Kingston’s belief that her parents are planning a wedding between her and the Chinese boy only compounds Kingston’s fear that she really is as insane as Crazy Mary and Pee-A-Nah. She worries that she can so realistically imagine movies in her head, and that there are “adventurous people inside [her] head to whom [she] talked.” When she no longer can keep her fears about her sanity to herself, she tries to tell one secret a day to her mother. Intentionally always talking to Brave Orchid when her mother is working late at night in the laundry, Kingston whispers her secrets to her mother, who only replies “Mm” and never stops working. One night, however, when Kingston “whispered and quacked” to let out another secret, Brave Orchid turns to her daughter and says, “I can’t stand this whispering. . . . Senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop. Go away and work. Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don’t feel like hearing your craziness.” Kingston is “relieved” that she can stop confessing to her mother, but Brave Orchid’s comments about her daughter’s “craziness” reinforce Kingston’s fear that she might be insane: “I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be It at our house? Probably me.” She is, after all, the messy and clumsy one who had a “mysterious illness.”
One day at the laundry, when the Chinese boy goes to the bathroom, Kingston’s parents look inside the two mysterious cardboard crates that he always carries with him and find that the crates are full of pornography. To Kingston’s amazement, Brave Orchid, rather than throwing the boy out of the laundry, only comments, “My goodness, he’s not too stupid to want to find out about women.”
Kingston’s isolation from and frustration with her parents, and especially Brave Orchid, who, Kingston feels, doesn’t understand how badly her daughter wants an “American-normal” life, reach a climax after Brave Orchid’s off-handed comment about the Chinese boy and his pornography. One evening, as the family sits eating dinner at the laundry, Kingston’s “throat burst open,” and out pours the many complaints she has been brooding over. She screams at her father and mother to tell the boy—“that hulk”—to leave the laundry and never come back. The boy leaves, never to be seen at the laundry again, but Kingston’s outburst does not end there; she and Brave Orchid have a vehement shouting match.
Kingston shouts that she has her own future plans, which do not include marrying: She plans to apply for financial scholarships to colleges because her teachers say she is very smart. In effect, she rejects her Chinese life, which she perceives as holding her back from becoming Americanized, and prefers to leave Chinese school and run for a student office at her American school and join clubs. She blames Brave Orchid for not being able to teach her English, and, even more damning, she accuses her mother of confusing her with talk-stories. At the height of her emotions, she realizes that her long list of grievances is now “scrambled out of order,” and that she is recalling things that occurred many years ago.
Symbolically, Kingston’s list of complaints recalls the ideographs for revenge that Fa Mu Lan’s father carved on the woman warrior’s back in “White Tigers.” In that chapter, Kingston noted that Fa Mu Lan’s family’s “list of grievances went on and on”; in “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” she writes, “I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother. . . .” Also, Kingston prays for a white horse—“white, the bad, mournful color”—like the “kingly white horse” that Fa Mu Lan rides into battle.
Kingston and Brave Orchid’s argument ends with Brave Orchid shouting “Ho Chi Kuei”—“Ho Chi” means “like,” and “Kuei” means “ghost”—at Kingston, who struggles to find meaning in the words. Chinese immigrants of Brave Orchid’s generation frequently referred to their children as “Ho Chi Kuei,” or half-ghosts, an expression that implies the Chinese-born immigrants’ resentment of the American-born generation’s rejecting traditional Chinese culture. However, in an enigmatic and contradictory way, “Ho Chi Kuei” also suggests the older generation’s jealousy—even pride—that their children can assimilate into American culture and prosper with relative ease. To Brave Orchid, Kingston has become “Ho Chi Kuei,” or like a ghost-foreigner.
Although Brave Orchid, in her anger, threatens to kick Kingston out of the house, we are unsure if Kingston moves out immediately following the fight or later. However, while neither woman seems to win the argument, their relationship changes forever because each reveals closely held secrets. For example, when Kingston accuses Brave Orchid of always calling her ugly, Brave Orchid explains that the phrase is meant to protect Kingston, not harm her: “I didn’t say you were ugly. . . . That’s what we’re supposed to say. That’s what Chinese say. We like to say the opposite.” Although Kingston does not fully understand that it is customary for Chinese parents to deny compliments paid to their children out of fear that vengeful gods might harm the children if the compliments are received vainly, she perceives that Brave Orchid is hurt by having to acknowledge her secret: “It seemed to hurt her to tell me that.” She also discovers that Brave Orchid “cut” Kingston’s frenum because Brave Orchid intended her daughter to “talk more, not less.” And when Kingston accuses her mother of wanting to sell her as a slave, Brave Orchid, who argues that Kingston has misunderstand her all these years, retorts, “Who said we could sell you? We can’t sell people. Can’t you take a joke? You can’t even tell a joke from real life.”
Kingston’s difficulty sorting what is factual in her life and what is imaginary continues even after she and Brave Orchid have their shouting match. For example, the phrase “Ho Chi Kuei” haunts her still, but she cannot ask anyone what this expression means: “I don’t know any Chinese I can ask without getting myself scolded or teased, so I’ve been looking in books.” However, she finds no definitive definition for the phrase, although she cynically remarks that one possible meaning is “dustpan-and-broom”—“a synonym for ‘wife.’” Fearful of being ridiculed by Chinese people were she to ask them about Chinese customs she doesn’t understand, Kingston searches for answers on her own but is unsuccessful. Consequently, she still cannot understand many of the things that Brave Orchid does—for example, placing drinks on the supper table for invisible ancestors. “I continue to sort out what’s just my childhood, just my imagination, just my family, just the village, just movies, just living,” she writes. “I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. . . . I enjoy the simplicity.”
By confronting her mother, Kingston, for the first time in her life, discovers a strong, personal voice with which she can reconcile the competing Chinese and American cultures. She learns to exercise power over her world through the use of words and the ability to form ideas. Like Brave Orchid, she now can conquer her own ghosts using talk-stories. Apart from American ghosts, however, Chinese ghosts, particularly female ancestors and crazy women, still haunt her. Throughout the novel, the many women whom Kingston refers to, who commit suicide, are locked up, or even killed, suffer for their failure to find individualized voices that assert their selfhood. Similarly, Kingston, by asserting her identity—especially her female identity—through language, risks being branded “crazy” by her family and treated as an outcast, a “ghost,” by the Chinese community.
Kingston introduces The Woman Warrior’s final talk-story, which focuses on the second-century Chinese female poet Ts’ai Yen, by saying, “Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine.” Here, Kingston’s choice of words is especially important: She publicly acknowledges that Brave Orchid’s talk-stories still play a significant role in her life, and that she and Brave Orchid share a special bond between them—a love for talk-story.
The talk-story begins with Brave Orchid telling how Kingston’s grandmother loved Chinese operas, and how her family, once while they attended an operatic performance, were almost hurt and robbed by bandits. Kingston then imagines that one of the operas her grandmother saw involved Ts’ai Yen, who is not as well known as the mythical Fa Mu Lan but whose life is better documented factually. Born in 177, not in 175 as Kingston suggests, Ts’ai Yen, the daughter of a wealthy scholar-statesman, was a musician and a poet. During a village raid in 195, she was captured by invading horsemen, whose chieftain made her his wife. For twelve years, she lived with these “barbarians” in the desert, and she even bore two children by the chieftain. Whenever the children’s father would leave the family tent, Ts’ai Yen would talk and sing in Chinese to her children. Eventually, she was ransomed and returned to her family so that she could remarry and produce Han—Chinese—descendants.
Among Ts’ai Yen’s writings is the lamentation “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” in which Ts’ai Yen relates her life among her captors and her return to her own people. The title of The Woman Warrior’s final chapter, based on Ts’ai Yen’s title, suggests that Kingston identifies herself as living among “barbarians.” More significant, however, is the symbolic relationship between Ts’ai Yen and Kingston’s parents: Ts’ai Yen was physically forced to leave her village, and Kingston’s parents, especially her father, because of depressed economic conditions in China, had no choice but to leave their homeland and seek employment in America; Ts’ai Yen characterizes her captors as barbarians, and Brave Orchid thinks all Americans are “barbarians”; and Ts’ai Yen, held captive for twelve years, sings about China and her Chinese family as a means to remember her cultural past; Brave Orchid’s many talk-stories are her means of preserving her cultural past.
Although Ts’ai Yen eventually is reconciled with her family in China, Kingston only briefly notes the former captive’s return to her homeland. Instead, she focuses on Ts’ai Yen’s recognizing the validity of the barbarians’ culture rather than on Ts’ai Yen’s lamenting over her separation from her native culture. Because the barbarians and their culture symbolize Brave Orchid’s perceptions of America, had Kingston dwelled on Ts’ai Yen’s separation from her family and village while disparaging the nomads’ culture, she would have validated the superiority, or supremacy, of a Chinese identity over an American identity; she would have justified Brave Orchid’s belief that American culture is barbarous. However, by concentrating on Ts’ai Yen’s recognition of and reconciliation with the nomads, Kingston suggests an ability to live harmoniously in both American and Chinese cultures. The talk-story implies not only Brave Orchid’s recognition of American influences on her daughter, but also Kingston’s own eventual acceptance of her Chinese past, which, after all, “translated well.”
