Afong Moy’s experience losing Yao Han establishes a pattern in which all the female characters hope for love that may never appear. The novel in fact begins on this note, though not with Afong: “Faye Moy signed a contract stating that she would never marry […] Faye thought that perhaps there should have been an exception made for older nurses” (3). Faye Moy desires to marry but has never realized this dream; now middle-aged, she considers much of her life wasted. In the doctrines of Buddhism, however, Faye finds a possible way of understanding her experiences. When trying to make sense of her life and of John Garland’s crash landing, she reflects that “there was something different about this one, a familiar feeling, like ci cang soeng sik—waking from a dream—though the Chinese version of déjà vu generally referred to two people who had met before” (13).

Ci cang soeng sik is related to reincarnation: People feel they have met before because they have met, albeit in a past life. To characters like Afong, however, the notion of reincarnation is not necessarily a comfort. Though she turns to reincarnation to explain the suffering she experiences, the lesson she draws is that she is being punished, essentially blaming herself for her own victimization and rationalizing the systemic misogyny and racism she endures: