Although "No Name Woman" and "White Tigers" are anthologized more often than the other individual chapters in The Woman Warrior, "Shaman" is arguably the novel's most pivotal chapter. As the middle chapter in Kingston's memoir about growing up listening to her mother's talk-stories, "Shaman" contains Brave Orchid's personal history, how she earned a medical degree of midwifery in China, then moved to America to be with her husband, and raised their American-born children.
The chapter's title, a tribute to Brave Orchid, refers to a person who acts as a medium between the physical and spiritual worlds, and who usually has healing powers. Brave Orchid is a shaman who exorcises ghosts, both in the Chinese women's school of midwifery and in Stockton, California. In Stockton, for example, when the garbage man walks up to the window from which Kingston and her siblings are taunting him, Brave Orchid hurriedly shuts the window, effectively securing the house from this "Garbage Ghost." However, more important than Brave Orchid's exorcising ghosts is that her story, coming as it does halfway through the novel, provides a transition between events in China and life in America. The novel's first two chapters detail stories based in a Chinese context; the last two chapters focus predominantly on the narrator's and Brave Orchid's lives in America. Bridging the gap between these two opposite realities is the chapter "Shaman," which begins in China but ends in America with Brave Orchid finally accepting that she will never return to China.
Kingston opens this chapter by describing Brave Orchid's three scrolls of medical certificates, a photograph of Brave Orchid herself, and a photograph of the medical school's graduating class. Note that when Kingston opens the canister that contains the scrolls, "the smell of China flies out, . . . a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain." Although the phrase "far back in the brain" indicates that the adult Kingston is remembering an event that occurred when she was younger, the phrase also suggests that her impressions of China were somehow subconsciously ingrained in her at birth, as if she could "smell" China because her mother once lived there and smelled odors that she associated with China, and then passed on these sensations to her daughter. However, China remains only a smell to Kingston, an intangibility made all the more confusing by her mother's talk-stories.
