50 pages • 1 hour read
The Girl Who Wrote in Silk
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Chapters 26-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary
Content Warning: This section discusses racism and death by suicide.
The Chin family come to Orcas Island, and Inara shows them the entire property. Inara struggles with telling Daniel about her father calling in the loan. As she watches them explore, it occurs to her that Daniel’s mother is a chef and could potentially be in a financial position to partner with her and rescue the hotel.
Margaret, Daniel’s mother, is excited initially, but Inara feels the need to tell them the whole truth before agreeing to anything. As she speaks, Daniel turns steely and his mother expresses her disappointment, leaving them to talk. Daniel ends their relationship because Inara lied to him. She asks what she should have done, since she was trying to protect her family. He tells her she should have owned her family’s history and apologized to the victims’ descendants. Inara desperately misses her mother as she stands alone in the unfinished hotel.
Chapter 27 Summary
After Daniel and his family leave, Inara lists the estate for sale. She spends every day going to the beach, waiting for the estate to sell. She gets a phone call from her brother while at the beach. Her father has had a heart attack and he’s likely to die that night. She hurries back to the mainland.
Chapter 28 Summary
Inara’s father is too weak for heart surgery and is fading fast. He wakes up in the hospital long enough to tell Inara to go forward with the hotel and to tell her siblings what she knows about Campbell. He tells Inara that he’s proud of her, and to find the book on his nightstand at home. Several hours later he dies.
Two days later, Inara finally goes into his room and finds the book he told her about. It’s the journal of Campbell’s wife, explaining that Campbell was haunted by the possibility of seeing Mei Lien’s ghost, because she disappeared and no one knew what happened to her. Inara realizes that Campbell didn’t kill Mei Lien and feels strongly relieved.
Olivia and Nate arrive. She tells them the whole story of Duncan Campbell, Mei Lien, and the Rothesay estate. They agree to tell the world the truth and apologize for their family’s actions.
Chapter 29 Summary
Two months after Yan-Tao left with Elizabeth, Mei Lien finishes the embroidered sleeve. She takes the sleeve and wraps it in Joseph’s shirt and oilcloth. She pries up Yan-Tao’s secret step and finds his baby blanket and her father’s coin purse, along with special rocks and pinecones. She pulls the blanket and purse out, smelling her son’s lingering baby scent and cries until all her grief is used up.
She carefully places the sleeve into the step, drags the tools over to the staircase and nails the step firmly in place. She hears Joseph’s voice, then her father’s, telling her she’s done well. She leaves the house and walks down to the ocean with the blanket and purse around her neck. She walks into the water and sees her loved ones as the water closes over her head.
Chapter 30 Summary
Inara waits to catch her flight back to Orcas Island. She calls Tom to arrange an afternoon meeting to start finishing the hotel with her new inheritance money. She hears someone call her name, and Margaret approaches her. Margaret shows Inara a comprehensive binder of plans for the restaurant for the hotel, asking if she still wants a partner.
Inara asks about Daniel, and Margaret points at Daniel across the small airport. Daniel apologizes for the way he handled things and tells her he misses her. Nate has told Daniel their decision to announce Campbell’s actions the following month, and Daniel tells her not to do it for him. Inara explains they’ve agreed to do it because it’s the right thing, and asks him to be there with her. He agrees, and she kisses him. She agrees to partner with Margaret, then catches her plane back to Orcas Island.
Chapter 31 Summary
Inara and her siblings dedicate the park to Mei Lien, with a statue based on Daniel’s sister Cassie instead of Duncan Campbell. They tell everything they know of Mei Lien’s story and Campbell’s crimes, seeking to find the descendants of the family of the people he murdered to help them in any way possible.
Inara returns to Orcas Island. She discovers that Daniel and Margaret have cleaned and restored the robe and connected it to the sleeve. It’s safely encased and on display in the hotel lobby.
Inara and Daniel walk together to the beach. Inara asks if Daniel believes Mei Lien is angry at their relationship, since Inara is a descendant of Campbell. Daniel says he thinks she approves, and when Inara looks out into the water, she hears a splash and feels a sense of peace. Inara agrees with Daniel.
Chapters 26-31 Analysis
The end of the novel is a combination of falling action and resolution that addresses The Generational Impact of Racism. Mei Lien’s story resolves after Yan-Tao’s exit, but isn’t fully resolved until Daniel and Inara come together and mend their fracture at the close of the book. Inara’s confession to Daniel and his mother, and the subsequent emotion she’s left with when Daniel leaves, is the closest thing she’s experienced to the pain Mei Lien endured through much of her life: “She wasn’t good enough to succeed with the hotel, wasn’t good enough to keep Daniel’s love, wasn’t good enough for her father to believe in her. She wasn’t good enough to make right a wrong done generations ago” (336).
The primary difference between Mei Lien’s tragedies and Inara’s moment of tragedy is that Inara holds herself personally responsible for all the problems in her life. Inara’s choices, rather than the actions of others beyond her control, have led her to this moment of fracture. The falling action begins at this point for her, flowing down toward the resolution when she takes action to remedy what she can and address her family’s legacy of racism once and for all.
Inara and her siblings’ decision to reveal the truth about Campbell and their family’s legacy marks a significant contrast with the secrecy cultivated by their father. In exposing their family’s crimes, Inara and her siblings choose to acknowledge the past instead of seeking to bury it, bringing a sense of closure to the conflict Inara has felt throughout the novel regarding Daniel’s family. Their decision to dedicate the park and statue to Mei Lien instead of Campbell further reflects their desire to make serious amends, suggesting that it is better to address the flaws of the past than to hide or minimize them.
Mei Lien’s death reinforces the symbolic importance of the ocean in the novel, enabling the end of her story to mirror the beginning, when her father pushed her overboard the ship. In returning to the ocean to die, Mei Lien sees her loved ones waiting for her, which implies that she is now reunited with them at last. Her voluntary walk into the water contrasts with her involuntary fall into the ocean at the novel’s opening, suggesting that Mei Lien is now in control of her fate. The ocean thus becomes a symbol of peace and reconciliation for her instead of trauma and loss.
The last line of the novel is Inara’s sense of Mei Lien’s feelings about the resolution of the novel: “Mei Lien approved” (372). The closing serves to connect the two characters across time, reflecting The Cultural and Personal Value of History. Throughout the novel, the two women have been subtly linked: In their relationships with their parents, in their romantic experiences, and in their internal conflicts related to their role in society. However, they are also distinctly separated by race, class, and differences in privilege. In choosing to tell the truth, to protect Mei Lien’s narrative and honor her experience, Inara allows Mei Lien’s spirit to find peace.
The novel has shifted from Inara’s third person point of view to Mei Lien’s third person point of view, and the language of this last line is ambiguous in its perspective. It could be a continuation of the previous line, “[Inara] knew Daniel was right” (372), thereby maintaining Inara’s perspective. However, because the line is its own paragraph, it is separated from Inara’s point of view, and could thus be read as Mei Lien’s direct approval of Daniel and Inara’s relationship. The former interpretation suggests that Inara is now living her life with Mei Lien’s experience in mind, bringing together the past and the present in service of a better future. In the latter interpretation, the novel’s resolution is a statement of Mei Lien finally finding peace after a century of struggle. Leaving the point of view ambiguous encourages both interpretations, further blurring the boundaries between past and present.
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