The Woman Warrior: 5. A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe Summary & Analysis

Kingston’s brother reported to one of his sisters what had happened in Los Angeles when Moon Orchid saw her husband, and that sister reported it to Kingston. Kingston thinks that his story may have been better than hers, for it would not have been “twisted into designs.” Kingston thinks that this may have been why Brave Orchid cut the frenulum under Kingston’s tongue, though there was no obvious evidence of this. Brave Orchid insists that she cut the tongue so that Kingston would never be “tongue-tied” and so that she would be able to speak any language.

In kindergarten, when she had to speak for the first time, Kingston was silent. As an adult, she still has difficulty finding her voice, even to say “hello” casually. She flunked kindergarten for not speaking to anyone, not even asking to use the restroom. Her sister also said nothing for three years. Kingston hated having to talk, but she also hated being silent. Reading aloud was easier because she did not have to make up the words. When her second-grade class put on a play, the Chinese girls were not included because their voices were too soft, and their parents did not sign the permission slips anyway. One Chinese girl, however, did win a spelling bee.

After American school, Kingston and her siblings went to Chinese school from 5:00 to 7:30 PM. There they used their voices. Boys who were very well-behaved in American school talked back, and the girls screamed during recess and sometimes had fist-fights. There was no play supervision.

Kingston notes that not all of the students who were silent at American school “found voice at Chinese school.” Both Kingston and her sister struggled during recitation exercises. Their voices sounded like that of “a crippled animal.” Another girl whispered.

When a delivery boy accidentally brought Crazy Mary’s pills to the laundry, Brave Orchid sent Kingston to go to the drugstore to “stop the curse” that the boy had brought. Kingston was to ask for “reparation candy,” sweetness in exchange for the threat of illness that he had brought. She still struggled to speak to the druggist in an audible voice.

On the other hand, Kingston contemplates the loudness of the Chinese. Her father once wondered if he could hear Chinese people talking “from blocks away” because he understood the language or because he was so loud. To Kingston, it is not just that the language was loud; it was also ugly. Normal Chinese women’s voices were “strong and bossy.” To sound more “American-feminine,” girls had to whisper. Most of them eventually found some kind of voice, “however faltering,” except for one girl.

The quiet girl was a year older than Kingston and in her class for twelve years. Her older sister was usually with her. Kingston’s younger sister was in the class below her. They were very much like the quiet girl and her sister, but their parents kept them home from school when it “sprinkled” and they did not work for a living, but they were similar in other ways, such as sports.

Kingston hated the quiet girl. Kingston hated that she was the last chosen for her team and that Kingston was also the last chosen for her team. One afternoon in the sixth grade, Kingston, her younger sister, the quiet girl, and the quiet girl’s older sister stayed late at school for some reason. Kingston ran back into the girls’ yard and past the quiet girl into the lavatory. The girl followed her there. Once there, Kingston demanded that the girl talk, and called her a “sissy-girl” for her refusal to speak.

Kingston examined the quiet girl’s face. She had “baby soft” skin with “pink and white cheeks.” She seemed fragile, and Kingston hated “fragility.” Kingston pinched the girl’s cheek to coax her into talking. When that didn’t work, she pulled the girl’s hair and made a honking noise. She even tried to get the girl to say, “Ow!” to indicate that she was hurt. When the girl began to cry, Kingston did not stop tormenting her, but told the girl how much she did not like her for what Kingston perceived as weakness. She was bigger even, and refused to defend herself.

Kingston became so frustrated with the quiet girl’s refusal to speak that she began to cry and plead with her to speak. She told the girl that no one would ever marry her if she didn’t speak, and that no one would ever notice her or employ her. Suddenly, the quiet girl’s sister appeared, and they found Kingston’s sister and all walked home together. On the way, Kingston advised the quiet girl’s older sister not to “pamper” the girl, but to make her speak.

Kingston fell ill for eighteen months and could not go to school. When she did return, she saw the quiet girl again; she had not changed. She wore the same clothes and had the same haircut. During a time when other Asian girls were starting to tape their eyelids, she wore no makeup. She continued to read aloud in class, but there was less of that when they got older. Kingston was wrong about the girl not having anyone to take care of her. Her older sister became a typist and did not marry, but lived with their parents. The quiet girl did not go out, except to the movies.

Kingston began to hate the secrecy of the Chinese. In her culture, she surmised, even the good things became unspeakable. Talking and not talking, Kingston thought, “made the difference between sanity and insanity.” She thought about the insane women she knew, such as the woman next door who “was chatty one moment […] and shut up the next.” There was also Crazy Mary, who “wore pajamas” and “[lurched] out of dark corners.” She was eventually “locked up in the crazyhouse” and never released. Finally, there was the woman Kingston’s brother had named Pee-Ah-Nah, who picked for orange berries in the “slough” (swamp) along with Kingston, her mother, and her siblings. Pee-Ah-Nah chased the children around and rode with a broom between her legs, leading them to refer to her as a “witchwoman.”

Kingston thought that every neighborhood or house had “its crazy woman or crazy girl,” or its “village idiot.” Kingston wondered if she would fill that role at her house. She continued to think about how girls were referred to as maggots, and her mother’s reasons for cutting her tongue. One day, a woman who was “the giver of American names” walked into the laundry and said that Kingston had “a pressed-duck voice” and that her mother ought to do something about it or they would not be able to marry her off. Kingston refuted the woman’s claim, and Brave Orchid admonished her for talking back.

Kingston learned that young men—FOBS, or Fresh-off-the-Boat’s—were placing ads in the Gold Mountain News for wives, and Kingston’s parents started answering them. Brave Orchid took one home from the laundry and showed him her daughters’ pictures, focusing on Kingston, the eldest. Kingston intentionally made herself seem incapable domestically so that the young men would lose interest. She dropped dishes and spilled soup on them.

At Chinese school, a “mentally retarded boy” who liked to hand out toys, supposedly from his parents’ stores, began to follow Kingston around school. He was large and had a tendency to bark. When “the hulk,” as Kingston sometimes called him, found out where Kingston worked, he began to sit at the laundry. His parents allowed him to sit on the cartons he set up for himself. Kingston was outraged that, despite her straight-A’s, no one could see that she had nothing in common with “this monster, this birth defect.” One day, he left his boxes for a long time and Brave Orchid opened up the boxes. They were stuffed with pornography. Brave Orchid concluded that he was not too stupid to want to know about women. The old women talked about him being stupid “but very rich.”

Kingston decided to mimic the habit of confession that she had learned from her Mexican and Filipino Catholic friends, and tell her mother all the true things she had ever done or thought. Kingston picked a time of day when Brave Orchid was alone, and decided to tell her one thing per day. One day, her mother asked her to stop all of her “whispering” and “senseless gabbings every night.” Kingston thought that maybe her mother asked her to leave her alone during her quiet time when there were few customers.

The hulk returned with another crate. This time, Kingston looked at her mother and screamed for them to send the boy away. She then went on a tirade, in which she told her mother that she could take care of herself and that she would not allow her to turn her into “a slave or a wife.” Finally, she accused Brave Orchid of trying to cut out her tongue so that she would not talk. Brave Orchid, “a champion talker,” was shouting, too, saying that she cut her daughter’s tongue to make her “say charming things,” but Kingston did not even say “hello.” Kingston demanded to know why her mother called her ugly. Her mother insisted that it was merely Chinese habit to say the opposite of the truth.

To learn who she really was and what she liked, Kingston says, she had to leave home. It turned out that she preferred conventional aspects of American life: plastics, periodic tables, and TV dinners with peas and carrots. She looked up “Ho Chi Kuei,” which is what Brave Orchid called her at dinner. “Kuei” meant “ghost.” When directed at boys, it could mean “dog ghost,” which was almost affectionate. When directed at girls, it was more akin to “stink pig ghost.”

Kingston remembered that the day after she “talked out the retarded man, the huncher,” she never saw him again. She wondered if she made him up. One day, she says, she wants to go to China and find out who is lying—the Communists who claim to have jobs for everyone or the relatives who cannot buy salt. Brave Orchid sends the money she earns from working in the fields to Hong Kong, and the relatives there send it on to the remaining aunts and to the children and grandchildren of Kingston’s grandfather’s “two minor wives.” Kingston wonders if her grandmother really lived to be ninety-nine, and if all the babies really wore a Mao button “like a drop of blood on their jumpsuits.” She thought that it would be good if the Communists took better care of themselves so that she would not have to send them money and could buy a “color t.v.” instead.

Kingston recalls a talk-story that her mother told her recently. Her grandmother loved the theater. One evening, a bandit raided the theater and nearly kidnapped Kingston’s youngest aunt, Lovely Orchid, but they let her go for a prettier girl. Kingston’s grandmother and Brave Orchid got home safely, proving to Kingston’s grandmother that the family would be “immune to harm as long as they went to plays.”

Kingston likes to think that her grandmother and aunts heard the songs of the poetess Ts’ai Yen at some of these plays. Ts’ai Yen, the daughter of a scholar, was kidnapped by a southern barbarian. During her twelve years with the barbarians, she had two children who did not speak Chinese. She tried to speak to them in Chinese, but they mocked her “sing-song” voice. The barbarians liked to sit on the sand and play flutes. When they reached a high pitch, the music disturbed Ts’ai Yen, and she returned to her tent and began to sing. The barbarians heard a sound that matched the flutes in pitch. Ts’ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words were in Chinese, but the barbarians understood her “sadness and anger.” Later, her children began to sing the songs with her when she sat “by the winter campfires.” After twelve years, she “was ransomed and married to Tung Ssu so that her father could have Han descendants.” She brought her songs back from the savage lands, including “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” which translates well.