Kingston follows the brief talk-story of the outlawed knot with a discussion between her mother and herself concerning Brave Orchid's supposedly cutting Kingston's frenum, the membrane under the tongue that restricts the tongue's movement. Although Kingston is unsure whether or not Brave Orchid truly sliced her frenum, she wants to believe that her mother did so as an act of empowerment: "Sometimes I felt very proud that my mother committed such a powerful act upon me." When Kingston again asks her mother why she cut Kingston's frenum, Brave Orchid's answer recalls the word "tied" from the talk-story about the Chinese knot-makers: "I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied." Brave Orchid understands all too well the necessity of her daughter having the power of language, and the relationship between language and personal identity. Symbolically, Brave Orchid tells Kingston that she cut her frenum so that her tongue "would be able to move in any language. You'll be able to speak languages that are completely different from one another." Brave Orchid, a powerful Chinese woman in her own right, is concerned that Kingston succeed not only as a woman of Chinese descent, but as a woman of Chinese descent living in America. In order to be successful, Kingston will have to learn to speak English, no matter how upsetting that is to the resigned Brave Orchid.
Kingston is confronted with her first challenge to speak English while attending kindergarten, but the fear and intimidation of publicly speaking English last well into her adulthood. Although she claims that she is making daily progress speaking English to strangers, she cannot forget her first three years of school, when her silence was "thickest." During these three years, she completely covered her school paintings with black paint, "layers of black over houses and flowers and suns." Concerned by these paintings, Kingston's teacher called her parents to the school, but they did not understand English and so could not discuss their daughter's behavior, other than Kingston's father cryptically telling Kingston that in China, "The parents and teachers of criminals were executed." To Kingston, however, these paintings represented the happy possibilities of curtains about to reveal "sunlight underneath, mighty operas."
