Kingston, who in “Shaman” narrated the personal talk-story of her mother, Brave Orchid, now relates the failed assimilation into American culture of Brave Orchid’s younger sister, Moon Orchid, whose inability to adapt to a new, American way of life destines her first to insanity and then to death. Estranged from her husband for thirty years after he left China and moved to America, Moon Orchid arrives in America from Hong Kong, where she lived a very comfortable life thanks to her husband, who regularly sent money to support her and their daughter, but who never personally corresponded with his Chinese family. He does not know that Brave Orchid has arranged for her sister to immigrate to America.
Unlike the other chapters in The Woman Warrior, “At the Western Palace” is narrated by a third-person narrator, who relates the talk-story about Kingston’s aunt by constructing a linear plot progression. The chapter opens at the San Francisco airport, where sixty-eight-year-old Brave Orchid has been waiting for over nine hours for Moon Orchid’s arrival. She is irritated that her children are wandering around the airport rather than sitting quietly with her. Moon Orchid’s daughter, whom Brave Orchid also helped emigrate from China, and who has not seen her mother for five years, sits patiently with her aunt. Brave Orchid has been awake since before her sister’s airplane took off from Hong Kong, intent on adding her “will power to the forces that keep an airplane up.” When she sees a group of soldiers and sailors in the airport terminal, she suddenly remembers that her own son is serving in the Vietnam War. Forced now to split her shamanic powers between her sister’s safety and her son’s safety, her head hurts from the concentration in keeping Moon Orchid’s plane airborne and her son’s ship afloat. Anxious about this son, whom she considers to be a heedless boy who will surely die in the war, she divulges her worries about him to her niece. Her other children can take care of themselves, she says, but this son is not normal: He “sticks erasers in his ears, and the erasers are still attached to the pencil stubs. The captain will say, ‘Abandon Ship,’ or, ‘Watch out for bombs,’ and he won’t hear.”
In this episode, in which Brave Orchid waits for Moon Orchid to arrive from Hong Kong, Brave Orchid contrasts her children’s behavior with her niece’s. She is highly critical of her children’s impatience, which she characterizes as a distinctly American trait; however, her niece’s sitting with her impresses Brave Orchid as proper, respectful, Chinese deportment. “Her American children could not sit for very long,” Brave Orchid muses to herself. “They did not understand sitting; they had wandering feet.” She thinks of them as a “bad boy and bad girl,” but her niece’s opinion of her cousins is very different. For example, when Brave Orchid complains that her son in Vietnam is careless and “not normal,” her niece defends him and his siblings. Speaking to her aunt, she says, “Your son can take care of himself. All your children can take care of themselves.”
Brave Orchid does not understand that her children, in addition to caring for themselves, also protect her from situations that would upset her. Such is the case when Brave Orchid accuses her children of hiding letters written to her by her son in Vietnam. Because they know that Brave Orchid wanted her son to flee to Canada to avoid being drafted, and that she worries about his safety, they hide his letters to shield her from the constant threat of his being killed in war.
When Moon Orchid finally arrives at the airport, Brave Orchid is shocked by how old her sister looks. Earlier, Brave Orchid mistakenly identified a young woman as Moon Orchid, but her niece cautiously explained that Moon Orchid would look much older than the woman whom Brave Orchid believed to be her sister. Brave Orchid’s initially identifying this young woman as Moon Orchid recalls the conversation between herself and Kingston at the end of “Shaman,” in which Brave Orchid contended that time in China moves more slowly than in America, and that had she remained in China, she would be young still. Remembering that this previous conversation between Brave Orchid and Kingston chronologically occurs after the events in “At the Western Palace,” Brave Orchid’s continuing to believe in “Shaman” that time is somehow suspended in China, even after she sees how old her newly arrived, younger sister is, emphasizes how strongly ingrained are her misperceptions of her former homeland, and how wholly she identifies herself as Chinese, not Chinese American. Even during the car ride to Stockton, Brave Orchid and Moon Orchid keep saying “Aiaa! How old!” whenever they look disbelievingly at one another.
Back at home, Brave Orchid wants to perform a luck ceremony to welcome her sister, but Moon Orchid tells everyone to open the presents that she has brought for them. She becomes totally immersed in giving out the gifts, including a paper doll of Fa Mu Lan, who, Moon Orchid assures her nieces and nephews, “really existed.” Brave Orchid considers these presents frivolous and extravagant. Unlike Moon Orchid, she is particularly wary of extravagances that may draw the attentions of jealous gods. Eventually, Brave Orchid has her luck ceremony, feeding candy to her children: “It was very important that the beginning be sweet.” The sisters then prepare a huge dinner for the family.
Brave Orchid and her children’s personal interactions during Moon Orchid’s gift-giving are strained at best. The cultural gap between them is immense, in large part because Brave Orchid judges her children based on traditional Chinese manners. For example, when Moon Orchid passes out the paper dolls, the children immediately begin to play with them. However, Brave Orchid, raised by Chinese parents who taught her “correct” Chinese behavior, privately thinks of her children, “How greedy to play with presents, in front of the giver.” This relationship between tradition and behavior is addressed most directly when Brave Orchid remembers that the Chinese word for “impolite” is “untraditonal.” She characterizes her children as lazy, and when they balk at eating the luck-ceremony candy that symbolizes good beginnings, she thinks of them as stupid: “They’d put the bad mouth on their aunt’s first American day; you had to sweeten their noisy barbarous mouths.”
Another reason for the breakdown of Brave Orchid and her children’s relationship is their lack of meaningful communication. Kingston recalls that when she was growing up, on certain occasions her mother opened the front door and mumbled something, and then opened the back door and mumbled again. Whenever the children asked her what and why she mumbled, Brave Orchid refused to interpret her actions. “It’s nothing,” she would say to her children. “She never explained anything that was really important. They no longer asked.” In addition, at the supper table, Brave Orchid always invoked silence and did not allow anyone to speak—at least, not in Chinese. Kingston notes that children in other families whose parents forbade talking at the supper table created an elaborate sign language to overcome their parents’ enforced silence. She and her siblings, however, talked freely in English, “which their parents didn’t seem to hear.” Because Brave Orchid does not consider English to be a “language,” the children may speak it without getting into trouble. Unfortunately, this language barrier dramatically increases the cultural gap between Brave Orchid and her children: Brave Orchid will not master English because it symbolizes the barbarous American culture, and the children resist speaking Chinese because they want to be “American-normal.”
