Even in the Chinese school, not all of the Chinese girls manage to speak. Kingston tells the story of one Chinese girl who is always silent. When this silent girl reads aloud in the classroom, she whispers, and no one ever hears her talk outside of class, not even on the Chinese school’s playground. In the eyes of the other children, there is little difference between Kingston and this girl, and Kingston resents this public perception of her as being the same as the silent girl. She also recognizes the unpopularity and non-conformity in the girl’s demeanor and fears that the girl’s public image implies her own unpopularity and non-conformity. Kingston hates this silent girl.
One day, finding herself alone with the silent girl in the Chinese school’s bathroom, Kingston confronts her and tries to make her talk. Despite becoming violent and brutal to her, Kingston cannot force the girl to talk; however, she does make her cry, although that was not Kingston’s intention in confronting the girl. Ironically, by the end of this scene, Kingston finds herself crying alongside the silent girl. She finally recognizes that the girl is trying to deal with fears similar to her own. They are not so different after all. Following this episode, Kingston falls sick and spends eighteen months in bed at home. Her “mysterious illness,” she believes, is retribution for her cruelty to the girl.
Ironically, Kingston’s bullying and cajoling the silent girl to speak is yet another example of how people “want to capture your voice for their own use,” although at the time, Kingston would not be aware of the hypocrisy of her own actions toward the girl. This episode, one of the few talk-stories not to originate from Brave Orchid, mirrors earlier stories in the novel in which females, language, silence, and identity are wholly and inextricably intertwined: No Name Woman’s family’s refusing to honor the memory of their suicidal relative, and Brave Orchid’s subsuming Moon Orchid’s voice within her own when the two women confront Moon Orchid’s husband. “If you don’t talk,” Kingston explains to the silent girl, whom she never names and thus denies an identity, much like No Name Woman’s family denied her an identity, “you can’t have a personality. . . . You’ve got to let people know you have a personality and a brain.”
During her confrontation with the silent girl, Kingston’s deep hatred of the girl lessens as she becomes more and more aware that she and the girl are alike: Both face similar fears inherent in assimilating into a new culture. Although Kingston resolves to make the silent girl speak, her inability to do so forces her to come to terms with her own fears associated with language and personal identity. At first, Kingston’s voice is “steady and normal,” but even after she physically hurts the silent girl by pulling her hair and pinching her skin and still the girl won’t talk, Kingston begins losing control of her own emotions. She implores the girl to “Just say ‘Stop,’” then screams “Talk” at the frightened girl, and then begs for any response: "Just say 'a' or 'the,' and I'll let you go. Come on. Please.” Finally, desperate and scared, she attempts to bribe her nemesis. “Look. I’ll give you something if you talk,” she pleads. “I’ll give you my pencil box. I’ll buy you some candy.” Ironically, Kingston’s offering candy to the silent girl recalls Brave Orchid’s demanding “reparation candy” from the drugstore.
Kingston’s lack of confidence in speaking English continues into adulthood, although she admits that English is easier to speak as she gets older. However, it remains painful for her to ask a bus driver for directions, or even to say “hello” casually. “A telephone call makes my throat bleed and takes up that day’s courage,” she writes earlier in the chapter. Her difficulty in speaking English is mitigated by a feeling of shame about her Chinese culture and Chinese adults, who, from her Chinese-American perspective, appear unsophisticated—for example, her mother and her mother’s generation still believe in ghosts and practice traditional Chinese customs.
Another reason for Kingston’s anxiety about speaking English derives from her parents’ mistrust of Americans, who, they suspect, will force them out of the country. Because of this deep-seated fear, Brave Orchid and her husband continually warn their children never to speak to American “ghosts”: “There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China.” What Kingston’s parents fail to recognize, however, is the precarious position in which they place their children, who are afraid to speak English for fear of entrapping their parents, but who are also mystified by the many secretive Chinese customs that Brave Orchid, who never explains her actions, performs. “Sometimes I hated the [American] ghosts for not letting us talk,” Kingston writes; “sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese. ‘Don’t tell,’ said my parents, though we couldn’t tell if we wanted to because we didn’t know.”
What complicates Kingston’s divided loyalties between her parents’ demanding that she not speak to Americans and her wanting to speak English to become more assimilated into American culture is her fear that “talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity.” She writes, “Insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain themselves,” which is precisely her predicament: She can’t “explain” who she is because her parents order her not to, but she couldn’t even if she wanted to because her parents refuse to tell her any factual information about their Chinese past, let alone the details of their coming to America. And what is even worse for Kingston are the many women she encounters who seem to support her belief that silence equals insanity. The “woman next door,” who, we are led to believe, cannot conceive children, scares Kingston even though the woman “said nothing, did nothing”; Crazy Mary, who as a toddler was left behind in China by her parents when they immigrated to America, becomes insane because by the time she is re-united with her parents in America, Kingston infers, she is too old to master English; and Pee-A-Nah, “the village idiot, the public one,” chases Kingston and her siblings, but not once does Kingston indicate that Pee-A-Nah actually says anything. Significantly, Kingston notes that the name “Pee-A-Nah,” which one of Kingston’s brothers made up, “does not have a meaning.” Personal names are powerful words in that they represent our personal identities; however, a name that “does not have a meaning,” that is indiscriminately used to identify a person, diminishes the unique individuality of that person. What frightens Kingston most is that she will become the village’s next crazy woman, that she will be silenced like Crazy Mary and Pee-A-Nah and lose her emerging individuality.
To become more assimilated into American culture, Kingston believes that she must totally reject her “Chineseness,” traits and customs that she connects most with her mother. She also decides that she will never be a slave or a wife, both female roles that she associates with Brave Orchid’s talk-stories. When she suspects that her parents are planning to marry her off to one of the new Chinese emigrants, whom she refers to as “FOB’s”—“Fresh-off-the-Boat’s”—she displays behavior that she knows the suitor will find totally unacceptable in a traditional Chinese wife. Humorously, she writes, “I dropped two dishes . . . [and] limped across the floor. I twisted my mouth and caught my hand in the knots of my hair. I spilled soup on the FOB when I handed him his bowl.” Because it was customary for the oldest daughter to be married before younger ones, Kingston knows that she can protect both herself and her sisters by being labeled an undesirable fool. By playing the fool, however, she plays a dangerous game, risking rejection from her Chinese society and being branded crazy—her biggest fear.
In addition to worrying about the newly arrived Chinese emigrants, Kingston becomes concerned when a Chinese boy starts visiting the family’s laundry despite its always being hot and uncomfortable. When she realizes that this boy, whom she refers to as the “mentally retarded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind,” visits the laundry because of her, she changes her work shift to avoid him. However, he figures out her new work schedule and continues to show up when she is working. Because her parents do not seem to mind the boy’s visiting the laundry, Kingston suspects that they are matchmaking the two of them. She fears that the bumbling behavior she feigned to repel the “FOB’s” is backfiring, and that her “undesirability” will lead her into a marriage with the boy: “I studied hard, got straight A’s, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect.”
