Any chance of a renewed personal relationship between Moon Orchid and her husband is doomed to fail because of the vast cultural differences between them. Moon Orchid's traditional Chinese upbringing has so completely conditioned her to be passive toward men, to accept unquestioningly any directive of her husband, that she cannot muster the emotional stamina needed to challenge his authority. "You don't have the hardness for this country," her husband tells her. He, however, does. He "smelled like an American," and he "looked directly at Moon Orchid the way the savages looked, looking for lies." He admits to Moon Orchid and her sister that he has "turned into a different person," and that they have become "people in a book I had read a long time ago." When Moon Orchid notes that her husband has lived in America for so long that he "talked like a child born here," she finally realizes that his power of language, which she does not have, is the greatest obstacle between them. This language difference, which symbolizes the diametrically opposed cultures in which each lives, never can be overcome. "Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the windows," Moon Orchid thinks, "and she must look like a ghost from China. They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts."
Following the dramatic meeting between Brave Orchid, Moon Orchid, and her husband in the car, Brave Orchid makes her brother-in-law take the two sisters to lunch, an odd, understated finale to the tumultuous conversation that has just occurred. Brave Orchid's son then drives his mother and aunt to Moon Orchid's daughter's home, where Moon Orchid will live. On the way, Brave Orchid tries to console her sister by minimizing the disastrous confrontation with Moon Orchid's husband. "Oh, well," she casually says. "We're all under the same sky and walk the same earth; we're alive together during the same moment." This theme of universality is remarkably similar to Kingston's own comforting comments to Brave Orchid at the end of the previous chapter.
Moon Orchid moves in with her daughter. However, as each day goes by, she becomes more emotionally disturbed and develops paranoid schizophrenia. She fears that "Mexican ghosts" are spying on her, and the one time that she talks on the phone to Brave Orchid, she quickly hangs up, saying "They're listening. Hang up quickly before they trace you." She moves into an apartment of her own to escape the ghosts who are "plotting on her life" but eventually moves again, this time to Stockton to live with Brave Orchid, who tells Moon Orchid's daughter that she will cure her sister of this illness that is fear. To her own children, Brave Orchid explains their aunt's returning to live with them by expanding the talk-story about the emperor and his four wives: ". . . the wife who lost in battle was sent to the Northern Palace."
