Because her mother's messages are difficult to adopt or apply to her immediate American reality, Kingston, after relating Brave Orchid's telling of No Name Woman's story, rewrites the tale from her own American perspective. She uses her own style of "talk-story" to guess the reasons for her aunt's actions. Ironically, although at the time she probably would not have recognized it, nor perhaps have wanted to, Kingston's rewriting her mother's talk-story as her own indicates an important element in her reconciling her Chinese past and her American present: She learns to talk-story by having listened to her mother. In this way, a continuity is established between her mother, who represents the cultural traditions of China, and herself as a first-generation Chinese American. Kingston will finally acknowledge this succession of generations when, at the end of "Shaman," she compares herself favorably to her mother and proudly recognizes their many similarities: "I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter."
Kingston rewrites No Name Woman's story based on her own understanding of the patriarchal nature of traditional Chinese society, in which women were conditioned to do as they were told, without question. Because of the close-knit community in which No Name Woman lived, Kingston contends that her aunt's sexual partner "was not a stranger because the village housed no strangers." Ironically, Kingston reasons, the same patriarchal society that subjugated women to subservient roles bears responsibility for No Name Woman's adultery. Because No Name Woman was conditioned to do everything that she was ordered to do, she was unable to gather the personal strength necessary to repel the man's sexual advances. This inability emphasizes what Kingston argues is the great disparity between how women and men were supposed to act: "Women in the old China did not choose. Some man had commanded her to lie with him and be his secret evil. . . . She obeyed him; she always did as she was told." Even more damning of this double standard in "old China" is Kingston's assertion that this man who basically raped No Name Woman was the same villager who organized the raid against No Name Woman's family. Kingston's version of Brave Orchid's original talk-story emphasizes how a dutifully submissive woman is victimized by a man's abusive manipulation of a gender-based social code.
