In this final chapter of The Woman Warrior, Kingston discusses further the difficulties she experienced growing up as a Chinese-American female. Greatest among these challenges was learning to speak English to non-Chinese people, while struggling to confront traditional Chinese culture, represented by her mother, which inhibited her efforts to integrate fully into American culture. She searches to locate a middle ground in which she can live within each of these two respective cultures; while doing so, she creates a new, hybrid identity between them. At the close of the chapter, she draws on a talk-story about the legendary Chinese female poet Ts'ai Yen to demonstrate her own achievement of a delicate harmony between two competing cultures. Throughout her identity-forming process, she also finds that she must assert herself by breaking away emotionally from her mother, who has been the center of her life. Once free, she can develop an identity of her own.
"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" begins with Kingston admitting that she heard about Moon Orchid's disastrous confrontation with her husband, which Kingston related in "At the Western Palace," from her brother. She then amends this admission: "In fact, it wasn't me my brother told about going to Los Angeles; one of my sisters told me what he'd told her." This passing on of stories demonstrates the always-changing nature of talk-stories, whose telling is dependent on the teller. For example, Kingston recognizes that her brother narrates Moon Orchid's story differently than she. "His version of the story," she writes, "may be better than mine because of its bareness, not twisted into designs." However, she relishes her talk-stories' involved and complicated designs because they emphasize the complexity of both the talk-stories and, more important, their narrator — Kingston herself. Likening herself to a knot-maker who, long ago in China, would have continued to create a special, intricate knot even after the emperor banned its being made, Kingston tests the boundaries that her mother, Chinese culture, and American culture erect to manipulate her every thought and action.
