In The Woman Warrior, Kingston repeatedly asserts the importance of education, recognizing that Chinese society, although it deems education very important, does not value educating women as much as men. To be a writer, scholar, and poet in China is to be held in high regard. Thus, the decisions of Ding Ling's and Kingston's mothers to pursue an education are even more extraordinary given societal limitations. Clearly, Kingston believes education to be liberating for women. Her own decision to become an educator and writer must be seen in this context.
Given the respect that Kingston has for educators and storytellers like herself, it is not coincidental that she ends The Woman Warrior with the true story of Ts'ai Yen, the first and greatest female poet of ancient China. Captured by the Southern Hsiung-nu in 195, Ts'ai Yen lived among her kidnappers for twelve years but could never fully assimilate into their culture. To cope with her separation from her family and village, Ts'ai Yen wrote "Eighteen Stanza for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," in which she tells of her captivity and her feelings of alienation among foreigners. Similarly, Kingston, in her memoir's last chapter, named for Ts'ai Yen's poem, strongly implies her parents' anguish living in America and, to a lesser degree, her own sense of herself as an alien among "barbarians." Brave Orchid's talk-stories are like the song that Ts'ai Yen sings, which the barbarians cannot understand: "Ts'ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger." The voice that Ts'ai Yen uses is a foreign one, not fully intelligible to others; Brave Orchid's talk-stories mystify Kingston, who struggles to find a personal meaning, something useful, in them. Like both her mother and Ts'ai Yen, Kingston establishes herself as a storyteller and scholar, an act of defiance against a culture that limits women. Claiming a personal voice that is both anguished and bold, she stresses the alienation that she feels living and growing up in a foreign culture. If Kingston's childhood fantasy was to be like Fa Mu Lan, a woman warrior who saves her family from an evil baron, her adult aspiration is to be like Ts'ai Yen, a poet who exorcises her grief through art, thereby saving herself and, indirectly, her family as well.
