Furthering the figurative imprisonment caused by separation from home, water plays an obvious role in the drowning of the narrator’s brother in the South China Sea. “My brother had been swallowed by the sea,” the narrator explains (Location 1556). The thought of her brother continues to hold the narrator captive 20 years later, and she says, “The only thing I couldn’t drive away was the memory of my brother, whose body lay just beyond reach, forming the shape of a distant shore” (Location 1272). Like the narrator’s memory of her mother, visions of the shore and the ocean, again, reign in the narrator’s memory of her brother, serving the purpose of further separating the two. In addition, the constant reminder of her brother’s death is arguably
