“What other pool can they swim in”

“What other pool can they swim in?” is Margaret Campbell’s question about whether a relationship between an American woman and a Chinese man can bridge the cultural distance she sees between them. The image turns her fear of exclusion into a problem of belonging: if each person is out of place in the other’s world, she wonders whether they can share any world at all.

Meaning and First Use

Margaret uses the expression while speaking with Jack Geller about trouble in her relationship with Li Yan. She describes the cultural gap through the image of two people each being a fish out of water in the other’s country, then asks what shared pool could possibly hold them. The question follows her reference to language, culture, and politics, making the metaphor encompass more than national difference: it gathers the barriers she believes shape their intimacy into one image of separation.

The question is rhetorical rather than a request for a practical solution. Margaret presents the gap as immense and difficult to cross, and casts herself as the person who cannot compete with a Chinese woman in Li Yan’s world. Her formulation reveals both the emotional force of that comparison and the limits of the perspective from which she makes it: she imagines belonging as a choice between pools, not as a space the couple might create together.

Return to the Image

Later, as Margaret walks alone beside the river, she returns to the same metaphor while considering what she will do next. She feels alienated both from the United States, which has seemed foreign since her return, and from China, which she cannot bring herself to call home. She resolves to complete her work on the Shanghai murders, re-autopsy the body in Beijing, and bring Xinxin back south before deciding what comes after.

Her thoughts bring the relationship question into sharper focus. If Li is truly drawn to Mei-Ling, Margaret believes she cannot compete; she recalls having told Jack that she and Li swim in very different pools. The image thus links a broad sense of cultural displacement to an immediate romantic fear, without resolving either one.

Narrative Significance

The pool metaphor recurs as a way of expressing Margaret’s uncertainty about where she belongs and whether her relationship with Li can survive the distance she perceives between them. Its repetition carries the earlier barroom question into a private moment of decision: she cannot yet name a home or determine the future of the relationship, so she concentrates on the work before her and lets events unfold. The expression gives that suspension a concise form, joining cultural difference, romantic insecurity, and Margaret’s feeling of being displaced.