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Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, TV dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

This passage appears in "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," shortly after the episode in which Kingston yells at her mother. It encapsulates some of the clarity Kingston begins to have once she leaves home—her ability to tell what is real from what is not, to make sense where before there was only confusion. It points to what we might call an "Americanization" of her life, a life filled with simple things like plastics and TV dinners. At the same time, it also points to a sadness that Kingston feels for having renounced some important aspects of her heritage. Note the regretful, almost gloomy repetition of the phrase "It comes true." Whereas her mother tells talk-stories about mythical places and peoples, Kingston says that she pours concrete out of her mouth—not exactly a poetic skill—as if she were turning the mazes and mysteries of her past into an ordered American city. The ordering of life may be useful to Kingston in some ways, but it can also deny the richness of her heritage. In fact, perhaps this quotation is most useful as a reminder of what The Woman Warrior is not: a traditional linear autobiography. Rather, living in a world with "no ghosts" is only one phase of Kingston's life; her memoir is more notable—and interesting—for the complexity and confusion of her recollection than it is for its clarity.

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