Two other details recall Fa Mu Lan's story. As Brave Orchid waits for the Sitting Ghost to appear, she reads from a textbook but soon grows tired. Kingston describes the text in Brave Orchid's textbook as her mother's eyes begin to droop: "Soon the ideographs lifted their feet, stretched out their wings, and flew like blackbirds; the dots were their eyes." This description of the textbook's ideographs as birdlike is similar to Kingston's personification of the bird that led Fa Mu Lan to the old couple: "In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for 'human,' two black wings." Also, when Brave Orchid first becomes aware of the ghost's presence in the haunted room, Kingston writes of her mother, "She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow — alone in white not unlike being alone in black." In "White Tigers," Fa Mu Lan journeyed up into the mountains to gain spiritual enlightenment and became a woman warrior.
After graduating from the women's school of midwifery, Brave Orchid returns as a doctor to her home village, which welcomes her with garlands and cymbals. "My mother wore a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair," Kingston writes. "She had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains," another reference to Fa Mu Lan. Brave Orchid returns to her village as a medical warrior to save lives. Her reputation grows with every home she visits because she has only success: "She would not touch death; therefore, untainted, she brought only health from house to house."
Although Brave Orchid's intention in telling her personal history to Kingston is to present herself to her daughter as an alternative to the traditional Chinese female roles of child bearer and caretaker, Kingston remains anxious about being a female. Her anxieties stem from listening to her mother's talk-stories about females who are placed in vulnerable positions within Chinese society. One such story involves the village crazy lady, "an inappropriate woman whom the people stoned." Here, Kingston uses the benign adjective "inappropriate" to contrast the woman's insane, uncontrollable actions with the villagers' violent, premeditated killing of her. In the wake of Japanese bombing that "drove people insane," Kingston suggests that the village crazy lady tried to reestablish a personal, ordered identity out of public chaos by wearing a headdress made of mirrors, which attracted the Japanese bombers' attention because the mirrors reflected sunlight and pinpointed where the villagers were hiding. However, the villagers, understandably fearful for their own safety, stone the woman to death rather than simply remove her headdress. For Kingston, this episode must have reminded her of when Brave Orchid warned her in "No Name Woman," "Don't humiliate us. . . . The villagers are watchful."
