Kingston's mother tells her the forbidden story of a great-aunt who was gang-raped by villagers, gave birth alone in a pigsty, and drowned herself and her newborn in the family well. Kingston is told never to repeat this. She repeats it — and spends the chapter imagining who this woman might have been.

Kingston inhabits the myth of Fa Mu Lan, the legendary woman warrior who trains in the mountains, disguises herself as a man to lead armies, defeats the Baron, and returns home to give birth. Intercut with this fantasy is Kingston's own reality: a Chinese-American girl told she is worthless, who imagines her immigrant grievances carved into her own back.

Kingston reconstructs Brave Orchid's life in China before immigration: her years at the To Keung School of Midwifery, her training as a doctor, her confrontation with the Sitting Ghost, her return to her village as a woman of power. Then immigration reduces her to a laundry worker in California, and Kingston struggles to reconcile these two versions of her mother.

Brave Orchid brings her sister Moon Orchid from China to California to confront the husband who abandoned her decades ago. The confrontation fails catastrophically. Moon Orchid's husband has built a new American life, and she doesn't fit into it. She descends into madness, institutionalized and speaking only of her delusions. She dies in the asylum.

Kingston narrates her own childhood silence — unable to speak at school, she torments a silent Chinese-American classmate she recognizes as a mirror of herself. She finally confronts her mother with a list of grievances and unspoken truths. The book ends with a shared myth: Kingston and Brave Orchid speak alternate lines of an ancient story, their voices finally meeting.