Even the hotel she stays in looks like "a grander version of the Hyatt Regency" and the Chinese feast she had envisioned was replaced by "hamburgers, french fries, and apple a la mode." It is not until she finally meets her twin sisters, in modern Shanghai, that she realizes that she is Chinese because of "blood" and not face or place. Within this story, however, is her mother's story, set in another time and place. Fleeing from the Japanese invasion, during World War Two in 1944, Jing-Mei's mother is forced to abandon her twin daughters on the road between Kweilin and Chungking. Upon hearing her mother's story Jing-Mei Woo is able to understand a great deal more about her mother and their relationship, as well as her own past. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" also uses its setting to explore place and heritage to give us better insight into the actions and feelings of the characters. Julian, living in a poor neighborhood with his mother, shortly after the integration of blacks to public transportation, struggles to get his mother to understand that the world has changed. No longer are there huge plantations with hundreds of slaves, in fact "there are no more slaves." Once fashionable neighborhoods, like the one in which they live, are now run down and dingy. Julian's mother persists in her belief that "since this had been a fashionable neighborhood forty years ago, they did well to have an apartment in it." Her grandfather had owned a plantation with two hundred slaves, whom she believed would have been better off if they stayed as such. To Julian's mother, "Your great-grandfather was a former governor, your grandfather a prosperous land owner. Your grandmother was a Godhigh," heritage makes a person. Having grown up with free blacks and integrated systems, Julian wanted to make his mother realize that you are not just born to status and culture any more by saying, "True culture is in the mind." He wanted her to unde...
