In contrast to spoken English, Chinese pronunciation appears hard and loud, or "chingchong ugly," as Kingston later characterizes it after she becomes more consciously attuned to American speech and values. This critical statement suggests her embarrassment at how she believes spoken Chinese sounds to American ears. However, cultural inhibition is not the only reason preventing the Chinese girls from speaking aloud. Rather, they want to be accepted as soft-spoken, American, and feminine. Ironically, although they think that they are being feminine, they are, in fact, being too soft to be heard.
Each day, following American school, the Chinese children go to Chinese school. There, the girls do not have the same silence problem that they do in the American school: They "screamed and yelled during recess" like everyone else. Reading Chinese aloud is not as difficult as reading English in the American public school because the children are not singled out to read before the entire class. All of the students read in unison: ". . . we chanted together, voices rising and falling, . . . everybody reading together, reciting together and not alone with one voice." However, the security that "together" affords Kingston is shattered when a new teacher arrives and makes individual students stand up and read aloud. This experience is too painful for the self-conscious Kingston and her sister, whose voices falter as regularly as they do in the American school: "When it was my turn," Kingston writes, "the same voice [as her sister's] came out, a crippled animal running on broken legs."
Kingston's and her sister's experiences in the Chinese school again emphasize language's power to create personal identities. Although we might expect Kingston to find comfort in speaking Chinese rather than English, she informs us that "you can't entrust your voice to the Chinese either; they want to capture your voice for their own use." For example, Brave Orchid forces Kingston, because she is older and speaks English better than the other family members, to demand "reparation candy" from a drugstore whose delivery boy mistakenly delivered medicine to Kingston's parents' laundry. Because Brave Orchid cannot speak English, she commandeers Kingston's voice to do her bidding and in the process embarrasses her daughter. "They want to fix up your tongue to speak for them," Kingston says of Chinese adults who refuse to learn English.
