YMMV / The Garden of Evening Mists

• Spiritual Successor: To Tan's first novel The Gift of Rain. They have a similar structure (narrator looking back in old age and recounting their life), setting (Malaya during World War 2), and focus on memory.
• The Woobie: Yun Ling's life is one tragedy after another. She's imprisoned along with her sister in a Japanese camp. The soldiers cut off two of her fingers, she sees her sister forced to become a "comfort woman", she's the sole survivor of the entire camp, she's reunited with her parents only to find her mother has suffered Sanity Slippage and doesn't recognise her, and in the framing device she's developing aphasia.

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