Although Brave Orchid’s talk-story about the emperor and his four wives is the shortest talk-story—only one paragraph—in The Woman Warrior, it is the best example of how talk-stories are meant to empower individuals. To Brave Orchid, the talk-story justifies her and her sister’s moral righteousness in confronting the barbarian husband and his barbarian wife, and guarantees success for their mission. Knowing that Moon Orchid lacks the courage needed to confront her husband and demand the respect from him that she deserves, Brave Orchid attempts to bolster her sister’s resiliency, to strengthen her mentally by likening her to a woman warrior who comes out of the dawn to “free the Emperor.” Stylistically, note the magical, mystical images that Kingston uses to introduce this otherworldly, mythological realm of emperors and empresses: “They set out at gray dawn, driving between the grape trees, which hunched like dwarfs in the fields. Gnomes in serrated outfits that blew in the morning wind came out of the earth, came up in rows and columns. Everybody was only half awake.” In only three sentences, we are transported into a wholly different world, a new reality in which women warriors fight for what they believe is right and just.
At times during the trip to Los Angeles, Moon Orchid grows momentarily confident in her ability to confront her husband, but as she approaches Los Angeles, she becomes more terrified than ever. However, Brave Orchid orders her son to continue the journey, and they track Moon Orchid’s husband’s address to a downtown skyscraper. There, Brave Orchid makes a reconnaissance visit to determine how best to surprise Moon Orchid’s husband. She discovers that he is a brain surgeon, and that his Chinese-American wife, whom Brave Orchid describes as a “modern, heartless girl,” works with him as a nurse. She also notes how poorly this second wife speaks Chinese. To get the husband alone, Brave Orchid devises a plan to trick him into leaving his office so that he can meet the sisters in their car on the street.
When the husband arrives at the car, Brave Orchid and Moon Orchid are taken aback by how commanding, young, and American he looks: “The two old ladies saw a man, authoritative in his dark western suit, start to fill the front of the car. He had black hair and no wrinkles. He looked and smelled like an American.” Initially, he unknowingly addresses Moon Orchid and her sister as “Grandmothers,” but when he finally recognizes who they are, he is angry at Moon Orchid. Demanding to know why she has come to Los Angeles and what she wants, he tells her that she is mistaken if she thinks that she can fit into his new American life. Although he does not want her to return to China (“I wouldn’t wish that on anyone”), he also does not want her to visit him again. His second wife does not know that he has a Chinese family, and in America he could be arrested for having two wives. While he is prepared to continue supporting Moon Orchid financially, he will not acknowledge her in his home.
This episode, in which Moon Orchid unsuccessfully confronts her husband, emphasizes how important language is to personal identity. As Moon Orchid sits in the car outside her husband’s office building, her confidence wanes in direct relation to her losing her ability to talk: “I won’t be able to talk,” she tells her sister. “And sure enough, her voice was fading into a whisper. She was shivering and small in the corner of the seat.” When she finally sees her husband for the first time in thirty years, his presence reduces her to silence. He directly asks her why she has tracked him down, but all she can do is “open and shut her mouth without any words coming out,” like a puppet. Only once in the entire exchange between her husband, her sister, and herself does she manage to say anything, and even then it is only the whispered, sorrowfully pliant question, “What about me?” Ironically, her loss of language is the deciding factor in her husband’s decision that she cannot fit into his American life. Speaking of the many guests he regularly entertains in his home, he says to Moon Orchid, “You can’t talk to them. You can barely talk to me.”
Any chance of a renewed personal relationship between Moon Orchid and her husband is doomed to fail because of the vast cultural differences between them. Moon Orchid’s traditional Chinese upbringing has so completely conditioned her to be passive toward men, to accept unquestioningly any directive of her husband, that she cannot muster the emotional stamina needed to challenge his authority. “You don’t have the hardness for this country,” her husband tells her. He, however, does. He “smelled like an American,” and he “looked directly at Moon Orchid the way the savages looked, looking for lies.” He admits to Moon Orchid and her sister that he has “turned into a different person,” and that they have become “people in a book I had read a long time ago.” When Moon Orchid notes that her husband has lived in America for so long that he “talked like a child born here,” she finally realizes that his power of language, which she does not have, is the greatest obstacle between them. This language difference, which symbolizes the diametrically opposed cultures in which each lives, never can be overcome. “Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the windows,” Moon Orchid thinks, “and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts.”
Following the dramatic meeting between Brave Orchid, Moon Orchid, and her husband in the car, Brave Orchid makes her brother-in-law take the two sisters to lunch, an odd, understated finale to the tumultuous conversation that has just occurred. Brave Orchid’s son then drives his mother and aunt to Moon Orchid’s daughter’s home, where Moon Orchid will live. On the way, Brave Orchid tries to console her sister by minimizing the disastrous confrontation with Moon Orchid’s husband. “Oh, well,” she casually says. “We’re all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we’re alive together during the same moment.” This theme of universality is remarkably similar to Kingston’s own comforting comments to Brave Orchid at the end of the previous chapter.
Moon Orchid moves in with her daughter. However, as each day goes by, she becomes more emotionally disturbed and develops paranoid schizophrenia. She fears that “Mexican ghosts” are spying on her, and the one time that she talks on the phone to Brave Orchid, she quickly hangs up, saying “They’re listening. Hang up quickly before they trace you.” She moves into an apartment of her own to escape the ghosts who are “plotting on her life” but eventually moves again, this time to Stockton to live with Brave Orchid, who tells Moon Orchid’s daughter that she will cure her sister of this illness that is fear. To her own children, Brave Orchid explains their aunt’s returning to live with them by expanding the talk-story about the emperor and his four wives: “. . . the wife who lost in battle was sent to the Northern Palace.”
Living with Moon Orchid becomes more difficult day by day. She makes Brave Orchid’s family turn off the lights and does not let them out of her sight. When Brave Orchid tells her family to humor her sister, the children hide in their rooms. Eventually, Moon Orchid starts to curse the family with bad omens, and Brave Orchid concedes that her sister has gone mad. Moon Orchid is institutionalized in an asylum and soon thereafter she dies. Like No Name Woman, she “slipped away entirely,” without proper identity and status.
Language again plays an important role in Moon Orchid’s demise here at the end of “At the Western Palace.” Returning to live with Brave Orchid in Stockton, Moon Orchid assures her sister that she heard Mexican ghosts talking in English about her. When Brave Orchid points out that Moon Orchid does not understand English, her younger sister replies, “This time, miraculously, I understood. I decoded their speech. I penetrated the words and understood what was happening inside.” Ironically, Moon Orchid’s decoding and penetrating the Mexican ghosts’ language is similar to what Kingston was forced to do while growing up and listening to her mother’s talk-stories. Because Brave Orchid never explained how the talk-stories were relevant to Kingston’s life, Kingston had to interpret their meanings. Unfortunately, because Moon Orchid does not understand English, her interpretation of the Mexicans’ English is based wholly on the insecurity she feels having been summarily rejected by her husband and now living in what for her must be a foreign, barbaric country. As Brave Orchid notes, “Moon Orchid had misplaced herself, her spirit (her ‘attention,’ Brave Orchid called it) scattered over the world.” Not even Brave Orchid, who calls her sister’s name in hopes that Moon Orchid’s spirit will return to her body, can help her sister regain her lost identity.
Only during her brief stay in the insane asylum, before she dies, does Moon Orchid regain a sense of identity through language. Speaking to Brave Orchid, she joyfully explains that she and the other female residents “understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I understand them.” For the first time since Moon Orchid emigrated from China, she feels a sense of community: “We are all women here.”
Why Moon Orchid initially developed paranoid schizophrenia and then eventually died, even after regaining a sense of identity, if only a false one, is best explained by Brave Orchid. “The difference between mad people and sane people,” she warns her children, “is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.” During the period in which Moon Orchid became more and more schizophrenic, she was obsessed with only one talk-story, that of the “Mexican ghosts” who were trying to kill her. In the asylum, she “had a new story” about how the other female patients were her daughters, but this one talk-story was the only story on which she fixated. Kingston, on the other hand, seems to understand what Brave Orchid means about a variety of talk-stories, which empower her like they do her mother. She draws on many talk-stories for The Woman Warrior, and, more important, she incorporates them into her personal life as best she can.
Although “At the Western Palace” seems less of a talk-story than the previous chapters, Kingston is strengthened by recalling Moon Orchid’s struggle to assimilate in America. At the chapter’s end, Kingston writes, “Brave Orchid’s daughters decided fiercely that they would never let men be unfaithful to them,” and then she adds, tongue-in-cheek, “All her children made up their minds to major in science or mathematics.” Ironically, because of this comical, almost flippant last sentence, we are left wondering if such a lesson is worth the great expense—Moon Orchid’s life—that was paid for the daughters to learn what they did.
