SPOILERS AHEAD
Kingston's collection of essays is a beautiful blend of culture, folklore, and memory in this bildungsroman. Difficult enough, Kingston excels at becoming an omniscient third-person narrator for stories her family does not want to tell, as most clearly evidenced in the essay, "At the Western Palace." Paired with her use of first-person in essays like "No Name Woman" and "White Tigers," the reader has to remind themselves that the Orchid sisters are not characters from Kingston's imagination, but her mother and aunt. The skill with which she blends the essays together feels as though they are a larger story, told in succinct parts that tell us what we need to know about Kingston, her family, her ancestors, and their culture. "White Tigers" is the most excellent with blending culture and folklore with personal story as Kingston embodies Mulan as a form of establishing her identity.
While the previously mentioned essays may best demonstrate Kingston's ability to shift between real and imaginary without leaving any seams, the final essay, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" is the one that tells the reader the most. Kingston hints at her individualism throughout the collection, but she always remains in relation to something else: folklore, her family, China. In the final essay, that is stripped and we can see how being a child of immigrant parents affects her as an individual. She has been told to be more demure by her aunt, has had her tongue cut by her mother in an effort to expand her linguistic capabilities, she has remained "boring" and grateful that she, a self-perceived family failure, was not still in China for fear of being turned into a daughter-in-law or slave. This tension is what leads her to torment another girl at her school, torturing her in a basement for what feels like an eternity to Kingston, the girl, and the reader. Having this scene precede her blow-out argument with her mother, the reader is witnessing how feeling like someone who cannot belong, either with her ancestral culture or her transplanted one, can result in anger, desperation, and outsiderdom. The final essay is the ending of Kingston's coming-of-age arc. The history of her family and the foreignness she experiences stop pushing her into a box she does not fit within and she becomes, as she imagined in "White Tigers," a warrior in control of her own destiny.
