When Moon Orchid's daughter must return to Los Angeles to her own family, Brave Orchid decides that it is also time for Moon Orchid to rejoin her husband. She forces her unwilling son to drive them all to Los Angeles. During the journey, Brave Orchid continues to imagine the approaches that Moon Orchid should take in confronting her husband and reclaiming her rights as his wife. Mood Orchid, however, remains unsure of herself, especially now that she has read in a newspaper that it is unlawful for an American man to be married to more than one woman at a time. "The law doesn't matter," Brave Orchid says to bolster her sister's confidence.
On the way to Los Angeles, Brave Orchid narrates a talk-story about an emperor with four wives, from which this chapter gets its ironic title. "A long time ago," Brave Orchid begins, an emperor had four wives, each of whom lived in a palace located at one of the earth's four major compass points. The Empress of the East, whom Brave Orchid likens to Moon Orchid, was "good and kind and full of light," but the Empress of the West, in her striving for ultimate power over the emperor's other three wives, imprisoned the emperor in the Western Palace. Only Moon Orchid, the Empress of the East, can save the emperor, her husband, from the evil clutches of the Empress of the West, her husband's second wife with whom he is living. "You must break the strong spell she has cast on him that has lost him the East," Brave Orchid encourages her sister.
Although Brave Orchid's talk-story about the emperor and his four wives is the shortest talk-story — only one paragraph — in The Woman Warrior, it is the best example of how talk-stories are meant to empower individuals. To Brave Orchid, the talk-story justifies her and her sister's moral righteousness in confronting the barbarian husband and his barbarian wife, and guarantees success for their mission. Knowing that Moon Orchid lacks the courage needed to confront her husband and demand the respect from him that she deserves, Brave Orchid attempts to bolster her sister's resiliency, to strengthen her mentally by likening her to a woman warrior who comes out of the dawn to "free the Emperor." Stylistically, note the magical, mystical images that Kingston uses to introduce this otherworldly, mythological realm of emperors and empresses: "They set out at gray dawn, driving between the grape trees, which hunched like dwarfs in the fields. Gnomes in serrated outfits that blew in the morning wind came out of the earth, came up in rows and columns. Everybody was only half awake." In only three sentences, we are transported into a wholly different world, a new reality in which women warriors fight for what they believe is right and just.
