Waverly laughed in a lighthearted way. 'I mean, really, June.' And then she started in a deep television-announcer voice: 'There benefits, three needs, three reasons to buy... Satisfaction guaranteed...' She said this in such a funny way that everybody thought it was a good joke and laughed. And then, to make matters worse, I heard my mother saying to Waverly: 'True, one can't teach style, June is not sophisticated like you. She must have been born this way.' I was surprised at my self, how humiliated I felt. I had been outsmarted by Waverly once again, and now betrayed by my own mother. Five months ago, some time after the dinner, my mother gave me my 'life's importance,' a jade pendant on a gold chain. The pendant was not a piece of jewelry I would have chosen for myself. It was almost the size of my little finger, a mottled green and white color, intricately carved. To me, the whole effect looked wrong: too large, too green, too garishly ornate. I stuffed the necklace ha my lacquer box and forget about it. But these day, I think about my life's importance. I wonder what it means, because my mother died three months ago, six days before my thirty-sixth birthday. And she's the only person I could have asked to tell me about life's importance, to help me understand my grief. I now wear that pendant every day. I think the carvings mean something, because shapes and details, which I never seem td notice until after they are pointed out to me, always mean something to Chinese people. I know I could ask Auntie Lindo, Auntie An-mei, or other Chinese friends, but I also know they would tell me a meaning that is different from what my mother intended. What if they tell me this curving line branching into three oval shapes is a pomegranate and that my mother was wishing me fertility and posterity? What if my mother really meant the carvings were a branch of pears to give me purity and honesty? And because l think about this all the time, I always notice other people wearing these same jade pendants-not the flat rectangular medallions or the round white ones with holes in the middle but ones like mine, a two-inch oblong of bright apple green, It's as though we were all sworn to the same secret covenant, so secret we don't even know what we belong to. East weekend, for example, ! saw a bartender wearing one. As I fingered mine, I asked him. 'Where'd you get yours?' 'my mother gave it to me,' He said. I asked him why, which is a nosy question that only one Chinese person can ask another in a crowd Caucasians, two Chinese people are already like family. 'She gave it to me after I got divorced, I guess my mother's telling me I'm still worth something.' And I knew by the wonder in his voice that he had no idea what the pendant really meant. In paragraph 1, Waverly characterizes June's advertisement as being______.