In addition to worrying about the newly arrived Chinese emigrants, Kingston becomes concerned when a Chinese boy starts visiting the family's laundry despite its always being hot and uncomfortable. When she realizes that this boy, whom she refers to as the "mentally retarded boy who followed me around, probably believing that we were two of a kind," visits the laundry because of her, she changes her work shift to avoid him. However, he figures out her new work schedule and continues to show up when she is working. Because her parents do not seem to mind the boy's visiting the laundry, Kingston suspects that they are matchmaking the two of them. She fears that the bumbling behavior she feigned to repel the "FOB's" is backfiring, and that her "undesirability" will lead her into a marriage with the boy: "I studied hard, got straight A's, but nobody seemed to see that I was smart and had nothing in common with this monster, this birth defect."
Kingston's belief that her parents are planning a wedding between her and the Chinese boy only compounds Kingston's fear that she really is as insane as Crazy Mary and Pee-A-Nah. She worries that she can so realistically imagine movies in her head, and that there are "adventurous people inside [her] head to whom [she] talked." When she no longer can keep her fears about her sanity to herself, she tries to tell one secret a day to her mother. Intentionally always talking to Brave Orchid when her mother is working late at night in the laundry, Kingston whispers her secrets to her mother, who only replies "Mm" and never stops working. One night, however, when Kingston "whispered and quacked" to let out another secret, Brave Orchid turns to her daughter and says, "I can't stand this whispering. . . . Senseless gabbings every night. I wish you would stop. Go away and work. Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don't feel like hearing your craziness." Kingston is "relieved" that she can stop confessing to her mother, but Brave Orchid's comments about her daughter's "craziness" reinforce Kingston's fear that she might be insane: "I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be It at our house? Probably me." She is, after all, the messy and clumsy one who had a "mysterious illness."
One day at the laundry, when the Chinese boy goes to the bathroom, Kingston's parents look inside the two mysterious cardboard crates that he always carries with him and find that the crates are full of pornography. To Kingston's amazement, Brave Orchid, rather than throwing the boy out of the laundry, only comments, "My goodness, he's not too stupid to want to find out about women."
