Other sources of Kingston's apprehension about her gender include the stories of baby girls being deliberately suffocated to death in ashes, which account for her recurring nightmares of babies being hurt. Unknowingly, Brave Orchid's sharing these horrific tales with Kingston undercuts any positive effect she might be trying to instill in her daughter. Rather than increase Kingston's self-esteem, these talk-stories cause her to question her own sense of self-worth. "My mother has given me pictures to dream — nightmare babies that recur, shrinking again and again to fit in my palm," Kingston writes. "I curl my fingers to make a cradle for the baby, my other hand an awning. But in a blink of inattention, I would mislay the baby. . . . Or bathing it, I carefully turn the right-hand faucet, but it spouts hot water, scalding the baby until its skin tautens and its face becomes nothing but a red hole of a scream." In this extended passage, note the repetitive "I" that begins each declarative sentence; Kingston tries to reassure herself that she "would protect the dream baby, not let it suffer, not let it out of my sight." However, no matter how many times she dreams of saving the baby, she fails to protect it, and the baby "recedes" from her.
Against this backdrop of dead baby girls and babies who die because they cannot defecate, Kingston struggles to keep her sanity. Her anguish is worsened by her uncertainty as to whether or not her mother might have taken part in these infanticides, or baby killings. "To make my waking life American-normal," she writes, "I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories." Again, China is "invisible," a subconscious world that threatens Kingston most at night. She can smell China; she can hear China ("my mother funneled China into our ears"); she can even taste China ("Mother! Mother! It's happening again. I taste something in my mouth, but I'm not eating anything"); but she cannot see China for herself. In contrast, America is the observable, physical world of the every day. Even when Kingston speaks of the innumerable ghosts that surround her in her American life, she differentiates between these intimidating ghosts' physicalness and the unknown — and, therefore, more terrifying — forms of ghosts that she would encounter were she and her family to move to China: "I did not want to go where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own."
