching for ashes indicate that she is attempting to account for the phenomenon logically before surrendering to the fact of the magic.

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“It’s not like it happens every day, but it happens enough to be a regular reminder: People see me as different. And now finding myself so directly named—hunxie, mixed blood—like a label printed out and affixed to my forehead…it makes something twist in my guts in a dark and blue-violet way.” 


(Chapter 20, Page 80)

Leigh describes the predicament of being seen as “other” in her native United States and in Taiwan, owing to her appearance of ambiguous ethnicity. The fact that she experiences the words “hunxie, mixed blood” like a “label printed out and affixed” to her forehead indicates that Leigh feels powerless to express herself in the face of the dominant culture’s definition of her. The “twist” in her guts also indicates that Leigh has a visceral repulsion to being labelled. Being “different” from the majority also contributes to Leigh’s sense of isolation.

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“Her body was silent, but her darkness was louder than anything. Our home shrank to the size of a dollhouse, and the walls pressed up against me so that I couldn’t breathe or speak or hear anything but her despair.” 


(Chapter 22, Page 88)

Leigh remembers her 14th birthday as the day she became aware that something might be wrong with her mother. Dory’s “darkness” is such that it appears to take up the entirety of Leigh’s environment, so that she is deaf to everything except her mother’s despair.

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“Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again. A moment of humiliation, or devastation, or absolute rage, to be rewound and replayed, spinning a thread that wraps around the brain, knotting itself into something of a noose. It won’t exactly kill you, but it makes you feel the squeeze of every horrible moment.” 


(Chapter 23, Page 97)

Leigh experiences memory as a malign force that is capable of trapping her in unpleasant stories and emotions. The image of the hangman’s noose is an ominous indication of the potentially deadly consequences of replaying the same bad memories. The haptic “squeeze” of “horrible” moments suggests that negative memories have real, felt consequences in the present moment.

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“If someone had asked me, I would’ve said that everything seemed right except for my mother, who seemed totally wrong, and that in turn made everything else feel dark and strained. I would’ve carved out my heart and brain and given them to her just so she could feel right again.” 


(Chapter 28 , Page 117)

In Leigh’s early observations of her mother’s depression, she seems to think that the fault lay in her mother and that it could be fixed. The visceral image of Leigh offering her heart and brain to her mother, to save her from herself, indicates how desperately she wants Dory to recover from her depression.

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“After a person’s death, they have forty-nine days to process their karma and let go of the things that make them feel tied to this life—things like people and promises and memories. Then they make their transition.” 


(Chapter 35 , Page 143)

Feng tells Leigh about the Buddhist belief that the 49 days after a person’s death are when they transition from this life into the next one and loosen their earthly ties. The constraint of the 49 days adds a degree of urgency to Leigh’s search for her mother, because after this time, she will no longer be a bird or remember the elements of her present life, including Leigh. The Buddhist belief suggests that Leigh’s mother is doing her own processing of the past, in a journey that mirrors Leigh’s own.

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“I always imagined that it would be my mother telling me the stories of her family. Not memories materializing from wisps of incense smoke, memories that feel stolen.” 


(Chapter 40, Page 164)

Leigh’s recovery of the memories about her grandmother’s youth is bittersweet because she wishes that her mother would have told her these stories. Her feeling that she has “stolen” the memories through her incense-led visions indicates that she thinks of herself as an imposter in her mother’s family and culture.

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“We watch, transfixed as it pushes its way out of the back, where the shell has opened like a costume unzipped. Slowly, the fresh body wriggles out, a pale summery green. The new legs kick a few times, inky eyes shining like they know everything in the world. Wrinkled, cabbage-like bunches unfurl themselves from the sides, smoothing out into long wings […] Its husk, brown and stiff, clings to the branch. A ghost left behind.” 


(Chapter 62 , Page 257)

Leigh watches the cicada’s molting as though its transformation is a metaphor for rebirth. Its transition from an old being to a new one reminds her of the metamorphosis her mother will undergo after the 49 days. The brown body the cicada leaves behind is a mere specter that is unrelated to its present being. Similarly, Dory will be entirely different when she is reborn.

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“‘I think people see ghosts all the time,’ says Feng. ‘And I think ghosts want to be seen. They want to be reassured that they truly exist. They drift back into this world after passing through the gates of death into another dimension, and suddenly they hear every thought, speak every language, understand things they didn’t get when they were alive.’” 


(Chapter 70, Page 292)

Feng’s testimony about the reality of ghosts reassures Leigh about her sightings of her dead mother. Feng gives voice to a realm that exists between the living and the dead, and to the sentience of once-alive, now dead beings. At this stage in the novel, Leigh is unaware of Feng’s own status as the ghost of Jingling. However, Feng displays her knowledge that a ghost can “speak every language,” which explains how she can understand Leigh without having formerly been taught English.

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“The cat was the one who reminded her that life was a real thing. All the rest of us might as well have been mannequins on display in the window of a museum.”


(Chapter 76, Page 318)

Leigh is jealous of Meimei, the cat that her father gifts her mother to help with her moods. While Meimei connects a depressed Dory with reality, and receives affection from her, Leigh feels that she is becoming as unreal and distant to her mother as an inanimate figure in a museum display case. While mannequins and museums are designed to simulate real life, they are no substitute for the real thing.

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“Long before doctors put a label on her condition and offered slips of paper bearing the multisyllabic names of pharmaceuticals. Long before my father had started leaving on his work trips. Long before everything: she was already hurting.” 


(Chapter 83, Page 358)

Leigh realizes that her mother’s sadness and the conditions leading to her depression and suicide were deeply rooted and traced back to her estrangement from her family. In having made the journey to Taiwan and to her maternal grandparents, Leigh has acquired deep insight into the phenomena that made her mother sad.

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“I forgot Winter Formal was even happening. There were other things to worry about, like my portfolio. Like how each day I dreaded going home, where I knew I would find all the shades drawn, everything dark, the air stale and thick with the stench of cat litter that desperately needed sifting.” 


(Chapter 88, Page 373)

Leigh’s ability to easily forget about Winter Formal, a fun high school event that would typically excite someone of her age, indicates how serious and burdened with responsibility her life has become. Her home, which should be a refuge, now seems more like a dungeon, a place of waste and stale air where she struggles to grow.

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“‘You’re so beautiful, you know? You’re, like, exotic.’ Every muscle in my body went taut. ‘I’m not,’ I said flatly. ‘I’m American. That’s not exotic.’” 


(Chapter 89 , Page 380)

At the winter formal, Leigh’s classmate Weston fetishizes her as “exotic” due to her mixed-race appearance. Leigh rebuffs the claim, asserting that she is just as American as Weston. The muscle tightness she experiences is a symptom of her disgust at being “othered;” it also reflects her discomfort at having her racial difference pointed out.

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“The morning light pale and watery…and shattered. Broken into a million pieces. Everything outside the apartment cracked, like someone took a sledgehammer to the world […] With each step I take, the cracks in the ground double, triple, black lines fissuring outward, the sound like ice breaking.” 


(Chapter 90, Page 385)

This apocalyptic imagery follows one of Leigh’s night visions. Her view of the world as broken and breaking further is a metaphor for Leigh’s state of mind following her sighting of her mother.

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“Let her go. Let her be. That’s the greatest gift you can offer a ghost.” 


(Chapter 91, Page 388)

Feng’s advice to Leigh regarding her mother on the eve of the 49th day is to not interfere in her mother’s departure from the earthly realm. While Leigh’s impulse might be to hold on, the opposite action of letting go is “the greatest gift” she could bestow on her mother in her current state.

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“Her light flickers out, and then there’s only ash and night. Cold, inky black swallows me up, and there’s nothing left to see. Nothing at all […] Just me and the abyss.” 


(Chapter 95, Page 414)

This passage follows Leigh’s final sighting of the bird. The imagery of the void indicates that Leigh is alone in the universe now that her mother has left her and the bird has vanished. Pan simultaneously generates the impression of surrender and isolation.

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“She said your name is powerful. It’s just like the Mandarin word for strength. Li.” 


(Chapter 98, Page 427)

The fact that Waipo recognizes a Mandarin homonym of Leigh’s name shows that she believes her mixed-race granddaughter can fully assimilate in her maternal culture. The meaning of li, strength, is a testament to Leigh’s courage and resilience in the face of hardship.

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“On the days we’ve accompanied Waipo to the market, I’ve learned that the sweetest papayas are those blushing a bit of red. The best pomelos are found by smelling them, feeling for the heaviest ones.”


(Chapter 103, Page 437)

The detailed knowledge of Taiwanese food that Leigh absorbs by accompanying her grandmother to the market compensates for the many years of distance between her and her maternal culture. The multisensory experience of choosing fruit, which engages sight, smell and touch, indicates the primal nature of Waipo’s lessons.

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“I thought I’d learned to read every expression that could possibly fill those features. I thought I knew them better than anyone. I was wrong. The look he’s giving me now—that hope in his eyes, that bright wishing—I’ve seen it before. But I never realized it was meant for me.” 


(Chapter 105, Page 454)

Leigh finally realizes that Axel’s hopes and wishes are invested in her and no other girl. Despite her intense study of Axel’s features over the years, and despite all her attempts to capture them on the page, this is the first confirmation she has of him wanting to be her romantic partner.

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“The purpose of memory, I would argue, is to remind us how to live.” 


(Chapter 108, Page 462)

The final sentence in the novel, which forms part of Leigh’s artist’s statement, indicates that she will use what she has learned about memory to enhance her life going forward rather than focusing on the past and getting lost in it.

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