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The second section is about the daughters' lives, and the vignettes in each section trace their personality growth and development. Through the eyes of the daughters, there is the continuation of the mothers' stories and how they lived in America. The Chinese-American daughters try their best to become "Americanized," at the same time showing off their heritage while their mothers watch on, dismayed.
The second section of the book is named The Twenty-Six Malignant Gates because in this section, the problem of communication and lack of understanding between mothers and daughters is shown. This section is full with mother-daughter conflicts. Lindo Jong's daughter, Waverly, ran away from home when she was young. Ying-Ying St. Clair's daughter, Lena, recalls of her past. She longed to have some kind of open interaction and expression with her mother. Lena now wonders if there is any sacrifice she could make to restore her mother's sanity. Rose, the daughter of An-Mei, shares her childhood story of losing her brother and having her family blame her for his death. She is currently married, but wants a divorce. Unable to do anything about the situation, she feels as helpless as when she watched her brother drowning. She compares her loss of faith in love to her mother's loss of faith in God.
The third section is ironically named American Translation because when the mothers give advice regarding their daughters' problems, the daughters either take the advice to mean something other than the mothers had intended, or they simply ignore it. At the end of each vignette in this section, the daughters, finally taking their mothers' advice realize that their mothers had been right about everything all along. Lena tells her husband that she is unhappy with their life together. For Waverly, she is still afraid of her mother's disapproval on anything she does. To her surprise, her mother is kind and supportive to her decision to remarry a second time.
