Ghosts in The Woman Warrior

While reading The Woman Warrior, I was intrigued by the narrator’s repeated use of the term “ghost” to refer to Americans.  At first, I assumed that she used this terminology to describe the whiteness of white people’s skin, but this later proved not to be the case.  Moon Orchid calls of the people she sees ghosts, but even after she starts to go insane and becomes very paranoid, she claims that she is being followed by Mexican and Philipino ghosts.  This undermined the racial connotation I had associated with the term ghosts and made me question its meaning.  I have often encountered foreigners’ criticisms of America which argue that its capitalism is so relentless and all-consuming that it makes Americans soulless beings who only strive for wealth and success.  This interpretation had some merit because of Brave Orchid’s lamentations of life in America, which mostly consisted of her decrying the endlessness of labor.  For instance, she claims that “Here midnight comes and floor’s not swept, the ironing’s not ready, the money’s not made.  I would still be young if we lived in China (106).”  Certainly this critique of American capitalism does exist in the novel, but it does not fully explain the characters’ use of the word ghost to describe Americans.  One particular usage that caught my attention occurred when Moon Orchid and Brave Orchid go to confront Moon Orchid’s husband at his place of work.  After the plan quickly collapses, Moon Orchid reflects that “Her husband looked like one of the ghosts passing the car windows, and she must look like a ghost from China.  They had indeed entered the land of ghosts, and they had become ghosts (153).”  Here it seems that ghosts simply refer to alien outsiders with whom one cannot communicate.  The fact that they became ghosts implies that they did not fully understand the extent of their alienation from this society until this incident, when they realized just how estranged from the homeland culture Moon Orchid’s husband had become.  But ghosts are also a recurring theme in traditional Chinese culture, and they can represent good spirits or harmful ones.  I think that Brave Orchid applied this nomenclature to Americans to depict the vast divide between their culture and to demonstrate how foreign they themselves ultimately felt.