Why Moon Orchid initially developed paranoid schizophrenia and then eventually died, even after regaining a sense of identity, if only a false one, is best explained by Brave Orchid. "The difference between mad people and sane people," she warns her children, "is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over." During the period in which Moon Orchid became more and more schizophrenic, she was obsessed with only one talk-story, that of the "Mexican ghosts" who were trying to kill her. In the asylum, she "had a new story" about how the other female patients were her daughters, but this one talk-story was the only story on which she fixated. Kingston, on the other hand, seems to understand what Brave Orchid means about a variety of talk-stories, which empower her like they do her mother. She draws on many talk-stories for The Woman Warrior, and, more important, she incorporates them into her personal life as best she can.
Although "At the Western Palace" seems less of a talk-story than the previous chapters, Kingston is strengthened by recalling Moon Orchid's struggle to assimilate in America. At the chapter's end, Kingston writes, "Brave Orchid's daughters decided fiercely that they would never let men be unfaithful to them," and then she adds, tongue-in-cheek, "All her children made up their minds to major in science or mathematics." Ironically, because of this comical, almost flippant last sentence, we are left wondering if such a lesson is worth the great expense — Moon Orchid's life — that was paid for the daughters to learn what they did.
