As in "No Name Woman," Brave Orchid uses talk-story to provide morals and guidelines for her daughter, who admits of her mother, "At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story." This admission is especially flattering of Brave Orchid because Kingston uses the same phrase, "the presence of great power," to describe the spirit of the white crane that helped a woman warrior invent white crane boxing. But Kingston interprets Brave Orchid's woman warrior stories differently than her mother intended. Again, because Kingston relates these stories to her personal American context, she reads different meanings into them.
In her own experience as a girl growing up in a Chinese family and community, Kingston knows that girls are not favored. After all, she points out, "There is a Chinese word for the female I — which is 'slave.' Break the women with their own tongues!" However, she believes that she could receive the recognition that is reserved for sons if only she traded her female identity for a male's, just as Fa Mu Lan does. Ironically, she finds that by doing things that are considered anti-feminine, she is still unfavored: "I refused to cook. When I had to wash dishes, I would crack one or two. 'Bad girl,' my mother yelled, and sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn't a bad girl almost a boy?" By giving up her femininity, Kingston also realizes that she will be unsuccessful in getting dates with boys. She finds that the role model provided in the Fa Mu Lan story cannot help her to escape the denigrating remarks made about girls — "Girls are maggots in the rice. It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters" — or to debunk the traditional roles expected of her.
Kingston reveals her disappointment in Fa Mu Lan and shows how the story is of little use to her American reality. For example, when she stands up as a "heroine" to one of her bigoted and chauvinistic American bosses, the real barons in her life, he simply fires her. She also has difficulty understanding why, in communist China, her aunts and uncles were slaughtered as if they were the barons, when in fact they were the villagers who needed saving from the barons' tyrannical rule. She feels tricked by these stories of her descendants because they create paradoxes that she cannot reconcile. One such contradiction involves birds: A bird leads Fa Mu Lan to the old couple on the mountaintop, but birds also lure Kingston's uncle to his death at the hands of the Chinese communists. Resignedly, Kingston notes, "It is confusing that birds tricked us."
