In this final chapter of The Woman Warrior, Kingston discusses further the difficulties she experienced growing up as a Chinese-American female. Greatest among these challenges was learning to speak English to non-Chinese people, while struggling to confront traditional Chinese culture, represented by her mother, which inhibited her efforts to integrate fully into American culture. She searches to locate a middle ground in which she can live within each of these two respective cultures; while doing so, she creates a new, hybrid identity between them. At the close of the chapter, she draws on a talk-story about the legendary Chinese female poet Ts’ai Yen to demonstrate her own achievement of a delicate harmony between two competing cultures. Throughout her identity-forming process, she also finds that she must assert herself by breaking away emotionally from her mother, who has been the center of her life. Once free, she can develop an identity of her own.
“A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” begins with Kingston admitting that she heard about Moon Orchid’s disastrous confrontation with her husband, which Kingston related in “At the Western Palace,” from her brother. She then amends this admission: “In fact, it wasn’t me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he’d told her.” This passing on of stories demonstrates the always-changing nature of talk-stories, whose telling is dependent on the teller. For example, Kingston recognizes that her brother narrates Moon Orchid’s story differently than she. “His version of the story,” she writes, “may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs.” However, she relishes her talk-stories’ involved and complicated designs because they emphasize the complexity of both the talk-stories and, more important, their narrator—Kingston herself. Likening herself to a knot-maker who, long ago in China, would have continued to create a special, intricate knot even after the emperor banned its being made, Kingston tests the boundaries that her mother, Chinese culture, and American culture erect to manipulate her every thought and action.
Kingston follows the brief talk-story of the outlawed knot with a discussion between her mother and herself concerning Brave Orchid’s supposedly cutting Kingston’s frenum, the membrane under the tongue that restricts the tongue’s movement. Although Kingston is unsure whether or not Brave Orchid truly sliced her frenum, she wants to believe that her mother did so as an act of empowerment: “Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me.” When Kingston again asks her mother why she cut Kingston’s frenum, Brave Orchid’s answer recalls the word “tied” from the talk-story about the Chinese knot-makers: “I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied.” Brave Orchid understands all too well the necessity of her daughter having the power of language, and the relationship between language and personal identity. Symbolically, Brave Orchid tells Kingston that she cut her frenum so that her tongue “would be able to move in any language. You’ll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another.” Brave Orchid, a powerful Chinese woman in her own right, is concerned that Kingston succeed not only as a woman of Chinese descent, but as a woman of Chinese descent living in America. In order to be successful, Kingston will have to learn to speak English, no matter how upsetting that is to the resigned Brave Orchid.
Kingston is confronted with her first challenge to speak English while attending kindergarten, but the fear and intimidation of publicly speaking English last well into her adulthood. Although she claims that she is making daily progress speaking English to strangers, she cannot forget her first three years of school, when her silence was “thickest.” During these three years, she completely covered her school paintings with black paint, “layers of black over houses and flowers and suns.” Concerned by these paintings, Kingston’s teacher called her parents to the school, but they did not understand English and so could not discuss their daughter’s behavior, other than Kingston’s father cryptically telling Kingston that in China, “The parents and teachers of criminals were executed.” To Kingston, however, these paintings represented the happy possibilities of curtains about to reveal “sunlight underneath, mighty operas.”
Kingston enjoys being silent at school, but life becomes miserable when she eventually realizes that she is expected to speak. “At first it did not occur to me I was supposed to talk or to pass kindergarten,” she writes, but when she flunks kindergarten, “silence became a misery.” Compounding her misery is her feeling of being bad when she is supposed to speak and cannot. When she does speak, her voice comes out as a mere whisper. Ironically, her teacher’s constantly instructing her to speak more loudly hinders rather than helps her confidence. Her fear of speaking recalls the previous chapter, in which Moon Orchid’s ability to talk greatly diminished when she met her husband. The silence that Moon Orchid, Kingston, and other Chinese girls in Kingston’s school experience seems culturally based. Moon Orchid never overcomes her apprehension to speak Chinese, her native language, to her husband; the adult Kingston still struggles to speak English publicly; and the Chinese schoolgirls, although they speak English sooner and more confidently than Kingston, are silent initially. “The other Chinese girls did not talk either,” Kingston notes, “so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl.”
The major obstacle to Kingston’s learning to speak English is culturally based on the individual’s relationship to society. Traditionally, Chinese custom frowns on a person, especially a female, who boldly and assertively speaks: Such behavior implies the individual’s raised status over others. American culture, however, is theoretically based on the rights of individuals, not on the collective whole of society, and the English language, in which a subject—oftentimes the first-person, singular “I”—generally begins each sentence, reflects this cultural emphasis on individualism. But when Kingston, raised by parents who speak only Chinese, reads aloud in English, she stumbles constantly when saying “I.” She writes, “I could not understand ‘I.’ The Chinese ‘I’ has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American ‘I,’ assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight?” Taught by her parents that proper behavior always means demurely acquiescing to others, she struggles with the defiant assertion of the self symbolized by the first-person, singular pronoun: “‘I’ is a capital and ‘you’ is lower-case.” Also, like the word “here,” “I” lacks strong consonants and has a “flat” sound, making it hard for a Chinese speaker to pronounce.
In contrast to spoken English, Chinese pronunciation appears hard and loud, or “chingchong ugly,” as Kingston later characterizes it after she becomes more consciously attuned to American speech and values. This critical statement suggests her embarrassment at how she believes spoken Chinese sounds to American ears. However, cultural inhibition is not the only reason preventing the Chinese girls from speaking aloud. Rather, they want to be accepted as soft-spoken, American, and feminine. Ironically, although they think that they are being feminine, they are, in fact, being too soft to be heard.
Each day, following American school, the Chinese children go to Chinese school. There, the girls do not have the same silence problem that they do in the American school: They “screamed and yelled during recess” like everyone else. Reading Chinese aloud is not as difficult as reading English in the American public school because the children are not singled out to read before the entire class. All of the students read in unison: “. . . we chanted together, voices rising and falling, . . . everybody reading together, reciting together and not alone with one voice.” However, the security that “together” affords Kingston is shattered when a new teacher arrives and makes individual students stand up and read aloud. This experience is too painful for the self-conscious Kingston and her sister, whose voices falter as regularly as they do in the American school: “When it was my turn,” Kingston writes, “the same voice [as her sister’s] came out, a crippled animal running on broken legs.”
Kingston’s and her sister’s experiences in the Chinese school again emphasize language’s power to create personal identities. Although we might expect Kingston to find comfort in speaking Chinese rather than English, she informs us that “you can’t entrust your voice to the Chinese either; they want to capture your voice for their own use.” For example, Brave Orchid forces Kingston, because she is older and speaks English better than the other family members, to demand “reparation candy” from a drugstore whose delivery boy mistakenly delivered medicine to Kingston’s parents’ laundry. Because Brave Orchid cannot speak English, she commandeers Kingston’s voice to do her bidding and in the process embarrasses her daughter. “They want to fix up your tongue to speak for them,” Kingston says of Chinese adults who refuse to learn English.
