Picture Us in the Light

The final section of Picture Us in the Light demonstrate that sometimes, there are no tidy resolutions to external and internal conflicts. Kelly Loy Gilbert traces the gap of understanding between first-generation children and their immigrant parents, an often-painful gap that leads to isolation and misunderstandings. Danny has enjoyed the privileges his parents’ hard work has provided. He’s grown up in peaceful, secure places and has been nurtured to be confident and explorative in his hobbies. But these privileges have come at a cost that Danny can’t fully understand because they are beyond his experiences. His parents have sacrificed the comforts of home, language, culture, and their own families and friends—all things that he himself holds dear. They sacrificed these comforts for Danny, so that he might live a life with more opportunities.

Danny will never be able to grasp what his parents endure, just as they can’t relate to his life. Gilbert frames immigrant families as resilient and tight knit, but sometimes unable to express themselves openly. In this final section, Danny has difficulty acknowledging his own lies and endangerment of his parents. It takes him a long time to apologize for the accident that ruined their last car and nearly killed his mother. This struggle with expressing himself often makes him turn to art, in which he doesn’t need to say the right thing at the moment and can instead revise his expression over and over again. Danny has difficulty talking with his parents because the depth of their pain feels insurmountable. His parents also have difficulty expressing themselves, sometimes due to language but mostly due to their commitment to keep their son safe and happy. They want to carry their own burdens without troubling Danny, but the latter wants to be included and help when he can.

Another major gap between Danny and his parents is the issue of legality. Danny is an American citizen and will never have to face the threats of deportation and imprisonment that follow his parents. Gilbert explores illegal immigration in this section, noting the injustice inherent in the term; if someone can be labeled as “illegal”, then their very presence is in juxtaposition with someone who is superior or, “legal”. This idea implies that people like Danny’s parents, who are loving, hard-working, and dynamic individuals, don’t deserve the safety that their son enjoys. In labeling someone as “illegal,” society creates an Other—“illegal immigrants” like Danny’s parents. This othering leads to insecurity because Danny’s parents have to be in constant hiding, worried that any slight movement will mean the end of the lives they’ve built. Being deemed “illegal” means keeping their very existence a secret, preventing them from being full beings in their son’s life, with their friends, and within society. Gilbert highlights the injustice of this by framing Danny’s parents as good people in a difficult, unfair situation. The lengths to which they need to go to keep their lives secret is so severe that they even reject medical attention when Danny’s mother is injured in the car accident. Danny’s artwork, the portrait of his mother, inadvertently exposes her to the world. Living “undocumented” means living a life of constant anxiety, of secrets and hiding.

In this section, Danny struggles with avoiding regret and finding resolution. He tries to tell Harry how he feels about him, even though he himself hasn’t come to terms with his love. Danny nonetheless wants to address these feelings because he worries that later in his life, he will regret not telling Harry about being in love with him. He already harbors regret over his family, Sandra, and Regina. He knows revealing the truth could affect his friendship with Harry, but the risk of regret is too much to bear. Notably, Danny decides to tell Harry about his feelings at a moment of high tension, as he is about to meet his long-lost sister Joy for the first time.

Therefore, Danny’s decision to confess to Harry can also be seen as a reaction to stress and his desire to live free of regret, not just something born of love. He seeks resolutions but learns that sometimes there are no resolutions. He cannot fix his parents’ immigration problem—in fact, trying to get involved might get them into trouble. Danny can’t bring Joy back to his parents, find a way to refinance their lives, or fix their past hurt. He can’t bring back Sandra, comfort Regina, or help Harry discover who he is. Gilbert presents these conflicts but doesn’t provide them with resolutions to emphasize her message that life is complex and sometimes resolution is impossible. However, this is not a message without hope; rather, Gilbert encourages her young readers to acknowledge the complexity of the world and maintain resilience throughout life’s challenges. People will always face problems that seem insurmountable, but it’s important to not give up on life and hope even without resolution.

In this section, Gilbert reveals the purpose of the flashbacks to China, which started as implied imaginings on Danny’s part but were actually the real story of his sister Joy. At first, these flashbacks seemed like Danny’s machinations because the novel is told through his first-person perspective. But Gilbert deviates from Danny to focus on Joy’s life in China. She adds these flashbacks to increase tension and slowly reveal Danny’s parents’ secrets. She utilizes this perspective in the final pages of her novel, in which Joy and Danny reunite again—this time, on Joy’s terms.

Providing this perspective helps end the novel on a hopeful note after the revelation that Danny’s parents left him without a trace so he could be free to live his life without their burden. The novel begins with a look into Danny’s father’s mysterious experiment, a controversial project that made Danny’s mother upset. In the final section of the novel, Gilbert circles back to this experiment and reveals why it caused so much friction: The experiment was Danny’s father’s way of reestablishing a metaphorical connection to his lost daughter, which Danny’s mother despised as it reminded her of whom she lost. Structurally, Gilbert fills in “plot holes” to solve some mysteries while keeping the ending open-ended to emphasize her message that not every conflict has an easy resolution.

In the end, Danny’s parents make one final sacrifice: They leave their son and go into hiding without telling him how he can find them. Worried that Danny will be burdened by their problems, Danny’s parents abandon him so he can attend RISD and have the future he worked for—the future they themselves invested in with sacrifice, love, and their own hard work. Though it makes for a painful ending, Gilbert includes this plot twist to emphasize the power of familial love.