 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Table of Contents The last section, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," describes Kingston's desire to find her voice. Her mother cut the frenum of her tongue when she was an infant, presumably in order to keep her from being "tongue-tied" and to help her speak two languages, but Kingston finds this disturbing and ineffectual. She describes a painful childhood learning English in an indifferent school system where her language learning difficulties and cultural conflicts were treated with scorn. She remembers a totally silent schoolgirl whom she one day tortured in the girls' bathroom in an attempt to make her talk. After this event, Kingston gets a mysterious illness, which keeps her in bed for eighteen months. Kingston saves up a list of more than two hundred complaints and confessions to tell her mother. She confronts her mother, and tells her she fears being sold into slavery as her mother's China stories have led her to believe. She also refuses to be treated as a second class citizen, and confesses that she is smart according to her American teachers.
She leaves home to escape from the anxiety she feels with her mother and her cultural heritage; but she returns later with an understanding of her mother and an appreciation for her storytelling power. She ends the book on two stories, one is her mother's and the other is hers. Her mother's story is about her grandmother who loved operas so much she made her family brave bandits to attend. Her story is about an ancient Chinese poet named Ts'ai Yen who was kidnapped by barbarians and kept for twelve years during which time she had two children and learned to respect the music of the barbarians. When she returned from captivity, she produced poetry that combined barbarian language and Chinese language. Table of Contents | |
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