The Immigrant Experience Theme Analysis

Kingston maintains a connection to “the old world” (China) primarily through her mother, Brave Orchid. Thus, Kingston develops a sense of China as both a real place and a mythical land. This tension is further highlighted by the fact that her family continue to obey the traditions and customs of the old world after immigrating to the United States, despite their lack of relevance in 1950s America. Her mother’s insistence that China is “home” persists until the last of their family’s land in China is taken over by the villagers. For Kingston, who has no personal connection to this land about which her mother speaks, the anecdote is merely another story, whereas Kingston’s mother never planned to make a permanent home in America. The mother and daughter’s differing perceptions of home reveal that the line that separates “the native” from “the foreigner” is generational and, often, merely a matter of conditioning.

Brave Orchid’s lack of understanding about her children’s behavior is one indication of her distance from her adopted country. What baffles her most is their constant movement—an effect of living in a country in which people could never stop working. The effect of this busy lifestyle produces, in Brave Orchid and Kingston, different perceptions of time as well as different values.

Brave Orchid’s perception of America is that of a place where she was too busy working to earn a living and maintain a household to remember the pleasures she had once enjoyed in China. Brave Orchid recalls moments when she could enjoy boredom, with “nothing to do but fan ourselves.” In contrast, in America, she cannot stop working and claims to “hurt” or “get dizzy” when she stops. This contrast highlights the demanding natures of life as an immigrant and the work that it takes to establish one’s place in a new country. Brave Orchid’s new life, marked by mobility, forced upon her the new habit of incessant movement to perform tasks—a habit so ingrained that, when she diverts from it, she believes that her body responds negatively to the change.

Brave Orchid passes this penchant for constant work on to her daughter, who insists that she knows how to work, works all the time, knows “how to kill food, how to skin and pluck it…how to keep warm by sweeping and mopping…how to work when things get bad.” In this regard, Kingston mirrors her mother’s resourcefulness and toughness. Despite her desire to distance herself from her mother’s expectations and “old world” tendencies, she admits that it is those tendencies which have helped her to become an independent woman.

On the other hand, Brave Orchid’s constant movement is not the result of restlessness, as she believes it is with her children, but concentration and discipline. While waiting for Moon Orchid at the airport, her own children do not sit with her for the nine hours in which she waits. They are instead “lured away by the magazine racks and the gift shops and the coffee shops” due to their “wandering feet.” She quietly “hoped they would get back from the pay t.v.’s or the pay toilets or wherever they were spending their money before the plane arrived.” The children’s “wandering feet” and attraction to things they do not need support their mother’s belief that they tend to be wasteful.

Brave Orchid’s perception of Americans parallels Kingston’s limited understanding of the Chinese, but it differs in that Brave Orchid sees all foreigners who are not Japanese (a legend says that they were sea-faring Chinese people sent on a mission from which they never returned) as otherworldly. Her method of reimagining inscrutable people and forces as ghosts parallels her daughter’s habit of re-appropriating folk tales, blending everyday life with history and myth in an effort to make sense of an overwhelming and often confusing world.

Every American Brave Orchid encounters is a “ghost,” distinguished only by the jobs or tasks that they perform, such as “Tree-Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts” and, the scariest of all to Brave Orchid, “Newsboy Ghosts” who “shouted ghost words to the empty streets” which she believed “reached children inside the houses, reached inside the children’s chests.” Brave Orchid’s creation of other Americans as “ghosts” indicates that they remain foreign to her despite her presence as the relative newcomer. They are ghosts, too, for each seems to have a special power—the ability to put out fires or drive different vehicles—which no one in her village had.

In China, Brave Orchid believed that, as a doctor, she contended with ghosts that sought to kill the babies she attempted to deliver. Unlike in America, she was not quietly suspicious of the spirits that she perceived but spoke to them directly, asserting that she was not afraid of them and would not give in. In California, her lack of English prevents her from interacting with those whom she does not understand or from asking about the machines whose functions are a mystery to her.

Brave Orchid’s American experience is one of striving. Like her daughter, she uses her imagination to cope with both forces that are hard for her to understand and those which are beyond her control. Instead of communicating with other Americans (she cannot due to her lack of English), she creates stories to explain their behavior, just as Kingston creates stories to understand what life in China may have been like. The reliance on stories—to understand the new country and to remember the one that was left behind—is what seems to link generations in Kingston’s family, just as Ts’ai Yen’s poems linked future generations of Chinese to their Han ancestors.