Although Brave Orchid regularly denigrates American culture, which she views as wasteful and uncivilized, she is not immune to its effects. One example of her relaxing the many Chinese customs with which she was raised is the American practice of hanging pictures of living relatives on walls in the house, in this case her and her husband’s own portraits. When Moon Orchid notices that her sister’s and brother-in-law’s pictures hang opposite her grandparents’ and asks why, Brave Orchid casually remarks, “No reason. Nothing. . . . In America you can put up anybody’s picture you like.” Her answer appears to be insignificant at first, but its import is great: No matter how much she resists the American culture around her, it affects her more than she might be willing to admit. Also, she hangs the pictures because “later the children would not have the sense to do it.”
After dinner, although it is late at night and Moon Orchid is tired from her long journey, Brave Orchid insists that Moon Orchid and Moon Orchid’s daughter “get down to [the] business” of reuniting Moon Orchid with her husband. She wants to talk about the glorious moment in which her sister will confront her brother-in-law and reclaim her marriage rights: “Oh, how I’d love to be in your place. I could tell him so many things. What scenes I could make.” For the last thirty years, Moon Orchid has been receiving money from her husband, but she has never told him that Brave Orchid had been planning to bring her to America: “She waited for him to suggest it, but he never did.” She is frightened at the prospect of confronting her husband, but Brave Orchid is adamant that her sister should reclaim her rightful place as “Big Wife”—the first-married wife of a husband. Although Brave Orchid knows that the husband has a second wife, whom he married after he arrived in America, she does not consider this “Little Wife” a barrier to her sister and brother-in-law’s reconciliation: Customarily, a wealthy Chinese man in China was married simultaneously to more than one woman.
Moon Orchid and her daughter stay with Brave Orchid for several weeks, a difficult time for Brave Orchid and her children. Brave Orchid is impatient with her sister, whom she regards as the “lovely, useless type.” Moon Orchid is unable to do manual work either in the house or in the family-owned laundry. Because the laundry is unbearably hot, the most she can learn to do is fold towels late in the day, when the temperature inside the laundry has cooled. Used to a life of comfort, she is “eager to work, roughing it in the wilderness,” but anything she attempts to do infuriates Brave Orchid because she works too slowly.
Moon Orchid’s stay with Brave Orchid reveals how very different these two sisters are. Brave Orchid represents frugality and tradition; Moon Orchid is frivolous, extravagant, and ephemeral. Their contrasting identities are best embodied in their names: Brave Orchid is “brave”; Moon Orchid, whose name means “flower of the moon,” is like a planet circling the sun, a body in orbit around her distant husband. Brave Orchid believes that a wife’s primary role is to “scold her husband into becoming a good man”; her sister passively accepts whatever her husband tells her to do, even if that means not being a part of his America life.
Brave Orchid has a strong, overpowering personality that assertively exerts itself in any situation. Single-mindedly determined that Moon Orchid should confront her “barbarian” husband, Brave Orchid exudes unquestioned confidence that any one of the many possible scenarios she devises for Moon Orchid to accost her husband will succeed. Brave Orchid is so totally consumed by her sister’s plight that she fails to realize that Moon Orchid’s passive, non-confrontational demeanor will not allow her to confront her husband. Note how often Brave Orchid discusses how she would act if she were in her sister’s stead. For example, strategizing how best Moon Orchid can impress her husband, Brave Orchid says, “Another thing I’d do if I were you, I’d get a job and help him out. Show him I could make his life easier; how I didn’t need his money.” However, Brave Orchid is not her sister: She relishes the dramatic opportunity to face her brother-in-law; Moon Orchid would rather move back to Hong Kong.
In contrast to Brave Orchid, Moon Orchid emerges as delicate and vacillating, happiest when following the lead of others. Physically, she has “long fingers and thin, soft hands.” Her “high-class city accent from living in Hong Kong” symbolically reveals a frail woman who has never worked in her life, and who has had servants fulfill her every need. Brave Orchid contemptuously remarks of her “wishy-washy” sister, “Not a trace of village accent remained; she had been away from the village for that long.” Brave Orchid also notes that “bright colors and movements distracted her” like they would a child. Faced with the looming threat of confronting her unsuspecting husband, Moon Orchid would choose—were it not for her sister’s constant nagging—to remain estranged from him. “Do we have to do something?” she passively asks.
Moon Orchid’s stay with Brave Orchid and her family also exposes the ever-present cultural gap between Brave Orchid and her children. This rift is caused, in part, by Brave Orchid’s failure to realize that many traditional Chinese customs are not adaptable to American culture. For example, when Brave Orchid tries to convince Moon Orchid that her estranged husband’s children by his second wife will recognize Moon Orchid as their mother, she tells her sister, “The children will go to their true mother—you. . . . That’s the way it is with mothers and children.” But that is not the way it is with Brave Orchid and her own children, who, Brave Orchid admits, are “antisocial and secretive.” “Ever since they were born,” she recalls, “they had burrowed little nests for themselves in closets and underneath stairs; they made tents under tables and behind doors.” Because the children live in a home so totally dominated by their autocratic mother, who rejects their assimilation into American culture, they physically construct hiding places to escape emotionally from her control and to create individualized, “American-normal” identities.
Brave Orchid’s children find Moon Orchid’s behavior odd, as she does theirs. The running commentary that Moon Orchid provides as she follows them about the house emphasizes just how Americanized Kingston and her siblings are. Growing up, Moon Orchid was taught to look demurely askance at adults, never directly into their eyes; her sister’s children, however, look straight into her eyes, “as if they were looking for lies. . . . They were like animals the way they stared.” Traditionally, Chinese custom considered a person polite who denied, not accepted, a compliment, but Moon Orchid’s nieces and nephews receive her compliments unashamedly. Initially, Moon Orchid suspects that Brave Orchid’s children are “animals” who live in a barbarian culture; her suspicion is confirmed when she sees them eat undercooked meat. Worse, they are “savages” who always smell like cow’s milk: “At first she thought they were so clumsy, they spilled it on their clothes. But soon she decided they themselves smelled of milk. They were big and smelled of milk; they were young and had white hair.” Moon Orchid does not realize that many Americans drink milk their entire lives, but neither do Brave Orchid’s children know that in traditional Chinese society, only babies drink milk.
When Moon Orchid’s daughter must return to Los Angeles to her own family, Brave Orchid decides that it is also time for Moon Orchid to rejoin her husband. She forces her unwilling son to drive them all to Los Angeles. During the journey, Brave Orchid continues to imagine the approaches that Moon Orchid should take in confronting her husband and reclaiming her rights as his wife. Mood Orchid, however, remains unsure of herself, especially now that she has read in a newspaper that it is unlawful for an American man to be married to more than one woman at a time. “The law doesn’t matter,” Brave Orchid says to bolster her sister’s confidence.
On the way to Los Angeles, Brave Orchid narrates a talk-story about an emperor with four wives, from which this chapter gets its ironic title. “A long time ago,” Brave Orchid begins, an emperor had four wives, each of whom lived in a palace located at one of the earth’s four major compass points. The Empress of the East, whom Brave Orchid likens to Moon Orchid, was “good and kind and full of light,” but the Empress of the West, in her striving for ultimate power over the emperor’s other three wives, imprisoned the emperor in the Western Palace. Only Moon Orchid, the Empress of the East, can save the emperor, her husband, from the evil clutches of the Empress of the West, her husband’s second wife with whom he is living. “You must break the strong spell she has cast on him that has lost him the East,” Brave Orchid encourages her sister.
