The Satisfaction Café
50 pages • 1-hour read
Kathy WangThe Satisfaction Café
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and illness, cursing, violence, death by suicide, and sexual abuse.
Falling House
Falling House is the name of the beautiful and architecturally significant home which Bill owns when he meets Joan. Prior to their marriage, Joan negotiates legal ownership of the house, and she inherits it when Bill dies. On the night of Bill’s funeral, his son, Theo, sets the house on fire. Falling House symbolizes the competition and contingency surrounding Bill’s love. Bill takes a great deal of pride in the house and sees it as a physical manifestation of his power and success. The house being named alludes to a tradition of landed estates in places like England (where a famous house symbolizes the power of the family who owns it over generations) and may also allude to the famous Fallingwater house designed by the prominent American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Joan’s decision to ask for an ownership stake in the house as part of her pre-nuptial agreement surprises Nelson but reflects her canny and confident ability to ensure her own needs are met. While Joan is confident that Bill loves her, she also knows that there is a profound power imbalance in their relationship, due to Bill’s financial assets and his social position as a white man born in the United States (in contrast to her status as an Asian immigrant).
Joan doesn’t simply rely on Bill’s goodwill, she sets her own terms and ensures that she will have something to take away from the marriage. While Joan loves Bill, she is aware that she will eventually be left alone, either because Bill (who is much older) will predecease her or because he might leave her (since she is his fourth marriage). Even as she embarks on the marriage, Joan is unwilling to rely on Bill’s good nature and attachment to her. While Joan is pragmatic and accepting about the contingent and fleeting nature of Bill’s love, his son Theo is much more emotionally volatile. Theo is presented as ungrateful for the privilege he grows up with, and he is embittered by Bill’s choice to marry Joan. When Bill dies, Theo is furious that he has not inherited the house, lamenting to Nelson that “I told him the house was my only wish. One fucking wish! What kind of father doesn’t even give that?” (166). For Theo, the house symbolizes the love and respect that he thinks he has been denied, and he is determined that if he can’t have it, no one can. The violent conflagration symbolizes Theo’s rage and the complex emotions Bill triggers in others.
The Gate
From the time that Jamie and Lee are children, Joan regularly takes them to a large park with a network of hiking trails including a precarious clifftop trail. The first time she visits this trail, Joan is frustrated to learn that the gate which should limit access to the trail has broken (making it possible for someone to unwittingly end up close to the dangerous cliffs). For decades, every time she visits, Joan leaves a note in the park’s suggestion box, requesting that someone fix the gate. The broken gate symbolizes the inevitability of pain and loss. Joan tends to focus on the positive aspects of life and hopeful possibilities for the future. She sees problems as obstacles to be overcome and believes that an individual can make the best of most situations. Joan reveals her indefatigable optimism by never ceasing to leave notes about the gate, even after many years go by without any change. Despite Joan’s efforts, pain and loss still find their way into her life and the lives of those she loves. Significantly, Joan chooses the clifftop trail as the place where she dies. She chooses the location because she accepts that there are things she cannot change (such as the broken gate and her declining health) but also because she will always do the best she can (by leaving notes and choosing to end her life on her own terms). The broken gate comes to symbolize how Joan accepts realities but is never cowed by them.
The Demon Rock
During Joan’s childhood, she lives in an apartment complex in Taiwan, where a large boulder sits in the central courtyard. The boulder is rumored to be haunted by the spirit of a woman who was murdered in the complex and Joan associates the boulder with sinister ideas. The demon rock symbolizes Joan’s childhood trauma and the sense of shame around sexuality that emerged during this period. When she was a young girl, Joan was privy to the knowledge that her mother, Mei, was having an affair with Joseph, a man who also lived in the apartment complex. One day, Joseph fondled Joan; Mei witnessed this and then began treating Joan with jealousy and anger. Rather than protecting her child, Mei treated Joan as a sexual rival. After Mei beats Joan, Joan notices the similarities between the pattern of the rock and the bruises on her body: “the demon rock appeared darker as well, mottled with old blood like her torso. The rock looked not just alive but healthy—as if it had received a transfusion of life” (193). Because the rock symbolizes shame, sexual trauma, and the vulnerability of women (rooted in Joan’s imagined connection between the rock and a survivor of domestic violence), it feeds on Joan’s newly awakened sense of shame and culpability when she is sexualized by her mother and her mother’s lover. Joan’s memories of Taiwan and her childhood become inextricably linked to her fears of the demon rock, which explains why she never returns to Taiwan as an adult.
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