About Maxine Hong Kingston
Born: 27 October 1940 in Stockton, California
Married: Earll Kingston, 23 November 1962
Education: Edison High School, Stockton, and the University of California, Berkeley
CHILDHOOD AND BIOGRAPHICAL GLIMPSES
Maxine Hong Kingston’s first two books, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976) and China Men (1980), are routinely referred to as works of autobiography. She would seem to have lent her authority to this view by the subtitle she gave to The Woman Warrior. But she describes her initial sense of all her work as that of a novelist, and she ascribes the decision to call her first two books nonfiction to her editors, who told her that reviewers are reluctant to review first novels, while readers feel they can identify with the people and narrative of an autobiography or memoir. Yet, all of Kingston’s work to date reveals a close affinity with the events and people of her own life. In The Woman Warrior she relates incidents from her childhood and early life; in China Men she writes about the immigrant history that produced her; and in her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), she draws on events from the years she attended the University of California, Berkeley.
Kingston was born Maxine Ting Ting Hong on 27 October 1940 in Stockton, California, the oldest child of Tom Hong and Ying Lan Chew Hong, immigrants from southern China. (Two children born to the Hongs before they immigrated died in China.) Her parents came from the village of Sun Woi, near Canton (Guangzhou), and were unusually literate and highly educated. Kingston recalls that they would recite classic Chinese poetry as well as village songs and rhymes and that as a young girl she failed to appreciate the extent of their learning. She describes her father as a poet, though she does not come from a family of writers. She
explains, “I feel I come from a tradition of literate people, even though they weren’t writers.”1
Kingston’s father immigrated to the United States in 1924. In China he had been a scholar and teacher, but when he arrived in New York City he was compelled to find manual rather than intellectual work. Fifteen years passed before he was able to send for his wife. During that time Ying Lan (Brave Orchid) studied medicine and worked as a doctor. Tom Hong eventually established a laundry in New York with two friends. When he found himself cheated of his proper share of the business, he moved with his wife, who had by then joined him, to Stockton. Here he initially worked as the manager of a gambling house, taking the owner’s place when the police raided and arrested everybody. In China Men Kingston relates the story of how she was named. According to her mother, her father named her “after a blonde gambler who always won” because he considered it a “lucky American name.”2 Kingston also describes the difficult circumstances in which her parents bought their house in Stockton. Twice they found a house they wished to buy, but in both cases the gambling-house owner, whom they asked to handle the transaction because he spoke English, bought the place himself and rented it to the Hongs, thus keeping them in the position of tenants. After finding a third house, Kingston’s parents said nothing to the gambling-house owner about their intentions until they had paid for it themselves’in cash. Kingston recalls that “It was exactly like the owner’s house, the same size, the same floor plan and gingerbread. . . . It was the biggest but most run-down of the houses; it had been a boarding house for old China Men. Rose bushes with thorns grew around it, wooden lace hung broken from the porch eaves, the top step was missing like a moat. The rooms echoed” (246). After the gambling house closed, the Hongs operated the New Port Laundry on El Dorado Street in Stockton.
All the family, including the children, shared the hard work of running the laundry. Here Kingston listened to her parents and other relatives “talk-story” as they recalled Chinese myths, fables, and history. In her writing she uses the stories she remembers from her childhood, and her memory helps to filter the important and enduring stories from the less significant: “I wrote from stories I remembered, because I knew if I asked them [her-parents] again, they would just tell another version. Besides, I feel that what is remembered is very important. The mind selects, out images and facts that have a certain significance. If I remember something that someone told me 20 years ago, then the story has lasted in that form for a very long time.”3
While Kingston admits to feeling that she is a “West Coast Chinese American,” she identifies with the rural country of the Central California Valley, “Stockton, Sacramento, Fresno, all of the Valley in the north,” rather than the city of San Francisco.4 In The Woman Warrior she gives a few glimpses of the Stockton in which she grew up. She refers to the time when “urban renewal tore down my parents’ laundry and paved over our slum for a parking lot. . . .”5 The Chinatown Kingston grew up in was located in the area surrounding Lafayette Street but was destroyed to make way for a crosstown freeway. About the destruction, she says, “our Chinatown was just a block and then the freeway wiped it out. It was such an insult, because they didn’t finish the freeway. They just made it go through Chinatown and it stopped right there.”6 The freeway remained incomplete for years, and its lack of purpose, coupled with the destruction that had made its partial construction possible, engendered what Kingston describes as paranoia among the residents. But she also admits that the destruction of the physical area that was Chinatown made her realize that the community existed not in a particular place but in the rituals and memories that everyone shared.
The Hong family lived in a rough neighborhood. In The Woman Warrior Kingston describes how her mother “locked her children in the house so we couldn’t look at dead slum people” (51). When Brave Orchid showed her sister around Stockton, she advised her how to avoid Skid Row on days when she was not feeling strong: “On days when you are not feeling safe, walk around it. But you can walk through it unharmed on your strong days” (139). In China Men Kingston recalls the derelicts and drunkards who tormented the children, telling of an afternoon when her sister barricaded herself under the dining-room table to escape the wino who was knocking on all the doors and windows (180). Their house was located adjacent to the railroad, a constant reminder of her great-grandfather’s contribution to the building of the transcontinental railroad. In describing the funeral of a great-uncle, Kau Goong, Kingston tells of how the procession headed for the Chinese cemetery and traveled past all the places that Kau Goong frequented in life, so that his ghost would not settle in any of these places: the Hongs’ house, Kau Goong’s club, the Benevolent Association in Chinatown, the Chinese school, the Catholic church, stores, and the laundry. Her fiction is based in this environment.
Kingston attended the Chung Wah Chinese School for Chinese American children on East Church Street in Stockton. In classes lasting from five o’clock to eight o’clock every night and from nine o’clock until noon on Sundays the children were taught how to write and speak Chinese.
In The Woman Warrior Kingston draws a series of contrasts between the American and Chinese schools, noting the different attitudes of the teachers and the children who would not speak English at the American school but did speak Chinese at the Chinese school. In Hawai’i One Summer (1987) she recalls her days at Edison High School, remembering that she had black girlfriends in school but was not really of their “set.” She did not consider sitting anywhere but at the Chinese lunch table: “There were more of us than places at that table. Hurry and get to the cafeteria early, or go late when somebody may have finished and left a seat.”7 The experience of being enmeshed in the Chinese community of Stockton provided the basis for Kingston’s writing. As a writer, she has been particularly affected by her recollection of the demands made by the two languages in which she was schooled as a child: English and the Chinese dialect spoken by her parents.
Kingston’s parents, like most of the Chinese community in Stockton at that time, came from the Say Yup region of China; the dialect of Cantonese known as “Say Yup” was Kingston’s first language. This has posed problems for her because the dialect has no written form. Even if she could represent these Chinese words and concepts in the alphabet of the English language, it would not satisfy her aim of representing the words spoken by Chinese Americans with an American accent. As Kingston has explained, “I’m specifically interested in how the Chinese American dialect is spoken in the California Valley. . . . When I write dialogue for people who are speaking Chinese, I say the words to myself in Chinese and then write them in English, hoping to capture some of the sounds and rhythms and power of Say Yup.”8
Language caused Kingston difficulties especially in her first years at school when, not knowing English and suffering fear and shyness as a result, she withdrew into silence. (This retreat into silence still comes upon the adult Kingston from time to time.) During such periods in her childhood she communicated in pictures rather than words, and for a time after she finished college she considered that perhaps she should work as a painter rather than a writer. Her awareness that she had in a sense already served her apprenticeship with words, whereas she was only beginning to learn the skills of a painter, took her back to writing.
Kingston began writing at the age of eight or nine, and indeed describes herself as a “born writer,” someone who cannot not write: her life has been shaped by what she calls “this desire always to find the words for life and for the invisible and for the visible and for the imagination.”9 Even when she was experiencing difficulty speaking, she continued to write. Kingston has described her memory of the first time a poem came to her: “I was sitting in a class and all of a sudden this poem came to me. I wrote 25 verses in something like a trance. I don’t recall what the class was about.”10 All through high school she wrote stories rather than poetry and confesses that the inability to understand the form of the academic essay or assignment meant that she received some poor grades. She recalls clearing space in her parents’ stockroom for her papers and notes. The stories she wrote in high school were to become those that make up The Woman Warrior and China Men. Kingston wrote these stories in various forms, with each successive version revealing her increased maturity and skill as a writer. For example, she explains how she “tried telling the China Men stories like Jason and the Argonauts, because I read that as a kid, where they were using epic hexameter meter, and so I tried to tell the story of the China Men as Jason and the quest for the Golden Fleece, using the hexameter rhythms and epic form. I suppose for decades I kept telling the same stories again and again, but each time I told it I had a better vocabulary and better craft.”11
The literary influences upon Kingston’s work, especially her early work, are limited. Kingston describes her childhood reading as being much like any other child’s. However, Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter (1945) had a significant impact upon her. In this autobiographical work, which is narrated by a young girl, Kingston found a Chinese American character with whom she could identify. At this point she realized that she had been falsely identifying with, and attempting to write stories about, the Caucasian characters with whom she was familiar from her reading. Kingston tells of a similar moment of self-consciousness while reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868): “1 was reading along, identifying with the March sisters, when I came across this funny-looking little Chinaman.’ It popped out of the book. I’d been pushed into my place. I was him, I wasn’t those March girls.”12 This kind of experience of exclusion from mainstream literature motivated her to create for herself a place in literature. Beyond this initial inspiration, her parents’ stock of myths, histories, and stories inspired and shaped her writing. Kingston reads a great deal of poetry, especially modern American poetry, and the work of prose writers such as Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick who write in a poetic style. Virginia Woolf’s writing, in particular her novel Orlando (1928), has influenced aspects of Kingston’s work, as she has explained: “I do some of the same tricks with time like the China Men who have lived for hundreds of years, just like Orlando lived for hundreds of years, and their history goes on and on.”13 Two other writers who stand out as having had an important impact upon Kingston’s work are William Carlos Williams and Walt Whitman. The influence of Whitman is most clearly seen in Tripmaster Monkey, in which the protagonist takes the name Wittman Ah Sing, echoing several poems in the 1881-1882 edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, such as “One’s-Self I Sing.”
Kingston acknowledges Williams’s essay collection In the American Grain (1925) as an early influence, especially the way in which he retold the myth of America. In his re-creation of the origin of the nation—telling the story of how it came into being—she perceives a profound connection between his work and her own, especially China Men. Kingston points to the coincidence that the earliest episode in her book takes place around 1850, which is the historical end point of Williams’s book. Both writers tried to achieve a poetic retelling of American history. In China Men Kingston inserts almost as a halfway marker in the narrative a factual history of Chinese Americans, beginning with the California gold rush of the late 1840s and continuing through the various discriminatory acts of legislation that have helped to define the Chinese experience in America. She departed from her usual indirect style to write this chronological history because she was frustrated by the lack of awareness of Chinese American history among her readership. She could not simply assume that her readers would know the historical background to which she referred. Thus, Kingston filled in those gaps in the historical knowl-edge of her audience, hoping that “maybe another Chinese American author won’t have to write that history.”14
Kingston invokes this sense of claiming a place for Chinese Americans in the history of the United States when she describes her work as “claiming America.”15 She does not mean that Asian people should simply accept American values and lifestyles; rather, she means that Asian Americans belong to the nation as a part of its history and diverse culture and are not “outsiders” existing only on the margins of American life. As Kingston points out in her discussion of the role of Chinese laborers in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, without Chinese Americans, the United States would be a quite different country from what it is today. For this reason the grandfathers in China Men are not given personal names; they are called “great-grandfather” and “great-great-grandfather” because they then can take on a kind of mythological stature as the great-grandfathers of the nation. Kingston’s writing is always about America rather than China; her effort is to reveal and celebrate the place of the Chinese in American history and culture and to have that contribution recognized. In addition, she is forging a place for Chinese American writers in the tradition of American literature. She recalls that when she wrote the story of the No Name Woman, the first story in The Woman Warrior, she was thinking of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s depiction of the adulterous Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter (1850). The title of “The Making of More Americans,” from China Men, deliberately echoes Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (1925), in which Stein attempted to forge a new American language, though Kingston has worked to create an American language with Chinese accents. In this way she responds to the social, political, and also literary exclusion of Chinese Americans from the mainstream of American life and culture.
Maxine and Earll Kingston, whom she married in 1962, moved from Berkeley to Hawaii in 1967. The reason for the move she describes as primarily an attempt to discover an answer to the question “Is there life after Berkeley?”16 Despite the antiwar efforts in which the Kingstons and their friends in Berkeley participated, the Vietnam War continued unabated. The disappointment this caused her and her husband, combined with the effect of the drug culture on friends whom she describes as “burned out,” prompted them to seek an alternative lifestyle. En route to their original destination, the Far East, they stopped in Hawaii and stayed for seven-teen years, returning to California in 1984. In 1967 Hawaii brought the reality of the war in Indochina closer than the Kingstons had experienced it in Berkeley. Kingston recalls, “Hawaii had its own problems, and with the presence of the military here, the Vietnam War was even more real on these islands.”17 Hawaii was militarized in ways that California was not; troops passed through the islands on their way to Vietnam, and veterans came to Hawaii for R and R (“Rest and Recreation”) between tours of duty. Both Kingston and her husband worked with veterans, at a church sanctuary for soldiers who were AWOL, and she learned from them that not everyone shared the antiwar sentiments of her friends and colleagues in Berkeley. These soldiers were not necessarily absent without leave because they objected to the war: some did not like the conditions under which they served, some disliked their officers or the food, and some were just fooling around, according to Kingston. In Hawai’i One Summer she recalls one young soldier in particular. In answer to her question about the things he likes to do, he tells her, “’I build model cars. . . . I built five hundred of them, and I lined ’em up and shot ’em and set ’em on fire.’ ’Why did you do that?’ ’It felt good— like when I was a door gunner on the chopper in Nam. Thousands of bullets streaming out of my gun.’” Silently she replies, “Don’t tell me about the gooks you shot, I thought. Don’t tell me about the hootches you torched” (18-19).
War and martial conflict feature prominently in Kingston’s first two books, though she writes in order to discover a way to over-come difference and hostility without violence. The decision to use The Woman Warrior as the title of her first book was made by her editor, and Kingston has come to regret it. In empha-sizing a martial image of women, the title suggests that war may be a way of resolving issues, whereas Kingston has always been motivated by her pacifist ideals and the quest for nonvio-lent means of resolving conflicts. She remarks, “I keep hoping we will all take the woman warrior in another sense, that there are other ways to fight wars than with swords.”18 This concern with how peace may be possible has affected not only her writing but also her life, first with her antiwar activities and later with her involvement in the antidraft movement in Hawaii: “It’s as if my writing spilled over into real life, and I felt I had to act. It’s not that I enjoy it. Anti-draft [sic] work intrudes on my life, so I just put my resentment right back into the struggle. I don’t like going to meetings or carrying signs, but I feel that it is my duty.”19
Kingston has remarked that Hawaii is not an easy place to feel a part of: “I think this is a hard place to belong to.”20 But Hawaii has embraced her; in 1980, shortly after the publication of China Men, she was honored as a Living Treasure of Hawaii by a Buddhist sect in Honolulu. The ceremony followed a tradition that was brought to Hawaii from ancient China, via modern Japan. Kingston explains that “in the same way that we designate paintings and monuments and mountains as treasures, they designate certain people as Living Treasures.”21 At age thirty-nine she was unusually young to receive this honor; she was also the first Chinese American to be honored in this way. At the same time the designation underscored her own feeling of not really belonging to Hawaii. The tradition itself represents a strategy used by the Buddhist priests to make themselves a part of the culture of Hawaii: “They decided that one way was to honor some of Hawaii’s treasures. It makes me feel really good to be honored by them. It feels as if the islands are saying, ’You can be a part of Hawaii too.’”22
Kingston’s teaching experiences, first in California and then in Hawaii, have had a lasting influence upon the way in which she views her audience—both her readers and those who attend her readings. She does not assume that she has a particular kind of readership and does not address herself to an exclusively Chinese American or Asian American audience. Rather, she tries to take everybody into account, calling herself a “megalomaniac” in this respect: “Everybody living today and people in the future, that’s my audience, for generations.”23
In Kingston’s childhood and upbringing there were obvious cultural factors that influenced the nature of her subsequent work: particularly her awareness of the position of women in Chinese culture, her experience of American racism, and her sense of a cross-cultural identity. She says that she is a feminist because of the upbringing she had: “Growing up as a kid, I don’t see how I could not have been a feminist. In Chinese culture, people always talk about how girls are bad.”24 Many of the stories in The Woman Warrior were motivated by feminist anger and vision.25 For example, Kingston recalls the anger she felt when her mother first told her the story of her father’s sister, the woman whose life is the subject of “No Name Woman”: “I was so mad at my mother for telling me a cruel tale for the joy of the telling.”26 Later she saw how the battle against silence in “No Name Woman” relates to her mother’s instruction that she must never repeat the story. Kingston has also broken the silence surrounding the misogynistic traditions that express the patriarchal character of Chinese society. These traditions include the institutionalized servitude of women through practices such as female infanticide, infant betrothal, female sla-very, concubinage, and prostitution. Gender relations are organized according to Confucian patriarchy, which means that women are obedient to the men in their family and derive their identity from the family; marriage is both a woman’s life and her fate.
Confucian patriarchy not only organizes social relations according to gender but also gives the Chinese language a powerful gender inflection. In both The Woman Warrior and China Men Kingston recalls with outrage the degrading proverbs she heard as a child: “Girls are maggots in the rice” (43) and “It is more profitable to raise geese than daughters” (46) The Chinese language embodies the assumption of feminine inferiority; in The Woman Warrior she observes, “There is a Chinese word for the female I— which is ’slave’. Break the women with their own tongues!” (47). The terms “girl” and “bad” are used as if they are synonymous: “’I’m not a bad girl,’ I would scream. . . . I might as well have said, ’I’m not a girl’” (46). Kingston also recalls the words she heard that were reserved for girls, such as “pig” and “stink pig” (204).
Kingston’s awareness of Chinese history and of the generational differences between herself and her parents has been deeply influenced by gender issues. In The Woman Warrior she muses on the transformation of Chinese society effected by the Communist Revolution, which “put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own” (62). Nonetheless, she shared her parents’ perception that poverty was still endemic in China. The Revolution changed attitudes and cultural practices to the extent that it enabled Kingston’s mother to become educated, but still she owned a female slave (a mui tsai). Brave Orchid was a contradictory character: she tried to raise her daughter in the traditional Chinese fashion of submissiveness and subordination, but she was herself a forceful and opinionated woman, fiercely independent and strong-willed.
In China Men Kingston continues to explore the issues of misogyny but within the context of feminine self-oppression: situations in which women insist upon the practice of traditions that oppress other women. In the story “On Discovery,” for example, it is a group of women, not men, who transform the traveler Tang Ao into a powerless woman by breaking his toes and binding his feet, thus mutilating his body according to patriarchal ritual. In “The Father from China” Kingston’s paternal grandmother, Ah Po, demonstrates the feminine internalization of misogynistic values in an episode in which her husband, Ah Goong, swaps his son for a daughter. She insists that the girl be returned and her son retrieved, shouting that her husband must be insane to have swapped a boy for a slave. The neighbors agree with Ah Po’s estimation: they would have sold the girl to Ah Goong if only he had asked, and when Ah Po accuses them of cheating her foolish husband and trying to swindle him, they simply hang their heads in shame. Kingston wonders if this experience accounts in part for her father’s behavior and for the woman-hating obscenities he mutters when he is angry. Ah Po herself is no weak woman: she is “a woman six feet tall on toy feet” (21), formidably strong and capable, yet she acts to maintain the inferior status of women. Ah Po is a woman of the same type as her daughter-in-law, Brave Orchid. In “The American Father” Kingston describes the depression her father (called “BaBa”) experiences after the gambling house has closed and he is out of work. BaBa’s decline is attributed to his loss of status. He has become a “slave” (that is, like a woman) and he is outstripped by his wife: “Her energy slammed BaBa back into his chair. She took over everything; he did not have a reason to get up” (250).
The radical gender division that Kingston was taught as a child resulted in her inability to understand that men and women are equally human. In “The American Father” she questions whether boys actually have feelings and can experience pain: “Girls and women of all races cried and had feelings. We had to toughen up. We had to be as tough as boys, tougher because we only pretended not to feel pain” (252). But with the return of her father’s spirit comes the “new idea that males have feelings” (254). A parallel is developed between the doomed poet Ch’u Yuan, whose story is told in “The Li Sao: An Elegy,” and BaBa—both live in exile, both have been reduced from high status to no status at all, and both are remembered in stories for their suffering and wisdom. Ch’u Yuan also offers a symbolic parallel with Kingston’s No Name aunt: he represents a male counterpart to her feminine sacrifice. This comparison demonstrates the unequal treatment of the sexes in patriarchal Chinese culture: both Ch’u Yuan and the No Name aunt overstep the boundaries of authority, but when the poet drowns himself, the people do penance for the injustice they have done him, while the aunt’s death is greeted with the further punishment of banishment from family history and communal memory.
Kingston’s upbringing within an immigrant Chinese community gave rise to the theme of exclusion in her writing—from Western culture as an Asian and from Chinese culture as a woman. This theme is related to the cross-cultural pressures she represents as an Asian American and her desire to win approval on the terms of both cultures, even . when the cultural demands are in conflict. Kingston has tried to understand the conflicting demands made of her by her Chinese ancestry and her American childhood. In her work she is critical of Chinese culture, which belittles her because of her gender (represented most dramatically by her tirade against her mother in “White Tigers,” from The Woman Warrior). Adopting an American perspective in one story in The Woman Warrior, she hears Chinese voices and remarks, “You can see the disgust on American faces looking at women like that. It isn’t just the loudness. It is the way Chinese sounds, chingchong ugly, to American ears, not beautiful like Japanese sayonara words with the consonants and vowels as regular as Italian” (171). The effort to analyze and understand the two cultures is difficult but essential; the alternative is represented by Brave Orchid’s sister Moon Orchid, who finds the two different lifestyles impossible to reconcile and loses her sanity.
In The Woman Warrior Kingston admits to her difficulties in understanding Chinese culture, particularly when so much is unspoken and unexplained: “How can Chinese keep any traditions at all? They don’t even make you pay attention, slipping in a ceremony and clearing the table before the children notice specialness. The adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask” (185). However, she is also aware that she does not belong entirely to American society either. Only by adopting the mythical persona of the woman warrior can she imagine bringing the two cultures together: “Nobody in history has conquered and united both North America and Asia” (49). In China Men Kingston confronts the issue of discrimination more openly in terms of racial conflict between Chinese and AngloAmericans. The chapter titled “The Laws” lists the racist legislation that has limited Asian immigration to the United States. Kingston undermines the stereotypes upon which this legislative prejudice is based by highlighting the diversity that exists among the Chinese of different regions. She perceives herself as living in a country “where we are eccentric people” (16).
In China Men Kingston describes the emasculation of Chinese men who come to America and work in demeaning jobs in the sugar fields of Hawaii, on railroad-construction gangs, and in laundries and restaurants. This powerlessness or “femininity” leads to conflict between Chinese men and women: the men find themselves forced to do demeaning “women’s” tasks like laundry work. As her father irons shirts Kingston overhears him mutter curses: “Dog vomit. Your mother’s cunt. Your mother’s smelly cunt” (12). Her father denies the stories Brave Orchid tells him about her exploitation by the Chinese owner of the gambling house and his family, who treat her—just as they treat him—as their slave. Kingston’s father’s suffering is expressed by his “wordless male screams that jolted the house upright and staring in the middle of the night” (13), which are matched by his threatening silences. The entire narrative is motivated by her attempts to create a past for her father and an explanation for his behavior, to know that when he utters feminine obscenities “those curses are only common Chinese sayings. That you did not mean to make me sicken at being female” (14). Thus, Kingston issues a challenge to her father: “I 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” (15). As it progresses, the narrative moves to ever wider perspectives in the attempt to reconstruct all the forces that shaped her father’s identity and his life.
Revenge is an important component of Chinese culture and Kingston’s writing, but she represents vengeance as the accomplishment of justice where before there was exclusion, prejudice, and discrimination based upon both gender and race. This kind of vengeance is based not on violence but on exposing injustice by finding the words with which to represent it accurately and give it artistic shape. The title of The Woman Warrior points to the importance of the theme of resistance and rebellion. Various rebellions are interleaved in the text: first, Kingston’s rebellion against conventional literary forms, which are inadequate to express her cross-cultural position; second, her rebellion against her powerful mother; and third, her rebellion against the patriarchal Chinese cultural influences to which she was subject. Common to each of these rebellions is Kingston’s revolt against imposed racial and gender identities.
Closely related to the idea of achieving vengeance through literary expression is the theme of silence, though the ability of a woman to express herself is related to the motif of mutilation. The woman warrior bears the villagers’ wrongs carved into her back. Kingston’s mother cuts her daughter’s frenum—the connecting membrane under the tongue—for one of two reasons: either to silence her and repress the “ready tongue [that] is an evil tongue” (164), or to free her tongue to learn many languages. Other women in The Woman Warrior are afflicted with silence. The No Name aunt gives “silent birth” (11). Kingston bullies and assaults a classmate who refuses to talk. Moon Orchid is unable to talk about her confusion of fantasy with reality and goes mad. Kingston comments, “I thought talking and not talking made the difference between sanity and insanity. Insane people were the ones who couldn’t explain themselves” (186). She is haunted by a fear of being thought insane and worries that her parents will betroth her to the retarded boy who visits the laundry. In the final chapter of the book she makes a list of grievances to tell her mother—to make her mutilated tongue work in the cause of her own liberation. In China Men Kingston seeks to articulate racial rather than gender prejudice. The narrative attempts to rewrite the history of the United States, to reclaim the role of Chinese labor in the creation of America, and in so doing to reinvent the notion of “the American” to incorporate the Chinese immigrant experience and its cross-cultural legacy. In this way Kingston challenges exclusive definitions of American national identity.
The relationship between The Woman Warrior and China Men is explained by Kingston’s views about feminism as a movement. In the latter book her girl narrator grows up and learns how to tell the story of the men’s lives. Kingston explains that in her view feminism must do the same thing: “I believe that in order to truly grow up, women must love men. That has to be the next stage of feminism: I can’t think that feminism just breaks off at the point where we get to join the Marines.”27 Originally the two works were to have been one big book but, as Kingston has said, the men’s stories interfered with the coherence and unity of the feminine values: the “men’s stories seemed to interfere. They were weakening the feminist point of view. So 1 took all the men’s stories out, and then I had The Woman Warrior.”28
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
The quality of Kingston’s work was recognized long before the publication of her widely acclaimed first book. In 1955, at the age of fifteen, she won a $5 prize for her essay “I Am an American,” which was published in The American Girl, the magazine of the Girl Scouts. When The Woman Warrior came out in 1976 it won several prestigious literary prizes. Though the book was published as a work of nonfiction in order to make it more understandable for reviewers and readers, Kingston’s editors soon regretted that decision. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, but Kingston recalls an editor telephoning her to say that if the book had been published as fiction she would have stood a good chance of winning in the more prestigious fiction category. Charles Elliott, Kingston’s editor at Alfred A. Knopf in New York, confesses that he was nervous about her appearance at the awards dinner. After all, the first time she came to his office she was wearing a borrowed coat that was far too big for her and a stocking cap; in Elliott’s words, “she looked like a bag lady.” At the awards dinner Kingston was the last of four speakers. Elliott continues: “She arrived wearing a dress that came down all the way to the ground and wearing a lei of flowers that were very fragrant. . . . She was so short that she couldn’t see over the rostrum and had to bend the microphone over the side to speak. 1 remember thinking, ’Oh, no!’ She had started off with this tiny little voice and before I could believe it, she had it right under absolute control with everyone nearly weeping.”29 The audience was particularly touched, in Elliott’s recollection, by Kingston’s confession that in thirty years of writing she had never thought of herself as a writer but that, with the presentation of the award, she learned that she was indeed a writer.
In the years immediately following the publication of The Woman Warrior Kingston won the Mademoiselle Magazine Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Race Relations. Her second book, China Men, met with similar acclaim: it was named to the American Library Association Notable Books List in 1980 and won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 1981. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction. When her first novel, Tripmaster Monkey, was published in 1989, it won the PEN/ USA West award for fiction.
In recognition of the contribution her writing has made to West Coast and Asian American literature, Kingston received the Stockton Arts Commission Award and the Asian-Pacific Women’s Network Woman of the Year Award in 1981. She dreaded the return to Stockton to accept the Arts Commission Award because the event promised to be much like a school reunion, with many of her teachers there, as well as several of the people she had written about. She recalls, “It was also a power thing to give me an event like that; there were various political enemies who wanted to confront one another. People with their own feuds showed up. It was the wild west, it was a Stockton event, and Stockton is where stories come from. So people from my books were there, plus people I didn’t have time to write about.”30 In 1983 Kingston won the Hawaii Award for Literature. Later awards include the California Council for the Humanities Award (1985) and the California Governor’s Award for the Arts (1989). In 1998 she was honored with the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award from the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association.
In 1992 Kingston received a fellowship from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund and used the prize money to begin writing workshops for Vietnam veterans. She had the idea of holding such workshops much earlier, when she attended a retreat organized by Thich NhatHanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, called “Healing the Wounds of War.” Veterans from America and Vietnam gathered for meditation and discussion, but it occurred to Kingston that the element of art was missing, so she incorporated a writing workshop during one day of the retreat. Later, when she won the fellowship from the Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Fund, she was asked to nominate a community project to work on; she decided to organize more workshops, to be held on a regular basis, and to open them to veterans of all wars.
Academic honors that have been bestowed upon Kingston include honorary doctoral degrees from Eastern Michigan University (1988), Colby College (1990), Brandeis University (1991), and the University of Massachusetts (1991). She was a Guggenheim fellow in 1981 and received the Brandeis University National Women’s Committee Major Book Collection Award in 1990. National recognition of the extent of Kingston’s contribution to American literature has taken the form of the 1990 Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1992 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in September 1997 she was presented with a National Humanities Medal by President Bill Clinton.
NOTES
1. Karen Horton, “Honolulu Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston,” in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, edited by Paul Skenazy and Tera Martin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p. 7.
2. Maxine Hong Kingston, China Men (New York: Knopf, 1980; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 243. Subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text.
3. Timothy Pfaff, “Talk with Mrs. Kingston,” in Conversations with Maxine Hong King ston, p. 16.
4. Arturo Islas and Marilyn Yalom, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” in Conver sations with Maxine Hong Kingston, p. 28.
5. Kingston, The Woman Warrior (New York: Knopf, 1976; reprint, New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 48. Subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text.
6. Skenazy, “Coming Home,” in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, p. 115.
7. Kingston, Hawai’i One Summer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), p. 12. Subsequent page citations are given parenthetically in the text.
8. Pfaff, “Talk with Mrs. Kingston,” p. 17.
9. Kay Bonetti, “An Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, p. 35.
10. Gary Kubota, “Maxine Hong Kingston: Something Comes from Outside Onto the Paper,” in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, p. 1.
11. Bonetti, “An Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” p. 34.
12. Jody Hoy, “To Be Able to See the Tao,” in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, p. 62.
13. Islas and Yalom, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” p. 26.
14. Pfaff, “Talk with Mrs. Kingston,” p. 15.
15. Islas and Yalom, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” p. 25.
16. Kubota, “Maxine Hong Kingston: Something Comes from Outside Onto the Paper,” p. 3.
17. Ibid., p. 4.
18. Hoy, “To Be Able to See the Tao,” p. 48.
19. Pfaff, “Talk with Mrs. Kingston,” p. 20.
20. Ibid., p. 15.
21. Ibid., p. 14.
22. Ibid., p. 15.
23. Islas and Yalom, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” p. 24.
24. Kubota, “Maxine Hong Kingston: Something Comes from Outside Onto the Paper,” p. 3.
25. Bonetti, “An Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston,” p. 35.
26. Hoy, “To Be Able to See the Tao,” p. 49.
27. Ibid., p. 57.
28. Paula Rabinowitz, “Eccentric Memories: A Conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston,” in Conversations with Maxine Hong Kingston, p. 69.
29. Charles Elliot, quoted in Horton, “Honolulu Interview: Maxine Hong Kingston,” p. 6.
30. Hoy, “To Be Able to See the Tao,” p. 65
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