Another, more important example of Brave Orchid's independent, warriorlike spirit is her decision to retain her own name rather than take her husband's after they married. The power to name oneself, to have an individual identity, is further emphasized when Brave Orchid, after arriving in America, keeps her own name rather than Westernize it. "Even when she emigrated," Kingston writes, "my mother kept Brave Orchid, adding no American name nor holding one in reserve for American emergencies." That Brave Orchid retained her own name, that she had a name at all, contrasts with Kingston's aunt's namelessness. Kingston suggests throughout the novel that people who control the power of language can survive any ordeal because they cannot lose their personal identities. For example, she notes that when Brave Orchid got scared as a child, "one of my mother's three mothers had held her and chanted their descent line, reeling the frighted spirit back from the farthest deserts." Likewise, after Brave Orchid, who herself is "good at naming," faces the Sitting Ghost at night in the school of midwifery, the following morning the other female students "called out their own names, women's pretty names," to guide Brave Orchid's spirit back to the school. A person like No Name Woman, however, whose identity is figuratively buried along with any memory of her, has no power to stand up for herself and combat the violence inflicted against her. She is a lost soul because her family refuses to call out the list of their ancestors' names in order to guide No Name Woman's spirit back home.
Waiting in the haunted room for the ghost's appearance, Brave Orchid wraps herself in a quilt made by her mother. Of special note is Kingston's description of the quilt: "In the middle of one border my grandmother had sewn a tiny satin triangle, a red heart to protect my mother at the neck, as if she were her baby yet." This protective talisman is identical to the "tiny quilted triangle, red at its center," that Fa Mu Lan had sewn for her baby. The use of the word "quilt" is especially effective in linking Brave Orchid's and Fa Mu Lan's stories. In addition, at the end of "Shaman," Brave Orchid will cover Kingston with a quilt, "the thick, homemade Chinese kind." These images of quilts unite the many woman-warrior influences in Kingston's life.
