The mention of this person named Yen symbolizes the sadness, fear, jealousness, and loneliness within Sa because Yen can be anyone from a friend to a potential love interest before the arranged marriage they entered. The idea of a person who she is in love with and cares about is thinking about other women in his foggy mind makes her think that he cares more about this person than her. He mentions all of the memories of the time he was with Yen with fondness in his tone. “When he turned to her and smiled, she saw gumdrops of mucus in the corners of his eyes ‘ You loved those brown sugar cones, Yen. You insisted that I hold yours for you so your hands wouldn’t get sticky.’’ (118-119) is a repeated jab at Sa because it seems to her all he can think about is Yen and not her. This causes the burdens placed on her to increase because she knows that it is not his fault but the diseases. Therefore she unable to argue or bring it up to him because he would quickly forget and repeat the same action again. In turn, this decision causes her to keep it pent up inside herself again just for his sake. To add to the increasing stress her worse fear has come true when he says “ Oh? Your name isn’t Yen?.Then what is it?”(119) . The fear of being forgotten makes it even harder for her to believe that she is important to him. Sa is unable to explain the problem to him …show more content…
Her character is shown to have a lot of wisdom and knowledge on what love is supposed to be which is fueling the decision to stick with her husband. The traits that she loves is in her husband is also within her as well such as hard-working, reliability, responsible, and brave but these traits are responsible for the downfall of Sa life. She puts in a great amount of work into taking care of him because she believes that by doing so will negate the feelings she has throughs him now which are feelings of dread and frustration. When leaving her job she says “ When her shift ended at noon and she gathered her things to go home, she always did so with a sense of dread that shamed her. She made up for it … by preparing the house for emergencies with great energy, as if she could forestall the inevitable through hard work.(108)”. She takes these emotions and ignores them because she has a very strong sense of responsibility and love towards her husband, therefore, does not want to leave him in his time of need. With her sense of loyalty, she takes on the name of another woman at the end sacrificing her self-identity because the only way to stay with him would become