Living with Moon Orchid becomes more difficult day by day. She makes Brave Orchid's family turn off the lights and does not let them out of her sight. When Brave Orchid tells her family to humor her sister, the children hide in their rooms. Eventually, Moon Orchid starts to curse the family with bad omens, and Brave Orchid concedes that her sister has gone mad. Moon Orchid is institutionalized in an asylum and soon thereafter she dies. Like No Name Woman, she "slipped away entirely," without proper identity and status.
Language again plays an important role in Moon Orchid's demise here at the end of "At the Western Palace." Returning to live with Brave Orchid in Stockton, Moon Orchid assures her sister that she heard Mexican ghosts talking in English about her. When Brave Orchid points out that Moon Orchid does not understand English, her younger sister replies, "This time, miraculously, I understood. I decoded their speech. I penetrated the words and understood what was happening inside." Ironically, Moon Orchid's decoding and penetrating the Mexican ghosts' language is similar to what Kingston was forced to do while growing up and listening to her mother's talk-stories. Because Brave Orchid never explained how the talk-stories were relevant to Kingston's life, Kingston had to interpret their meanings. Unfortunately, because Moon Orchid does not understand English, her interpretation of the Mexicans' English is based wholly on the insecurity she feels having been summarily rejected by her husband and now living in what for her must be a foreign, barbaric country. As Brave Orchid notes, "Moon Orchid had misplaced herself, her spirit (her 'attention,' Brave Orchid called it) scattered over the world." Not even Brave Orchid, who calls her sister's name in hopes that Moon Orchid's spirit will return to her body, can help her sister regain her lost identity.
Only during her brief stay in the insane asylum, before she dies, does Moon Orchid regain a sense of identity through language. Speaking to Brave Orchid, she joyfully explains that she and the other female residents "understand one another here. We speak the same language, the very same. They understand me, and I understand them." For the first time since Moon Orchid emigrated from China, she feels a sense of community: "We are all women here."
