However, as a child, the impressionable Kingston believes in her mother's extraordinary exorcistic abilities. Left on her own to make sense of her mother's stories, Kingston recalls one perplexing story in which Brave Orchid confronts "Sit Dom Kuei," ghosts that appear as snake-like whirlwinds. Because of her limited understanding of the Chinese language, Kingston cannot translate what "Sit Dom Kuei" means, except that "Kuei" is Chinese for ghost. Hopelessly asking "How do they translate?" Kingston's language fails her, ironically because Chinese is not her native language. Also, her inability to translate "Sit Dom Kuei" is another symbol of the cultural gap that separates her from her parents. Only at the memoir's end, after having secured a private, personal identity as an adult, a woman, a Chinese American, an American, will Kingston confidently proclaim about her own talk-story, "It translated well."
In "Shaman," as in the previous chapters, Kingston cannot ask Brave Orchid questions and expect understandable answers that are relevant to her own life. Instead, she depends on her own imagination and concludes only that her mother, like the legendary figures about whom she talk-stories, was powerful against ghosts because she could eat anything and everything. In making this conclusion, Kingston begins to accept that she will need to reconcile, or learn to live with, the differences between her American life and the values and practices expected of her in her Chinese home life. However, integrating her mother's horrific talk-stories into her American life, or at least discounting their believability to lessen their vivid sensationalism, severely threatens Kingston's psychological stability. For example, when she endures yet another telling of the monkey story, in which participants sit around a table and literally eat the brain of a monkey, whose head is trapped within a cutout hole in the table's middle, Kingston unsettlingly writes, "a curtain flapped loose inside my brain." She is so horrendously shocked by this gruesome account that she again loses the power of language and is unable to tell her mother, "Stop it." This account's graphic depiction is intensified even more when we — and Kingston — learn that the monkey was alive when the participants began eating its brain. "It was alive?" Kingston incredulously asks. "The curtain flaps closed like merciful black wings." In addition, Kingston directly follows this talk-story with her mother's telling her children, "Eat! Eat!" Humorously, what Brave Orchid wants them to eat — "blood pudding awobble in the middle of the table" — looks too akin to the monkey brain that they have just heard about to be digestible.
