Shaman reading

Throughout Kingston's writing I've noticed a theme of her being caught between her American life that she was born into, and the Old World values that her family expects her to live by. I found the first two chapters to be on the confusing side, mostly because at times it was hard to decipher what events had actually happened and what details she embellished upon to make more interesting. I think that the story of Fa Mu Lan as told in White Tigers was Kingston's way of exploring a life that she wished she had; one that would have made her parents and community proud of her, because of the courage and dedication it took to become a warrior. In Shaman we got to see an entirely different side of Kingston's mother. I had pictured her to be a very subsurvient and dependent housewife, and by learning of her time spent in medical school I began to see a more independent and intellectual side of her. Instead of continuing to lavish herself with clothes and other things, she put the money her husband sent from America to a more productive use. It was interesting to see how the pressure of being twenty years older than her classmates pushed her to work hard and study contstantly, because she wanted to appear like her intelligence had been bestowed upon her by the Gods, not as a result of avid studying. The section that tells about the haunted room where the mother sleeps one night to prove or disprove the ghosts' prescence, made me question whether or not she actually believed in ghosts or not. At first it seems like she doubts they exist and is not afraid of them, but then during what may have been just a nightmare, she goes back and forth talking about how she will vanquish the "Sitting Ghost" in the morning and that she isn't afraid of it because she knows all about what it does. A quote on page 68 that describes how she felt in the dark haunted room was, "She had been pared down like this before, when she had traveled up the mountains into rare snow -- alone in white not unlike being alone in black." What do you guys think this quote's meaning and intent was meant to be, as far as the mother's complex life goes?