Ghosts
Ghosts permeate (or maybe haunt) the entire book and, we might infer, Kingston's life. Foreigners, non-Chinese people, are represented in the book as ghosts. The book also has literal ghosts. They...
Songs for a Barbarian Reed Pipe
Kingston closes the book with the story of Ts'ai Yen and the translated songs that she brought to the Han people in China. As you might have noticed, Kingston also titles the last chapter "A Song f...
Words on One's Back
Kingston writes that her parents use knives to write her family into her back before she goes to war. This way, her body is a literal tablet on which the family is represented. Kingston writes that...