By confronting her mother, Kingston, for the first time in her life, discovers a strong, personal voice with which she can reconcile the competing Chinese and American cultures. She learns to exercise power over her world through the use of words and the ability to form ideas. Like Brave Orchid, she now can conquer her own ghosts using talk-stories. Apart from American ghosts, however, Chinese ghosts, particularly female ancestors and crazy women, still haunt her. Throughout the novel, the many women whom Kingston refers to, who commit suicide, are locked up, or even killed, suffer for their failure to find individualized voices that assert their selfhood. Similarly, Kingston, by asserting her identity — especially her female identity — through language, risks being branded "crazy" by her family and treated as an outcast, a "ghost," by the Chinese community.
Kingston introduces The Woman Warrior's final talk-story, which focuses on the second-century Chinese female poet Ts'ai Yen, by saying, "Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young, but recently, when I told her I also talk story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine." Here, Kingston's choice of words is especially important: She publicly acknowledges that Brave Orchid's talk-stories still play a significant role in her life, and that she and Brave Orchid share a special bond between them — a love for talk-story.
The talk-story begins with Brave Orchid telling how Kingston's grandmother loved Chinese operas, and how her family, once while they attended an operatic performance, were almost hurt and robbed by bandits. Kingston then imagines that one of the operas her grandmother saw involved Ts'ai Yen, who is not as well known as the mythical Fa Mu Lan but whose life is better documented factually. Born in 177, not in 175 as Kingston suggests, Ts'ai Yen, the daughter of a wealthy scholar-statesman, was a musician and a poet. During a village raid in 195, she was captured by invading horsemen, whose chieftain made her his wife. For twelve years, she lived with these "barbarians" in the desert, and she even bore two children by the chieftain. Whenever the children's father would leave the family tent, Ts'ai Yen would talk and sing in Chinese to her children. Eventually, she was ransomed and returned to her family so that she could remarry and produce Han — Chinese — descendants.
