Kingston enjoys being silent at school, but life becomes miserable when she eventually realizes that she is expected to speak. "At first it did not occur to me I was supposed to talk or to pass kindergarten," she writes, but when she flunks kindergarten, "silence became a misery." Compounding her misery is her feeling of being bad when she is supposed to speak and cannot. When she does speak, her voice comes out as a mere whisper. Ironically, her teacher's constantly instructing her to speak more loudly hinders rather than helps her confidence. Her fear of speaking recalls the previous chapter, in which Moon Orchid's ability to talk greatly diminished when she met her husband. The silence that Moon Orchid, Kingston, and other Chinese girls in Kingston's school experience seems culturally based. Moon Orchid never overcomes her apprehension to speak Chinese, her native language, to her husband; the adult Kingston still struggles to speak English publicly; and the Chinese schoolgirls, although they speak English sooner and more confidently than Kingston, are silent initially. "The other Chinese girls did not talk either," Kingston notes, "so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl."
The major obstacle to Kingston's learning to speak English is culturally based on the individual's relationship to society. Traditionally, Chinese custom frowns on a person, especially a female, who boldly and assertively speaks: Such behavior implies the individual's raised status over others. American culture, however, is theoretically based on the rights of individuals, not on the collective whole of society, and the English language, in which a subject — oftentimes the first-person, singular "I" — generally begins each sentence, reflects this cultural emphasis on individualism. But when Kingston, raised by parents who speak only Chinese, reads aloud in English, she stumbles constantly when saying "I." She writes, "I could not understand 'I.' The Chinese 'I' has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American 'I,' assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight?" Taught by her parents that proper behavior always means demurely acquiescing to others, she struggles with the defiant assertion of the self symbolized by the first-person, singular pronoun: "'I' is a capital and 'you' is lower-case." Also, like the word "here," "I" lacks strong consonants and has a "flat" sound, making it hard for a Chinese speaker to pronounce.
