SOURCE: "Fellow Rebels: Annie Dillard and Maxine Hong Kingston," in English Journal, Vol. 78, No. 8. December, 1889, pp. 50-67.

[In the following essay, Bischoff compares Dillard's American Childhood with Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiography The Woman Warrior, noting that despite different backgrounds the two authors depict similar experiences.]

For all their pseudosophisticated behavior and easy familiarity with high technology, today's high-school students continue to respond to and relish books about fictional young adults who, like themselves, struggle with generic teenage problems: rebellion against parental strictures, competition with siblings, the confines of school, fascination with and fear of the opposite sex, the looming necessity of momentous decisions about career choices and lifestyles. Traditionally, most such novels featured the adventures of young men (with the exception of the ubiquitous Nancy Drew); more recently, we have seen the skyrocketing popularity of such written-for-teens books as those of Judy Blume.

Certainly, such works have their place as leisure reading; however, the senior-high-school English instructor who seeks teachable contemporary literature that has both the virtues of writerly excellence and the popular appeal of the merely entertaining paperbacks is often left floundering in search of titles that promise to be appropriate, accessible, and well-received in the senior-high-school classroom. I'd like to suggest a pair of books published at opposite ends of the past decade that are well written, discussion-worthy, and sufficiently alike in content that they can be taught in tandem for comparative purposes as part of a contemporary-literature unit. Both books come to terms with the problems of adolescence noted above; both authors have fine literary reputations, as attested by their being named Pulitzer Prize winner (Dillard) and Pulitzer Prize runner-up (Kingston); both works offer satisfying reading challenges to students. And as an added bonus for teachers attempting to foster respect for cultural diversity in their classroom reading, the authors are women of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

Despite their cultural differences, Annie Dillard and Maxine Hong Kingston show remarkable similarities in their accounts of teenage rebellion in their respective autobiographies. Both Dillard's American Childhood (1987) and Kingston's Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (1977) relate their authors' conflicts with family and society, culminating in emotional confrontation scenes that leave the problems unresolved. In both instances, the authors' self-descriptions portray them as intense questioners of the status quo, feeling out of place in their respective worlds, biding their time until they can escape to the greater opportunities hovering tantalizingly just beyond the reaches of their neighborhoods.

For all their parents' efforts to rein them in, both Dillard and Kingston had parents who were themselves rebels. When Dillard was ten, her father "quit the firm his great-grandfather had founded a hundred years earlier … [and] sold his own holdings in the firm" in order to emulate his hero Mark Twain by going down the Mississippi River alone in a cabin cruiser. While Frank Doak abandoned his journey after only six weeks, he had set a memorable example for his daughter. Dillard's mother was similarly unconventional. She was witty, playing deft verbal games with duller people and, says Dillard, "collar[ing] us into her gags"; she held unpopular opinions about the McCarthy hearings and people who lived in trailer parks and the humanity of blue collar workers.

Kingston's father, too, strayed from the norm: as a young man, alone among his brothers, he chose an education rather than land as his share of the family inheritance and, after emigrating to the United States, eventually elected to send for his wife rather than return to China himself. Kingston's mother, Brave Orchid, was a strong and liberated woman for her era: she used the money sent her from America by her husband to sail alone to Canton and enroll in medical school to become a physician. She refused to share prevailing beliefs in the overwhelming powers of the supernatural, facing down a Sitting Ghost and continuing to cross a bridge on which she had once seen the smoky ghosts called Sit Dom Kuei. Although Brave Orchid tried to mold her Biggest Daughter along more conformist lines, she herself furnished a contrary illustration of fierce independence.

Both Dillard and Kingston had two sisters, and in each case the younger siblings were a contrast to them. Dillard describes Amy, three years younger than she, "Quiet. And little, and tidy, and calm, and more or less obedient," while Kingston describes her next youngest sister as being "neat while I was messy." Neither did this sister share Kingston's active imagination. Kingston relates her horror at discovering that her sister, whom she had thought of as "the person most like me in all the world." did not share her habit of "talk[ing] to people that aren't real inside your mind." Amy and her older sister shared more free-spiritedness than did the Hong sisters. However, in both families, the age gap between the youngest and oldest of the three sisters was great enough to prevent either from having much influence on the other.

Within each family, the oldest girl deliberately flouted many of her parents' injunctions. Dillard advanced from snowballing passing cars to "try[ing] to kill a streetcar by overturning it," putting stones on the tracks; she refused to take Communion and quit the church. She was fingerprinted in juvenile court after a drag-racing accident in which she injured her knees; she was suspended from school for smoking cigarettes. At home, she stayed in her own room whenever she could and "read or sulked." Dillard describes herself as being fanatical about her privacy:

Actually, it drove me nuts when people came in my room. Mother had come in just last week. My room was getting to be quite the public arena. Pretty soon they'd put it on the streetcar routes. Why not hold the U.S. Open here?

Kingston faced additional challenges growing up in a Chinese-American household: she was constantly fighting the ingrained Chinese put-down of women. She quotes endless derogatory proverbs: "Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds": "There's no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls"; "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls." Though her mother exhorted Kingston not to be a rebel like her father's sister, whose illegitimate pregnancy led to her suicide and the family's subsequent refusal to acknowledge she had ever lived, Kingston deliberately set out to be a "bad girl." She refused to cook; she broke dishes; she raised unlucky dust swirls while sweeping; she got into fights in junior-high school; she looked at dead slum people. When her exasperated mother would call her "bad." Kingston says, "Sometimes that made me gloat rather than cry. Isn't a bad girl almost a boy?"

Kingston refused to see her future role as that of the Chinese wife—or slave. If she couldn't be a boy, or a Fa Mu Lan, a warrior woman, she was determined to have a career. Perhaps the fervor of her rebellion was at least partially responsible for the mysterious illness she contracted; at about this time, Kingston quit battling for eighteen months, bedridden by an illness that had no perceptible symptoms and no apparent cause. Possibly the psychological conflict raging within her found manifestation in this way.

Both Dillard and Kingston rebelled against the limitations of society as represented by their school and/or community. As she grew older, Dillard says, "I wanted to bust up the Ellis School with my fists." She planned classroom insurrections:

It was a provocative fact, which I seemed to have discovered, that we students outnumbered our teachers. Must we then huddle like sheep?… Lately I had been trying to inflame my friends with the implications of our greater numbers. We could pull off a riot. We could bang on the desks and shout till they let us out. Then we could go home and wait for dinner.

However, Dillard laments, "I got no takers." Looking around at the world of the girls of her school, Dillard says,

I hated it so passionately I thought my shoulders and arms, swinging at the world, would split off from my body like loose spinning blades, and fly wild and slice everyone up. With all my heart, sometimes, I longed for the fabled Lower East Side of Manhattan, for Brooklyn, for the Bronx, where the thoughtful and feeling people in books grew up on porch stoops among seamstress intellectuals.

Dillard also was fed up with the country club, and with church. "At the country club," she says, "you often wanted to leave as soon as you had come, but there was no leaving to be had." She faulted the values of the woman who "never washed her face all summer, to preserve her tan," writhed at the predictability of "figures in a reel endlessly unreeling." who drank old-fashioneds in winter and frozen daiquiris in summer. She was equally critical of that society's religious observances:

Nothing so inevitably blackened my heart as an obligatory Sunday at the Shadyside Presbyterian Church: … the putative hypocrisy of my parents, who forced me to go, though they did not; the putative hypocrisy of the expensive men and women who did go.

In sum, says Dillard,

I adored, I longed for, everyone on earth, especially India and Africa, and particularly everyone on the streets of Pittsburgh—all those friendly, democratic, openhearted, sensible people—and at Forbes Field, and in all the office buildings, parks, streetcars, churches, and stores, excepting only the people I knew, none of whom was up to snuff.

Kingston's schooldays were a trial for her, too, though for a different reason. Uncertain of herself and of her spoken English, Kingston says,

During the first silent year I spoke to no one at school, did not ask before going to the lavatory, and flunked kindergarten…. It did not occur to me I was supposed to talk.

During those early years, she was more victim than rebel: the Japanese kids picked on her, and she and the other Chinese girls were left out of the second-grade play. By the time she got to sixth grade, however, Kingston "was arrogant with talk"; she became a straight-A student, determined to join clubs and activities and win a scholarship to college. But because of her struggles to cope successfully with the American educational system, Kingston did not aspire to overturn it, as Dillard did. Her rebellion instead was against the obstacles provided by her culture that slowed her rise to the top.

Like Dillard, Kingston disapproved of many of the customs and behaviors of her community. She resented having to lie and say she had already eaten when offered food, instead of bluntly admitting, "I'm starved. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip cookies." She keenly felt the unfairness inherent in Great-Uncle's pleasure in taking her brothers out for candy and new toys while refusing to take her and her sisters because they were girls ("Maggots!"). She cringed with embarrassment when her mother made her go to the drugstore for "reparation candy" to remove the curse of a mistaken delivery of medicine to their family. She hated both the awful power of the white people ("ghosts") that forced her to be circumspect in all she said and the Chinese propensity for secrecy that prevented her from revealing to her teachers her parents' real names or birthdays or occupations. Perhaps most of all, she grew up angry at the confusing bedrock of Chinese culture: the habit of never explaining holiday observances or proper behavior patterns and the indoctrination into a bewildering mixture of truth and "talk-story" that made family history an inseparable combination of fact and make-believe.

Neither Dillard nor Kingston claims to have understood boys very well while growing up, although Dillard, who says she was "conspicuous" though not "central," had a much more active social life, beginning with dancing school at age ten and progressing to dinner dances at the Sewickley Country Club. She played football and baseball with boys when she was little; by sixteen, she had a boyfriend whom she loved "so tenderly, I thought I must transmogrify into vapor." Nevertheless, for all her appreciation of the boys' "cuteness," Dillard laments, "How little I understood them! How little I even glimpsed who they were." She imagined that they, as she, fought losing battles to avoid going to church and thus observed with disbelief their apparent devotion at prayer. She thought that the boys shared her own aspirations to do romantic and exciting things, only to discover soon thereafter that their aspirations were much more worldly: to make money, to head powerful corporations. If, deep within them, they also longed to escape the expectations of their society, Dillard reflects, "I never knew them well enough to tell."

Kingston's social experience lacked many of the parent-arranged boy-girl activities that were common in Dillard's life; as a teenager, she was hampered by having to change her naturally loud Chinese voice to one that was quiet "American-feminine," her "Chinese-feminine" pigeon-toed walk to Americanized "walking erect." Like Dillard, Kingston didn't understand boys very well; unlike Dillard, she was frightened by their mystery:

As if it came from an atavism deeper than fear, I used to add "brother" silently to boys' names. It … made them less scary and as familiar and deserving of benevolence as girls.

However, says, Kingston, by such action

I hexed myself also—no dates. I should have stood up, both arms waving, and shouted out across libraries, "Hey, you! Love me back." I had no idea, though, how to make attraction selective, how to control its direction and magnitude. If I made myself American-pretty so that the five or six Chinese boys in the class fell in love with me, everyone else—the Caucasian, Negro, and Japanese boys—would too. Sisterliness, dignified, and honorable, made much more sense.

Both Dillard and Kingston had a penchant for wandering far from their home territory, as if unconsciously searching for something before they were even able to give it a name. Dillard first "memorized the neighborhood" and by age seven had "traveled over the known world's edge" on her bicycle. She spent years exploring the 380-acre Frick Park; she kept "push[ing] at my map's edges." Kingston was also an intrepid adventurer:

I took my brothers and sisters to explore strange people's houses, ghost children's houses, and haunted houses blackened by fire. We explored a Mexican house and a red-headed family's house…. We explored the sloughs, where we found hobo nests.

By sixteen, says Dillard, "I was going to hell on a handcart … and I knew it and everyone around me knew it, and there it was." "I morally disapproved most things in North America," Dillard remembers, "and blamed my innocent parents for them." She convulsed with laughter over private jokes in school and volunteered too exuberantly in class; she damaged musical instruments with her wild, free playing: "I was what they called a live wire. I was shooting out sparks that were digging a pit around me, and I was sinking into that pit." She needed outlets but didn't know what they were: "I wanted to raise armies, make love to armies, conquer armies." She felt impelled to do something, but didn't know what to do first: "What would you do if you had fifteen minutes to live before the bomb went off?"

At this age, Dillard, like Kingston, had a voice problem, but whereas Kingston initially was too quiet, Dillard was too loud: "I couldn't lower my voice although I could see the people around me flinch." She was a turmoil of emotions: rage, anger, hatred, boredom, disdain, wildness. At various times, Dillard recalls, "I approved almost nothing," and "I despised everything and everyone about me"; "I woke every morning full of hope, and was livid with rage before break-fast." She would have done something about her condition, if only she had known what to do.

During the same time in her life, Kingston too felt anger, hatred, rage, as well as consciousness of her own faults. She wanted to take revenge on the people who had figuratively written the "chink" and "gook" words on her back, to avenge the injustices that the Communists had perpetrated on her Chinese relatives and that the American bureaucracy had dealt her parents in taking away their laundries. Had it been possible, Kingston says, she would have become an outlaw Chinese knot-maker, dedicated to tying a special complex knot that had been ruled illegal; the position seemed symbolically right for her. She browbeat herself, remembering some two hundred misdeeds she had kept secret from her mother: praying for a horse of the unlucky white color, stealing money for candy, fighting at Chinese school, envying Catholics, killing an innocent spider. Once she had pinched and hair-pulled and screamed at another Chinese girl who reminded her too much of herself in being perpetually the last chosen for her team and in being so desperately quiet (though for many more years than Kingston was). It was part of her emotional confusion that while Kingston didn't truly repent any of these actions, she nonetheless desperately wanted to be forgiven for them.

In Dillard's case, eventually she and her parents sat down together late one evening to try to resolve Mrs. Doak's despairing question, "'Dear God, what are we going to do with you?'." "We all seemed to have exhausted our options," says Dillard. "They asked me for fresh ideas, but I had none. I racked my brain, but couldn't come up with anything. The U.S. Marines didn't take sixteen-year-old girls." At this stage of her life, according to Dillard, she thought of herself as "the intelligentsia around these parts, single-handedly"; "it was beginning to strike me that Father, who knew the real world so well, got some of it wrong." She was determined that she wasn't going to marry the "right" boy; she didn't want to grow up to lead the kind of life that was expected of her. Dillard had never faced an insurmountable obstacle within what she calls "the narrow bounds of my isolationism," so she was certain that she could be and do anything that she pleased. She didn't want to be smoothed down, as her headmistress had suggested she would be, by college: "I had hopes for my rough edges. I wanted to use them as a can opener, to cut myself a hole in the world's surface, and exit through it." The alternative filled her with horror: "Would I be ground, instead, to a nub? Would they send me home, an ornament to my breed, in a jewelry bag?"

Even Dillard's friend Ellin recognized that Dillard's eyes were willfully closed to the realities of the social—and greater—worlds around them; in answer to Dillard's questions, she would often sigh and exclaim to everyone at large, "'She still doesn't get it!'" Dillard's father could only aggrievedly conclude that sometimes, as in the case when she quit the church, Dillard "was deliberately setting out to humiliate" her parents. There is no indication that she was. Rather, the portrait of Dillard that emerges is one of a bright, creative young woman who was hyperactively restless, whose "idea was to stay barely alive … until the time came when I could go [elsewhere]." Dillard pictures her departure from home as inevitable: books "would propel me right out of Pittsburgh altogether." Yet, Dillard says, although her "mother knew we would go [,] she encouraged us." It was simply a matter of determining for once and for all to "drive to Guatemala, drive to Alaska" instead of to the family garage. Until then, Dillard could only bide her time and whisper "the password phrase … 'There is a world. There is another world'." As she finished her days at Ellis School, she knew that her first stop in it would be at Hollins College.

While the confrontation scene in Dillard's book describes trembling voices and full ashtrays, its counterpart in Kingston's book takes place at the crowded dinner table in the laundry as Kingston stands up screaming, impelling her mother to begin shouting back, her lather to ignore her, and her siblings to steal away silently. In an emotional diatribe, Kingston pours out a disorganized list of grievances and declarations and private goals: she wants the mentally retarded man banished from consideration as husband material for her or her sister; she's suffered her whole lifetime over the confusions of the lies of "talk-story"; she's going to quit Chinese school and abandon the Chinese customs she thinks are stupid; she's going to go to college and become a professional instead of getting married.

Much of this resembles Dillard's youthful convictions and protestations. Like Dillard, Kingston is convinced she is intelligent: "Do you know what the Teacher Ghosts say about me? They tell me I'm smart, and I can win scholarships. I can get into colleges. I've already applied. I'm smart. I can do all kinds of things. I know how to get A's." No more than Dillard does Kingston declare herself willing to abide by her parents' ideas of a suitable marriage partner: "You think you can give us away to freaks. You better not do that. Mother." Again, like Dillard, Kingston believes she can do and be anything:

I could be a scientist or a mathematician…. But I didn't say I wanted to be a mathematician either. That's what the ghosts say. I want to be a lumberjack and a newspaper reporter…. I'm going to chop down trees in the daytime and write about timber at night.

And as Ellin did for Dillard, Mrs. Hong has to explain to a rebellious young woman that she "doesn't get it": when Kingston protests being called ugly, her mother tells her. "That's what we're supposed to say. That's what Chinese say. We like to say the opposite."

In the "Epilogue" of her book, Dillard notes,

Possibly because Father had loaded his boat one day and gone down the Ohio River, I confused leaving with living, and vowed that when I got my freedom, I would be the one to do both.

She suggests that with maturity she learned that one can do the second without necessarily doing the first. On the other hand, Kingston declares,

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, t.v. dinners with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts.

As a mature woman come home to visit her family, Kingston relates that she tells her mother,

I've found some places in this country that are ghostfree. And I think I belong there, where I don't catch colds or use my hospitalization insurance. Here I'm sick so often, I can barely work. I can't help it, Mama.

For Kingston, leaving home seems to have been a necessary move in order to remain healthy and happy and balanced.

Thus, the resolutions of the books differ, but in other respects, their contents are strikingly the same. Both the young WASP and the young Oriental woman describe themselves as teenage rebels, feeling trapped within their families and their societies. Both are bright, ambitious, curious; both seek to come to terms with a world larger than that immediately known to them. By comparing the two works, one finds that Dillard's and Kingston's struggles to do this illuminate each other. And by comparing the growing-up problems of the authors with their own trials and uncertainties, student readers of Dillard and Kingston may find reassurance that their own rebellions are not singular, while they broaden their literary backgrounds through exposure to the works of two fine writers.