Although Brave Orchid regularly denigrates American culture, which she views as wasteful and uncivilized, she is not immune to its effects. One example of her relaxing the many Chinese customs with which she was raised is the American practice of hanging pictures of living relatives on walls in the house, in this case her and her husband's own portraits. When Moon Orchid notices that her sister's and brother-in-law's pictures hang opposite her grandparents' and asks why, Brave Orchid casually remarks, "No reason. Nothing. . . . In America you can put up anybody's picture you like." Her answer appears to be insignificant at first, but its import is great: No matter how much she resists the American culture around her, it affects her more than she might be willing to admit. Also, she hangs the pictures because "later the children would not have the sense to do it."
After dinner, although it is late at night and Moon Orchid is tired from her long journey, Brave Orchid insists that Moon Orchid and Moon Orchid's daughter "get down to [the] business" of reuniting Moon Orchid with her husband. She wants to talk about the glorious moment in which her sister will confront her brother-in-law and reclaim her marriage rights: "Oh, how I'd love to be in your place. I could tell him so many things. What scenes I could make." For the last thirty years, Moon Orchid has been receiving money from her husband, but she has never told him that Brave Orchid had been planning to bring her to America: "She waited for him to suggest it, but he never did." She is frightened at the prospect of confronting her husband, but Brave Orchid is adamant that her sister should reclaim her rightful place as "Big Wife" — the first-married wife of a husband. Although Brave Orchid knows that the husband has a second wife, whom he married after he arrived in America, she does not consider this "Little Wife" a barrier to her sister and brother-in-law's reconciliation: Customarily, a wealthy Chinese man in China was married simultaneously to more than one woman.
Moon Orchid and her daughter stay with Brave Orchid for several weeks, a difficult time for Brave Orchid and her children. Brave Orchid is impatient with her sister, whom she regards as the "lovely, useless type." Moon Orchid is unable to do manual work either in the house or in the family-owned laundry. Because the laundry is unbearably hot, the most she can learn to do is fold towels late in the day, when the temperature inside the laundry has cooled. Used to a life of comfort, she is "eager to work, roughing it in the wilderness," but anything she attempts to do infuriates Brave Orchid because she works too slowly.
