Two other details recall Fa Mu Lan’s story. As Brave Orchid waits for the Sitting Ghost to appear, she reads from a textbook but soon grows tired. Kingston describes the text in Brave Orchid’s textbook as her mother’s eyes begin to droop: “Soon the ideographs lifted their feet, stretched out their wings, and flew like blackbirds; the dots were their eyes.” This description of the textbook’s ideographs as birdlike is similar to Kingston’s personification of the bird that led Fa Mu Lan to the old couple: “In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for ‘human,’ two black wings.” Also, when Brave Orchid first becomes aware of the ghost’s presence in the haunted room, Kingston writes of her mother, “She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow—alone in white not unlike being alone in black.” In “White Tigers,” Fa Mu Lan journeyed up into the mountains to gain spiritual enlightenment and became a woman warrior.
After graduating from the women’s school of midwifery, Brave Orchid returns as a doctor to her home village, which welcomes her with garlands and cymbals. “My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair,” Kingston writes. “She had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains,” another reference to Fa Mu Lan. Brave Orchid returns to her village as a medical warrior to save lives. Her reputation grows with every home she visits because she has only success: “She would not touch death; therefore, untainted, she brought only health from house to house.”
Although Brave Orchid’s intention in telling her personal history to Kingston is to present herself to her daughter as an alternative to the traditional Chinese female roles of child bearer and caretaker, Kingston remains anxious about being a female. Her anxieties stem from listening to her mother’s talk-stories about females who are placed in vulnerable positions within Chinese society. One such story involves the village crazy lady, “an inappropriate woman whom the people stoned.” Here, Kingston uses the benign adjective “inappropriate” to contrast the woman’s insane, uncontrollable actions with the villagers’ violent, premeditated killing of her. In the wake of Japanese bombing that “drove people insane,” Kingston suggests that the village crazy lady tried to reestablish a personal, ordered identity out of public chaos by wearing a headdress made of mirrors, which attracted the Japanese bombers’ attention because the mirrors reflected sunlight and pinpointed where the villagers were hiding. However, the villagers, understandably fearful for their own safety, stone the woman to death rather than simply remove her headdress. For Kingston, this episode must have reminded her of when Brave Orchid warned her in “No Name Woman,” “Don’t humiliate us. . . . The villagers are watchful.”
Other sources of Kingston’s apprehension about her gender include the stories of baby girls being deliberately suffocated to death in ashes, which account for her recurring nightmares of babies being hurt. Unknowingly, Brave Orchid’s sharing these horrific tales with Kingston undercuts any positive effect she might be trying to instill in her daughter. Rather than increase Kingston’s self-esteem, these talk-stories cause her to question her own sense of self-worth. “My mother has given me pictures to dream—nightmare babies that recur, shrinking again and again to fit in my palm,” Kingston writes. “I curl my fingers to make a cradle for the baby, my other hand an awning. But in a blink of inattention, I would mislay the baby. . . . Or bathing it, I carefully turn the right-hand faucet, but it spouts hot water, scalding the baby until its skin tautens and its face becomes nothing but a red hole of a scream.” In this extended passage, note the repetitive “I” that begins each declarative sentence; Kingston tries to reassure herself that she “would protect the dream baby, not let it suffer, not let it out of my sight.” However, no matter how many times she dreams of saving the baby, she fails to protect it, and the baby “recedes” from her.
Against this backdrop of dead baby girls and babies who die because they cannot defecate, Kingston struggles to keep her sanity. Her anguish is worsened by her uncertainty as to whether or not her mother might have taken part in these infanticides, or baby killings. “To make my waking life American-normal,” she writes, “I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories.” Again, China is “invisible,” a subconscious world that threatens Kingston most at night. She can smell China; she can hear China (“my mother funneled China into our ears”); she can even taste China (“Mother! Mother! It’s happening again. I taste something in my mouth, but I’m not eating anything”); but she cannot see China for herself. In contrast, America is the observable, physical world of the every day. Even when Kingston speaks of the innumerable ghosts that surround her in her American life, she differentiates between these intimidating ghosts’ physicalness and the unknown—and, therefore, more terrifying—forms of ghosts that she would encounter were she and her family to move to China: “I did not want to go where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own.”
Kingston’s childhood fears about the expectations placed on females also stem from Brave Orchid’s talk-stories involving female slavery. The sorrowful descriptions of the Chinese girls who are sold as slaves heighten her own fear about being an unwanted daughter who could potentially be sold as a slave were she and her parents to move to China. “Whenever my parents said ‘home,’” she writes, “they suspended America. They suspended enjoyment, but I did not want to go to China. In China my parents would sell my sisters and me.”
In addition, Kingston struggles with the paradox that Brave Orchid might have favored the quiet girl who was her slave more than Kingston herself: “I watch them with envy,” she writes of her mother and the girl. “My mother’s enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl.” Believing that her mother showed more concern for the slave girl than she does for her own daughters, Kingston suggests that her sister also must compete with this slave for their mother’s affection. “Throughout childhood,” she explains, “my younger sister said, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a slave.’” In “White Tigers,” to please her mother, Kingston endeavored to be like Fa Mu Lan, but her attempts to live up to her mother’s expectations were ridiculed by Brave Orchid; in “Shaman,” her sister chooses the girl-slave as a model. However, Kingston’s sister’s wanting to win her mother’s affection by taking on this role is paradoxical: She will have to accept that she is an unwanted daughter since only unwanted daughters are sold or given away as slaves.
Kingston also finds it contradictory that her mother, who is medically trained as a midwife, could believe in superstitions. As an adult writing the stories of her mother’s encounters with ghosts and monsters, she must recognize the deep vein of ingrained Chinese lore in Brave Orchid’s talk-stories. She suspects that all of the women at the To Keung School of Midwifery were like her mother’s three female roommates, who eagerly obeyed Brave Orchid and pulled earlobes and chanted spirits away. Although Kingston writes that the students were “new women, scientists who changed the rituals,” despite their scientific training they continued to believe in ghosts and other spirits, a contradiction that the adult Kingston cannot reconcile.
However, as a child, the impressionable Kingston believes in her mother’s extraordinary exorcistic abilities. Left on her own to make sense of her mother’s stories, Kingston recalls one perplexing story in which Brave Orchid confronts “Sit Dom Kuei,” ghosts that appear as snake-like whirlwinds. Because of her limited understanding of the Chinese language, Kingston cannot translate what “Sit Dom Kuei” means, except that “Kuei” is Chinese for ghost. Hopelessly asking “How do they translate?” Kingston’s language fails her, ironically because Chinese is not her native language. Also, her inability to translate “Sit Dom Kuei” is another symbol of the cultural gap that separates her from her parents. Only at the memoir’s end, after having secured a private, personal identity as an adult, a woman, a Chinese American, an American, will Kingston confidently proclaim about her own talk-story, “It translated well.”
