The Woman Warrior: 3. Shaman Summary & Analysis

Four times, Brave Orchid has shown Kingston her medical diploma. Her family airmailed the metal tube that holds it from Hong Kong. There are three scrolls inside the tube. One is a medical diploma that says that Brave Orchid graduated from a school of midwifery. Another is a class photograph. She is twenty-seven and not smiling or “humorous,” like one of the girls in the photograph, “who lifts her mocking chin to pose like Girl Graduate.” Kingston contrasts her mother’s image with early photos of her father in America, “in bathing suits at Coney Island beach” or posing “in the cockpit of a biplane.” He and his friends were “always laughing.” The third scroll is from the Department of Health, Canton.” The words are printed on a photograph of Kingston’s mother, the same photograph from her diploma. She was twenty-seven when she graduated.

Brave Orchid left her village by ship, just as Kingston’s father had, and moved into a dormitory with five other women. She left most of her things behind, in her family’s care. Medical school allowed Brave Orchid to live for two years, free from servitude. She befriended her roommates but did not tell them that she already had two children.

Brave Orchid went to a welcoming ceremony in the auditorium and listened to two hours of speeches from faculty members. Immediately after supper, she began to study. She usually stayed in her room and only dropped into the dining hall once in a while. Students fought over who could sit next to her in class, since glancing at her test papers helped them get back on track when they had forgotten something, and Brave Orchid did not mind this.

To make up for not having the best memory—unlike Kingston’s father, who could recite entire poems—Brave Orchid did a lot of “secret studying.” She was older, so she knew that she was expected to know more. Her secret place for studying was a room that was supposedly haunted. Brave Orchid named all of the ghosts that haunted the dormitory, but did not believe that they were ancestors. Instead, they were possibly “an entirely different species of creature.”

When the other girls in the dormitory worried over strange sounds, Brave Orchid would dismiss them as “the wind” and rose to the challenge of checking to see if she was right. When she returned, having seen nothing, another girl insisted that the haunting began at midnight. To prove that she was not afraid but to also get to bed at a decent hour, Brave Orchid agreed to sleep “in the ghost room.” The other girls worried, but Brave Orchid promised to call out to them if anything bad happened. She refused to accept charms. She went back to her room and took her textbook as a weapon.

Brave Orchid pretended not to be afraid. She read aloud to prove that she was calm. Eventually, she fell asleep. Then something “alive” then crawled to “the foot of the bed.” She recognized it immediately: a Sitting Ghost. She fought it, but it only absorbed her energy. She knew that everyone else in the dormitory was asleep, so no one would check on her. She tried another tactic with the ghost, which she called “Boulder.” She spoke calmly to the ghost, assuring it that it would not win and that it did not belong there. She threatened to burn it. She ignored it and “chanted her lessons for the next day’s classes.” The ghost then “scurried off.” When the students went to her the next morning, she told them to take hold of her earlobes to call her back into her body, and then she said that she would tell them a story.

Brave Orchid told her classmates about how Sitting Ghost had “pounced” on top of her. It had no “head, no eyes, no face,” but only “mounds of hair” which “hid its claws and teeth.” She recalled that it was “bigger than an ape, and growing.” She would have stabbed it, but this Sitting Ghost was a mutation that “wrested” the knife from her hand. At 3:00 AM, she died for a while and lost her way for “ten years.” She walked from the Gobi Desert back to the To Keung School. She had to outwit the Wall Ghosts and “their side-to-side games along the way,” which intended to divert her from her path. Altogether, she said, she had been gone for twelve years, but only an hour had passed in the room.

Brave Orchid insisted that the danger was not over, for Sitting Ghost fattened itself at night and was listening as she spoke. Sitting Ghost was different because it fed on lives—not just those of babies, but also adults. It was “a serious ghost, not at all playful,” with the ability to “conjure up enough substance to sit solidly throughout a night.”

Brave Orchid decided that she and her classmates had to rid the world of the “disease” of ghosts. She told them to scorn ghosts when they came to haunt them. They returned to the ghost room with buckets, and alcohol and burners from the laboratories. They smoked the ghosts out of the room. When the smoke cleared, Brave Orchid said that “the students found a piece of wood dripping with blood.” When they burned it, “the stench was like a corpse exhumed for its bones too soon.” The women laughed at the smell.

When Brave Orchid got scared as a child, one of her three mothers would call her “frighted spirit” back by chanting her descent line. However, if the women at the dormitory had done that, they would have called Brave Orchid back to the wrong place—her village. Instead, they called out their own names, as well as “women’s pretty names, haphazard names.” In doing so, they created new directions, and Brave Orchid’s spirit followed them. It is possible that this is why she “lost her home village and did not reach her husband for fifteen years.” Brave Orchid later led her own children out of nightmares by chanting the names of family members, which brought Kingston comfort. An old-fashioned woman would have run into the streets, calling out for her child; but Brave Orchid was a modern woman who said her spells in private.

Though the peasants in her village were more impressed by those who finished three- and six-week courses, Brave Orchid was welcomed home with “garlands and cymbals” after becoming a doctor. Unlike the Communists, who wore only a blue uniform dotted with a “red Mao button,” she wore “a silk robe and western shoes with big heels, and she rode home carried in a sedan chair.” Brave Orchid always dressed well when she made her calls, and some villagers, she remembered, “brought out their lion and danced ahead of [her].” She tells her daughter, "You have no idea how much I have fallen coming to America.”

Before moving to the Bronx, where Kingston’s father was living, Brave Orchid worked in her village, yanking bones straight and delivering babies “in beds and pigsties.” She “stayed awake keeping watch nightly during air raids.” She did all of this dressed as elegantly as when she stepped out of her sedan chair. She also never changed her name, for professional women reserved the right to keep their maiden names. Even after she emigrated to America, she added no American name.

When Brave Orchid went to Canton market to shop, she was free with money. One day, she bought a female slave, but she decided to buy one from a professional whose girls were neatly arranged. She stopped at a slave girl “whose strong heart sounded like thunder within the earth.” Brave Orchid put the girl through a series of tests to judge her intelligence, and asked her what she would do with the loose ends of woven string. The girl intentionally gave an answer which indicated that she did not know how to finish weaving, so that Brave Orchid could buy her at a lower price. Brave Orchid decided that she would train the girl, who was sixteen years old, to become a nurse.

Kingston notes that her mother seems more grateful for having had the slave girl than for having had her own daughters. Kingston’s younger sister, sensing this favoritism, said that when she grew up, she wanted to be a slave—which amused her parents. Brave Orchid bought the girl for one hundred and eighty dollars (fifty dollars in American money), whereas it cost two hundred dollars to have Kingston. Brave Orchid later found the girl a husband.

For a time, Brave Orchid’s village was “endangered by a fantastic creature, half man and half ape, that a traveler to the West had captured and brought back to China.” One day, the ape man escaped. It was known to have attacked people. The ape-man had long orange hair and a beard, and was clothed “in a brown burlap rice sack.” If Brave Orchid’s father had not brought Third Wife, a black woman, back from the West, Brave Orchid may have thought that this ape-man was a Western barbarian. Brave Orchid chased the creature away for trying to scare her. The ape was soon recaptured, lured back to its cage with “cooked pork and wine.” Sometimes, Brave Orchid visited the ape-man at the home of the rich man who had captured him. The creature seemed to recognize her. Brave Orchid thinks that it may not have been an ape-man, but maybe one of the Tigermen, “a savage northern race.”

As a midwife, Brave Orchid found ways to fool the ghosts. She would refer to some infants as piglets to fool ghosts who were “on the lookout for a new birth.” She would call beautiful, welcome babies ugly, dirty pigs to fool “the gods jealous of human joy.” One infant had blue eyes, leading its mother to think that a ghost had entered him, but Brave Orchid “said the baby looked pretty.” Other defects were more serious, such as that of an infant born with no anus. Kingston imagined the baby as a child, “grunting and weeping” in its effort to defecate. Because the child had been allowed to live, Kingston assumes that it was a boy.

During summer afternoons when it was especially hot, Kingston’s parents would tell the children ghost stories “so that [they] could get some good chills up [their] backs.” Brave Orchid told a story of a ghost that tried to knock her off of a swaying walking bridge. She did not encounter the ghost again. Kingston surmises that her mother won in ghost battle due to her ability to eat anything. Kingston compares her to other big eaters in Chinese legendary history. Big eaters always win.

Kingston’s mother cooked all kinds of things that were not normally eaten in the United States, including raccoons, skunks, snakes, turtles that crawled around on the pantry floor, and catfish that swam in the bathtub. She also boiled the weeds they pulled up in the yard. She kept a big brown hand “stewing in alcohol and herbs” in a glass jar on a shelf and used it to “rub [their] sprains and bruises.” Brave Orchid said it was a bear’s claw. She told Kingston that when Chinese people had the money, they bought monkeys’ brains. She insisted that the children eat all leftovers and told them that if something tasted good, it was bad for them, whereas if it tasted bad, it was good for them.

Kingston writes that her mother was content with hairy beasts, both ghosts and those made of flesh, because she could eat them. She also did not eat them on fasting days. Brave Orchid differed from the village crazy lady because she was a capable exorcist. The crazy lady was not, so she was stoned shortly before Brave Orchid left China.

Brave Orchid was living in the mountains with other refugees when Kingston’s father had finally saved enough money to send Brave Orchid travel fare to New York. It was 1939, and “the Japanese had taken much of the land along the Kwoo River.” The Japanese were the only foreigners whom the Chinese did not regard as foreigners. Some believed that they were descended from Chinese explorers sent across the Eastern Ocean to discover a mythical island from which they never returned, out of fear of having their heads sawed off by the emperor for not finding “the herbs of immortality.” Another story said that they were descended from an ape who raped a Chinese princess.

When she moved to the United States, Brave Orchid experienced the same war she had left behind in China. She warned the children to watch out for planes that came in threes, because in China, that had been a sign of an air raid. The bombings drove some people mad with fear. During the raids, the village crazy lady put on a headdress with small mirrors. She moved her arms in flailing circles and one villager thought that she was signaling the planes. They began to think that she was a spy for the Japanese, which Brave Orchid refuted, but to no avail. Though Brave Orchid tried to take away the headdress, the woman refused, and the villagers stoned her to death.

Brave Orchid arrived in New York in January 1940. Kingston was born in the middle of World War II. As a child, she dreamed both about “shrinking babies” and “rows of airplanes” and other aerial vessels flying overhead. Her mother had taught Kingston to see every person and machine in America as a ghost. Newsboy Ghost, with his ability to call people out of their homes with his voice, frightened Kingston the most. Once Garbage Ghost, a man with “yellow and brown hair” who collected the trash, referred to himself as “Garbage Ghost” in Chinese. Brave Orchid warned her children not to speak in front of the White Ghosts again, for they had learned Chinese. She told them that they would go home again to China one day and “buy furniture, real tables and chairs” and that they would “smell flowers for the first time.”

Kingston’s parents never considered America “home.” She feared that once they were back in China, her parents would sell her, or her father would marry two or three more women who would spatter cooking oil on the children’s toes and blame their crying on naughtiness. Furthermore, Kingston feared the size of the world, and how China was so far away.

Kingston recalls her last visit to her parents. She had trouble falling asleep. Brave Orchid sat, watching over her, wearing “shawls and granny glasses, American fashions.” Brave Orchid told Kingston about how much she worried after her and the other children, particularly because they never told her what they were up to. It had been a year since Kingston’s last visit.

While they are talking, Brave Orchid notices that she never calls Kingston “Oldest Daughter,” but instead, “Biggest Daughter.” Kingston asks about the two older children who supposedly died in China, but Brave Orchid denies that they ever existed.

Brave Orchid had continued to work, though she was in her seventies. She dyed her hair black to appear younger, then stood in line on Skid Row to get chosen to do farm work. Brave Orchid said that the Urban Renewal Ghosts had given them money for tearing down the laundry, but they could not start over. Neither wanted to stop working, though Kingston’s father is now retired. Brave Orchid calls the United States “a terrible ghost country” where one can never stop working. She did not want to leave China, where she had more leisure time and was treated with more respect, but she insists that Kingston’s father would not have survived without her, for she was “the one with the big muscles.”

Brave Orchid tells Kingston that the family can never return to China—a dream Kingston’s parents had been holding onto for forty years. The last of Kingston’s uncles was killed. The villagers wrote to ask Kingston’s father if they could take over the family’s land, and he agreed. Brave Orchid insists that she does not want to go back to China anyway, because the Communists “are much too mischievous.” She suspects the Chinese immigrants who work in the fields of being Communists too, though Kingston insists that they came to America to escape Communism.

Brave Orchid wants Kingston around more often, saying that she wants to live in a house where she “can’t turn around without touching somebody.” Kingston insists that she moved away because she feels better away from home. She does not get sick as often, and does not worry about ghost sounds. Her mother concludes that the weather in California must not be good for her, and accepts that Kingston should, therefore, live away. Brave Orchid calls her daughter “Little Dog,” a term of endearment she has not used in years. Kingston suddenly feels much lighter, but still has the same dreams about “shrinking babies and the sky covered with airplanes and a Chinatown bigger than the ones here.”