In the last section of "Shaman," which chronologically takes place after the next two chapters, Brave Orchid confronts Kingston about why she doesn't visit her parents more than once a year. "The last time I saw you," Brave Orchid exaggeratedly complains, "you were still young." Although both women still hold decidedly opposite outlooks on life, Kingston emphasizes that she and her mother are not as different as she perhaps would like to believe. Physically, both women have white hair; emotionally, they are equals who have strong, independent identities. However, Kingston is painfully aware that her mother is slowly losing her will to live, to function independently of her husband and children. At one point in this section, Kingston chides her mother not to eat pills lying around the house if they are not hers: "You shouldn't take pills that aren't prescribed for you. 'Don't eat pills you find on the curb,' you always told us." Like many adults with parents who are aging quickly, Kingston is becoming the caregiver to her mother, who previously was the caregiver to Kingston.
Brave Orchid's complaint that she does not see Kingston often enough introduces a preoccupation with time that dominates Kingston and Brave Orchid's conversation here at the end of the chapter. Earlier, Kingston noted that even after her mother began living in America, Brave Orchid never stopped "seeing land on the other side of the oceans." Brave Orchid's goal was to return someday to her Chinese ancestral village and live out her life there, but now she admits that she and Kingston's father will never return to their homeland. "We have no more China to go home to," she concedes. This realization is apparent in the answer she gives when Kingston asks her about the two children who died in China: "No, you must have been dreaming. You must have been making up stories. You are all the children there are." Whether or not Brave Orchid truly has suppressed memories of her life in China now that she knows that she can never return to the land of her birth is unclear. The possibility remains that her memories of her two dead children are too painful to discuss, much like No Name Woman's family refused to honor her memory.
