Desperate to win her mother’s approval and to do something “big and fine,” Kingston does not recognize that her mother uses the story of Fa Mu Lan to make the point that sacrificing oneself for the family and village is more important than gaining individual success. Fa Mu Lan’s sacrificial acts of fighting in place of her father and saving her village from the tyrannical baron are more important than any actual glory she earns in battle. Brave Orchid downplays her daughter’s success at school because, according to the moral of Fa Mu Lan, the self-sacrificial act deserves recognition, not the glory Kingston gets from school, especially since females are not expected to excel in school or in their careers.
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.”
Kingston also cannot conceal her conflicting emotions about wanting to have a family of her own but fearing that to do so would only prove her mother right, that women are raised to be only wives and mothers. Jealous of Fa Mu Lan’s ability to be swordswoman, wife, and mother, and of the woman warrior’s network of support from her family, husband, and village, simultaneously Kingston is angry that she herself does not have any of these things. “Then,” she writes, “I get bitter: no one supports me; I am not loved enough to be supported. That I am not a burden has to compensate for the sad envy when I look at women loved enough to be supported.” Ironically, the greater she tries to distance herself from her Chinese heritage, the more she realizes just how affected she has become from listening to her mother’s talk-stories about her female ancestors. Although she wants most to identify herself as an individual who lives in America and who has very few ties to China, nevertheless she admits, “Even now China wraps double binds around my feet.”
As an adult, Kingston continues to struggle with “dragons,” the paradoxes in life. She describes her pain about the emotional distance between herself and her Chinese-born parents in these words: “When I visit the family now, I wrap my American successes around me like a private shawl; I am worthy of eating the food. From afar I can believe my family loves me fundamentally. They only say, ‘When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls,’ because that is what one says about daughters.” However, there is still a bitter irony in what she says about her parents and her relationship with them.
In the chapter’s last paragraph, Kingston finds consolation that she and Fa Mu Lan serve a common purpose. Both women are concerned about the welfare of their people, and both testify to the strength and determination of women who create their own destinies rather than let others decide their futures for them. Fittingly, the Chinese god of war and the Chinese god of literature are one and the same: Kuan Kung. “What we have in common are the words at our backs,” Kingston writes, speaking of herself and Fa Mu Lan. “The idioms for revenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families.’ The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too—that they do not fit on my skin.” Using her gift for talk-story, Kingston fights the many paradoxes in her life with words rather than with a sword.
