Back at home, Brave Orchid wants to perform a luck ceremony to welcome her sister, but Moon Orchid tells everyone to open the presents that she has brought for them. She becomes totally immersed in giving out the gifts, including a paper doll of Fa Mu Lan, who, Moon Orchid assures her nieces and nephews, "really existed." Brave Orchid considers these presents frivolous and extravagant. Unlike Moon Orchid, she is particularly wary of extravagances that may draw the attentions of jealous gods. Eventually, Brave Orchid has her luck ceremony, feeding candy to her children: "It was very important that the beginning be sweet." The sisters then prepare a huge dinner for the family.
Brave Orchid and her children's personal interactions during Moon Orchid's gift-giving are strained at best. The cultural gap between them is immense, in large part because Brave Orchid judges her children based on traditional Chinese manners. For example, when Moon Orchid passes out the paper dolls, the children immediately begin to play with them. However, Brave Orchid, raised by Chinese parents who taught her "correct" Chinese behavior, privately thinks of her children, "How greedy to play with presents, in front of the giver." This relationship between tradition and behavior is addressed most directly when Brave Orchid remembers that the Chinese word for "impolite" is "untraditonal." She characterizes her children as lazy, and when they balk at eating the luck-ceremony candy that symbolizes good beginnings, she thinks of them as stupid: "They'd put the bad mouth on their aunt's first American day; you had to sweeten their noisy barbarous mouths."
Another reason for the breakdown of Brave Orchid and her children's relationship is their lack of meaningful communication. Kingston recalls that when she was growing up, on certain occasions her mother opened the front door and mumbled something, and then opened the back door and mumbled again. Whenever the children asked her what and why she mumbled, Brave Orchid refused to interpret her actions. "It's nothing," she would say to her children. "She never explained anything that was really important. They no longer asked." In addition, at the supper table, Brave Orchid always invoked silence and did not allow anyone to speak — at least, not in Chinese. Kingston notes that children in other families whose parents forbade talking at the supper table created an elaborate sign language to overcome their parents' enforced silence. She and her siblings, however, talked freely in English, "which their parents didn't seem to hear." Because Brave Orchid does not consider English to be a "language," the children may speak it without getting into trouble. Unfortunately, this language barrier dramatically increases the cultural gap between Brave Orchid and her children: Brave Orchid will not master English because it symbolizes the barbarous American culture, and the children resist speaking Chinese because they want to be "American-normal."
