At school, Brave Orchid feels pressure to appear smarter than her fellow classmates: Because she is older than they, traditionally she is expected to be wiser. She seeks out hiding places in which to study secretly so that she will appear more knowledgeable than her peers. These hiding places also symbolize the importance that the female students place on personal space. For example, in her section of the room that she shares with other female students, Brave Orchid "placed precisely" each of her personal items. Her cataloging these items emphasizes the pleasure she gets from organizing her own belongings rather than someone else's: "The locks on her suitcase opened with two satisfying clicks; she enjoyed again how neatly her belongings fitted together, clean against the green lining." Although the "daydream of women — to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself" — seems limited at best, most likely the majority of the female students came from homes headed by either a father or a husband, and the women would have been treated by the male figures as second-class citizens in their own homes. "Free from families," Kingston writes, "my mother would live for two years without servitude. She would not have to run errands for my father's tyrant mother with the bound feet or thread needles for old ladies." Ironically, however, "neither would there be slaves and nieces to wait on her."
The incident in which Brave Orchid spends the night in the haunted room and is sat on by a Sitting Ghost recalls many details from the previous two chapters. Kingston begins this section of the narrative with the word "Maybe," which signals that she is reinterpreting her mother's talk-story to understand better how the tale affects her own American life. This narrative strategy is similar to Kingston's inventing a personal history for No Name Woman and introducing Fa Mu Lan's talk-story using the subjective "would." By creating one possible scenario of Brave Orchid's bravery, Kingston emphasizes how her mother is herself a woman warrior, who is unafraid to sleep overnight in a haunted room. Brave Orchid exerts her independent spirit not only when she accepts the other students' challenge to meet whatever ghost awaits her, but intellectually when she daringly questions the traditional belief of life after death: "How do we know that ghosts are the continuance of dead people? . . . Perhaps human beings just die, and that's the end. I don't think I'd mind that too much."
