Kingston's isolation from and frustration with her parents, and especially Brave Orchid, who, Kingston feels, doesn't understand how badly her daughter wants an "American-normal" life, reach a climax after Brave Orchid's off-handed comment about the Chinese boy and his pornography. One evening, as the family sits eating dinner at the laundry, Kingston's "throat burst open," and out pours the many complaints she has been brooding over. She screams at her father and mother to tell the boy — "that hulk" — to leave the laundry and never come back. The boy leaves, never to be seen at the laundry again, but Kingston's outburst does not end there; she and Brave Orchid have a vehement shouting match.
Kingston shouts that she has her own future plans, which do not include marrying: She plans to apply for financial scholarships to colleges because her teachers say she is very smart. In effect, she rejects her Chinese life, which she perceives as holding her back from becoming Americanized, and prefers to leave Chinese school and run for a student office at her American school and join clubs. She blames Brave Orchid for not being able to teach her English, and, even more damning, she accuses her mother of confusing her with talk-stories. At the height of her emotions, she realizes that her long list of grievances is now "scrambled out of order," and that she is recalling things that occurred many years ago.
Symbolically, Kingston's list of complaints recalls the ideographs for revenge that Fa Mu Lan's father carved on the woman warrior's back in "White Tigers." In that chapter, Kingston noted that Fa Mu Lan's family's "list of grievances went on and on"; in "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," she writes, "I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother. . . ." Also, Kingston prays for a white horse — "white, the bad, mournful color" — like the "kingly white horse" that Fa Mu Lan rides into battle.
Kingston and Brave Orchid's argument ends with Brave Orchid shouting "Ho Chi Kuei" — "Ho Chi" means "like," and "Kuei" means "ghost" — at Kingston, who struggles to find meaning in the words. Chinese immigrants of Brave Orchid's generation frequently referred to their children as "Ho Chi Kuei," or half-ghosts, an expression that implies the Chinese-born immigrants' resentment of the American-born generation's rejecting traditional Chinese culture. However, in an enigmatic and contradictory way, "Ho Chi Kuei" also suggests the older generation's jealousy — even pride — that their children can assimilate into American culture and prosper with relative ease. To Brave Orchid, Kingston has become "Ho Chi Kuei," or like a ghost-foreigner.
