Nightmare Fuel / The Joy Luck Club

• Voice From The Wall is quite disturbing, from the beginning when Lena is imagining all sorts of dangers that could happen to a child every day, to her watching her mother go mad from depression and pain, to the (imagined) sounds of a mother abusing her daughter on the other side (even though it turns out they were just playing loudly) of her bedroom wall. And Lena witnesses these nightmares at only ten years old.
  • The tragedy that Lena's infant brother was born without a brain.
• Huang Taitai's treatment of Lindo in The Red Candle when Lindo's husband refuses to sleep with her.
• The circumstances that drove An-Mei's mother to become a concubine.
• The death of Rose's four-year-old brother Bing in Half And Half is this and Tear Jerker.
• After abandoning all her earthly possessions, along with her infant daughters, while fleeing the Japanese, Suyuan thinks in relief that at least she has nothing left to lose...just before realizing that her hair is falling out. This final shock pushes her over the Despair Event Horizon and she laughs and weeps while pulling out huge clumps of her own hair.