Throughout her absence from home, Fa Mu Lan views her family and village by looking into a water gourd that the old man possesses. She sees her brother taking their father's place in the army conscription, an act of perfect filial piety — complete obedience and service to one's parents. She also watches her own wedding ceremony, in which her parents wed her to her childhood friend, who marries her despite her absence. He, too, is conscripted into the army.
When the village families are called upon once again to send male family members for service in the army, Fa Mu Lan, having trained for fifteen years with the old couple, returns to her village to take her father's place. Upon arriving, she is showered with glories by her family "as if they were welcoming home a son." However, before her parents allow her to leave to take her father's place in the army, they force her to kneel before the family's ancestral shrine while her father uses a knife to carve a "list of grievances" into her back. Fa Mu Lan does not cry despite the pain. Should she die while fighting in battle, the list, including the oaths, names, and address of her family, will serve to remind everyone of the sacrifices she and her family made.
Fa Mu Lan's father's physically carving words into his daughter's back is a shocking act that seems cruel and inhumane, yet another example of a patriarchal society that sanctions violence against women. Paradoxically, however, his actions are also a testament to the power of language. Fa Mu Lan becomes a text — literally — of written words: "My father first brushed the words in ink, and they fluttered down my back row after row. Then he began cutting; to make fine lines and points he used thin blades, for the stems, large blades." The ideographs, or symbols, of revenge that Fa Mu Lan's father carves into her back transform her into a woman who is revenge incarnate — revenge made flesh. Earlier in the chapter, Kingston noted the bird that led Fa Mu Lan up into the mountains: "In the brush drawings it looks like the ideograph for 'human,' two black wings," and the mountains themselves "look like the ideograph 'mountain.'" By drawing attention to how much these ideographs — revenge, bird, and mountain — look like the very idea or objects that they represent, Kingston emphasizes how language defines experience, which otherwise would remain unrecorded — for example, No Name Woman's life story, or Maxine Hong Kingston's own identity as a female Chinese American.
