What
are we to make of the fate of fragile Moon Orchid? Transported to America by
unconventional means (sister rather than husband), she arrives to an uncertain
welcome and impossible future. Chinese women, we have been instructed, are
moved by men, Brave Orchid herself brought to America by her husband. But although
the traditional Chinese gender roles which have played such a central role in Woman Warrior must be examined, the same
mistake of limitation regarding Chinese femininity must not be made once again
in a critical analysis of the novel. Moon Orchid’s frightening dissolution must
be examined in relation to class and the immigrant experience as well as
gender.
Moon
Orchid is a transnational figure of dislocation from her very introduction, departing
for the “Gold Mountain” (the United States) from Hong Kong. Hong Kong, often
characterized as a place where East meets
West, was under the sovereignty of the British until 1997, when control was
officially handed over to China. However to this day the island exists as part
of yet apart from China. Returning to the topic at hand, how can Moon Orchid
hope to be “Chinese” once more when she has been something else, something in
between, for decades?
Like
a child watching adults, Moon Orchid follows her sister’s children around the
house, studying and narrating their movements: an attempt to learn to be again. Near seventy, however, Moon
Orchid is no child, and her move to America, like Brave Orchid’s has involved a
significant loss of class position, from a life of ease, servants, and
allowance to a life of hard labor and toil. Once again, Hong Kingston reminds
the reader of a feminine freedom in the East which remains unrealized in the
West. To come to America, Moon Orchid has given up her freedom, sold the room
of her own—and for what? America has not lived up to its promise, life in the
“Golden Mountain” in actuality harder than that of the village, as Brave Orchid
continually reminds the narrator: “‘you have no idea how much I have fallen
coming to America’” (77), “‘human beings don’t have to work like this in
China’” (105), and, finally, “‘I can’t stop working,’” (106). It is alluded to
that Moon Orchid’s daughter has suffered at the hands of a “rich and angry man
with citizenship papers…a tyrant” (128). Mother, once free, is pushed towards
the domestic subservience that has trapped her daughter in the West. Moon
Orchid, once a free woman provided for by a husband across an ocean, faces a
new life of brutal labor in the laundry, of servitude, of feminine duty. Should
we be surprised at her madness?
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