In “Peanut’s Fortune”, the wealth of a person represents the good luck that they possess. Upon her meeting with the fortune-teller, Peanut chose her new husband to be prosperous and inherently endowed with riches. As Amy Tan describes, ‘Peanut bought a fortune that promised that within the year she would marry a man who would make both her parents happy. . . . Her future household would have enough riches that she would never desire anything else” (121). After changing her destiny, Peanut was satisfied with her new future, thinking that she escaped bad luck by evading her marriage with a local man from her small hometown. She paralleled wealth with luck, and saw good fortune in her new marriage simply because of her husband’s prosperity. Convinced that this man owned abundant riches to provide for the rest of her …show more content…
The play depicted “landlords and merchants . . . always running after poor people, chasing them until dark. And the only safe place a poor person could go was to this play . . . As long as [the poor person] stood inside the roped-off area, nobody could demand payment” (124). Furthermore, once the New Year had begun, the debts were cancelled. Just as the poor people inside the area were locked away from the grasp of debt collectors, the misfortune of Peanut’s sister was sealed once she entered the market. However, her perspective on her misfortune changed as she fell in love with Wen Fu’s personality, much like how the merchants and landlords fell away from their stubborn attitude and forgave the debts at the start of the new year. In both situations, those with misfortune were “roped-off” and saved from their bad luck. With this change of fortune, attitudes were also transformed on the last day of the year and ultimately carried into the new year, when all animosity was forgotten and everyone wished happiness and luck in the future of