The first of five short stories, “Water Names” begins with a description of a “fierce encoded quarrel” between siblings over frivolous things, complete with biting, hair-pulling, and bickering that render them “sisters in name only” (121). Disappointed by the sisters’ discord, their grandmother scolds them for arguing “like a bunch of chickens” and gathers them to listen to a traditional folktale that had been passed down through generations (121). 

Theme Breakdown: The sisters’ brief squabble (and the grandmother’s resulting disappointment) holds thematic significance, hinting at the story’s later message of the importance of familial bonds in overcoming division.

The story she tells follows the structure of a traditional Chinese cautionary tale: a restless fisherman’s daughter, spoiled and sheltered from the dangers of the world, becomes fascinated with “faraway things and places” (123). The river, “as familiar as the sky,” appears to her as “a bright, broad road stretching out to curious lands” whose depths she had yet to “fully understand” (123). This restlessness parallels the immigrant longing for America as a land of opportunity, blatantly overlooking its dangers, and making the ending all the more significant. Rather than appeasing her curiosity, the daughter begins to see a reflection of a ghostly apparition in the water and ultimately leaves her family for this man, implied to have drowned in the water’s depths after “los[ing] her mind to desiring” (125). 

In this light, the grandmother’s folktale becomes a subversion of the idealized American dream, demonstrating that abandoning one’s family for distant dreams results in tragedy. Instead, the grandmother argues that strength comes from “running together, like raindrops,” emphasizing the importance of family and unity. Ending with a final simile, she claims that, “We have survived countless floods and seasons of ill-fortune because we have the spirit of the river in us . . . Our strength and spirit wear down mountains into sand” (116). Through this comparison, the grandmother frames family and cultural continuity as forces capable of withstanding external hardship and the seductive lull of distant ambitions.