The Three Jade Rings Symbol Analysis

The Ma family’s three jade rings symbolize the passage of time and how it can be perceived differently by different beings. The rings first appear when Ma Shouying gives them to his son Ma Sih Hsuin (later Winston Ma) to take to the U.S. when he flees the coming Communist Revolution in China. The rings are priceless artifacts, each intricately carved to portray scenes involving trees. Shouying describes one ring as the Lote tree (a sacred tree in the Quran) that represents the past; the second ring is Fusang (a mulberry tree in a mysterious Eastern land) that represents the future; the third tree is a pine, representing the present or “Now.” Years later, Winston shows his own daughter Mimi Ma the rings and repeats his father’s explanations.

Throughout The Overstory, the narrator plays with different perceptions of time, challenging readers to consider how time might pass differently for a tree than for a human being. Introduced early in the book, the jade rings serve an important purpose by connecting the motif of trees with the idea of time. Further, the very idea of rings as related to trees points to the “rings” of a tree’s trunk. Most trees grow a new outermost ring each year, building on the rings of their past years. This, the book suggests, is a different way of experiencing time than people are used to. Instead of time moving like an arrow from a past that is left behind and toward a distant future, it moves concentrically outward, always containing the past (like the tree’s inner rings) even as it exists in the present and grows toward the future. Mimi Ma herself experiences a similar sensation after first seeing the three jade rings: she feels like time becomes “a column of central circles,” with her timeless self at the center and her present existing on the outermost ring. This idea of different ways of experiencing time is then important to The Overstory’s general goal of getting readers to step outside of their own limited perspective and consider other kinds of consciousness (namely, that of trees) as having meaning and value.