Although “No Name Woman” and “White Tigers” are anthologized more often than the other individual chapters in The Woman Warrior, “Shaman” is arguably the novel’s most pivotal chapter. As the middle chapter in Kingston’s memoir about growing up listening to her mother’s talk-stories, “Shaman” contains Brave Orchid’s personal history, how she earned a medical degree of midwifery in China, then moved to America to be with her husband, and raised their American-born children.
The chapter’s title, a tribute to Brave Orchid, refers to a person who acts as a medium between the physical and spiritual worlds, and who usually has healing powers. Brave Orchid is a shaman who exorcises ghosts, both in the Chinese women’s school of midwifery and in Stockton, California. In Stockton, for example, when the garbage man walks up to the window from which Kingston and her siblings are taunting him, Brave Orchid hurriedly shuts the window, effectively securing the house from this “Garbage Ghost.” However, more important than Brave Orchid’s exorcising ghosts is that her story, coming as it does halfway through the novel, provides a transition between events in China and life in America. The novel’s first two chapters detail stories based in a Chinese context; the last two chapters focus predominantly on the narrator’s and Brave Orchid’s lives in America. Bridging the gap between these two opposite realities is the chapter “Shaman,” which begins in China but ends in America with Brave Orchid finally accepting that she will never return to China.
Kingston opens this chapter by describing Brave Orchid’s three scrolls of medical certificates, a photograph of Brave Orchid herself, and a photograph of the medical school’s graduating class. Note that when Kingston opens the canister that contains the scrolls, “the smell of China flies out, . . . a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain.” Although the phrase “far back in the brain” indicates that the adult Kingston is remembering an event that occurred when she was younger, the phrase also suggests that her impressions of China were somehow subconsciously ingrained in her at birth, as if she could “smell” China because her mother once lived there and smelled odors that she associated with China, and then passed on these sensations to her daughter. However, China remains only a smell to Kingston, an intangibility made all the more confusing by her mother’s talk-stories.
Brave Orchid’s photographs fascinate Kingston, who notices how differently her mother looks into the camera: “She has spacy eyes, as all people recently from Asia have.” Brave Orchid’s “spacy” look underscores the intense fear and hesitancy that many Chinese emigrants felt leaving their homeland for America. However, Kingston points out that after these emigrants reside in America for a few years, they “learn the barbarians’ directness—how to gather themselves and stare rudely into talking faces as if trying to catch lies.” For example, photographs of Kingston’s laughing father, who looks directly into the camera and wears a straw hat “cocked at a Fred Astaire angle,” show how Westernized he has become since moving to America. Emphasizing the transitional nature of this chapter, Kingston writes that her mother, who has lived in America for many years, now “has eyes as strong as boulders, never once skittering off a face.” Also, Brave Orchid’s style of dress has dramatically changed. In the medical school class photograph, she wears a dress that suppresses any hint of sexuality: “Chinese dresses at that time were dartless, cut as if women did not have breasts.” In old age, Kingston notes toward the chapter’s end, Brave Orchid dresses in “American fashions.”
Kingston uses the photographs of her mother as a narrative device to introduce Brave Orchid’s personal story. Like many Chinese men during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Brave Orchid’s husband—Kingston’s father—immigrated to America in search of work. Intending to return to China, instead he sends money to his wife for her boat fare to America. During the time of Brave Orchid’s husband’s absence, their two Chinese-born children die, and only after a sufficient period of mourning—“In China there was time to complete feelings”—does Brave Orchid decide to attend a medical school of midwifery. Note that on the side of the boat that carries Brave Orchid to the medical school from her hometown, a sea bird is painted to protect the boat against “shipwreck and winds.” As in previous chapters, Kingston closely links birds to her family’s history; for Brave Orchid, at least, birds bring good luck.
At school, Brave Orchid feels pressure to appear smarter than her fellow classmates: Because she is older than they, traditionally she is expected to be wiser. She seeks out hiding places in which to study secretly so that she will appear more knowledgeable than her peers. These hiding places also symbolize the importance that the female students place on personal space. For example, in her section of the room that she shares with other female students, Brave Orchid “placed precisely” each of her personal items. Her cataloging these items emphasizes the pleasure she gets from organizing her own belongings rather than someone else’s: “The locks on her suitcase opened with two satisfying clicks; she enjoyed again how neatly her belongings fitted together, clean against the green lining.” Although the “daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself”—seems limited at best, most likely the majority of the female students came from homes headed by either a father or a husband, and the women would have been treated by the male figures as second-class citizens in their own homes. “Free from families,” Kingston writes, “my mother would live for two years without servitude. She would not have to run errands for my father’s tyrant mother with the bound feet or thread needles for old ladies.” Ironically, however, “neither would there be slaves and nieces to wait on her.”
The incident in which Brave Orchid spends the night in the haunted room and is sat on by a Sitting Ghost recalls many details from the previous two chapters. Kingston begins this section of the narrative with the word “Maybe,” which signals that she is reinterpreting her mother’s talk-story to understand better how the tale affects her own American life. This narrative strategy is similar to Kingston’s inventing a personal history for No Name Woman and introducing Fa Mu Lan’s talk-story using the subjective “would.” By creating one possible scenario of Brave Orchid’s bravery, Kingston emphasizes how her mother is herself a woman warrior, who is unafraid to sleep overnight in a haunted room. Brave Orchid exerts her independent spirit not only when she accepts the other students’ challenge to meet whatever ghost awaits her, but intellectually when she daringly questions the traditional belief of life after death: “How do we know that ghosts are the continuance of dead people? . . . Perhaps human beings just die, and that’s the end. I don’t think I’d mind that too much.”
Another, more important example of Brave Orchid’s independent, warriorlike spirit is her decision to retain her own name rather than take her husband’s after they married. The power to name oneself, to have an individual identity, is further emphasized when Brave Orchid, after arriving in America, keeps her own name rather than Westernize it. “Even when she emigrated,” Kingston writes, “my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies.” That Brave Orchid retained her own name, that she had a name at all, contrasts with Kingston’s aunt’s namelessness. Kingston suggests throughout the novel that people who control the power of language can survive any ordeal because they cannot lose their personal identities. For example, she notes that when Brave Orchid got scared as a child, “one of my mother’s three mothers had held her and chanted their descent line, reeling the frighted spirit back from the farthest deserts.” Likewise, after Brave Orchid, who herself is “good at naming,” faces the Sitting Ghost at night in the school of midwifery, the following morning the other female students “called out their own names, women’s pretty names,” to guide Brave Orchid’s spirit back to the school. A person like No Name Woman, however, whose identity is figuratively buried along with any memory of her, has no power to stand up for herself and combat the violence inflicted against her. She is a lost soul because her family refuses to call out the list of their ancestors’ names in order to guide No Name Woman’s spirit back home.
Waiting in the haunted room for the ghost’s appearance, Brave Orchid wraps herself in a quilt made by her mother. Of special note is Kingston’s description of the quilt: “In the middle of one border my grandmother had sewn a tiny satin triangle, a red heart to protect my mother at the neck, as if she were her baby yet.” This protective talisman is identical to the “tiny quilted triangle, red at its center,” that Fa Mu Lan had sewn for her baby. The use of the word “quilt” is especially effective in linking Brave Orchid’s and Fa Mu Lan’s stories. In addition, at the end of “Shaman,” Brave Orchid will cover Kingston with a quilt, “the thick, homemade Chinese kind.” These images of quilts unite the many woman-warrior influences in Kingston’s life.
