Moon Orchid's stay with Brave Orchid and her family also exposes the ever-present cultural gap between Brave Orchid and her children. This rift is caused, in part, by Brave Orchid's failure to realize that many traditional Chinese customs are not adaptable to American culture. For example, when Brave Orchid tries to convince Moon Orchid that her estranged husband's children by his second wife will recognize Moon Orchid as their mother, she tells her sister, "The children will go to their true mother — you. . . . That's the way it is with mothers and children." But that is not the way it is with Brave Orchid and her own children, who, Brave Orchid admits, are "antisocial and secretive." "Ever since they were born," she recalls, "they had burrowed little nests for themselves in closets and underneath stairs; they made tents under tables and behind doors." Because the children live in a home so totally dominated by their autocratic mother, who rejects their assimilation into American culture, they physically construct hiding places to escape emotionally from her control and to create individualized, "American-normal" identities.
Brave Orchid's children find Moon Orchid's behavior odd, as she does theirs. The running commentary that Moon Orchid provides as she follows them about the house emphasizes just how Americanized Kingston and her siblings are. Growing up, Moon Orchid was taught to look demurely askance at adults, never directly into their eyes; her sister's children, however, look straight into her eyes, "as if they were looking for lies. . . . They were like animals the way they stared." Traditionally, Chinese custom considered a person polite who denied, not accepted, a compliment, but Moon Orchid's nieces and nephews receive her compliments unashamedly. Initially, Moon Orchid suspects that Brave Orchid's children are "animals" who live in a barbarian culture; her suspicion is confirmed when she sees them eat undercooked meat. Worse, they are "savages" who always smell like cow's milk: "At first she thought they were so clumsy, they spilled it on their clothes. But soon she decided they themselves smelled of milk. They were big and smelled of milk; they were young and had white hair." Moon Orchid does not realize that many Americans drink milk their entire lives, but neither do Brave Orchid's children know that in traditional Chinese society, only babies drink milk.
