Much of Kingston's The Woman Warrior follows the oral tradition, and retells the stories of her family's past and of cultural figures like Fa Mu Lan. Not surprisingly, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" is a retelling of Kingston's personal life and her quest to find her own identity. In this section, Kingston depicts the difficulty she had growing up in San Francisco, while trying to understand her mother and her Chinese background by presenting various stages of her life. These stages are portrayed in four various characters: the quiet Chinese girl from her school, Pee-A-Nah, the crazy witch lady; the mentally retarded boy, and Ts'ai Yen. Each character then represent Kingston's struggle to assimilate with society, her desire to understanding herself, the difficulty of defining her identity, and the resolution that was finally found between both cultures.
             When she was younger, Kingston began to notice the differences between the Chinese children and the "ghost" children. Her silence, she believes, "had to do with being a Chinese girl" (166). In the figure of the quiet Chinese girl from her school, Kingston finds an outlet to release her pent up resentment towards her culture and portray her feelings of weakness in America. To Kingston, the little Chinese girl represents all traditional Chinese aspects that she was trying to rebel against. The girl is quiet, overprotected by her parents, adheres to the Chinese culture, and was thought to be mute and dumb; very much like how Kingston was believed to have a zero IQ. In describing her interaction with the Chinese girl, Kingston's tone radically changes from the rest of the novel. Her tone becomes much angrier and frustrated, representing her feelings discontentment with herself. Her hate for the girl's "fragility" (176) is because she sees a mirror reflection of herself and her own weaknesses in th...