Introduction
Ahighly acclaimed memoirist, Kingston integrates autobiographical elements with Asian legend and fictionalized history to delineate cultural conflicts confronting Americans of Chinese descent, particularly issues of female identity. Frequently studied in a variety of academic disciplines, her works bridge two civilizations in their examination of social and familial bonds from ancient China to contemporary California. Kingston often focuses on issues of cultural and institutional sexism and misogyny as well as female autonomy and identity. Writers such as Amy Tan, David Henry Hwang, Gish Jen, and Fae Myenne Ng have been strongly influenced by Kingston's portrayal of the history of Chinese American women.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Born in Stockton, California, to parents who were Chinese immigrants, Kingston experienced first-hand the often painful results of clashes between American and Chinese cultures. Her mother, who was a strong influence on Kingston, wanted her to remain essentially Chinese and instilled in her the beliefs, traditions, and customs of her native country. As a young woman, Kingston struggled academically, primarily because she refused to talk in class. Scholastically, her performance improved to the point where she was awarded a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. In 1965, she received her teaching certificate. She taught English and mathematics at the high school level in California and Hawaii for several years. The tension between her Chinese background and her immersion in American culture became a recurring theme in her later work. In 1976, her first book, The Woman Warrior, was published to critical and popular acclaim. She was appointed professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1990. She has received several awards for her work, including two National Book Awards, for The Woman Warrior and China Men (1980), and other national and local recognitions for her writing. In 1992, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She and her husband live in Oakland, California.
MAJOR WORKS
As an American-born daughter of stern immigrant parents, Kingston explores in her work the anxiety that often results from clashes between radically different cultural sensibilities. Her exotic, myth-laden narratives are informed by several sources: the ordeals of immigrant forebears who endured brutal exploitation as they labored on American railroads and cane plantations; the "talk-stories," or cautionary tales of ancient heroes and family secrets told by her mother; and her own experiences as a first-generation American with confused cultural allegiances. From these foundations, Kingston forms epic chronicles of the Chinese immigrant experience that are esteemed for their accurate and disturbing illumination of such social patterns as Asian cultural misogyny and American institutional racism. Her first autobiographical volume, The Woman Warrior, has been deemed an innovative and important feminist work. It is viewed as a personal, unconventional memoir that seeks to reconcile Eastern and Western conceptions of female identity. Kingston eschews chronological plot and standard nonfiction techniques in her memoir, synthesizing ancient myth and imaginative biography to present a kaleidoscopic vision of female character. The narrative begins with Kingston's mother's brief caveat concerning No Name Woman, young Maxine's paternal aunt, whose disrepute has rendered her unmentionable. Left in their village by her émigré husband, No Name Woman became pregnant—perhaps by rape—and was forced by the villagers to drown herself and her baby. Affirming traditional attitudes, Maxine's mother, Brave Orchid, describes such practices as foot-binding and the sale of girls as slaves, and she threatens Maxine with servitude and an arranged marriage to a retarded neighborhood boy. Subsequent chapters, however, provide sharp contrast to these bleak visions, for Brave Orchid also recites the colorful legend of Fa Mu Lan, the woman who wielded a sword to defend her hamlet. Kingston...
(This entire section contains 1269 words.)
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then describes Brave Orchid's own incongruent character; independent enough to become one of rural China's few female doctors, she returned to her customary submissive role upon joining her husband in America. InChina Men Kingston examines the lives and experiences of her mythological father, grandfather, great-grandfather, uncles, and brothers. In these narratives, BaBa serves as the father figure, Ah Goong as grandfather, and Bak Goong as great-grandfather. The concept of the father embodies a significant theme of the book: the importance of personal history as a means to self-awareness and self-confidence. Ah Goong works for the railroads planting dynamite charges in mountains and hillsides and digging holes for bridge supports. Several critics have noted that Ah Goong's coarse description of his onanistic acts functions as a way of feminizing the land and describing it in terms of possession, elements typical of much Western writing. In this respect, Ah Goong's language raises questions about universal masculine responses to the environment while at the same time highlighting a search for female identity in the male-dominated Chinese-American myth of westward expansion.
Tripmaster Monkey (1989) is an experimental novel narrated by Kuan Yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy, and is loosely based on the "monkey tales" of Chinese folklore which feature a trickster hero who is also an artist and a magician. The protagonist is Wittman Ah Sing, a young Chinese playwright in San Francisco who reaches maturity during the hippie era of the late 1960s. Wittman, an Asian American wanting to become an important American playwright, is not only a monkey figure, or someone who must rely upon cunning and metaphorical sleight-of-hand to reach his goals, but also a jazz musician: he must improvise his life, attitudes, and behavior from moment to moment if he is to survive in the urban wilderness. To Be the Poet (2002) is a collection of prose and poetry based on Kingston's 2000 William E. Massey lectures at Harvard. The book provides readers with a glimpse of a poet at work during the creative process. The Fifth Book of Peace (2003) is a complex, stream of consciousness memoir that relates the destruction of a novel-in-progress that occurred when Kingston's Oakland, California, home burned to the ground in 1991. The Fifth Book of Peace incorporates a retelling of the narrative of the destroyed novel combined with several other elements: Kingston's memories about her attempts to rescue the manuscript from her burning house, her quest to understand myths surrounding the Chinese Three Lost Books of Peace, and her plea to veterans of all wars to help her proclaim a message of peace.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Critics view Kingston as one of the most prominent and influential Asian American authors of the twentieth century. The Woman Warrior is considered her best-known work. Since its first printing, it has been translated into more than three dozen languages and has become an extremely popular university text, widely read in courses in education, sociology, psychology, anthropology, women's studies, Asian studies, and American literature. Feminist critics applaud the memoir for its insightful and poignant exploration of female identity. A few reviewers, however, have asserted that the emphasis on female character development has come at the expense of the male characters in the book. Some critics have viewed The Woman Warrior as a distortion of Asian mythology and culture. Asian American male writers, particularly Frank Chin, have accused Kingston of selling out by misrepresenting Chinese mythology and culture and utilizing a Western literary form—the memoir—to pander to Western audiences. Kingston, along with other critics and writers, has responded by asserting that her creative reworkings and personalization of Chinese mythology is a legitimate postmodern strategy. Moreover, Kingston contends that she will not allow her work to be influenced by narrow and questionable definitions of Asian American literature. Some allege that negative criticisms of Kingston's work—particularly of The Woman Warrior—are based on the male chauvinism and ethnocentricism of the critics themselves. With this ongoing debate, as well as her considerable literary accomplishments, Kingston is viewed as a controversial and vital American author.
Principal Works
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts (memoir) 1976
China Men (nonfiction) 1980
Hawai'i One Summer (essays) 1987
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (novel) 1989
To Be the Poet (prose and poetry) 2002
The Fifth Book of Peace (nonfiction) 2003
Primary Sources
SOURCE: Kingston, Maxine Hong with Shelley Fisher Fishkin. "Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston." In Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin, pp. 159-67. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998.
In the following interview, taped in 1990 and originally published in American Literary History in 1991, Kingston discusses gender stereotypes, the role of feminist writers, and the major influences on her writing.
[Fishkin]: In a recent article you wrote in the magazine Mother Jones called "The Novel's Next Step," you explore what the novel of the future might look like—perhaps a sequel to Tripmaster Monkey. Among other things, you note that your hero's wife, Taña, will have to "use the freedom the feminists have won. These struggles have got to result in happy endings for all, and the readers must learn not to worship tragedy as the highest art any more." Are you suggesting that feminist writers need to write out of power and pride rather than anger and rage in the future? How can they build on "the freedom that's been won"?
[Kingston]: I think that feminist writers have been writing with power and pride, but I am suggesting that we have to invent new images and ways of power. So far the world thinks of power as violence, that power comes from a gun. We must create a new kind of drama in which there is drama, but it's nonviolent. And this has barely been thought of. I'm saying that women especially have a duty to work in this direction. I felt really appalled when Miss U.S.A. said women ought to have every right to go into combat. I see that as women trying for power by being as good as men are in violent ways.
In The Woman Warrior you counter the stereotype of the silent and confident Woman Warrior, and in Tripmaster Monkey you counter the stereotype of the Chinese man who came to make money—a story you explore in China Men —with the image of a Chinese man who came to play. In fact, one of your characters says, "What if we came for the fun of it?" Do you think that these wonderful new images of confident women and playful men can help shape a new reality?
Yes. I hope when artists write new characters, we invent new archetypes and they are visions of ways that we can be.
So the stories we tell about who we are can shape who we become?
Yes. What we need to do is to be able to imagine the possibility of a playful, peaceful, nurturing, mothering man, and we need to imagine the possibilities of a powerful, nonviolent woman and the possibilities of harmonious communities—and if we can just imagine them, that would be the first step toward building them and becoming them.
You've occasionally alluded to the power of the imagination to create reality, to embody truth, to make something exist that may not have existed before—not just in a psychological sense, but in an almost tangible, real sense. You describe, for example, the whistling arrow that you saw in a museum that was exactly like one you had imaginedin your book, and you wrote, "I felt I had created it. I wrote it, and therefore it appeared." Do you think that your imaginative vision can generate reality and can generate truth?
Yes. It was wonderful that I saw this whistling arrow in the museum, but the point of my story was that this heroine took the arrows and turned them into flutes, and then she composed songs for these flutes. My idea was that we can turn weapons into musical instruments. It's sort of like plowshares from swords, and, again, I'm saying that the first step is to have that kind of consciousness that can create the world and save it. We have to change human consciousness and that's a step towards changing the material world.
I was thrilled to find out that the main character in your novel was named Wittman Ah Sing, because ever since I read The Woman Warrior I was convinced that Whitman had to be close by lurking somewhere in the shadows—Walt Whitman—
Oh really? Walt Whitman? After reading Woman Warrior? Oh, that's wonderful! Am I glad! I'm touched!
It showed. Everywhere. I wondered if he's been an empowering influence for you?
Oh, yes, yes, yes. I like the freedom that Walt Whitman was using to play with and shape the American language. Especially in writing Tripmaster Monkey—I just lifted lines from Leaves of Grass. You would think they were modern Sixties' slang—"Trippers and Askers" and "Linguists and Contenders Surround Me"—all of that—"Song of the Open Road," "Song of Occupations"—I just took those for title headings for my book. I like the rhythm of his language and the freedom and the wildness of it. It's so American. And also his vision of a new kind of human being that was going to be formed in this country—although he never specifically said Chinese—ethnic Chinese also—I'd like to think he meant all kinds of people. And also I love that throughout Leaves of Grass he always says "men and women," "male and female." He's so different from other writers of his time, and even of this time. Even a hundred years ago he always included women and he always used [those phrases], "men and women," "male and female."
What other writers have helped inspire and empower you to come up with your voice as an American writer and as a feminist writer?
I found that whenever I come to a low point in my life or in my work, when I read Virginia Woolf's Orlando, that always seems to get my life force moving again. I just love the way she can make one character live for four hundred years, and that Orlando can be a man, Orlando can be a woman. Virginia Woolf broke through constraints of time, of gender, of culture. I think an American writer who does that same thing is William Carlos Williams. I love In the American Grain because it does that same thing. Abraham Lincoln is a "mother" of our country. He talks about this wonderful woman walking through the battle-fields with her beard and shawl. I find that so freeing, that we don't have to be constrained to being just one ethnic group or one gender—both those writers make me feel that I can now write as a man, I can write as a black person, as a white person; I don't have to be restricted by time and physicality.
At one point the narrator of The Woman Warrior who is totally exasperated with her mother's stories, complains, "You won't tell me a story and then say 'this is a true story,' or 'this is just a story.' I can't tell the difference. I can't tell what's real and what you make up." How do you respond to questions like that about your work?
You mean when the audiences ask me, "Is it real?"—when students ask that? I think people ask me those things because I put the question in their minds. The people give me back the question I give them. I know why they do it. I meant to give people those questions so that they can wrestle with them in their own lives. You know, I can answer those questions, but then that means I just answer it for me. And what I want is to give people questions (which I think are very creative things)—and then when people wrestle with them and struggle with them in their own minds and in their own lives, all kinds of exciting things happen to them. I don't want people to throw the responsibility back to me.
General Commentary
SOURCE: Juhasz, Suzanne. "Narrative Technique & Female Identity." In Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies, edited by Catherine Rainwater and William J. Scheik, pp. 173-89. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985.
In the following essay, Juhasz maintains that The Woman Warrior and China Men "compose a woman's autobiography, describing a self formed at the source by gender experience."
Maxine Hong Kingston's two-volume autobiography, The Woman Warrior and China Men, embodies the search for identity in the narrative act. The first text places the daughter in relation to her mother, the second places her in relation to her father; they demonstrate how finding each parent is a part of finding oneself. For Kingston, finding her mother and father is to name them, to tell their stories. Language is the means with which she arrives at identity, first at home, and then in the world. But because a daughter's relation to her mother is psychologically and linguistically different from her relation to her father, so is the telling of these stories different.1
Although the two texts are superficially similar, they are generated from different narrative patterns. In The Woman Warrior alternating movements toward and away from the mother take place within a textual field in which a linear progression, defining first the mother, then the daughter, takes place. In China Men narrative movement goes in one direction only, toward the father. But because this impulse in the latter book is continually diffused into generalization and idealization, it begins over, again and again. Such narrative structures suggest the evolution of female identity, which is formed in relation to the mother through the achievement of individuation in the context of connection, in relation to the father through the understanding of separation, the creation of substitutes for connection. Taken together, The Woman Warrior and China Men compose a woman's autobiography, describing a self formed at the source by gender experience.
To say this is neither to ignore nor to minimize the question of national identity everywhere present in Kingston's writing. Born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents, her search for self necessarily involves a definition of home. Is it America, China, or some place in between? For Kingston the question of national identity complicates the search for self. Yet it is possible to understand how gender identity and national identity can be versions of one another, how home is embodied in the mother and father who together stand for the primary source of the self. For Kingston, in fact, who has never been there, China is not so much a physical place as it is a construct used by her parents to define their own identities. America too, especially for her parents, is a psychological state as much as it is a place. My own focus here on sexual identity is therefore not meant to negate the other dimension of the problem, but rather to reveal sexual and national identities as parts of one another. For it is as a Chinese-American woman that Kingston seeks to define herself.
The narrator's search for home in both books is for a place and a self. That search involves rejections of source as well as connections to it, even as the achievement of identity is a combination of individuation and attachment: "Whenever my parents said 'home,' they suspended America. They suspended enjoyment, but I did not want to go to China. In China my parents would sell my sisters and me. My father would marry two or three more wives, who would spatter cooking oil on our bare toes and lie that we were crying for naughtiness. They would give food to their own children and rocks to us. I did not want to go where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own."2
The movement of both texts is toward her own definition of home as a place to which she can return. "The simple explanation makes it less scary to go home after yelling at your father and mother. It drives the fear away and makes it possible someday to visit China, where I now know they don't sell girls or kill each other for no reason" (WW [Woman Warrior], 238). The explanation is the writing of the book, telling stories of home—of China and America in general, but of mothers and fathers in particular. "I want to hear the stories about the rest of your life," the narrator of China Men says to her father: "the Chinese stories." Her purpose is thereby to know him: "I want to know what makes you scream and curse, and what you're thinking when you say nothing; and why when you do talk, you talk differently from mother."3 In the first chapter of The Woman Warrior, telling the forbidden story—told to her, nevertheless, by her mother—of an aunt who committed suicide, the narrator explains, "Unless I see her life branching into mine, she gives me no ancestral help" (WW, 10). Telling her aunt's story is a way to bring their two lives together, to discover commonality. At the same time, however, it reveals their differences as well. Telling their stories, in fact, both frees her from them and binds her to them, which is the process of finding home. "Thank you, Mother, thank you, Father," says the narrator in her fantasy of herself as a woman warrior: "They had carved their names and addresses on me, and I would come back" (WW, 44).
The Chinese phrase for story telling is "talking-story," and it defines the narration of both books. It is as well the subject of both books, because finding words, telling stories, is in Kingston's writing the other major metaphor, along with home, for the process of achieving identity. Chinese into English, silence into speech: when they appear in her books, these themes are subject and technique. The narrator of The Woman Warrior, who literally could not speak in public as a child, later cries to another silent Chinese-American girl, "If you don't talk, you can't have a personality. You'll have no personality and no hair" (WW, 210). The narrator's fantasy of the powerful woman, the woman warrior of the title, involves a female avenger with words actually carved on her back: "The ideographs for revenge are 'report a crime' and 'report to five families.' The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—'chink' words and 'gook' words too—that they do not fit on my skin" (WW, 63). That power, equated with the ability to talk-story, is specifically associated with her mother: "I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story" (WW, 24).
Talking-story, discourse itself, is central to the difference between the two books, representative in turn of the difference in the relationships between daughters and mothers, daughters and fathers. The narrator's mother talks to her; her father does not. "Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories … a story to grow up on" (WW, 5). The Woman Warrior begins and ends with the narrator's mother talking-story. By the end of the book, the daughter's independent identity can be understood through her connection to her mother; talking-story is indicative of both parts of the mother-daughter relationship: "Here is a story my mother told me, not when I was young but recently, when I told her I also talk-story. The beginning is hers, the ending mine" (WW, 240). Her father, in contrast, does not talk. Screams and curses define his speech, but more important yet is his silence: "You kept up a silence for weeks and months" (CM [China Men], 8).
At the core of the relationship between daughter and mother is identification. The mother-child bond has always been the primary one, and girls never have to break it in the way boys do, by understanding that they are of different sexes. Through her stories, the narrator's mother passes on her version of reality to her daughter: "She tested our strength to establish realities," explains the narrator as The Woman Warrior begins. The matter is complicated, however, by the fact that the mother often tells lies. In China Men the narrator specifically contrasts men's stories with "the fairy tales and ghost stories told by women" (CM, 37). "No, no," says the narrator's mother to her in The Woman Warrior, "there aren't any flags like that. They're just talking-story. You're always believing talk-story" (WW, 213). To find her own identity the daughter needs to ascertain the difference between herself and her mother. Discovering a separate identity for her mother is one way to help her find her own self. Discerning the relation between her mother's "truths" and "lies" is representative of this process.
With her father the narrator needs not to loosen a connection but to make one. His discourse, and especially the lack of it, is indicative of the fundamental separateness between daughter and father, a separateness that arises because the father is neither a daughter's primary love nor is he of the same sex. The narrator's father screams or curses at her, "Wordless male screams that jolted the house upright and staring in the middle of the night" (CM, 8). His curses defile women: "Your mother's cunt. Your mother's smelly cunt" (CM, 8). Worse are his long silences, whereby he "punished us by not talking … rendered us invisible, gone" (CM, 8). To believe that her father does not mean her with his curses, to find out who he really is, the daughter has to invent him: "I'll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I'm mistaken. You'll just have to speak up with the real stories if I've got you wrong" (CM, 10). In the face of silence, invention is her only possible recourse. Yet it cannot be trusted in the same way that the narrator of The Woman Warrior trusts her imaginings about the lives of women relatives. Furthermore, it would be better, in the end, if he would tell her himself.
Therefore, although the two texts are conceived of by their author as "one big book [, she] was writing them more or less simultaneously," and although their surface stylistic features are similar, there is a profound difference between them. Whereas she "thought there would be a big difference between the men and the women," Kingston does not in fact "find them that different."4 On the surface, the texts do look and sound alike. Both tell stories of relatives, stories interspersed with memories of the narrator's own childhood, in a matter-of-fact tone and declarative sentences that permit the speaker a fluid interchange between fact and fantasy, reportage and poetry. Yet the results are different, indicating more profound differences in narrative structure. Kingston herself points to their different sources. "In a way," she says, "The Woman Warrior was a selfish book. I was always imposing my viewpoint on the stories. In China Men the person who 'talks-story' is not so intrusive. I bring myself in and out of the stories, but in effect, I'm more distant. The more I was able to understand my characters, the more I was able to write from their point of view and the less interested I was in relating how I felt about them."5 "More distant": This distance is, I think, a necessary result of the difference in finding a father rather than a mother, and it produces a text that creates not a universal or an androgynous but a female understanding of masculine experience. The essential separation between daughter and father is bridged by fantasy that, while it may do its work with intelligence and love, is never empathetic and is always idealized. For all its attention to detail, the text it produces is curiously—or not so curiously—abstract. The Woman Warrior is a messier book, but for me it is more satisfying than China Men. Yet, taken together as they are meant to be, they offer valuable insights into the nature of female identity, as it is created in relation not simply to women, not simply to men, but to both sexes, both parents.
The Woman Warrior is "messy" insofar as its narrative patterns are several and intertwined. Complex is really a better word for the various kinds of narrative movements that taken together reflect the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship. The move to individuate and the move to connect both arise from the essential attachment between daughter and mother; the need for separation thus exists in the context of connection. In consequence, the identity that the text establishes for its narrator is achieved through a process involving both individuation and attachment.
The largest narrative pattern has a linear direction. The first three stories move toward defining the mother, thereby distinguishing her from the daughter; the two final stories go on to define the daughter, distinguishing her from the mother. But within each of the stories other movements occur in alternating patterns, maintaining the necessary tension between separation and connection. The text as a whole, for example, can be seen as an alternation between the stories the mother tells and the stories the daughter tells. Each teller's stories, in turn, alternate between true stories and stories that are not true.
The mother creates her relationship with her daughter through the kinds of story she tells her, stories whose purpose is sometimes to keep the two women alike and sometimes to make them different, as when, for example, the mother tries to offer her daughter a life other than her own. Seeking to know her mother, the daughter begins by thinking that what she has to understand is the difference between her mother's "truths" and "lies." Ultimately, however, she comes to discover not so much which ones are lies but why they are lies, and it is this kind of awareness that helps her to see her mother as another person.
At the same time, the daughter's own narrative style also alternates between "truths" and "lies." Her truths are her actual memories of her own past; but to write her history beyond herself, she invents or imagines stories—of her dead aunt in China, of her mother's young womanhood, of the woman warrior. This process of imaginative empathy should be understood not as prevarication but as fiction. It is, however, not the literal truth, and it establishes both connection with her subject, by means of empathy, and separation as well—the story is, after all, her own creation.
In each of the stories, these alternating rhythms create the double movement of individuation in the context of connection that enables the narrator to establish identity. In the first story, "No Name Woman," for example, the mother's telling of the aunt's story gives rise to her daughter's version of it, yet the daughter's version is revisionary. The daughter's story, in turn, both deepens her connection to her female heritage and creates some separation from it and thereby control over it.
The daughter begins her search for identity in The Woman Warrior by looking, not at her mother, but at another female relative, an aunt who took her own life in China, a woman whose own identity has been denied because the family never speaks of her. It is perhaps less frightening to approach her mother and the issue of female identity in this way at the outset of the book. Nevertheless, her mother's words begin and end the story, and it is her mother who has told her of the aunt's existence. "'You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself. She jumped into the family well. We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born'" (WW, 3). The conclusion of her mother's story points specifically to connection with her own sex: "'Now that you have started to menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you.'…Whenever she had to warn us about life, my mother told stories that ran like this one, a story to grow up on" (WW, 5).
But the daughter is not satisfied with her mother's account. "My mother has told me once and for all the useful parts. She will add nothing unless powered by Necessity, a riverbank that guides her life" (WW, 6). The daughter wants to know, for example, what kind of clothes her aunt wore, "whether flashy or ordinary." She wants, in other words, access to the motivation, the feelings, the personality of this female ancestor, to "see her life branching into mine"; she wants "ancestral help." And she senses in the very abbreviation of her mother's version a duplicity: "The emigrants confuse the gods by diverting their curses, misleading them with crooked streets and false names. They must try to confuse their offspring as well, who, I suppose, threaten them in similar ways—always trying to get things straight, always trying to name the unspeakable. The Chinese I know hide their names; sojourners take new names when their lives change, and they guard their real names with silence" (WW, 6).
To name what her mother has left out the narrator employs imaginative empathy, making up her aunt's story and in that way coming to know her, to connect with her. Because she conceives of this aunt as like herself, rebelling against tradition, she identifies with her: "my aunt, my forerunner," who, "caught in a slow life, let dreams grow and fade and after some months or years went towards what persisted" (WW, 9). To "get it straight, to name the unspeakable," the narrator must use her own imagination, not her mother's.
It takes the narrator three chapters to apply this technique directly to her mother. This third chapter, "Shaman," stands at the center and heart of the text. What precedes it is "White Tigers," the story of the woman warrior, the fabulous Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father's place in battle, the girl with whom the narrator identifies and into whom she turns herself, the girl who comes at last to stand for the woman writer.
Once again, impetus for the narrator's imaginative reconstruction of the story of the woman warrior is given by her mother's version. Now the daughter begins to have some intimation that her mother's duplicity has a function other than to confuse or conceal. Chinese culture, as the narrator has described it in "No Name Woman," is strongly repressive of women. Yet, as she says in the opening lines of "White Tigers," "when we Chinese girls listened to adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swords-women. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous they had to have their feet bound" (WW, 23). In telling her daughter stories of female heroism that directly contradict many of her other messages about the position of women, the mother shows her daughter another possibility for women that is not revealed in her equally strong desire for her daughter's conformity and thus safety in a patriarchal system. Which, then, is the "true" story?
In "White Tigers," too, the narrator replaces her mother's story with her own, yet at the same time she understands her mother's connection with her own version of the woman warrior, who is also an image of herself:
Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I couldn't tell where the stories left off and the dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep.…
At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story. After I grew up, I heard the chant of Fa Mu Lan, the girl who took her father's place in battle. Instantly I remembered that as a child I had followed my mother about the house, the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village. I had forgotten this chant that was once mine, given me by my mother, who may not have known its power to remind. She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a warrior woman.
[WW, 24]
Not only is the mother's connection to her daughter acknowledged here but her female power as well, a power specifically associated with her ability to talk-story. In the telling of her own story—with herself as the woman warrior, a hero possessing most of all the power of imagination—a story which is then contrasted to her actual childhood memories of repression and misogyny, the narrator concludes by identifying language as the means by which she can become a woman warrior. The association with her own mother, the woman story teller, cannot be ignored: "The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs" (WW, 63).
In "Shaman" the narrator looks directly at Brave Orchid, the mother whose presence has infused and helped to create the stories that precede it. She tells not one but two stories, however—or tells the story twice: the "truth"—her actual memories of her mother, a laundress in America—and the "fiction"—the story of her mother who in China became a doctor. The fiction includes her own postulation of thoughts and feelings, added to the facts she has been given to create the character of Brave Orchid. But of course both kinds of story, the mother as ordinary woman and the mother as hero, are necessary, both kinds of knowledge, truth and fiction—each a corrective for the other, each a part of the reality of character.
Brave Orchid's heroism, as her daughter tells it, identifies her with the woman warrior, because her success, like the woman warrior's, is based on powers of the imagination. "I learned to make my mind large," writes the narrator, as the woman warrior, in "White Tigers," "as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes. Pearls are bone marrow; pearls come from oysters. The dragon lives in the sky, ocean, marshes, and mountains; and the mountains are also its cranium. Its voice thunders and jingles like copper pans. It breathes fire and water; and sometimes the dragon is one, sometimes many.…When I could point at the sky and make a sword appear, a silver bolt in the sunlight, and control its slashing with my mind, the old people said I was ready to leave" (WW, 35, 39). She describes Brave Orchid in similar fashion:
My mother may have been afraid, but she would become a dragoness.…She could make herself not weak. During danger she fanned out her dragon claws and riffled her red sequin scales and unfolded her coiling green stripes. Danger was a good time for showing off.…
My mother was wide awake again. She became sharply herself—bone, wire, antenna—but she was not afraid. She had been pared down like this before, when she had travelled up the mountains into rare snow—alone in the white not unlike being alone in the black.
[WW, 79, 80]
In China, Brave Orchid is best at vanquishing ghosts, this power symbolic of her becoming a "new woman," a woman doctor. But in America, with its taxi ghosts, police ghosts, meter-reading ghosts, and five-and-dime ghosts, she is mystified, no longer in control. Although she remains brave in the face of these dangers, in her daughter's memory she is no hero but a very ordinary woman.
The factual and fantastic tales of Brave Orchid combine to make of her a complete person in her daughter's eyes, a person with a separate identity both to be proud of and of necessity to reject, to move beyond. The story ends, however, with a more recent memory, one which reminds the reader that it is the connection itself, both uncomfortable and satisfying, that endures, even after the daughter has gone on to her own life.
"'Aiaa,' sighs Brave Orchid to her daughter, now a grown woman: 'how can I bear to have you leave me again?'" (WW, 118). "Her eyes are big, inconsolable. A spider headache spreads out in fine branches over my skull. She is etching spider legs into the icy bone. She pries open my head and my fists and crams into them responsibility for time, responsibility for intervening oceans" (WW, 126). Yet even as the daughter pulls away from the connection and its corresponding need, she also, on the very next page, finds satisfaction, encouragement, and, yes, a sense of identity in it:
She yawned. "It's better, then, for you to stay away. The weather in California must not agree with you. You can come for visits." She got up and turned off the light. "Of course you must go, Little Dog."
A weight lifted from me. The quilts must be filling with air. The world is somehow lighter. She has not called me that endearment for years—a name to fool the gods. I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter.
[WW, 127]
The next stage of the book moves onward, however, even if the stories themselves demonstrate that the process in life is not schematic. The next stage of the journey is to leave home, to define the self, or, Kingston says here, to speak for oneself. In the two final stories the narrator learns to talk.
"At the Western Palace" offers the story of female relatives, once again, as the prelude or first step. The association of women with madness is shown as the alternative to their achievement of self-identity. Moon Orchid, Brave Orchid's sister who cannot change Chinese reality into American reality, goes mad. "'The difference between mad people and sane people,' Brave Orchid explained to her children, 'is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over'" (WW, 184). The story of Moon Orchid is expanded upon in the final chapter, "Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe": "I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves. There were many crazy girls and women.… I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would be it at our house? Probably me (WW, 216, 220).
The narrator's own childhood silence—"a dumbness, a shame"—comes from the conflict between her Chinese upbringing and the ways of an American school, but in the story she represents it as symbolically caused by her mother (China), who seems to have cut her tongue, slicing the frenum, when she was a child. "'It's your fault I talk weird,'" accuses the daughter, later, to a mother who however has explained, "'I cut it so that you would not be tongue-tied. Your tongue would be able to move in any language.…I cut it to make you talk more, not less, you dummy'" (WW, 234, 190).
Moving beyond this terrible shyness and silence demands the thing that happens at last, when the daughter starts to talk back. "I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat" (WW, 229). In a fierce tirade against her mother she asserts her own American sense of independence and attacks, specifically, her mother's talk-stories: "And I don't want to listen to any more of your stories; they have no logic. They scramble me up. You lie with stories. You won't tell me a story and then say, 'This is a true story,' or, 'This is just a story.' I can't tell the difference. I don't even know what your real names are. I can't tell what's real and what you make up. Ha! You can't stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn't work" (WW, 235).
Establishing herself as a talker in opposition to her mother—as American instead of Chinese, a truth teller instead of a liar—makes it possible for her to define herself as separate from her mother. Leaving home at this stage means leaving China, and her mother's Chinese way of talking ("We like to say the opposite"), in order to understand difference: "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" (WW, 237).
Yet this way of seeing and talking, this complete sense of separation from her mother, from China, is not the whole truth either, the truth of her identity, and this fact the text itself has revealed. For the text is more complex and fuller of insight than any particular moment of understanding within it. Poised against the linearity of the narrator's progress is the recurrent alternation of movement toward and tugs against connection that takes place within the narrative field, as it were, in which the forward progress occurs. Thus, when the narrator discovers her independence from her mother, that fact is indeed a part of her process toward identity but is not its fulfillment. Independence must be understood in order that connection can occur again, but a connection, finally, between two different people rather than between two people who together make one identity.
The Woman Warrior ends with its narrator's perception of this achievement, with the story of the Chinese woman poet Ts'ai Yen, with a celebration of the woman who is powerful because she can speak, can write. The story is begun by her mother, finished by the daughter. "It translates well" (WW, 243). In this way we see how the connection between mother and daughter, both storytellers, both women warriors, has been reestablished, but on terms that now both allow for separation and admit attachment.
China Men is less complicated textually than The Woman Warrior. As Kingston says, "the person who 'talks-story' is not so intrusive." Although here, too, the fact of memory is juxtaposed against the fiction of imaginative recreation, the memories are much fewer, and the imagining—the stories of male relatives, of grandfathers, father, uncles, and brother—is no longer urgent, no longer empathetic. These stories, lines thrown out across the chasm of separation, are more idealistic than realistic, more conceptual than kinetic, more parallel than developmental. The richness and tension created by the search for difference in the context of sameness—the mother-daughter relationship—is replaced by the clarity that distance offers, a lucidity that is at the same time monotonal. Only one person, after all, is talking here; narrative movement is in only one direction, not the tug toward and away from the mother but the yearning toward the father that goes so far but no farther, proceeding from anger and ignorance toward knowledge and admiration. The father need not be left, only loved:
What I want from you is for you to tell me that those curses are only common Chinese sayings. That you did not mean to make me sicken at being female. "Those were only sayings," I want you to say to me, "I didn't mean you or your mother. I didn't mean your sisters or grandmothers or women in general."
I want to be able to rely on you, who inked each piece of our own laundry with the word Center, to find out how we landed in a country where we are eccentric people.
[CM, 9]
Her father's screams, curses, and, especially, his silence produce a profound ignorance that the narrator, whose love for her father is at war with her anger, longs to destroy. The fact of this ignorance is offered as an introduction to the book in a one-page piece entitled "On Fathers." Here the narrator and her brothers and sisters, waiting at the gate for their father to come home, see a man coming around the corner. They think he is their father. "But I'm not your father," he tells them: "Looking closely, we saw that he probably was not. We went back inside the yard, and this man continued his walk down our street, from the back certainly looking like our father, one hand in his pocket. Tall and thin, he was wearing our father's two-hundred-dollar suit that fit him just right. He was walking fast in his good leather shoes with the wingtips" (CM, 3).
The parable shows not only the children's lack of familiarity with their father but also the kind of evidence upon which they have based their false sense of knowledge: clothes, shoes, shape of the body. They recognize him from the outside only, from the back, the point being that this is not genuine knowledge. The purpose of the text as a whole is to gain that knowledge by imaginatively entering the father's interiority—something denied to the daughter by actual experience—by replacing opacity and abstractness with concrete particularities, a technique that served the narrator well in The Woman Warrior to establish the identity of her mother.
Yet in using this technique the narrator is self-conscious in a way she is not in The Woman Warrior. "I think this is the journey you don't tell me," she says as she introduces one version of her father's passage to America, to be followed later by "of course my father could not have come that way. He came a legal way, something like this" (CM, 50). Whereas in The Woman Warrior the transitions between "fact" and "fiction" occur almost seamlessly, China Men bases its structure on the artifice of these transitions and of their very creation. This format helps to make us aware of the "distance" of which Kingston speaks, a distance necessitated by the nature of the father-daughter relationship, which begins in separation and difference, rather than in connection or sameness.
To tell the story of fathers is to tell the story of China's coming to America. Both the mother and the father represent China to the American-born narrator, but there is a difference in their experience and therefore in the aspect of the homeland they embody. While the women were left behind in China, coming afterward to join their husbands, the men were the sojourners who came to America to discover the "Gold Mountain" there. In seeking to know her father the narrator looks as well for the experience of active appropriation, however painful, even humiliating some of its aspects may be, that has been denied to women, who find their power in the imagination, as The Woman Warrior shows, not in the public world. China Men confronts that public world, as grandfathers and fathers wrestle with nature and society from Hawaii to Alaska, from New York to California.
Yet there is in China Men a generality, an abstractness to all this experience that seems to bespeak the impossibility of the narrator's ever claiming male experience as an integral part of her heritage. Each character in the book has his own name, his own adventures, but all are referred to more frequently as "the father," "the grandfather," "the brother," a mode of appellation that is itself indicative of the generic character of the men, their normative function. In reading, it is difficult to keep them separate. They merge into the common maleness, a concept that the prose creates. The following passage can serve as example:
He sucked in deep breaths of the Sandalwood Mountain air, and let it fly out in a song, which reached up to the rims of volcanoes and down to the edge of the water. His song lifted and fell with the air, which seemed to breathe warmly through his body and through the rocks. The clouds and frigate birds made the currents visible, and the leaves were loud. If he did not walk heavy seated and heavy thighed like a warrior, he would float away, snuggle into the wind, and let it slide him down to the ocean, let it make a kite, a frigate bird, a butterfly of him. He would dive head first off the mountain, glide into the airstreams thick with smells, and curve into the ocean. From this mountaintop, ocean before him and behind him, he saw the size of the island. He sang like the heroes in stories about wanderers and exiles, poets and monks and monkeys, and princes and kings out for walks. His arias unfurled and rose in wide, wide arcs.
[CM, 95]
What is most significant here is the combination of specific detail with a generalization of consciousness; the combination not only depersonalizes the individual man—in this instance it is Bak Gook, "The Grandfather of the Sandalwood Mountains"—so that he becomes akin to all the other male consciousnesses in the book, but also allows him, regardless of his immigrant status—he is a frequently brutalized sugarcane worker—to become heroic. All the Chinamen are capable of this kind of poetry, the result, I think, of an idealization of masculine experience representative of the daughter's approach to her father. Although the author seeks the humanizing middle ground between the father's generalized curses about the women and the daughter's idealized flights of poetic heroism, she creates such moments infrequently, despite many physical details, and these moments occur more often in actual memories than in imaginings.
These memories, which begin the book and reappear occasionally as the narrative continues, remind us that the search for the father is occasioned by both yearning and fear or anger. "The American Father" begins with memories of "father places": "He also had the power of going places where nobody else went, and making places belong to him.…When I explored his closet and desk, I thought, This is a father place; a father belongs here" (CM, 236-37). The father goes places nobody else went, made places belong to him, places that bespeak the Gold Mountain itself as well as the cellars, attics, and gambling hall of this particular father. The passage shows the daughter's yearning for the power of appropriation, heightened, perhaps, by its very inaccessibility.
After her father has lost his job at the gambling hall and becomes despondent, his children respond to his silence with a confusion—"I invented a plan to test my theories that males feel no pain; males don't feel" (CM, 251)—that finally turns to anger:
We children became so wild that we broke Baba loose from his chair. We goaded him, irked him—gikked him—and the gravity suddenly let him go. He chased my sister, who locked herself in a bedroom. "Come out," he shouted. But of course, she wouldn't, he having a coat hanger in hand and angry. I watched him kick the door; the round mirror fell off the wall and crashed. The door broke open, and he beat her. Only my sister remembers that it was she who watched my father's shoe against the door and the mirror outside fall, and I who was beaten.
[CM, 252]
Such experiences, informed as they are by powerful unmediated responses to the father's separateness, can be contrasted to the imagined experiences of the men themselves, sympathetic but lacking this intensity, experiences narrated through the creation of a masculine consciousness. Sympathy is not empathy, and the very distance between them seems to influence the nature of the knowledge that is available to the narrator.
China Men demonstrates that finding the father, for the daughter, means finding what one has always known: that distance. Fear and anger may be transformed into love, but it is a love based on knowledge laced with idealization. Over and over in China Men, in each of its stories, the daughter begins in ignorance, with silence, and fills the gap or void with the fruits of her own imagination to gain—just that—her own creation. Never having been able to encounter the true interiority of the father, she has, finally, only the stories she has told about him. She finds her identity as a storyteller, a writer, here as in The Woman Warrior, but here there is a suggestion that the imagination is less the embodiment of life itself than an alternative to it.
Consequently, the two processes—finding the mother, finding the father—seem less than parallel for the daughter. Regardless of its author's intentions, China Men is more of a postscript to The Woman Warrior than a complement to it. Because the mother is not only of the same sex but, by virtue of the familial arrangements of society, the infant's first and primary love, she remains at the center of the daughter's search for identity. The familial arrangements of society ask as well that the female be understood in relation to the male—as the word female itself suggests—so that Kingston is correct in seeing The Woman Warrior as a partial text, an incomplete autobiography. Finding the father may be understood as synonymous with ascertaining the woman's relation to the external world, or the other. Difference and distance, which produce ignorance, fear, and idealization, create boundaries that can be bridged imaginatively but cannot really be destroyed. The yearning to destroy them, perhaps the most important feature of the search, in both its intensity and its frustrations or displacement, propels the text of China Men but is also diffused by it. Kingston sees that text as an achievement for herself as a writer—not so "selfish," not so "intrusive." Perhaps she is right. Perhaps this is the success daughters can have with fathers—to displace the yearning for him with the creation of something in his place, to understand that her love must be informed by the knowledge of separateness.
Taken together, the search for the mother and the search for the father allow a person to find home, a place both inside and outside the self, in the way that, for a woman, the mother is always inside, the father always outside. Finding home gives a sense of such boundaries, of understanding not only what is eternally beyond the self but what is eternally within the self. The woman, as in The Woman Warrior and China Men, establishes her individual identity in this context. Recognizing this context, this meaning for home, she can leave it, go on into her life, while she recognizes that home can never be left but only understood.
Telling is the way to understand, so finally both volumes of Kingston's autobiography are about becoming a writer. Taken together, the two texts demonstrate the special power of telling and, especially, of the imagination for women. Traditionally denied access to the outer world by literal appropriation, women can nevertheless follow a different route. Language is symbolic action, and it becomes, in this autobiography, the route and embodiment of female psychological development.
Notes
- The understanding of female development that I bring to my reading of literature comes from recent studies in feminist psychology, such as Nancy Chodorow's Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1978) and Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development: (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982). I make no attempt here to correlate specific ideas of the psychologists with specific literary interpretations, for my point is neither to "prove" the psychological theories with the literary texts nor vice versa, but rather to show how literature as well as psychology is based in and seeks to articulate such ideas about human experience.
- The Woman Warrior (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 116; hereafter cited in the text as WW.
- China Men (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 10; hereafter cited in the text as CM.
- Timothy Pfaff, "Talk with Mrs. Kingston," New York Times Book Review, 15 June 1980, 25-26.
- Ibid., 26.
Title Commentary
LINDA HUNT (ESSAY DATE FALL 1985)
SOURCE: Hunt, Linda. "'I Could Not Figure out What Was My Village': Gender v. Ethnicity in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior." MELUS 12, no. 3 (fall 1985): 5-12.
In the following essay, Hunt examines the relationship between gender and ethnicity in The Woman Warrior.
Feminist theorists have argued about the extent to which women share a common culture. In Three Guineas Virginia Woolf has a character assert, "as a woman I have no country.…As a woman my country is the whole world."1 This has a fine ring to it, but if the sentiment were wholly true we would not find in women's lives so much pain, confusion, and conflict. Temma Kaplan explains the complexity of the subject: "It is impossible to speak of 'women's culture' without understanding its variation by class and ethnic group. Women's culture, like popular or working class culture, must appear in the context of dominant cultures."2
The truth of Kaplan's statement is borne out by reading fiction and autobiography written by women from different backgrounds. Such books not only show the great cultural diversity women experience but also evoke the incompatible definitions of femininity and the irreconcilable demands a woman is likely to encounter as she attempts to live in more than one cultural world at the same time.
Women's worlds may vary widely depending on ethnic background and social class, but in the societies from which we have written literature, male dominance is a common denominator.3 Maxine Hong Kingston's autobiographical The Woman Warrior suggests that we need to pay attention to the contradictions male dominance creates for women who are at one and the same time subordinated by a culture, and yet, embroiled in its interstices; such women may be painfully at odds with themselves. A woman like Kingston, who is doubly marginal (i.e. not a member of the dominant race or class) is likely to feel this conflict with particular acuteness because an affiliation with a minority culture tends to be particularly strong.4
Explaining to the reader one of the many contradictions which are part of the legacy of her Chinese-American girlhood, Kingston comments bitterly, "Even now China wraps double binds around my feet."5 The most difficult double-bind has been the need to reconcile her loyalty to her Chinese-American heritage, a background which devalues and even insults women, with her own sense of dignity as a female.
This paper is about Kingston's attempt to resolve the war within herself, a struggle that is exacerbated by the tremendous emphasis Chinese culture puts on social cohesion. She has been raised to experience and require a powerful identification with family and community, and yet, as a woman, she cannot simply accept a place in a culture which calls people of her sex "maggots," "broom and dustpan," "slave."
Maxine Hong Kingston's personal struggle is fought—and resolved at least partially—on the battlefield of language. The words used against her sting, and, unable to find the right words and the right voice to express her own point of view, and indeed, unsure of that point of view, she is rendered nearly voiceless for much of her youth. She speaks inaudibly or in a quack, and once physically assaults another Chinese girl whose silence reminds her of her own. The core of the problem is that by being simultaneously insider (a person who identifies strongly with her cultural group) and outsider (deviant and rebel against that tradition), she cannot figure out from which perspective to speak. It is only through mastery of literary form and technique—through creating this autobiography out of family stories, Chinese myths, and her own memories—that she is able to articulate her own ambivalence and hereby find an authentic voice.
Kingston begins with an aunt back in China whose name the family tried to forget, telling her story in such a way that she artfully shifts point of view and sympathy in order to convey her divided loyalties. The aunt became an outsider to her village by getting pregnant while her husband was in America. The enraged villagers, terrified by her behavior, drove her to suicide: any lust not socially-sanctioned was seen as disruptive of the social order.
The author identifies with the rebellious aunt, whom she calls "my forerunner," creating from her imagination various detailed scenarios, first of rape and then of romantic attraction, alternative versions of what might have happened, which are narrated in the omniscient third person. Kingston hypothesizes that her female relative might have succumbed to her impulses as relief from the burden of being "expected … alone to keep the traditional ways, which her brother now among the barbarians in America could fumble without detection" (p. 9). She expands on her theme, beginning to imagine in sensuous detail the pull that an attractive man might have had on this aunt "caught up in a slow life."
But Kingston's allegiance is abruptly withdrawn. Interrupting her sensuous description of the imagined lover, the narrator exclaims, "She offered us up for a charm that vanished with tiredness, a pigtail that didn't toss when the wind died" (p. 9, emphasis mine). The word "us" is startling because Kingston has abruptly shifted from third person to first person plural and from identification with the aunt, the outsider, to being one of the villagers, an insider.
The aunt's story is resumed in a more objective vein, and we are given an explanation of the motives of the avengers of the social code:
The frightened villagers, who depend on one another to maintain the real, went for my aunt to show her a personal, physical representation of the break she had made in the "roundness." … The villagers punished her for acting as if she could have a private life secret and apart from them.
(p. 14)
While the remainder of the tale emphasizes the events which befell the persecuted woman, her thoughts and feelings, the narrative remains riddled with ambivalence. Kingston's recounting of her aunt's story has been a defiant act of recompense towards the forgotten relative, a desire not to participate in her punishment. Yet, one more twist occurs in the last sentence of the chapter:
My aunt haunts me.… I alone devote pages of paper to her.… I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in drinking water.
(p. 19)
Suddenly the aunt is seen as an enemy, and Kingston's own act in writing her story appears in a different light.
Kingston's profound conflict about where her loyalty lies regarding the experience of this aunt she has never met serves to convey her own agonized indecision about what stance to take towards her own Chinese-American upbringing. If she identifies with the community, she must accept and even endorse her own humiliation at their hands; if she allows herself to fully experience the depths of her alienation, she is in danger of being cut off from her cultural roots. Thus she juxtaposes an exploration of the legend of Fa Mu Lan, a tale her story-telling mother used to chant, against the story of the outlaw aunt. The purpose is to test whether her culture's myth about a heroic woman who defends her village will provide a way for Kingston to transcend the degrading female social role, and yet, be loyal to the community.
Kingston retells the story, casting herself as the swordswoman who through magic and self-discipline is trained to bring about social justice while at the same time fulfilling her domestic obligations. Significantly, a good part of her training involves exercises which teach her how to create with her body the ideographs for various words: in Kingston's universe it is through mastery of language that a warrior is created. Language is again important in that before Fa Mu Lan sets out, dressed as a man, to lead her male army against the enemies of her people, the family carves on her back the words which suggest their endless list of grievances.
When the narrator, Kingston's fantasy of herself as Fa Mu Lan, returns home the villagers "make a legend about her perfect filiality" (p. 54). This myth, combining heroism and social duty as it does, is explored to see if winning the approval and admiration of the Chinese or Chinese-American community can provide so much gratification that Kingston will be persuaded to repress her injuries at the hands of the community. However, she subverts her own attempt by embedding within her tales of the female avenger certain elements which bring forth once again the theme of the injustices women suffer as a sex and the issue of female anger.
Hunting down the baron who had drafted her brother, she presents herself as defender of the village as a whole: "I want your life in payment for your crimes against the villagers." But the baron tries to appeal to her "man to man," lightly acknowledging his crimes against women in a misguided attempt at male-bonding:
Oh, come now. Everyone takes the girls when he can. The families are glad to get rid of them. "Girls are maggots in the rice. It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters." He quoted to me the sayings I hated.
(p. 51)
Since this version of the swordswoman's story is Kingston's own creation, she is surely introducing the baron's sexism at this juncture to show the reader that, try as she does, she cannot simply overlook the patriarchal biases of Chinese culture. The enemy of her village seeks to create an alliance with the defender of family and community on the common ground of misogyny. No wonder Kingston exclaims just after the swordswoman's tale is finished, "I could not figure out what was my village" (p. 54).
Even more subversively, in the process of spinning out her tale of the dutiful defender of the village, Kingston briefly indulges in a digression about a different kind of warrior woman. She has herself (the swordswoman) released from a locked room in the baron's castle a group of "cowering, whimpering women." These females who make "insect noises" and "blink weakly … like pheasants that have been raised in the dark for soft meat" are utterly degraded:
The servant who walked the ladies had abandoned them, and they could not escape on their little bound feet. Some crawled away from me, using their elbows to pull themselves along. These women would not be good for anything. I called the villagers to come identify any daughters they wanted to take home, but no one claimed any.
(p. 53)
As creator, Kingston allows herself to respond with hostility to her own fantasy of the ultimate in female humiliation by turning these pathetic creatures into "witch amazons" who "killed men and boys." Unlike Fa Mu Lan, who is impelled to be a warrior by idealism and disguises herself as a man, these women are mercenaries (i.e. self-interested), ride dressed as women (i.e. female-identified), and buy up girl babies from poor families; slave girls and daughters-in-law also run away to them. Kingston reveals her intense discomfort with this anti-social story she has used to deconstruct the socially-acceptable swordswoman myth by distancing herself from it. She falls into the conditional: "it would be said," "people would say," and concludes, "I myself never encountered such women and could not vouch for their reality" (p. 53).
Despite such subterfuges, the reader has not been allowed to forget that any Chinese woman who seeks to identify exclusively with the injustices experienced by the entire "village" at the hands of outsiders will be denying the damage she herself and others of her sex have suffered at the hands of outsiders and insiders alike. The term "female avenger" becomes ambiguous: can Kingston be satisfied with being an avenger who is a female or does she need to be the avenger of females?
Not ready to answer this question, Kingston uses the third and fourth chapters of The Woman Warrior to probe even further the implications of her culture's sanctioned way for a woman to be strong. Brave Orchid, Kingston's mother, has lived a life that conforms quite closely, within the limits of realistic possibility, to the woman warrior model. Left behind in China when her husband went off to America to improve the family's fortunes, she entered medical school and became a doctor. Through rigorous self-discipline she triumphed not only over her studies but over a "sitting ghost" who serves as the symbolic embodiment of the fear and loneliness she must have experienced. "You have no power over a strong woman," Brave Orchid asserts to the ghost.
After completing her studies Kingston's mother returned home to serve her people as a practitioner of medicine. For some years she braved the terror of the dark woods as she went from village to village on her rounds as a physician. Like the swordswoman of the legend who returns from public life to do farmwork, housework, and produce sons, Brave Orchid accepted the next, more mundane, phase of her life without complaint; when summoned by her husband to the United States she became his partner in a laundry and had six children (including the author) after the age of forty-five.
Kingston is being as fair as possible. Her mother's story shows that the warrior woman model could work for some women. Proud of her past achievements, Brave Orchid has turned them into materials to draw on when she "talk-stories." Yet Kingston follows the narrative of Brave Orchid with the experience of Moon Orchid, Brave Orchid's sister, whose emigration to the United States leads to her madness and death. This aunt is not a strong person—and it is important that Kingston remind us that not all women have access to the remarkable reserves of strength and inflexible will that have served her mother. Also, Brave Orchid is responsible for her sister's breakdown in that she insists that Moon Orchid aggressively pursue her Americanized and bigamously remarried husband. She assumes her sister's husband and his second wife will accept their obligation to Moon Orchid since she is "Big Wife" (first wife), and bolsters Moon Orchid's faith by reminding her of family stories from China in which the first wife had no difficulty reclaiming her position in the family after a lapse of time. Brave Orchid's advice is dangerous because she is holding onto a myth of reality structured around laws and traditions that regulated marital interaction in China and offered some protection to women but which is useless in America. Thus Kingston reminds us that new situations require new myths. The warrior woman legend may have been the best Chinese society could offer her mother, but if she herself is to use it, fundamental modification will be necessary.
It is in the final chapter, "A Song For A Barbarian Reed Pipe," that Kingston articulates most explicitly both her fury at her Chinese heritage and the strategies she has found for making peace with that heritage and salvaging from it what she can. She tells of how as a teenager she stored up in her mind a list of over two hundred truths about herself, bad thoughts and deeds to confess to her mother. When she tried to tell one item a day only to find Brave Orchid simply wasn't interested, she "felt something alive tearing at [her] throat."
Finally, one night when the family was having dinner at the laundry, her "throat burst open." Instead of confessing her own disloyalty to family and Chinese tradition, Kingston found herself bitterly cataloguing her own numerous grievances:
When I said them out loud I saw that some of the items were ten years old already, and I had outgrown them. But they kept pouring out anyway in the voice of Chinese opera. I could hear the drums and the cymbals and the gongs and brass horns.
(p. 236)
The transmutation of sins into grievances is significant: the fact that Kingston conceptualized these items first one way and then the other reveals again the ambivalence about whether she is insider or outsider which caused her muteness. This outburst is an important breakthrough in that she is impelled to make a choice, and choosing to identify as injured outsider frees her to speak. At this stage what she articulates with that newfound voice is the need to get away from the Chinese-American community: "I won't let you turn me into a slave or a wife. I'm getting out of here. I can't stand living here anymore" (p. 234).
At the same time, Kingston's list of grievances is certainly an echo of the grievances the legendary swordswoman had had carved on her back, the difference being that Fa Mu Lan's list was not personal. Kingston's autobiography becomes her way of being a woman warrior on her own behalf and perhaps on behalf of other Chinese girls and women. She had found a way to exact revenge against her background (one idiom for revenge being to "report a crime") and yet to honor it. In crying out to the world about her culture's mistreatment of women, she has in a sense taken on the warrior role her culture recommended to those of its women most capable of heroism. In finding a literary form and techniques which allow her to give voice to the conflicts and contradictions which almost silenced her, Maxine Hong Kingston is paying tribute to the importance her family and culture have always placed on the verbal imagination.
Kingston's autobiographical masterpiece, with its theme of diverse cultural realities, reminds us to be careful about embracing a universal notion of what it means to be a woman. At the same time, however, the book raises the possibility that an important link not for all but for many women is the disjunction between female identity and the other aspects of cultural heritage. Agonizing contradictions between allegiance to gender and fidelity to some other dimension of one's cultural background—and this might be race or class instead of or as well as ethnicity—may be a commonplace of the female experience. From an artistic point of view the result may be an anxiety of identity that is at least as debilitating as the "anxiety of authorship" that Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert argue takes away women's sense of legitimacy as writers.6 Maxine Hong Kingston found a way to break out of the silence created by this anxiety, but the alienation which stems from such a rupture at the very center of their beings may be one of the most profound obstacles women face in finding their voices.
Notes
- Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), p. 166.
- Temma Kaplan, "Politics and Culture in Women's History: A Symposium," Feminist Studies, 6 (Spring, 1980), 44.
- It is interesting to note that several anthropologists have made a convincing case for the existence of sexually egalitarian pre-literate societies. See, for example, Peggy Reeves Sanders, Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Eleanor Leacock, "Ideologies of Male Dominance As Divide and Rule Politics: An Anthropologist's View," in Woman's Nature, eds. Marian Lowe and Ruth Hubbard (New York: Pergamon Press, 1983).
- See Margaret Homens, "Her Very Own Howl: The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction," Signs, Winter, 1984, for an interesting discussion of the significance of women's double-marginality.
- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 57. (All further page references will be cited within the text and will be to this edition.)
- Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979).
LINDA MORANTE (ESSAY DATE 1987)
SOURCE: Morante, Linda. "From Silence to Song: The Triumph of Maxine Hong Kingston." Frontiers 9, no. 2 (1987): 78-82.
In the following essay, Morante contends that The Woman Warrior "narrates Kingston's own journey from silence and selflessness to song and selfhood."
Maxine Hong Kingston begins The Woman Warrior with the tale of her nameless aunt, a woman engulfed by defeating silence. She concludes her memoir with the legend of Ts'ai Yen, a female poet who triumphs in song. An American heiress confounded by a legacy of Chinese language and culture, Kingston records her own struggle for self-expression. The mute schoolgirl who smeared paper with opaque black paint, the incommunicative adolescent who could not voice her sorrow to her mother, the inarticulate young adult who could only peep in protest to her racist employers eventually becomes the adult artist who "talks-story" in a "high and clear" voice.1
In The Woman Warrior Kingston inextricably knots this pursuit of words with the process of self-creation and survival. Silence obliterates identity. It blots the self from Kingston's childhood paintings as it effaces her aunt's name, hence her being, from posterity's memory. Word-lessness is paired with insanity, the disintegration of the coherent self: "Insane people were the ones who couldn't explain themselves," Kingston's narrator decides (p. 216). Deranged women, all of them inarticulate, haunt the text's nightmarish landscape.2 Kingston's neighbor, now chattering, now speechless, is eventually shut up in an insane asylum. Laughing, snarling, crazy Mary points at the invisible and lunges out of darkness. Pee-anah, the village idiot, wordlessly pursues children through slough and street. Moon Orchid, Kingston's transplanted aunt, her soft voice dissipating into whispered lunacies, ultimately finds others who "speak the same language" only in a mental hospital (p. 185). These nonspeakers torment young Kingston who believes "talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity" (p. 216). She worries that she will join the mad sorority; she too is unable to speak to others; she too visits with the people inside her head.
Conversely, articulation creates selfhood. Kingston, unlike the lunatic women who plague her, in the end does not succumb to the silence that imperils her childhood and adolescence. As an adult, as the writer of her autobiography, she eventually discovers her voice and the courage to employ it. The Woman Warrior narrates Kingston's own journey from silence and selflessness to song and selfhood. This triumphant telling, the act of writing, engenders and preserves the identity of its creator.3
Kingston depicts her childhood and adolescence as an unending, yieldless labor for words to express and beget her identity. Her taunt at another mute schoolgirl—"If you don't talk, you can't have a personality"—is actually the self-directed warning of a child frightened by a desolate expanse of widening silence (p. 210). This early silence is, in part, a legacy from a people who believe that "a ready tongue is an evil."4 The Chinese keep secrets, they conceal their real names, they withhold speech. The hovering threats of deportation directed toward Chinese immigrants in America deepen this taciturnity.5 Even as a child Kingston realizes the cultural roots of her reticence: "The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl" (p. 193).
Her speechlessness has to do also with cultural dislocation: being a Chinese girl in an American school, a daughter of China exiled in an alien country.6 She must disentangle the traditions and language, the legacies of her dual homelands: "Those of us in the first American generations have had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fits in solid America" (p. 6). Her inability to enunciate or comprehend the American pronoun "I" suggests this cultural confusion amidst which her speech and identity falter:
I could not understand "I." The Chinese "I" has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American "I," assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; "I" is a capital and "you" is lower-case. I stared at the middle line and waited so long for its black center to resolve into tight strokes and dots that I forgot to pronounce it.
(p. 193)
The bold, simple, "straight" strokes of the genderless English pronoun radiate the imposing Individualism of the self in American culture. But the "small and crooked" feminine Chinese pronoun figures the dwarfing of the female self in a culture that practiced "girl slavery and girl infanticide" (p. 222). Language is the vessel of culture; "There is a Chinese word for the female I which is a 'slave'" (p. 56). The two contradictory cultural concepts of the female self baffle and silence Kingston's younger self.7
She stutters not only over the pronoun "I." Her silence is "thickest-total" during her early schooling (p. 192). American kindergarten is "the first silent year": "When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent" (p. 191). In first grade, when she is called upon to read out loud, "squeaks come out of [her] throat" (p. 193). In second grade her "too soft or nonexistent" voice excludes her from the class play (p. 194). Even in her Chinese school her voice rasps like a "crippled animal running on broken legs" (p. 196).
In sixth grade Kingston's effort for voice and selfhood crests when she tortures her Doppelgänger, another wordless and insecure Chinese classmate.8 Their lack of athletic skill yokes Kingston and her other self, hallmarking their shared passivity:
We were similar in sports. We held the bat on our shoulders until we walked to first base. (You got a strike only when you actually struck at the ball.) Sometimes the pitcher wouldn't bother to throw to us. "Automatic walks," the other children would call, sending us on our way.
(pp. 200-01)
Defeat in the all-American sports arena signals failure in the arena of American social life. Too unaggressive to strike at the ball, the last chosen for their teams, the girls are timid benchwarmers virtually excluded from their social group.
When she attacks her alter ego Kingston tries to destroy what she despises and fears in herself, the reticence and servility of the Chinese feminine self that hinder her becoming the confident, well-liked American "I." Aching for a "stout neck," "hard brown skin," and the daring to "hit the ball," she berates her shadow self for her "flower-stem neck," "baby-soft" skin, and inability to "swing at the ball" (pp. 201, 204-05, 208). Her unintentionally reflexive jeers unmask her own aspirations to become all-American: "Do you want to be like this, dumb … your whole life? Don't you ever want to be a cheerleader? Or a pompon girl? What are you going to do for a living?" (p. 210). It is not without irony that Kingston looks back on her younger self who applauds the American-feminine role model of cheerleader. Though it is better to be a cheerleader than a slave, American girls, instead of starring on the field, occupy the sidelines.9
Still, the satire of American sex roles, evident in this passage and throughout the work, is overshadowed by blatant Chinese misogyny. Kingston stresses the fact that it is her American teachers who foster her sense of self-worth, independence, and achievement. Moreover, the derision of the retrospective adult does not undercut the earnest intertwining of speech and selfhood in this passage. To become a cheerleader, the symbol of American schoolgirl "rah-rah" popularity, one must be able to shout. At heart, it is the voicelessness of her double, herself, the way "she would whisper read," the way that only "wheezes … came out of her plastic flute," that makes the young Kingston shudder (pp. 201, 202).
Thus, when she pinches and tears the soft flesh of her mute China Doll mirror self, she tries to slay the fabulous, monstrous concept of female worthlessness that extinguishes her speech. But the expunging of an inculcated psychological "dragon" by excoriating its physical objectification is an impossible feat.10 She fails utterly. Her descent into the underworld of the self, appropriately set in the sex-segregated, mazy hell of a basement lavatory, does not yield self-knowledge or voice. Rather, her own cries, pleas, and shrieks echo the "sobs, chokes, noises" of her double and bind them more inextricably (p. 207). Neither achieves meaningful speech. In the end, Kingston, self-annihilated, wraps herself in the silence of a sickbed. When she rises after a year and a half and returns to school, she "ha[s] to figure out again how to talk" (p. 212).
From childhood through adolescence, Kingston continues her quest for self-expression. As a teenager she is familiar with the English language and American culture, but her voice still squeals with ugly "duck"-like insecurity (p. 232). Reluctant incommunicativeness still isolates her. She seeks a pathway out of this aloneness by unbosoming her secret sins, dreams, and afflictions to her mother, Brave Orchid:
I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat … how I had prayed for a whitehorse of my own.…How I wanted the horse to start the movies in my mind coming true. How I had picked on a girl and made her cry. How I had stolen from the cash register.…If only I could let my mother know the list, she—and the world—would become more like me, and I would never be alone again.
(pp. 229-30)
It is the wish of the adolescent for the magical telling that would transform her separation into connection, that would make her loneliness disappear. But her wish is unfulfilled. Even when she relays her least significant confidences, her mother's punctuating response, "m'm, m'm," intensifies Kingston's aloneness (pp. 232, 233). And when she divulges her longing for the imaginary steed that will carry her into the never-never land of adventure, her mother silences her: "I can't stand this whispering.… Senseless gabblings every night. I wish you would stop.…Whispering, whispering, making no sense. Madness. I don't feel like hearing your craziness.…Leave me alone" (p. 233). The real Brave Orchid is too distant from the fairy-tale land of communication: "So I had to stop.… I shut my mouth, but I felt something alive tearing at my throat.… Soon there would be three hundred things, and [it would be] too late to get them out before my mother grew old and died" (p. 233).
Just as Brave Orchid now silences young Kingston's confession, so has she interfered with her speech throughout her girlhood. Kingston recalls how as a child she believed her mother actually severed her frenum:
I used to curl up my tongue in front of the mirror and tauten my frenum into a white line.… I saw no scars in my mouth. I thought perhaps I had had two frena, and she had cut one.… At … times I was terrified—the first thing my mother did when she saw me was to cut my tongue.
(p. 190)
This recurrent memory embodies figurative truth: Brave Orchid has tampered with her daughter's speech. Kingston opens her memoir, suggestively, with her mother's command for silence: "You must not tell anyone … what I am about to tell you" (p. 4). As China's spokeswoman the mother instills in her daughter a sense of the literally "unspeakable" (pp. 6, 215). But her prohibition of speech wells from a more private source of paranoia. Like the other Chinese immigrants she is nervous about her precarious status. She distrusts even her own children, threatened by their foreignness.11 When Kingston questions Brave Orchid about the shadowy issues of immigration and citizenship, she is shrilly warned: "Don't tell … Never tell … Don't tell" (pp. 213-15). Brave Orchid believes that if her daughter dares to speak out, they will be sent out, back to China.
Worried that the family will be deported if they stand out in any way, Brave Orchid orders her daughter to bury her identity and protests under a protective veil of quiet:
"Don't tell," … Lie to Americans. Tell them you were born during the San Francisco earthquake. Tell them your birth certificate and your parents were burned up in the fire. Don't report crimes; tell them we have no crimes and no poverty. Give a new name every time you get arrested.
(pp. 214-15)
Deny your birth, name, and ancestry, Brave Orchid cautions: swallow your protest. She demands the silence that is self-obliteration.
When Kingston fears that her parents have arranged her marriage to a retarded boy who has been loitering around inside her family's laundromat, her "throat bursts open" in a climactic confrontation with her mother. The adolescent begins to cross the threshold into selfhood (p. 233). Assuming that her parents have chosen a hideous half-wit for her mate—a "monster" altogether unfit to mount with her upon her white charger—she blurts out her most precious secrets:
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'm smart.…I know how to get A's, and they say I could be a scientist or a mathematician if I want. I can make a living and take care of myself.…Not every body thinks I'm nothing. I am not going to be a slave or a wife.… I am going to get scholar ships, and I'm going away.…So get that ape out of here.…And I'mnot going to Chinese school anymore. I'm going to run for office at American school, and I'm going to join clubs. I'm going to get enough offices and clubs on my record to get into college.…Ha! You can't stop me from talking. You tried to cut off my tongue, but it didn't work. So I told the hardest ten or twelve things on my list all in one outburst.
(pp. 227, 234-35)
The monologue reiterates her taunts at her schoolgirl double. Now, when she refuses to become a slave or a wife or to attend Chinese school, she again rejects the traditional Chinese devaluation of women. Now, when she resolves to become a club officer and to attend college, she again determines to become the esteemed, self-reliant westerner. Appropriately, her voice, no longer whispering, no longer duck-like, is "like Chinese opera. I could hear the drums and the cymbals and the gongs and brass horns" (p. 236). Though the passage rings with the exaggeration of the mock epic, it describes a turning point in young Kingston's life. Her declaration of independence frees her and temporarily soothes her throat pain.12 She leaves home "to see the world" (p. 237). She sets forth to discover "places in this country that are ghost free," where she can "belong" (p. 127).13 Kingston's narrator is coming of age.
It is as an adult that Kingston tells her own story in The Woman Warrior. It is a story told both in spite of and because of the mother who silenced her and yet taught her to sing. A reproach and a tribute. Young Kingston justifiably accuses her mother of trying "to cut off [her] tongue" to stop her speech; Brave Orchid rightfully claims that she severed her daughter's frenum so that she "would not be tongue-tied" (pp. 235, 190).
Brave Orchid's paradoxical effects upon her daughter's speech emerge from the duality of her own character, a discordant marriage of feminism and misogyny. As a young woman she had courageously journeyed alone across China to medical school where she subdued ghosts and learned to conquer disease. Even in America her strength and spirit prevail over the drudgery of the family laundromat. Ironically, while living in China this paradigm of female power had gone to market and—after examining and bargaining like a shrewd farmer buying livestock—had purchased an adolescent girl to serve as her slave. In America, though she owns no slave girl, she has a daughter whose self-respect she batters with misogynist doctrine. Brave Orchid embodies the selfhood that she insists women can never possess.14
Kingston identifies this confounding contradiction in her mother-as-teacher: "She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan" (p. 24). While predicting her daughter's selflessness, Brave Orchid makes her cognizant of the Song of the Self; while demanding her wordlessness, she instructs her in the art of "talkingstory."15
In fact, though Kingston reproaches her mother for impeding her speech, the structural design of the individual chapters of The Woman Warrior pays tribute to Brave Orchid and the "great power" of "talking-story" that she passes down to her daughter (p. 24). As Kingston constructs each of her chapters—either directly or indirectly—upon one of Brave Orchid's talk-stories, it is as if she is inheriting her mother's bequest of words again and again.16 In "No Name Woman," for example, Brave Orchid's barely told tale of her sister-in-law's sexual violation and its consequences, the birth and death of the illegitimate baby, the punishment and suicide of the mother, is the germ of Kingston's lavish retelling of the same story. In the beginning of "White Tigers," the second chapter, Kingston recollects how as a girl she had trailed her mother around the house, "the two of us singing about how Fa Mu Lan fought gloriously and returned alive from war to settle in the village" (p. 24). Brave Orchid has "taught" her young daughter the "song" that stimulates the grown artist's elaborate fantasy of another young girl's becoming a victorious female avenger of crimes against her village (p. 24). As Brave Orchid has once again "given" Kingston the subject of her art, the design reappears (p. 24). "Shaman" describes the China her mother had "funneled … into [her] ears" (p. 89). This chapter, which narrates Brave Orchid's adventures as a medical student and doctor in China, is Kingston's imaginative flight to a time before her birth and to a land she has visited only in her mother's storytelling. Brave Orchid's tales allow her daughter to "return to China" where she has "never been" (p. 90). Kingston's own talk-story of the encounter between her mother and aunt with her bigamist uncle, "At the Western Palace," is thrice-removed from one of Brave Orchid's narratives.
Her account of her aunt's futile attempt to reclaim the husband who three decades before had left her in China and set out to discover a new life—and wife—in America is based upon the story passed from her mother to her brother to her sister to her. It is clearly fanciful, "twisted into designs" (p. 190). In "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe," the final chapter of The Woman Warrior, she acknowledges her artistic debt to her mother: "Here is a story my mother told me … when I told her I also talk-story. The beginning is hers, the ending, mine" (p. 240). Kingston, in essence, has described the process and design of her autobiography. Brave Orchid is the womb from which her daughter's art is born.
Kingston christens her autobiography The Woman Warrior because in the legend of the female avenger she discovered an avatar of self-hood, an ideal that celebrated the union of femininity and verbal as well as physical power. Fa Mu Lan, Ts'ai Yen, the swordswoman of the "White Tigers" fantasy, and Brave Orchid—the women warriors real and make-believe who rage across the text—all possess the power of speech. The imaginary avenger of "White Tigers" sings to her troops "glorious songs that came out of the sky … when [she] opened [her] mouth, the songs poured out and were loud enough for the whole encampment to hear" (p. 44). Brave Orchid, the aptly named modern incarnation of the female warrior, is a "champion talker" whose voice never fails (p. 235).
Kingston likens herself to one of the woman warriors suggested by the title of her memoir, particularly the swordswoman of the "White Tigers" fantasy: "The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar.…What we have in commonare the words at our backs" (p. 62). Kingston has learned that these scarred grievances, the crimes against women and minorities, must be uttered in spite of the fearful mothers and racist executives determined to silence her. Unlike the spluttering adolescent who timidly objects to the bigotry of her employers, Kingston now shouts out against prejudice and stereotyping.17 She protests loudly (and not too much) the sexist Chinese axioms that hammered upon her sense of self-worth: "Girls are maggots in the rice"; "It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters"; "Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds"; "When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls" (pp. 51, 54, 62). She denounces the Sins of the Fathers against the female self. Her words blast sexism and racism. While the imaginary swordswoman decapitates her enemies, Kingston surpasses this "childish myth"18 because she wields deadlier arms:
The idioms for revenge are "report a crime" and "report to five families." The reporting is the vengeance—not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words—"chink" words and "gook" words too—that they do not fit on my skin.
(p. 63)
But words, the weapons of destruction and aggression, paradoxically create and preserve. The act of writing—or telling—engenders selfhood. Suggestively, the first and last characters to serve as focal points of the book, the voiceless aunt and the victorious poet, mirror Kingston's own progress from the silence that is selflessness to the song that is selfhood.
As Kingston has fathomed, no-name aunt's real punishment for her sexual violation and pregnancy is not the suicidal drowning of her body in the well but the drowning of her name—or identity—in silence. The culture that venerates ancestors and eternalizes them by means of an oral tradition damns her to anonymity, to the underworld of the unmentionable. "You must not tell anyone … what I am about to tell you"; "Don't let your father know that I told you." Thus Brave Orchid encloses her skeletal version of her sister-in-law's story in warnings to her daughter (pp. 3, 5). And Kingston, though eager for the particulars of her aunt's life, "cannot ask" her mother further questions about "Father's-drowned-in-the-well sister" (p. 6).
Instead she directs her inquiry to her own imagination. With the power of fantasy she conjures her aunt's long-silent, invisible ghost and delivers her from oblivion by fleshing her out in generous detail. If she cannot baptize her with a name, she can at least sculpt her into a possible shape—as a romantic living in a culture condemning her to conforming sexlessness, as a slave cowering before male command.19 Certainly the aunt was a woman defeated by silence, who labored "in eternal cold and silence," who, never pronouncing her impregnator's name, gave "silent birth" to a baby whose cry was quickly drowned, together with her own sobs, in the family well (pp. 16, 10). Even now her ghost "waits silently" to pull another down to oblivion (p. 19).
But in relating this story of wordless failure, Kingston not only rescues her aunt's memory, she overcomes the silence thwarting the final establishment of her own identity. Warned, on the day she began to menstruate, of her aunt's sexual transgression, she now tells the tale and thereby heralds her own crossing of the threshold into selfhood. The initial chapter demonstrates the triumph of speech in the entire work. As she finds the courage to speak when ordered to be silent, so does she discover "words so strong" that they can secure her identity (p. 18). The adult articulates for the child and adolescent once hushed by insecurity. The artifact creates and saves the artist.
Kingston concludes her memoir with the parable of Ts'ai Yen. In recounting the life story of this ancient woman warrior whose battle for self-expression culminated in songful victory, she retells her own story. She sings of her double; she celebrates herself. The child who shuddered at the strangled wheezes of the flute of her one-time alter ego is now the adult proclaiming the flute-like voice of another double self.20 This triumphant song of becoming a woman and a warrior is the climax, the "high note" of the entire piece (p. 243).
Twenty-year-old Ts'ai Yen, at the portal of adulthood, is abducted to a barbarian land where no one understands her language. Like her legendary ancestress, Kingston has struggled to grow up among the uncomprehending "ghosts" of an alien land. Both women transform—this time the telling does work its magic—the desperate loneliness of their cultural dislocation into art. Ts'ai Yen, upon hearing the high-pitched music of flutes, longs for and then achieves voice to echo this sound; she sings "a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes" (p. 243). Her lyrics of her distant home and family articulate her "sadness and anger" to the barbarians (p. 243). The poet Ts'ai Yen has discovered a voice and language that "translated well" (p. 243). Her songs have descended to Kingston, the deserving heiress of this legacy. Like Ts'ai Yen, Kingston has yearned for voice and has learned to vocalize. She too has "translated" the wordless "anger and sadness" of her life "among ghosts" into an autobiography or a self that speaks eloquently to us. She too has become a woman and a warrior.
Notes
To my mother, Maria DeRobertis Morante, I dedicate this article with love because she taught me her own version of the woman warrior's song when I was a child. To my two daughters, Kristin and Marissa Morante Tester, I dedicate this article with hope that I can in turn teach them this song of womanly strength and dignity.
- Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 243. All further references to this edition appear in the text.
- Although there is one mentally retarded, also incoherent Chinese boy, madness is consistently associated with women in WW. See also Shirley Nelson Garner, "Breaking Silences: The Woman Warrior," Hurricane Alice, 1, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 1983/84), 5-6.
- Suzanne Juhasz, in her essay "Towards a Theory of Form in Feminist Autobiography," in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1980), p. 236, observes, "It is through words—through finding them, forming them, saying them aloud, in public—that Kingston reaches selfhood." See also Robert Rolf, "On Maxine Hong Kingston and The Woman Warrior," Kyushu American Literature (May 1982), p. 5; Margaret Miller, "Threads of Identity in Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior," Biography, 6, No. 1 (Winter 1983), 27-28; Garner, p. 5.
- Kingston, p. 190. See also p. 13: "Every word that falls from the mouth is a coin lost."
- See Kingston, p. 213.
- See Kingston, pp. 196-99, where she describes another incident underlining her cultural dislocation. See also Woon-Ping Chin Holaday, "From Ezra Pound to Maxine Hong Kingston: Expressions of Chinese Thought in American Literature," MELUS, 5, No. 2 (1978), 18, who maintains, "The biography it [WW] presents is that of someone belonging to a marginal group, the Asian-American, coping with its ethnic origins in American society"; and Juhasz, p. 233.
- See Kingston, pp. 12, 200, where she describes how, when trying to modulate the "Chinese-feminine" voice into the softer tones of "American-feminine," she whispers inaudibly.
- Deborah Homsher, "The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston: The Bridging of Autobiography and Fiction," Iowa Review, 10, No. 4 (1979), 95. See also Miller, p. 21, and Garner, p. 6.
- Rolf, p. 8, notes that in this passage Kingston mocks "the superficial trappings of traditional American femininity." Still, he maintains that both the American and Chinese "types of female are viewed with irony, neither is presented as clearly superior to the other."
- Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, "The Metaphysics of Matrilinearism in Women's Autobiography: Studies of Mead's Blackberry Winter, Hellman's Pentimento, Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Kingston's The Woman Warrior," in Women's Autobiography, p. 200.
- See Kingston, p. 213.
- Rolf, p. 6, describes this scene as a "furious declaration of her independence." Garner, p. 6, notes the freeing power of this speech.
- See Kingston, pp. 116-27, where she records a dialogue with her mother that takes place years after she has left home.
- Several critics discuss Brave Orchid's contradictory nature. See Homsher, p. 96; Demetrakopoulos, pp. 201-02; Miller, p. 23. 15. Miller, p. 24, describes Brave Orchid as a woman warrior "diminished by the American reality." She contends that "there is only one power she has left to bequeath her daughter: the power to 'talk-story.'"
- See Carol Mitchell, "'Talking-Story' in The Woman Warrior: An Analysis of the Use of Folklore," Kentucky Folklore Record, 27 (January-June 1981), pp. 6-7. Mitchell analyzes Kingston's use of oral stories to structure the autobiography. See also Homsher, p. 95, and Miller, p. 26.
- See Kingston, pp. 57-58, where she describes the failure of her voice in confrontations with her racist employers.
- Kingston, in "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers," in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities, ed. Guy Amirthanayagam (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 57, contends that the "White Tigers" chapter is a "childish myth … not the climax we reach for."
- Note that Kingston also postulates, then rejects an identity of a scarlet woman for her aunt. See Juhasz, p. 232; Homsher, p. 94.
- Several critics note likenesses between Kingston and Ts'ai Yen. See Holaday, p. 22; Patricia Lin Blinde, "The Icicle in the Desert: Perspective and Form in the Works of Two Chinese-American Women Writers," MELUS, 6, No. 3 (1979), 52; Rolf, p. 9.
Further Reading
Bibliography
Huang, Guiyou. "Maxine Hong Kingston (1940-)." In Asian American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliograpical Critical Source-book, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson, pp. 138-55. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Extensive bibliography of secondary sources which includes articles and reviews from both scholarly and popular journals and books.
Biographies
Sabine, Maureen. Maxine Hong Kingston's Broken Book of Life: An Intertextual Study of the Woman Warrior and China Men. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004, 229 p.
Bio-critical examination of Kingston's life and works.
Wang, Jennie. "Maxine Hong Kingston." In A Reader's Companion to the Short Story in English, edited by Erin Fallon, R. C. Feddersen, James Kurtzleben, Maurice A. Lee, and Susan Rochette-Crawley, pp. 234-40. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Short biographical introduction to Kingston's life and work.
Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia, ed. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior : A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 193 p.
Biography of Kingston that also provides a critical review of The Woman Warrior.
Criticism
Chin, Frank. "This Is Not an Autobiography," Genre 18, no. 2 (1985): 109-30.
Argues that autobiography is not a Chinese genre, and that Kingston effectively "sells out" in her writing.
Feng, Pin-chia. The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston: A Postmodern Reading. New York: Peter Lang, 1998, 193 p.
Examines the role of the bildungsroman in Morrison and Kingston.
Ho, Wendy. "Mother/Daughter Writing and the Politics of Race and Sex in Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior." In Asian Americans: Comparative and Global Perspectives, edited by Shirley Hune, Hyung-chan Kim, Stephen S. Fugita, and Amy Ling, pp. 225-38. Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1991.
Examines the mother-daughter relationship in The Woman Warrior.
Huntley, E. D. Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2001, 204 p.
Critical appraisal of Kingston with bibliographical resources.
Kramer, Jane. "The Woman Warrior." The New York Times Book Review (7 November 1976): 1, 18, 20.
Favorable review of The Woman Warrior.
Madsen, Deborah L. Maxine Hong Kingston. Detroit: Gale Group, 2000, 156 p.
Explores thematic and stylistic aspects of Kingston's work.
Rabine, Leslie W. "No Lost Paradise: Social Gender and Symbolic Gender in the Writings of Maxine Hong Kingston." Signs 12, no. 3 (spring 1987): 471-92.
Aims to "reconcile insights of symbolic and social feminism" in Kingston's work.
Schueller, Malini. "Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversion in The Woman Warrior." Criticism 31, no. 4 (fall 1989): 421-37.
Considers gender and ethnic identity in The Woman Warrior.
Simmons, Diane. Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1999, 184 p.
Full-length critical study, prefaced by an insightful 50-page biographical introduction to Kingston's life.
Skandera-Trombley, Laura E., ed. Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999, 359 p.
Collection of numerous critical essays, fairly evenly divided in coverage of The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey.
Wogowitsch, Margit. Narrative Strategies and Multicultural Identity: Maxine Hong Kingston in Context. Wien: Braumüller, 1995, 179 p.
Comprehensive examination of Kingston with lengthy bibliography.
OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:
Additional coverage of Kingston's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: American Writers Supplement, Vol. 5; Asian American Literature; Authors and Artists for Young Adults, Vols. 8, 55; Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: Biography and Resources, Vol. 2; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography Supplement; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 69-72; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 13, 38, 74, 87; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 12, 19, 58, 121; Contemporary Novelists, Ed. 7; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 173, 212; Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook, 1980; DISCovering Authors Modules: Multicultural and Novelists; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Feminist Writers; Literature and Its Times, Vol. 5; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Eds. 1, 2; Modern American Women Writers; Novels for Students, Vol. 6; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; Short Stories for Students, Vol. 3; Something about the Author, Vol. 53; and World Literature Criticism Supplement.