Kingston's childhood fears about the expectations placed on females also stem from Brave Orchid's talk-stories involving female slavery. The sorrowful descriptions of the Chinese girls who are sold as slaves heighten her own fear about being an unwanted daughter who could potentially be sold as a slave were she and her parents to move to China. "Whenever my parents said 'home,'" she writes, "they suspended America. They suspended enjoyment, but I did not want to go to China. In China my parents would sell my sisters and me."
In addition, Kingston struggles with the paradox that Brave Orchid might have favored the quiet girl who was her slave more than Kingston herself: "I watch them with envy," she writes of her mother and the girl. "My mother's enthusiasm for me is duller than for the slave girl." Believing that her mother showed more concern for the slave girl than she does for her own daughters, Kingston suggests that her sister also must compete with this slave for their mother's affection. "Throughout childhood," she explains, "my younger sister said, 'When I grow up, I want to be a slave.'" In "White Tigers," to please her mother, Kingston endeavored to be like Fa Mu Lan, but her attempts to live up to her mother's expectations were ridiculed by Brave Orchid; in "Shaman," her sister chooses the girl-slave as a model. However, Kingston's sister's wanting to win her mother's affection by taking on this role is paradoxical: She will have to accept that she is an unwanted daughter since only unwanted daughters are sold or given away as slaves.
Kingston also finds it contradictory that her mother, who is medically trained as a midwife, could believe in superstitions. As an adult writing the stories of her mother's encounters with ghosts and monsters, she must recognize the deep vein of ingrained Chinese lore in Brave Orchid's talk-stories. She suspects that all of the women at the To Keung School of Midwifery were like her mother's three female roommates, who eagerly obeyed Brave Orchid and pulled earlobes and chanted spirits away. Although Kingston writes that the students were "new women, scientists who changed the rituals," despite their scientific training they continued to believe in ghosts and other spirits, a contradiction that the adult Kingston cannot reconcile.
