In “Shaman,” as in the previous chapters, Kingston cannot ask Brave Orchid questions and expect understandable answers that are relevant to her own life. Instead, she depends on her own imagination and concludes only that her mother, like the legendary figures about whom she talk-stories, was powerful against ghosts because she could eat anything and everything. In making this conclusion, Kingston begins to accept that she will need to reconcile, or learn to live with, the differences between her American life and the values and practices expected of her in her Chinese home life. However, integrating her mother’s horrific talk-stories into her American life, or at least discounting their believability to lessen their vivid sensationalism, severely threatens Kingston’s psychological stability. For example, when she endures yet another telling of the monkey story, in which participants sit around a table and literally eat the brain of a monkey, whose head is trapped within a cutout hole in the table’s middle, Kingston unsettlingly writes, “a curtain flapped loose inside my brain.” She is so horrendously shocked by this gruesome account that she again loses the power of language and is unable to tell her mother, “Stop it.” This account’s graphic depiction is intensified even more when we—and Kingston—learn that the monkey was alive when the participants began eating its brain. “It was alive?” Kingston incredulously asks. “The curtain flaps closed like merciful black wings.” In addition, Kingston directly follows this talk-story with her mother’s telling her children, “Eat! Eat!” Humorously, what Brave Orchid wants them to eat—“blood pudding awobble in the middle of the table”—looks too akin to the monkey brain that they have just heard about to be digestible.
In the last section of “Shaman,” which chronologically takes place after the next two chapters, Brave Orchid confronts Kingston about why she doesn’t visit her parents more than once a year. “The last time I saw you,” Brave Orchid exaggeratedly complains, “you were still young.” Although both women still hold decidedly opposite outlooks on life, Kingston emphasizes that she and her mother are not as different as she perhaps would like to believe. Physically, both women have white hair; emotionally, they are equals who have strong, independent identities. However, Kingston is painfully aware that her mother is slowly losing her will to live, to function independently of her husband and children. At one point in this section, Kingston chides her mother not to eat pills lying around the house if they are not hers: “You shouldn’t take pills that aren’t prescribed for you. ‘Don’t eat pills you find on the curb,’ you always told us.” Like many adults with parents who are aging quickly, Kingston is becoming the caregiver to her mother, who previously was the caregiver to Kingston.
Brave Orchid’s complaint that she does not see Kingston often enough introduces a preoccupation with time that dominates Kingston and Brave Orchid’s conversation here at the end of the chapter. Earlier, Kingston noted that even after her mother began living in America, Brave Orchid never stopped “seeing land on the other side of the oceans.” Brave Orchid’s goal was to return someday to her Chinese ancestral village and live out her life there, but now she admits that she and Kingston’s father will never return to their homeland. “We have no more China to go home to,” she concedes. This realization is apparent in the answer she gives when Kingston asks her about the two children who died in China: “No, you must have been dreaming. You must have been making up stories. You are all the children there are.” Whether or not Brave Orchid truly has suppressed memories of her life in China now that she knows that she can never return to the land of her birth is unclear. The possibility remains that her memories of her two dead children are too painful to discuss, much like No Name Woman’s family refused to honor her memory.
Culturally, Brave Orchid and Kingston perceive time differently. Brave Orchid honestly believes that time in China is paced more slowly than in America: “Human beings don’t work like this in China. Time goes slower there. . . . I can’t sleep in this country because it doesn’t shut down for the night.” For her, China symbolizes youth because that is where she spent the earlier years of her life. “Time was different in China,” she reasons. “One year lasted as long as my total time here. . . . I would still be young if we lived in China.” For Kingston, however, “time is the same from place to place.” Time is universal because geographical location is universal: We all share the same earth, no matter where on it we are physically located.
Kingston exhibits concern and caring as Brave Orchid’s caregiver by helping her mother understand that China is still as much a part of her world as America is. Hoping to arouse her mother’s defeated spirit, Kingston tries to reason with her: “We belong to the planet now, Mama. Does it make sense to you that if we’re no longer attached to one piece of land, we belong to the planet? Wherever we happen to be standing, why, that spot belongs to us as much as any other spot.” Struggling to comprehend her daughter’s meaning, Brave Orchid seems to have forgotten that earlier in the chapter, while she was waiting for the Sitting Ghost to appear, she herself voiced a similar thought in relation to the moon and stars: “‘That is the same moon that they see in New Society Village,’ she thought, ‘the same stars.’” And, in the parenthetical sentence directly following Brave Orchid’s thought, Kingston notes that growing up, she heard her mother similarly say, “That is the same moon that they see in China, the same stars though shifted a little.”
Although Brave Orchid remains inconsolable at the chapter’s end, both she and Kingston gain a better understanding of one another from their conversation. Brave Orchid genuinely accepts that her daughter visits her only once a year because physically and emotionally she needs that separation from her parents to keep her sanity. When Kingston tells her mother, “Here I’m sick so often, I can barely work. I can’t help it, Mama,” Brave Orchid finally acknowledges her daughter’s needs: “It’s better, then, for you to stay away. . . . Of course, you must go, Little Dog.” The affectionate term “Little Dog,” perhaps prompted by Kingston’s own use of the childlike “Mama,” greatly affects Kingston, who now understands that her mother loves her, even if she doesn’t say that she does. “The world is somehow lighter,” Kingston contentedly writes. “She has not called me that endearment for years—a name to fool the gods.”
The dragon imagery at the end of the chapter symbolizes a resolution between Brave Orchid and Kingston. Earlier, when Brave Orchid faced the Sitting Ghost, Kingston wrote, “My mother may have been afraid, but she would be a dragoness (‘my totem, your totem’).” Here at the chapter’s close, Kingston reaffirms that she and Brave Orchid are both women warriors: “I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter.” Although the chapter’s last paragraph strongly suggests that nights still hold unseen terrors for Kingston, she tacitly acknowledges that she owes her creative abilities to Brave Orchid, whose talk-stories are the impetus for Kingston’s own power of language as a woman warrior, as a dragon in her own right.
