The book is a collection of Maxine Hong Kingston's memoirs, so it is technically a work of nonfiction. But the author is careful never to mention her name in the narrative. This is presumably because the book, while grounded in truth, does not maintain a clear boundary between reality and fantasy. In light of these facts, we shall call the narrator of this book "the narrator," not "Hong Kingston," reserving the latter name for the author.

The book begins with the voice of the narrator’s mother saying, “You must not tell anyone…” She tells her daughter a dark family secret; in China, her husband’s sister drowned herself in their well. After that, the family kept secret not only the suicide, but also the sister-in-law’s very existence. She goes on to recount this sister’s birth. In 1924, her father, husband, and brothers-in-law left to seek fortune in California, “the Gold Mountain.” Like most of the men in their village, they sought money elsewhere because the village crops were suffering. The mother stayed behind with the other women, living with her sister-in-law. Some time later, she noticed that her sister-in-law was pregnant. Neither she nor anyone else in the village discussed it; the sister-in-law’s husband had been gone for years, so her pregnancy was disgraceful to the village.

On the night that the sister-in-law was to give birth, the villagers stormed their house, dressed to scare. After slaughtering the animals, they swarmed the house and destroyed everything they could find. They stole what they had not ruined before leaving. That night, the sister-in-law gave birth amid the mess from the raid. The next morning, the narrator’s mother found her and her newborn baby drowned in the family well. At the end of the story, we learn its intended moral. The mother tells her daughter, “Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born. The villagers are watchful.” She is warning her daughter against promiscuity and against shaming her family.

Now we hear the narrator’s voice. She explains that her mother usually invoked stories from her homeland of China to teach life lessons. The narrator and her generation, by contrast, were first-generation Chinese-Americans. They had to navigate two cultures in order to form a unique identity. Because the narrator is forbidden to ask about her aunt, she fills in the gaps in the story with her imagination. In her first version of the story, she says her aunt was a rape victim because “women in the old China did not choose [with whom to have sex].” She vilifies not only the rapist but all the village men because, she asserts, they victimized women as a rule: “The other man was not, after all, much different from her husband. They both gave orders; she followed. ‘If you tell your family, I’ll beat you. I’ll kill you. Be here again next week.” To make matters worse, the aunt would not have been able to hide from her rapist because the village was small; he may have been a vendor she had to visit daily. Her fear must have been constant and inescapable. The narrator considers the ways in which Chinese culture alienates those who have erred. Her own parents used to talk about an “outcast table,” where family members who had shamed the family had to eat alone.

The narrator puts aside her rape theory to imagine her aunt as a freely sexual woman, who groomed herself carefully in order to attract attention from men. She pictures her aunt drawing stares from all the village men, longing for a lover, and dying in silence to protect her baby’s father. Her actions would have threatened the village’s tradition of pairing couples from birth in order to ensure stability and conformity. The aunt’s adultery was a deviation, but it was considered “a crime” because the village was going through hard times. By giving birth to an illegitimate child—an outcast—the aunt had robbed the village of a legitimate person who would grow up to “feed the old and the dead” and “look after the family.”

The narrator imagines the end of her aunt’s life. Her family cursed her after the raid, yelling, “Ghost! Dead ghost! Ghost! You’ve never been born.” She gave birth alone in a pigsty, her newborn child a “little ghost,” an outcast like its mother. The protagonist explains that her aunt showed her child love and mercy by drowning it along with her. She could have simply abandoned her baby, but “mothers who love their children take them along.” The aunt knew that her child would grow up to be a pariah and wanted to spare it the shame that had killed her, made her a ghost, even before she died. Moreover, the baby was probably a girl. Had it been a boy, the preferred sex, her aunt might have had hope for its future and left it in the care of the village.

The narrator notes that by following her mother’s orders never to mention her aunt, she has been complicit in her aunt’s unfair punishment. She says that even in the ghost world, her aunt must be an outcast. She pictures her lonely, scrounging leftover offerings that other ghosts’ relatives leave them. To the narrator, writing about her aunt is a kind of penance for participating in her continuing castigation. Sometimes she fears that her aunt’s ghost is malevolent, striving to harm her for exposing her shame to readers.

Analysis

“No Name Woman” introduces us to some of the book’s major themes. The first of these is silence. With the opening words of the book, “You must not tell anyone.” the narrator’s mother inducts her into a long tradition of keeping things secret. As the narrator explains, keeping silence is not passive; it can involve willing oneself to forget something or someone. Because the narrator does as she is told and keeps the silence about her aunt, she too shames her aunt and denies her the right to be remembered. She feels so complicit just for keeping the silence that she is afraid her aunt’s ghost wants to harm her. In the book’s final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” we see just how much the code of silence torments the narrator; she takes out her frustration by taunting and assaulting a reticent classmate.

The second theme Hong Kingston introduces in “No Name Woman” is that of female power. In one sense the aunt is a powerless character, so powerless that she is given no name and no right to have existed. In another sense, she is too powerful to be named or remembered. Besides, as a woman, the aunt had the biological power to bring a baby into the world, and she had the social power to let her pregnancy affect the whole village. The villagers considered her baby not only an annoyance but an actual threat to their security. In hard times, this illegitimate “ghost” would spend its life as a dead weight, draining their resources and disturbing their traditions. The narrator explains that in the village community, individual power and not just female power frightened the villagers: “The villagers punished [the aunt] for acting as if she could have a private life, secret and apart from them.”

No one knows the power of giving birth better than the narrator’s mother, who has given birth to eight children as well as delivered countless others. She tells her daughter not to get pregnant out of wedlock and end up a “ghost” like her aunt. The narrator tells us, “Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America.” First-generation Chinese-Americans, she says, must try to incorporate their parents’ “old Chinese” wisdom into their American lives. Despite the need for translation between generations, the narrator likely did not have to do much to apply her aunt’s story to her own life. It would have been the mid-1950s when her mother told her the story, a time before second-wave feminism, when “old Chinese” and American views on pregnancy out of wedlock were actually not so different from today’s American society.

The villagers never tried to find the man who got the aunt pregnant. The narrator even suggests that he helped raid her house. The double standard works in both countries. Whereas men are expected to seek adventure and throw tradition to the wind, women are expected to stay home and keep tradition: “The heavy, deep-rooted women were to maintain the past against the flood, safe for returning.” Hong Kingston uses imagery of women like trees holding strong against a flood of modernization. They are treated as the weaker sex but are expected to be the ones with moral strength.

The word “ghost” has several different meanings in the narrative. A ghost can be a disembodied spirit, an outcast, a non-Chinese person, or the memory of a person who died. In America, ghosts are non-Chinese people, “White Ghosts” or the slightly less intimidating “Black Ghosts.” They are ghosts to the immigrant Chinese people because their customs are hard to understand. In America, memories of the dead can also haunt people, such as Brave Orchid’s first two children, “no name” aunt, and later, Moon Orchid. In China, all kinds of ghosts are abundant. The narrator explains, “In the village structure, spirits shimmered among the live creatures.” “No name” aunt is a ghost during her lifetime because she is an outcast. The narrator claims that her aunt’s ghost—her spirit—is haunting her. By this, she can mean either her aunt’s spirit or simply the memory of her.

The narrator does not usually cast ghosts in a positive light, and she sets this tone when she talks about her aunt’s ghost. She supposes it is angry with her for breaking the silence and exposing her shame for all to see. The fact that the narrator’s family tries so hard to forget the aunt proves that her ghost torments them, too. They keep her spirit away by continually denying that she ever existed. That ghosts can sometimes be vengeful does not mean that they are not helpful. The narrator calls her aunt “my forerunner” and explains, “Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help.” The narrator is not so much afraid of her aunt’s ghost as she is reverent of it. She defends her aunt for at least escaping, if not taking a stand against, the sexist traditions that took away her right to her identity.

Unlike the story of the narrator's "no name" aunt, most of her mother's stories convinced her of women's strength and independence. She tells a story about one woman who invented white crane boxing. Legend says that the woman was a fighter, trained by “an order of fighting monks.” One morning, she tried to use her fighting pole to move a white crane that landed outside her window. The crane broke her pole in half. The woman recognized the crane as a spirit and asked it to teach her how to fight. Purportedly, the crane cried out in agreement; from then on, white crane fighters imitated the cry when boxing. The crane transformed into an old man and became the woman’s boxing teacher. According to the narrator, this was one of the “tamer” stories about strong women that her mother told her.

Whereas her mother told her directly that she would become “a wife and slave,” her mother’s stories had a different, more enduring kind of influence. One of the narrator’s favorite tales is the legend of Fa Mu Lan. She puts herself in Fa Mu Lan’s place and begins to describe her transformation from farm girl to “woman warrior.” The narrator, as Fa Mu Lan, follows a bird from her house all the way to the top of a steep mountain. The bird shows her a hut where a kind old man and woman live. They feed her and let her spend the night. In the morning, they invite her to stay for fifteen years and become a warrior.

Fa Mu Lan is afraid to leave her parents until the old man shows her the water in his drinking gourd, which is like a magic mirror. In it, she sees her parents; they are sad she is gone but had known from her birth that she would become a warrior. Fa Mu Lan chooses to stay and learn. The first thing the man and woman teach her is how to control her body so carefully that she blends in with her natural surroundings. Eventually, she is able to stand so still that animals approach her. She has such control over her muscles that she can move even the involuntary ones. She learns to jump twenty feet in the air from a standstill.

When Fa Mu Lan is about to turn fourteen, the man and woman blindfold her and bid her run in the mountains. She sprints without falling or bumping into anything. Eventually, she reaches a very high, snowy peak called “the tiger place.” Her teachers leave her to find her way back with no rations or tools. As the days wear on, Fa Mu Lan finds it harder to fast but refuses to hunt; she has become a vegetarian under her teachers’ watch. One night, a rabbit sacrifices itself for Fa Mu Lan. It jumps into the fire she has built and magically turns into delicious meat. She eats thankfully.

After wandering for many days, Fa Mu Lan becomes acutely attuned with the world; she can feel the passage of time and see hidden beauty everywhere. One day, she has a vision of a golden man and woman spinning in perfect time with the earth. When the vision breaks, she sees the old man and woman. They feed her and ask her to recount her journey. Fa Mu Lan falls asleep before she can tell them that she knows their secret. They are actually many lifetimes old. From then on, Fa Mu Lan can see the old man and woman as their younger selves when she looks at them. She also realizes that they are siblings or friends, not lovers.

For the next eight years, the old man and woman train Fa Mu Lan in the “dragon ways.” A dragon is so enormous, they teach her, that mountains are merely the top of its head. One can harness the dragon’s power and gain immortality by drinking sap from an ancient tree. One day, Fa Mu Lan begins to menstruate. Because she cannot be with her family on such an important day, her teachers let her watch them in the gourd. She sees a band of soldiers come to her parents’ house and draft her brother and future husband; their baron has pledged one man from every family in his district to the army. She watches disgustedly as the baron and his family send up thankful prayers for being exempt.

Despite Fa Mu Lan’s desire to save her brother and future husband, her teachers forbid her to leave. She must wait to fight until she is twenty-two and can defeat whole armies. Then one day, Fa Mu Lan looks in the gourd and sees that her father has been drafted. Carrying with her a man’s disguise and a pouch of beads, she hurries down the mountain to take his place in battle. When she reaches home, her family envelops her in love and comfort. Then she reveals her plan to fight in her father’s place. Her parents have her kneel in front of the altar and tattoo their grievances on her back. This is so that if she dies and cannot avenge their wrongs, they will be written on her body for someone else to see. She becomes “a weapon of revenge.”

One night when Fa Mu Lan is polishing her armor, a magical white horse comes to her. It is already suited with a saddle her size, and on its hooves is written, “to fly.” The family loads the horse with supplies, and Fa Mu Lan prepares to ride off in disguise. Before she can leave, a young man offers to join her; he becomes the first member of her army. A second soldier rides in on a black horse and says he wants to join her. Then the village people offer their sons to her. She takes “the ones their families could spare and the ones with hero-fire in their eyes, not the young fathers and not those who would break hearts with their leaving.” Finally, Fa Mu Lan sets off with her army.

Fa Mu Lan makes sure that her army is ruthless to enemies but kind to innocent villagers. She inspires them, feeds them, and sings to them, all the while hiding her identity. One morning, Fa Mu Lan’s husband comes to her tent and tells her, “I’ve been looking for you since the day that bird flew away with you.” The two were betrothed when Fa Mu Lan was away. From then on, husband and wife fight side by side. She fights even when she is pregnant, her belly disguised by her armor. Fa Mu Lan gives birth during a battle and then stays in battle with the minutes-old infant inside her armor. When the child is a month old, Fa Mu Lan sends him to live with her husband and his family. She rushes them off, saying, “Go now … Before he is old enough to recognize me.” With her family gone, Fa Mu Lan becomes withdrawn and lonely.

One day, Fa Mu Lan wanders carelessly into the woods, where enemies ambush her and their leader pins her to the ground. She fights fiercely, but he is very strong. Eventually, he steals her pouch of beads and flees. Fa Mu Lan then decides to continue her journey alone. After all, she and her army have already beheaded the emperor and replaced him with a rightful leader. When she returns home, Fa Mu Lan faces the baron alone. She demands that he apologize for sending so many beloved fathers and sons off to war. When he refuses, she tears off her shirt to show him her tattoo; then she beheads him. Fa Mu Lan oversees the execution of the baron’s evildoing family and servants. She and the villagers renovate the baron’s palace to use as a communal hall. Finally, she reunites with her husband and son.

Suddenly, we are back in the narrator’s American life, which she says “has been such a disappointment.” Her mother may have told her stories about strong women, but she contradicted them with sexist comments about girls being second-rate and destined for servitude. As a child, whenever the narrator heard her parents or their neighbors demean girls, she would thrash on the floor and scream. The immigrant population was so sexist that the narrator’s great-uncle would not take her or her sister on outings; he took their three brothers to keep up appearances. The narrator did not even impress her family when she returned from Berkeley with straight-A grades. It did not matter what she accomplished because her success was not theirs. As a woman, she would eventually “desert” her family to live with her husband.

As an adult, the narrator still feels pathetic next to Fa Mu Lan’s bravery and greatness. She wants to fight against sexism, racism, and other injustices, but she is not a warrior. The narrator explains a bit about the injustices her family has faced in China and America. Many of their relatives were tortured and executed by the Communist government. Those who remained wrote from communes about how they were overworked and starving. Even though the narrator’s parents escaped the Communists, the American government twice closed their laundries for the sake of urban renewal. The narrator used to search for signs that she would become like Fa Mu Lan. She was constantly looking for a bird that would lead her away. She sought out fortunetellers to be her tutors. To familiarize herself with violence, she sneaked outside to look whenever there were dead bodies in the neighborhood. Eventually, the narrator realizes that although she will never be a soldier in armor, she can fight in some way by writing about injustice.

Analysis

In this chapter, Hong Kingston introduces a verb, “to talk-story.” It refers to the oral tradition of storytelling, which tends to combine reality and fantasy. In the book’s final chapter, amid her outburst at her mother, the narrator will admit that she cannot stand the liminality of “talk-stories.” Brave Orchid’s stories about the narrator’s own life bother her especially, such as the one about cutting her tongue. Not knowing what is true and what is make-believe makes her feel unsafe and excluded. The irony, of course, is that The Woman Warrior is the narrator’s and the author’s own “talk-story.” The book is considered a work of nonfiction, but it is really not so readily classified as that. In the tradition of her mother’s talk-stories, these recollections incorporate much hearsay, retell legends, and sometimes balance precariously between what is real and unreal.

While her mother’s stories can alienate the narrator, they also make her feel wanted. In “No Name Woman,” Brave Orchid tells a tale of sexism and censure; she makes the narrator complicit in her aunt’s punishment by urging her to keep the silence. But when Brave Orchid tells her daughter the legend of Fa Mu Lan, she indirectly encourages the narrator to be strong and daring. Furthermore, when she “talks-story,” Brave Orchid transforms in her daughter’s eyes from an out-of-touch and nagging parent into a “great power.” The narrator says, “At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story … She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman.” In warrior legends, the image of a woman changes from censured slave to powerful avenger. The narrator tries to reconcile these two versions of what it means to be a woman. She says, “Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound.” She surmises that “old Chinese” villagers do not really think women are weak; rather, they recognize women’s potential and make a conscious effort to make sure it is never realized.

Growing up, the narrator decides that the only way to get respect is to reject what is traditionally feminine. In one memory, she recalls: “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?” She does the same thing in the book’s final chapter, when her parents bring suitors to the laundry for her. She makes herself seem as “boyish” as possible, anything but demure, obedient, and marriageable. The narrator learns later that becoming “a woman of great power” does not mean giving up what is female or feminine. A woman is never a “warrior”; she is a “woman warrior.” Fa Mu Lan does traditionally male things like avenge wrongs done to her family and lead an army. But the narrator is careful to mention the traditionally female qualities that make her such a unique leader. She feeds and sings to her soldiers to keep their spirits up. She gives birth in the heat of battle and then “[rides] back into the thickest part of the battle” with her baby slung inside her armor. She nurtures her infant in the very same moment as cutting down the enemy with her sword. She does not have to give up being a woman or a mother in order to be a warrior; she is able to be literally both at once.

In “White Tigers,” the narrator uses Fa Mu Lan’s story to laud women for the great and often unnoticed responsibilities they carry. Fa Mu Lan leaves home at the young age of seven, but it is the beginning of her menses, the sign of physical maturity, that coincides with her introduction to pain and sacrifice. On that day, she looks into the gourd and sees her family being drafted. As an adult and a warrior, it is her responsibility to save them. Like writers before and after her, Hong Kingston marks the beginning of menses as a time of personal, spiritual, and intellectual growth. No mere physical function to the narrator, menstruation is a symbol of how power and pain are wedded in a woman’s life. Fa Mu Lan sums up this view when she remembers, “I bled and thought about the people to be killed; I bled and thought about the people to be born.” First, Fa Mu Lan experiences the pain associated with menstruation. Simultaneously, she gains the power to bring life into the world, birth also being painful. So is watching her family leave to fight for a corrupt baron, and so is doing battle. The narrator's mother loads her with responsibility when she begins menstruating. She tells her the story of her "no name" aunt and tells her not to "humiliate" her family in the same way. Being a woman, and not just one of “great power,” involves enduring pain and making sacrifices.

Fa Mu Lan is the narrator’s hero, not only because she is brave and strong. As a first-generation Chinese-American, the narrator struggles to eke out her unique identity while at the same time longing to fit in somewhere. Other than fighting, the first and most important skill Fa Mu Lan learns is the ability to make herself blend in. Her teachers have been living at one with their surroundings for a long time before Fa Mu Lan arrives. The young warrior-in-training notices this the first night she spends with them. She observes: “A rock grew in the middle of the house, and that was their table. The benches were fallen trees. Ferns and shade flowers grew out of one wall, the mountainside itself.” The old man and woman have shelter, but it is barely separable from the rest of the mountainside. Even the roof lifts off so that they can be one with the sky and ground. Eventually, Fa Mu Lan learns how to be so connected with the world that she can run among the animals and make swords of lightning appear in the sky. The narrator longs to have that level of control over herself and her life as much as she wishes to feel she belongs.

Another skill for which the narrator envies Fa Mu Lan is her ability to see things incredibly lucidly. After Fa Mu Lan spends many days alone in the mountains, her senses are so refined that she is able to detect the very passage of time. She is able to see simultaneously how ancient are her teachers and how young are their spirits. The narrator only wishes she could make such clear sense of things. The contradictions the narrator sees in her community can sometimes overwhelm her, especially regarding a woman’s purpose. Fa Mu Lan learns from her teachers how to embrace paradoxes and appreciate things from multiple perspectives. She recounts, “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Pearls are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium … Sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.” Contradictions do not baffle Fa Mu Lan; instead, she is able to explore them and gain greater understanding. In many ways, The Woman Warrior is the narrator’s (and the author’s) exploration of contradictions which, by the end, give her a stronger grasp on her world.

This chapter tells the story of how Brave Orchid became a doctor in China. The narrator explains that, very occasionally, her mother would take out her diploma and class pictures from her midwifery medical school. She posed very seriously in the pictures and had reason to; at the time they were taken, her husband was already in New York City. He sent silly pictures and letters to her, but that did not change the fact that she was stranded in China with only memories of her two dead children for company.

Brave Orchid sailed to the capital of her province to attend medical school, bringing with her only a few belongings. It was not a glamorous life, but it was unusually pleasant. She and the other women in her class were living out “the daydream of women,” the fantasy of having personal space and time. She quickly became one of the brightest students in her class, memorizing and repeating information with ease. Brave Orchid was twenty years older than many of her classmates. Her age, to which she did not fully admit, partially explained why she was fearless and calm when they were anxious. She had the most scientific mind of all the students. She was not afraid of ghosts and even volunteered to sleep in “the ghost room,” a dormitory that was supposedly haunted. When Brave Orchid slept in the ghost room, a “Sitting Ghost” climbed on top of her and pinned her to the bed. Keeping a level head, she berated it and then ignored it until it went away. The next night, the other students helped her vanquish the ghost with buckets of flaming oil.

Brave Orchid returned to her village and was lauded for being a doctor. With her newfound fortune, she went to the market to buy herself a slave. As she walked home with her chosen girl, she explained that she was a doctor and would train the girl to be her nurse. She became a renowned and exceptionally skilled doctor, delivering babies and vanquishing ghosts as she traveled. The narrator says that the ghosts from her mother’s stories have always haunted her, especially those of the babies she delivered who died.

On very hot summer days, the narrator’s family would tell ghost stories to “get some good chills up (their) backs.” Stories of “big eaters” stuck with the narrator in particular. “Big eaters” were heroes who vanquished ghosts by cooking and eating them. Brave Orchid could eat practically anything, which the narrator took as a sign of her bravery. She cooked her family skunk, turtle, and other types of meat that others would not touch. The narrator remembers being horrified by her mother's story about "monkey feasts," where diners ate the brains of a live monkey. So determined was Brave Orchid to make her children brave eaters, she would keep serving them the same piece of food meal after meal until they ate it.

The narrative turns to how Brave Orchid left China. During the Second World War, she used her skills to ease the villagers’ nerves when Japanese planes flew overhead. One day, the village’s crazy woman put on festive clothing and began waving her arms out in the open. Convinced that she was signaling the Japanese planes, the villagers stoned her to death. Brave Orchid emigrated six months later. The narrator was born in America during the War. She grew up knowing different ghosts than those her mother had known. In America, “ghost” referred to almost any non-Chinese person.

Back in the present, the narrator is an adult visiting her mother. Brave Orchid reveals to her daughter that their relatives have finally taken over their property in China. Now there is no chance of returning there to live out old age. She also expresses her greatest wish, that her children and their families will move in with her and her husband. Even though Brave Orchid is being tender, the thought of spending so much time with her mother gives the narrator a blinding headache. She feels as though her mother is physically torturing her. Being home, she explains, actually makes her sick to the point of hospitalization. To her relief, her mother calls her the endearing name “Little Dog” and tells her to leave if California makes her ill. The narrator ends the chapter by revealing that both she and her mother were born in the year of the Dragon. Even though her mother drives her crazy, she feels special because of that connection. Because she is her mother’s oldest surviving child, she says she is “practically a first daughter of a first daughter.”

Analysis

The narrator’s feelings toward her mother vary throughout the book and are often negative. In this chapter, she makes her reverence for her mother clear. From the title, “Shaman,” we know that the narrator sees Brave Orchid as a powerful and wise person. She understands that her mother was not simply a medical doctor in China, but also a “shaman,” someone able to mediate between the physical and spiritual realms and destroy evil spirits. In this chapter alone, the narrator associates her mother with great heroines. She describes her mother’s becoming a doctor with as much reverence as she does the legends of Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen. In one part of the chapter, she even says of Brave Orchid, “She had gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains.” Her mother is a woman warrior, one who transforms from a powerless servant into a powerful enabler, healing the world’s wrongs. Brave Orchid’s name even encompasses the idea of the woman warrior. She is “brave” like men are expected to be but retains the mysterious feminine qualities and refinement of an “orchid.” Like Ts’ai Yen and Fa Mu Lan, she is a mother and a soldier, sacrificing neither identity for the other.

As a rule, Brave Orchid does not explain customs and rituals to the narrator; this makes her feel alienated. As much as she might scorn her mother’s traditions, especially the ones that she feels silence her, the narrator never derides her mother’s spiritual abilities. She knows ghosts are real because those from her mother’s stories haunt her. As a child, the narrator tries to break free of her mother’s influence. As an adult, she is able to consider their bond as relatives, as “Dragons,” and as women, a source of pride. In a rare moment of cherishing “old Chinese” tradition, she says she is glad to hold the rank of “practically a first daughter of a first daughter.”

In most of the book, Brave Orchid is overwhelmingly a family woman. She spends her time caring for her husband and children and works a second job picking tomatoes just to send money to her Chinese relatives. No amount of time or money is wasted when it is in the interest of her family’s wellbeing. Brave Orchid is a woman who tries to find husbands for her daughters by answering classified ads and arrives at the airport nine hours in advance for her sister’s arrival from China. In “Shaman,” she even tells the narrator that her sole wish is to be surrounded by all the members of her family. “Shaman” explains that Brave Orchid has been a “wife-slave” only since she emigrated. In China, she lived the life of an independent, educated, respected, and wealthy woman. In those days, she lived

the daydream of women—to have a room, even a section of a room, that only gets messed up when she messes it up herself. The book would stay open at the very page she had pressed flat with her hand … To shut the door at the end of the workday, which does not spill over into evening.

Here Hong Kingston invokes Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, in which Woolf states that in order to be a good writer, a woman must have space, time, and money of her own. Though Brave Orchid is a doctor and not a writer, Woolf’s statement applies to her. When Brave Orchid has privacy and opportunity, she is a classic “go-getter.” She studies tirelessly and gets excellent grades while pulling off the illusion that her success is effortless. Only in America, where her privacy is gone and her opportunity severely dampened, is she forced to put aside her passion for medicine and spend all her time worrying about family.

One particularly touching moment in “Shaman” and the entire book is when Brave Orchid tells her daughter that the Chinese relatives have taken over their land, dashing her hopes of going back there once and for all. Brave Orchid’s husband has been in America even longer than she has. They own a business, have a home, and have six children. Despite the obvious permanence of her life in America, and the fact that China has changed dramatically since she left, Brave Orchid still maintains the hope of returning to her homeland. When Brave Orchid tells the narrator her hope is gone, she reveals her longing for a more empowered life.

At the chapter’s end, the narrator says, “She sends me on my way, working always and now old, dreaming the dreams about shrinking babies and the sky covered with airplanes and a Chinatown bigger than the ones here.” The way the sentence is written after the first phrase makes it unclear whether the narrator is describing herself or her mother. With this stylistic choice, the narrator gives us a deeper understanding of the bond between the two women. We already know that Brave Orchid’s talk-stories about China have infiltrated the narrator’s experience of life. She fears ghosts and bombing raids, even though she knows them only secondhand. In the above sentence, the narrator reminds us that both mother and daughter work hard, grow old, have nightmares, and dream of China. They are more connected than she liked to think when she was growing up.

The narrator describes how at age sixty-eight, her mother, Brave Orchid, reunited with her sister, Moon Orchid, after thirty years. Brave Orchid arrived at the airport nine hours ahead of time. She brought Moon Orchid’s daughter and two of her own children with her. She used her concentration to help keep her sister’s plane in the air, just as she did to keep her son’s ship afloat in Vietnam. Once the plane arrived, they waited four hours for Moon Orchid to appear. When the sisters finally met, each could not believe how old the other had become. This surprise was ironic because, the narrator says, they were almost identical, “with faces like mirrors.”

Moon Orchid’s arrival made Brave Orchid realize even more how unappreciative her children were of Chinese customs. They did not appreciate the gifts Moon Orchid brought or how monumental her arrival was. Brave Orchid also quickly remembered how impractical and easily distracted her sister was. She sat Moon Orchid down to discuss what to do about her husband. He did not know that she had come to America. He had been there so long that his daughter had no memory of him. Brave Orchid was the one who arranged Moon Orchid’s trip to America. She was also the one who had worked out her niece’s citizenship by finding her a “tyrant” of a Chinese-American husband. She insisted that her sister confront her husband and claim her rightful place as his First Wife. His new wife would be her slave, and she would claim this woman’s sons for her own. Moon Orchid said she had no business doing so, especially because her husband had been good to her and her daughter; he had always sent them all the money the needed.

We begin to see things from Moon Orchid’s perspective. She tried to match her nieces and nephews with the descriptions from Brave Orchid’s letters. She checked them against her sister’s descriptions of them and decided that they were much better children than she claimed; their problem was that they were not happy. Moon Orchid could not get any of the children to spend time with her or make conversation. She considered them to have been “raised … in the wilderness” because they did not possess Chinese social skills. They did not respect their elders and were not modest. Brave Orchid tried to put Moon Orchid to work at home and at the laundry, but she was too slow and distracted to be a good worker.

One day, despite Moon Orchid’s protestations, Brave Orchid dragged her to Los Angeles to reclaim her husband. They ended up at his office instead of his house; apparently, he had become a brain surgeon. Brave Orchid figured the office nurse was his new wife. The sisters did not have an appointment, so they could not get in to see Moon Orchid’s husband. Instead, Brave Orchid forced her son to run upstairs and say there was an emergency outside. Moon Orchid’s husband came out, and because he did not recognize her, he called her “grandmother.” Once he recognized her, he said: “It’s a mistake for you to be here. You can’t belong. You don’t have the hardness for this country. I have a new life.” His new wife and sons did not even know she or her daughter existed. He promised to keep sending her money, but he told her she could never come back to see him again. Moon Orchid was shamed and went to live with her daughter.

After the confrontation, Moon Orchid barely wrote to Brave Orchid. It turned out that she had become paranoid about her daughter’s neighborhood, so Brave Orchid sent for her. Even at her sister’s house, Moon Orchid was afraid to go outside. She seemed to have lost her spirit. Brave Orchid was determined to bring her sister back to her vibrant self, but Moon Orchid only got worse. She became convinced of a government conspiracy against her and the family, she shut the windows at all times, and she cried whenever someone left the house because she was convinced they would never return. Finally, Brave Orchid and her niece put Moon Orchid in a mental asylum. Brave Orchid visited her there twice. Moon Orchid never returned to her normal self, but she was happy there; she considered the other inmates her “daughters.” Eventually, Moon Orchid died in her sleep. Brave Orchid attributed her sister’s downfall to heartbreak.

The family took Moon Orchid’s decline and death very much to heart. Brave Orchid became vehement about making sure her husband would never take a second wife. Her daughters resolved never to let a man cheat on them.

Analysis

"At the Western Palace" refers to two things in this chapter. First is the American dream, the myth of wealth and success on "Gold Mountain," which can as easily be called "the Western Palace." We know from Brave Orchid's experience and, later, Moon Orchid's, that the American dream is often an ideal that is not achieved in reality. "At the Western Palace" also refers to Moon Orchid's husband's office. The sisters journey there with as high hopes as Chinese settlers during the Gold Rush. They are there to claim what is rightfully theirs.

The chapter is stylistically distinct from the other chapters. Elsewhere, the narrator uses the personal first-person voice even though she is distinguished from the author. In marked contrast, she tells “At the Western Palace” in the third person. One reason for this distancing is that the narrator is not a central character in “At the Western Palace.” She did experience life with Moon Orchid, but she was not present for the story’s climax, the confrontation with her aunt’s husband. That part of the story she learned secondhand from her brother. “At the Western Palace” is essentially a story about culture clash and its varying effects on people.

Moon Orchid is a foil for Brave Orchid. The two women are physically almost identical, as symmetrical as orchid flowers, but otherwise they are as unalike as the adjectives in their names. Brave Orchid is strong and intrepid enough: to have gotten a medical degree at middle age, to stand up to those she feels have wronged her, and to give up everything to build a new life in a foreign country. Moon Orchid is passive; she depends on other people to guide her, just as the moon passively depends on the sun for light. Moon Orchid’s name also hints at her instability. To the human eye, the moon changes its shape and size from month to month, and the word “lunacy” is derived from folklore about the moon’s influence on insanity. Moon Orchid is just as changeable as the moon. Even when she is mentally stable, she acts flighty and out of touch. She does not realize, for example, that it bothers her nieces and nephews when she wonders aloud about everything they are doing.

What the sisters have in common is their adherence to “old Chinese” traditions. When Moon Orchid first arrives, the sisters are able to bond over cooking a meal together. Brave Orchid sees her sister as her partner in maintaining tradition. Moon Orchid gives her commonality against her shamefully “untraditional” children. Because she enjoys the solidarity, Brave Orchid ignores her sister’s protestations and forces her to travel to Los Angeles and confront her husband. She tries to make her sister into Fa Mu Lan, reclaiming her husband just as Fa Mu Lan unseated the emperor and reclaimed the baron’s mansion. To Brave Orchid, reclaiming Moon Orchid’s husband is tantamount to reclaiming “old Chinese” tradition once and for all. She forgets that her sister does not have her strong constitution. As a result, Moon Orchid faces the ultimate culture clash that causes her decline.

Brave Orchid has been facing culture shock ever since she arrived in the United States. In China, she was a renowned doctor and defeater of evil spirits. There she had “real Chinese children” who understood her and did not shame her like her ungrateful American children. She does not explain rituals or traditions to her children because she knows they, like “White Ghosts,” will consider them backwards. Brave Orchid’s strength and confidence allow her to tolerate the injustices of living in America: losing her career, feeling disconnected from her children, and working tirelessly in blue-collar jobs to send money to countless needy relatives. Brave Orchid considers China, not California, her home. We find out later in the book just how desperately she clings to China for her sense of self; only decades after her emigration, after her family takes over her property in China, does she finally realize she will not be returning there to live out her days.

In contrast to her sister, Moon Orchid cannot handle culture shock. Ironically, she faces the ultimate culture shock when she finds out that her husband is remarried and their marriage is essentially null and void. The narrator’s writing is impartial concerning the husband. We can see him through Brave Orchid’s accusing eyes, or sympathize with him because the confrontation threatens to unseat his life. The husband himself points out that Moon Orchid is not strong enough to handle life in America, away from everything she knows. In this sense, he knows her better than Brave Orchid. As frail as Moon Orchid might be, it is unquestionable that her heartbreak leads to her decline. Only after her husband rejects her does she become paranoid and lose her sense of self. For Moon Orchid, culture shock is inseparable from the shock of being cast aside. Though the narrator does not give her express opinion about Moon Orchid, it is clear that this aunt’s story haunts her as much as her “no-name” aunt’s. In different ways, both aunts are victims of tradition. The “no-name” aunt breaks tradition by having a child out of wedlock. From then on, she is censured. Moon Orchid (pushed by Brave Orchid) tries to cling to tradition and get her husband back, only to be humiliated and sent away. Neither aunt can stand being humiliated and unwanted; shame and fear claim both their lives.

The narrator explains that when she was born, her mother supposedly cut the dividing tissue under her tongue so that she would be able to “pronounce anything.” There was no memory or physical evidence, but the narrator believed the story. Her mother had not cut any of her siblings’ tongues. Despite her “loosened” tongue, the narrator was very shy about speaking, especially in English. She was so reticent that she flunked kindergarten. “Chinese school,” which the Chinese children attended each day after “American school,” was a relief. There, the narrator did not have to speak in English and was more comfortable.

One day, a delivery boy brought a prescription to the laundry that was meant for the mentally ill woman who lived nearby. Brave Orchid was enraged because she considered the visit a curse. She made the narrator go to the pharmacy with her and demand that they remove the curse of “sick medicine.” At the pharmacy, the narrator pretended to translate, but she really told the pharmacist that her mother was demanding free candy. From then on, he and the other pharmacists gave her family candy with their prescriptions and whenever they visited. Brave Orchid never found out what her daughter had done.

Next, the narrator tells the story of a girl who could not speak up at all, not even in Chinese school. The narrator despised her for being shy and antisocial, but also for being clean and meticulous while she was messy and clumsy. One day, the narrator and her sister stayed late with the girl and her sister. Alone with the girl, she tried to bully her into talking. She taunted her, pinched her cheeks, and pulled her hair until she sobbed, but to no avail. The narrator herself cried out of desperation. Finally, the girl’s sister came in and rescued her. The narrator was sick in bed for the next year and a half, as if the world was punishing her for bullying the girl.

As she grew older, the narrator became increasingly frustrated with the ways the Chinese immigrant community silenced itself. She was not to answer any questions about her parents’ histories due to fear of deportation. People in the community were afraid to interact with government or public agencies on any level; they would not even report crimes to the police. Her parents did not bother to explain to their children the many rituals they performed and traditions they kept. The only way she and her siblings found out they were breaking tradition was when their parents hit and scolded them.

Several "crazy women" lived in the neighborhood and frightened the narrator. The two most notable were Crazy Mary and Pee-A-Nah. Crazy Mary's parents emigrated without her when she was a toddler. When they finally brought her over, she had lost her mind. Pee-A-Nah was a woman who dressed like a witch and carried a broom. She used to chase the children when Brave Orchid wasn't around. The narrator blamed the neighborhood's prevalence of crazy women on their village code of silence. According to her, not talking “made the difference between sanity and insanity.” She was sure that she would become the madwoman of her household.

The narrator took her vivid imagination, clumsiness, lack of cleanliness, and mysterious illness to be signs of her insanity. As much as they frightened her, she was glad for them because they made her undesirable as a slave; she thought as long as she was crazy, her parents would not sell her. Of course, there was never any real threat of being sold. Still, the narrator felt as though her parents were plotting to get rid of her and her sister. She had been taught early on that boys were prizes and girls were useless embarrassments. The narrator became more convinced of her parents’ plot when they began bringing suitors to the laundry.

The narrator found some consolation in knowing that, as the oldest, she had to be married off first. Since she would refuse, her sister would be safe as well. When the narrator’s mother brought suitors by, the narrator chased them off by being as clumsy and messy as possible. She cut off her friendship with a mentally challenged boy because she was afraid her parents would consider him a good husband for her. Even though he came and sat on crates at the laundry each day while she worked, she forced herself to ignore him. One day when the boy had wandered away, the narrator’s mother opened up his crates. When she found them full of pornography, she still let him stay.

The narrator began compiling a mental list of all the forbidden things she had done or seen that she wanted to tell her mother. There were so many trapped inside that they made her throat hurt. When she mustered the courage, she began to tell her mother one thing each night. To her surprise, her mother did not seem to care about any of her tales. Finally, the mother told her daughter to leave her alone. In retrospect, the narrator realized that she had been interrupting her mother’s precious time alone. One night, the narrator could not take the mentally challenged boy’s presence anymore. She screamed at her parents, telling them to make him go away. She told them she was a straight-A student and no match for a “retarded” boy. She declared that she would get out of their community, not being made into “a slave or a wife.” The narrator’s mother shouted back at her, called her “Ho Chi Kuei,” and told her to get out. After that, she never saw the boy again.

The narrator explains that she is now far removed from that Chinese community. She does not even consider herself bilingual because she cannot understand any Chinese except the village dialect in her parents’ neighborhood. She has to look up the meaning of“Ho Chi Kuei” in books, but she cannot find it. She has a different view of Chinese life now that she is removed from it. For instance, she now knows that her relatives do not sell girls and are not barbarians. The narrator realizes that in addition to her cultural knowledge, she has inherited great responsibility. Her mother works picking tomatoes in order to send money to their relatives in China. The narrator knows that one day, she will inherit that responsibility. She does not trust her Chinese relatives; she wants to see for herself whether they are as unfortunate as they claim to be.

The book ends with a story that the narrator’s mother told her recently, after the narrator revealed that she could also “talk story.” Most of the story is her mother’s, but the narrator made up the ending. In China, the narrator’s grandmother loved the theater so much that she demanded that her whole family attend all the performances with her. Her relatives knew that bandits would ransack their house while they were gone, because bandits followed the acting troupes from town to town. Still, they went with the grandmother. That night, the bandits bypassed the villagers’ houses and attacked the theater itself. The family narrowly escaped. Ever after, the grandmother insisted that continuing to go to the theater would ensure their safety. The narrator hopes that her family got to hear, among other things, the poetry of the scholar’s daughter Ts’ai Yen. She was captured by barbarians as a young woman and was forced to fight and have children among them.

The barbarians’ traditions disgusted Ts’ai Yen, for she was a foreigner among them. Even her own children could not speak Chinese properly, though she tried to teach them in secret. She hated their primitive ways. One night, Ts’ai Yen heard the barbarians playing strange, shrill-sounding music. The sound alarmed her, but she could not hide from it even in her tent. Finally, she began to sing in Chinese about her family. Somehow, the barbarians understood her meaning and were fascinated. When Ts’ai Yen was finally returned to her family for a ransom, she brought her songs back with her. One of the songs is “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” She says, “It translated well.”

Analysis

The book’s final chapter focuses on the concepts of silence and speech. The girl who would not talk is like a magnified version of how the narrator sees herself. She is pathetic because she will not raise her voice, much less a fist, to defend herself. The narrator feels as powerless as this girl acts, so she projects her frustration onto her blameless schoolmate. The silent girl also represents a paradox that the narrator sees within the Chinese immigrant community. The “villagers” may be very loud in their daily lives, but they keep a code of silence about important issues. The narrator explains the first part of the paradox thus:

You can see the disgust on American faces looking at women [like the emigrant villagers]. It isn’t just the loudness. It is the way Chinese sounds, chingchong ugly, to American ears, not beautiful like Japanese sayonara words with the consonants and vowels as regular as Italian. We make guttural peasant noise and have Ton Duc Thang names you can’t remember. And the Chinese can’t hear Americans at all; the language is too soft and western music unhearable. I’ve watched a Chinese audience laugh, visit, talk-story, and holler during a piano recital, as if the musician could not hear them.

The narrator has said in earlier chapters that her mother frequently embarrassed her by being so loud in public. The second part of the paradox is that the emigrant community forbids its members to discuss certain things. The narrator’s prime example of this is that in her youth, she and the other children did not know their own parents’ names. Their parents did not explain customs and rituals to them, instead opting to hit them when they did the wrong thing. Part of the community’s silence comes from fear of deportation. Like many immigrant groups in the United States, the villagers are afraid to speak to the police or government, even to report crimes. The larger part of the community’s silence, however, comes from tradition. To the villagers, the spoken word is very powerful. Names are kept secret because uttering them is tantamount to casting a spell. Rituals are not explained, presumably, because of their power.

Other things are kept secret out of shame. The narrator explains wryly, “If we had to depend on being told, we’d have no religion, no babies, no menstruation (sex, of course, unspeakable), no death.” The community holds a collective belief that keeping things silent means not having to deal with them. Because the narrator does not share their sensibility, she feels constantly as though she is being silenced, denied her right to live openly and honestly. She recalls, “I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity.” Her parents and the other “villagers” may make her crazy, but she feels as though they are the crazy ones for keeping the silence. She screams at her mother, “Ha! You can’t stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue but it didn’t work.” Brave Orchid told her daughter that she cut her tongue to make speech easy for her. The narrator does not believe this because she feels as though her mother has been trying to silence her—her opinions and her hopes—for as long as she can remember.

Even though silence pervades the whole immigrant community, the women are silenced the most. Equally if not more than how much the men silence them, they silence one another. We have already seen how the narrator’s mother tries to silence her by demanding she behave a certain way. In the same way, Brave Orchid tries to silence Moon Orchid’s desires because they do not mesh with cultural ideas of propriety. Moon Orchid does not want to confront her husband; she is satisfied with their very limited relationship. Brave Orchid, true as ever to her name, takes her sister’s silence for fear and weakness. She thinks she is doing her a favor by forcing her to confront her husband. Because Moon Orchid cannot speak up for herself or defend herself against Brave Orchid, she faces heartbreak, loss of self, and eventually madness. For Moon Orchid, silence was indeed “the difference between sanity and insanity.” If she had been able to argue for herself, her life might have ended more happily.

Even though the story of Ts’ai Yen does not come until the end of the chapter, the name for the chapter as a whole is “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” The story of Ts’ai Yen is connected with everything else in the chapter because it is an allegory of the narrator’s struggle with identity and empowerment. The narrator sees herself as Ts’ai Yen. The main difference is that the “barbarians” in the narrator’s life are people in her own community and family. Even though the Chinese immigrant community is familiar to the narrator, she does not feel at home there. Try as she might, she cannot overcome the cultural disconnect between generations; she cannot get people of her parents’ generation to see life the way she does or share her values. For example, when the narrator reveals that she has applied to college, her mother tells her to be a typist and work on her charm instead of her intelligence. She is expected to fit into the Chinese paradigm of success, to be a wife and a mother—an obedient “slave.” When she balks at a sexist song, her father replies, “A husband may kill a wife who disobeys him. Confucius said that.”

Even though she is generally reticent, the narrator finally manages to stand up to her mother in the last chapter. In this part of the book, we see the narrator’s warrior-self emerging. She uses words to defend not only her life choices but also her very right to exist. Beneath her accusations is the feeling that, in Brave Orchid’s eyes, she has never been able to measure up to her deceased Chinese siblings. She feels that she has always come second in her mother’s heart and been denied her true life and true identity as first daughter.

Eventually, the narrator realizes that she does not need her mother to validate her worth. She is truly fighting with herself for a sense of validation. She realizes, “[There is] no listener but myself.” The angry outburst at Brave Orchid teaches the narrator that she is a person with great inner strength, not so far removed from Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen as she thought. As an adult writing her memoirs, the narrator becomes even more like her heroes. By venting her confusion, frustration, and anger, she follows in Ts’ai Yen’s footsteps and sings her own defiant song. She exposes, and in doing so, avenges the wrongs done to and within the Chinese immigrant community. At the same time, she fights to defend her culture and its past. In her own way, the narrator is the book’s central “woman warrior,” and the memoirs themselves document her battle.

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