The Overstory

by

Richard Powers

The Overstory: Part 1: Roots—Mimi Ma Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
It is 1948 in Shanghai, China, and Ma Sih Hsuin, an electrical engineering student, is preparing to leave for America. He sits with his father Ma Shouying, a wealthy businessman and scholar, discussing their family. They speak English—Shouying’s English is aristocratic and British, while Sih Hsuin’s is poor and awkward—and Shouying notes how far they have come. Their family is Muslim and originally from Persia, but now they run a business empire in Shanghai. Shouying then explains that Sih Hsuin must go to America because the Communists will soon arrive and destroy their family and its wealth. Sih Hsuin protests that the Americans will help them, but Shouying tells him he is being naïve.
As The Overstory shifts to focus on its second protagonist, Mimi Ma, the chapter begins with the backstory of his family, much like the previous chapter began with the backstory of Nick’s family. Sih Hsuin is only allowed to go to America to study engineering as part of a special program (implied to be part of the Displaced Persons Act of 1948), explaining why the rest of his family cannot accompany him. The book again touches briefly on major events in human history, in this case the 1949 Communist Revolution in China.
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Shouying then takes Sih Hsuin to another room where he unlocks a secret safe hidden behind a filing cabinet. Inside are many treasures. First, Shouying removes three jade rings, each intricately carved to show three different trees. “Look the color!” Sih Hsuin exclaims when he sees them. He examines their incredible artistry as Shouying speaks. “You live between three trees,” he says. Behind is the tree of the past: the Lote tree, a sacred tree in the Quran and a sign of their family’s Persian history. In front is the tree of the future: Fusang, a mulberry tree in a magical land to the East. “You’re off to Fusang now,” Shouying tells his son.
These three jade rings are a concrete representation of the passage of time through the image of trees. The ring’s Lote Tree (also called Sidr, a kind of buckthorn) is an image from the Quran, marking the “farthest boundary” at the end of the seventh heaven. Fusang is a mythical tree from Chinese literature representing a mysterious land to the East—often interpreted to mean Japan or the Americas. Shouying sees Fusang as the United States, where his son is now going to make a new life.
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Shouying hands Sih Hsuin the third ring, explaining that the third tree is the tree of “Now,” the tree that is all around and will follow him always. Sih Hsuin asks what kind of tree this is, and in response, Shouying opens a beautiful wooden box. Inside is an ancient painted scroll depicting several old men in robes, one sitting beneath a pine tree. Shouying says the tree of Now is this kind: the pine. The script on the scroll is too old for Sih Hsuin to translate, but his father tells him that it says the men are “Luóhàn. Arhats. Adepts who have passed through the four stages of Enlightenment and now live in pure, knowing joy.”
In some Buddhist traditions, the Luóhàn are arhats, or holy people who have become enlightened and achieved nirvana. One aspect of enlightenment that is emphasized here is living in full awareness of the present, or the “Now.” The Buddha famously became enlightened while sitting beneath a Bodhi Tree (also called sacred fig tree), and one of the arhats in the scroll reflects this image with his position beneath the pine tree. This also calls back to The Overstory’s opening passage, in which the unnamed woman sits beneath a pine tree and receives messages from the trees around her.
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Sih Hsuin is overwhelmed to see these treasures, and he realizes that his family is much wealthier than he ever imagined. Shouying tells him that he must take these objects with him to America, because otherwise the Communists will destroy them. Sih Hsuin reluctantly accepts, but he promises to bring the heirlooms back when China is safe again.
Shouying has no hope for the future of his family or his country, so he sends off his most prized possessions with his son. Everything the Mas have built might be destroyed, but at least these precious objects may yet survive.
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Get the entire The Overstory LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Overstory PDF
Later Sih Hsuin begins his journey east. He takes a train to Hong Kong, where he boards a ship. The Asian passengers are crammed together belowdecks, while the Europeans live luxuriously above. After 21 days at sea, they arrive in San Francisco, and Sih Hsuin feels happy and optimistic. To fit American norms, he reverses his name, so that he is now Sih Hsuin Ma instead of Ma Sih Hsuin.
The Overstory tends to only briefly touch on important events from history and the human experience, and everything is narrated in the present tense. This creates a disorienting mixture of past and present that’s similar to how a tree experiences time (a tree’s rings contain both the past and the present). Here, the book touches on anti-Chinese racism: Sih Hsuin is forced into poor conditions on the boat simply because he's Asian, and he feels compelled to Americanize his name so that others will accept him.
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A customs official questions Sih Hsuin and looks through his luggage. She doesn’t find the jade rings, which have been baked into moon cakes, but the scroll is out in plain sight. The official asks about it, and Sih Hsuin tries to stay calm. He explains that the men in the paintings have discovered “the True Thing,” which is that “human beings, so small. And life, so very big.” The official laughs scornfully at this and waves Sih Hsuin through.
In his beginner’s English, Sih Hsuin touches on the idea that human beings do not encompass the whole of life, and in fact are just a small aspect of something much larger and more complex. He is referring to this principal in the context of Buddhism, but it also applies to the book’s general portrayal of humanity as just one part of the natural world.
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Years pass, and Sih Hsuin becomes “Winston Ma.” He attends school in Pittsburgh, marries a Southern white woman named Charlotte, and moves to Wheaton, Illinois. In the backyard of their new house Winston plants a mulberry tree, the tree of Fusang, to honor his father and the silkworms, the source of their family’s success. As they stand looking at the tree, Charlotte relates a supposed Chinese saying that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the next best time is now.
Silkworms only live on mulberry trees, and it is implied that the Ma family in China made its fortune at least partially through the silk business. This is also the tree represented on one of the jade rings: Fusan, or the tree of the future. Meanwhile, Winston is suppressing his past self—even his name—in order to more fully assimilate into American culture.
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“Countless nows pass,” and Winston’s three young daughters sit eating beneath the mulberry tree while their parents are shut up in their bedroom, blasting classical music. The girls argue about who Mao is, their “Chinese grandpa” who is in a work camp, what their father’s job is—Winston works at a lab inventing a travel phone—and what they think their parents are doing in their room. Nine-year-old Mimi, the oldest girl, starts to climb the mulberry to look into their window.
Describing the past as a collection of “nows,” or present moments, challenges the way people view time. It suggests that perhaps the past, present, and future aren’t as distinct as human beings tend to assume. Winston’s daughters know almost nothing about China or their father’s past life there, suggesting that he is still very closed off about this part of his identity. The “Chinese grandpa” is Shouying, who was indeed imprisoned by the Communists as he himself predicted.
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Mimi thinks about her father, who was entirely a mystery to her until just the day before. Winston is beloved by all as a “small, cute, smiling, warm, Muslim Chinese guy who loves math,” but he never speaks Chinese and rarely talks about his past. The day before, however, Mimi had come home crying because of a classmate’s racist bullying. Winston then finally told his daughter about his life in China and about Mao and the Communists.
Winston seems to want his agreeable personality (he’s “small, cute, smiling, warm”) to overshadow any cultural or racial differences that could make him stand out in the U.S. However, because Mimi has no connection to her Chinese family or background, she feels confused when faced with racist bullying. As a result, Winston’s love for his daughter overcomes his reluctance to talk about his past.
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Winston then took Mimi into his study and showed her the three jade rings and the arhat scroll. About the arhats, Winston said, “They solve life. They pass the final exam. […] Chinese superhero!” At that moment, Mimi felt as if older versions of herself were rising up within her current nine-year-old self, as time became “a column of concentric circles,” with her eternal self at the center and “the present floating outward along the outermost rim.”
Mimi’s feelings in this scene present the passage of time as being like the rings of a tree. Instead of moving towards the future in one direction, trees grow outward ring by ring, always preserving their past rings in concentric circles alongside their outermost present ones. Mimi feels like this for a moment: she becomes “a column of concentric circles” in which “the present float[s] outward along with outermost rim.” In other words, she contains past, present, and future within herself all at once.
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Quotes
Back in the present, Mimi keeps climbing the mulberry tree. Her youngest sister, Amelia, yells at her that she’s not allowed to climb the tree, and then calls to their father that “Mimi’s in the silk farm!” Mimi hushes her and promises to show her and Carmen, the middle sister, something special. Then they sneak into Winston’s office, and Mimi shows her sisters the rings and the scroll.
The Mas refer to the mulberry tree as the “silk farm” because it is the only kind of tree that can house silkworms. The unique description of time continues as Mimi remembers her revelation in the study while also experiencing the present moment of climbing the mulberry tree.
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Winston Ma loves America’s national parks, and every June he takes the family on a trip to visit them. He spends months planning and preparing, and then they all squeeze into their car and take a road trip. This summer they go to Yosemite, and Winston takes meticulous notes about every campsite where they stay. The girls practice their instruments in the car but mostly fight with each other. Charlotte doesn’t try to stop them, and the narrator notes that she is already beginning to slip into dementia, though no one knows it yet.
Mimi will come to associate these trips to national parks with memories of a happy childhood, which means that she will also feel a strong connection to the wilderness and forests of these parks. In mentioning Charlotte’s worsening dementia, the omniscient narrator again steps outside the perspective of the characters in the present.
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At one campsite, Winston fly fishes in a lake, and Mimi accompanies him. Winston loves fly fishing and feels free out on the water, measuring everything and trying to “think like a fish.” Watching him, Mimi thinks that he is like the next arhat, a descendant of the men on the scrolls. Later, as the family is picnicking, a bear suddenly wanders into their camp. Charlotte grabs Amelia and runs into the lake, and Mimi and Carmen quickly climb a tree. Winston remains seated.
Mimi recognizes that Winston becomes like an enlightened arhat when he lets his mind and attention slow, focusing on the movements of the river and “think[ing] like a fish.” This is another example of the book’s emphasis on the importance of paying attention and immersing oneself in nature.
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The bear wanders around the camp as Winston stays perfectly still, taking photos of it. When the bear approaches him, Winston stands up and starts talking to the bear in Chinese, while slowly edging toward the car. The bear seems distracted, and Winston is then able to toss it some food and the whole family runs to the car. Later that night Mimi, in awe of her father, asks Winston if he was afraid. He says that he wasn’t, and that it is “Not my time yet. Not my story.” This idea frightens Mimi—that he could know when his “story” will end. Winston says that when he was talking to the bear, he apologized to it for humanity’s stupidity. He said, “Don’t worry. Human being leaving this world, very soon.”
Winston carries over his arhat-like attention to the dangerous encounter with the bear, as he is able to remain calm and keep his family safe by treating the bear like a fellow conscious creature. It is also notable that in a time of crisis, Winston returns to speaking Chinese, suggesting that he has not cut off that part of himself at all, but just keeps it private now that he’s living in the U.S. This is the first example of a character taking comfort in the fact that nature will outlast humanity, as Winston assures the bear that humans will go extinct soon, and then nature will be left alone once more.
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Mimi ends up going to Mount Holyoke College, where she starts to date women. She studies poetry at first, but after reading Edwin Abbott’s book Flatland, she realizes that she wants to be an engineer like Winston. She transfers to Berkeley and starts studying ceramic engineering. She thrives there, and after graduation takes a job as a casting process supervisor in Portland. The job requires a lot of travel, and she goes to Korea often. Meanwhile Carmen and Amelia also grow up, go to college, and get jobs.
The narrative again speeds up to summarize several years in the course of a few paragraphs. Flatland is an allegorical novel satirizing class rigidity and dogmatism through a world based on geometry. Ceramic engineering involves working with certain kinds of inorganic and non-metallic materials, and it’s applicable to many industries and other kinds of engineering.
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In Wheaton, the mulberry tree is attacked by bugs and bacteria. Winston tries everything, but the tree is slowly dying. One day, he calls Mimi and tells her that his invention has finally been completed and sold to other companies. Winston seems dispirited by this, however, and he lingers on the dying mulberry tree. Mimi tries to cheer him up, as she has never heard him sound so depressed. Charlotte picks up the phone and starts speaking in Latin. Then Winston returns, asking Mimi, “What I do now?” When they hang up, Mimi intends to call her sisters and tell them about the call, but soon other responsibilities and distractions drive it from her mind.
Despite their love for each other, Winston still remains something of a mystery to his daughters, and Mimi doesn’t know how to comfort him in his depression. She expects him to stay the same as always, and she can’t accept that there might be deep pain beneath his mild exterior. Winston focuses on the mulberry tree as the image of his troubles, feeling that his own life’s story is coming to an end as the tree dies.
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That fall, Winston dies by suicide. One day, while Charlotte is in the basement studying Latin, Winston sits under the dying mulberry and shoots himself in the head. There is no suicide note except for a poem by Wang Wei left open in his study. Mimi is at the airport when she gets the call. Before she even answers, she feels that she knows what has happened and is even remembering it already.
As with the death of Nick Hoel’s family, this tragedy is placed in immediate proximity to an important tree. When Mimi gets the call about Winston’s death, she has another experience of time that differs from the usual human perspective. Wang Wei was a famous Chinese poet from the 700s B.C.E. Wei’s writing embodied Buddhist ideals like the concept of the “now,” which hearkens back to the tree of “Now” represented by the third jade ring.
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Mimi returns home, where Charlotte is slipping into dementia and won’t accept that Winston is dead. The body and gun have been removed, but nothing else, so Mimi has to clean up the bits of her father’s brain scattered across the yard and mulberry tree. When she’s done, she sits under the dying tree and weeps.
This traumatic event makes Winston’s death viscerally real for Mimi, as she must experience the literal destruction of his mind beneath the mulberry tree. Further, she cannot even turn to her mother in this time, as Charlotte becomes wholly delusional in response to the tragedy.
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Carmen and Amelia arrive, and the three sisters sit together, remembering their father and trying to understand his suicide. They avoid the mulberry tree. Mimi tells them about the phone call, and in response, Amelia comforts her while Carmen blames her. Meanwhile, Charlotte keeps speaking about Winston in the present tense, claiming that she’ll see him again.
As with the Hoels and their chestnut, the Ma mulberry tree is now intimately tied to both Winston’s life and his tragic death. Mimi and Carmen seem to have a combative relationship, while Amelia generally tries to keep the peace between her sisters.
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The three daughters have to deal with all the paperwork that comes with a sudden death. Mimi tells the others that they need to divide Winston’s belongings, and that Charlotte can’t take care of herself anymore. She and Carmen argue, while Amelia tries to keep the peace. Later, the daughters decide to each take one of the three jade rings. They reach in blindly to pick at random, and Mimi receives the ring representing the tree of the future: the pine. Mimi suggests selling the arhat scroll or donating it to a museum, but Carmen wants it to stay in the family. She leaves it to Mimi to get its value appraised.
The pine tree is associated with the arhat scroll and the Buddha’s bodhi tree. It’s also another reminder of The Overstory’s opening pages in which the unnamed woman achieves a kind of enlightenment beneath the pine; it’s possible that this woman is Mimi.
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The police return the gun that Winston used, but no one in the family has a permit for it. Mimi puts it in the carrier of her old bicycle and rides to the gun shop where Winston bought it, hoping to sell it back. On the way, she is stopped by a police officer. She is terrified that he will find the gun, but he sends her on her way. Later Mimi waits at the airport for her flight back to Portland, twisting the jade ring around her finger nervously. She has the arhat scroll in her carry-on bag. Mimi feels that she only wants peace, but she must now live “in the shadow of the bent mulberry.”
Instead of finding enlightenment beneath a tree, Mimi has, at this point, found only sorrow under the mulberry. She feels wholly lost as she must now return to her normal life, devastated by her father’s death but still entirely without answers or closure. As with the section about Nick Hoel, Mimi’s introduction ends with human tragedy “in the shadow” of a tree.
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