"Woman Warrior" Maxine Hong Kingston

I started writing about books before I started this blog, so I have decided to include some of that writing here. This'll make it look like I have really been busy when I am just stealing things I had written last year or before.

The book was not what I expected. The title is "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts", and that, combined with the comments on the back of the book, led me to believe that the book would be a traditional biography. However, the book did not start off by telling about events in Kingston’s life. The book has five chapters, and we do not learn about Kingston’s childhood until the final chapter. The first four chapters are about an aunt, Fa Mu Lan, her mother and another aunt, respectively. The final chapter finally tells us events in Kingston’s youth, and I am assuming that I would not have felt the same about that last chapter if I had not read the other four chapters first.

The book reminded me of writing by Amy Tan and other authors of Chinese descent, and I am struck by the difference in the writing by Chinese authors and English-speaking authors writing about China, such as Pearl Buck. The books by Buck were written about a certain era in China, but focus on that specific era alone without telling us what happened before; that is, the books center around the narrative here-and-now. Chinese writers of modern fiction, at least those that I have read so far, introduce events in the context of stories from the past, and their novels are almost dominated by stories of parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents. From this I surmise that Chinese culture places a strong emphasis on ancestry, and it is as if they feel it is impossible to tell a story about someone without filling in the back story, i.e., what are the stories of the ancestors? The short list of fiction by Chinese authors I have read also focuses on motivations often more so than events.

Kingston faces a common problem of first-generation U.S. citizens living with their foreign born parents, that of being torn between the traditional and assimilation. We saw something similar to this in Silko's "Ceremony" and Erdrich's "Love Medicine", even though the Native American culture was engulfed by Western culture instead of being immersed into it. There will be common issues faced by all immigrant children, but Chinese immigrant children from Kingston’s generation face additional problems, and that is the culture her parents left in China has changed, too. In other words, even if Kingston wanted to return to China, there would be no place to go to that is like the village her parents left. After her parents left China, the way of life for their village changes under Communist rule, not once, but several times. Therefore, Kingston’s parents are lost at sea culturally, being different from both the community they moved to and the community they moved from. I wonder sometimes if this is one of the reasons some Chinese families try so desperately to keep their children from being assimilated, so that they can retain an oasis of the culture they have known.

Even though "Warrior Woman" was not what I expected it to be, the prose is beautiful, I enjoyed the story-telling format and wanted more when I was done. I did a project on Kingston in class and found her to be a fascinating woman. I found that the students in my Minority Literature class thought Kingman was this bitter, sad woman disappointed in her childhood, but I thought that Kingman wrote some very funny things in "Warrior Woman," yes dry, but very funny. I think this even more after seeing some video of her. In this video, she tells her journey into poetry writing, and it is hilarious. You have to listen to her poem about the walruses. To see how strong a woman she is, this video that describes the struggles she went through to write the "Fifth Book of Peace" is powerful. What would you do if your life work was destroyed?

Written on 24 January 2009.

A couple of days ago in the mathematical modeling class that I teach, I lead the students through a discussion of barriers to communication, and so I began thinking about the barriers to communication for children of non-native English speakers. I remember, in the movie “Double Happiness,” Jade Li was in an audition for a part in a movie that was being directed by a Chinese woman. Even though Jade grew up in Canada, she learned how to speak a Chinese dialect from ther parents, and the director was excited to find a Chinese-speaking actress. However, when given the script to read, Jade had to admit that she did not read Chinese, so she was caught between cultures, not really belonging to either one. Kingston is like that in the last chapter of Woman Warrior, because when she goes to school she struggles with English and at the same time her mother tells her that she has a very limited Chinese vocabulary, so at this point Kingston’s language skills are caught between the two cultures, and she doesn’t know how to speak in either. She tortures another Chinese-American girl who doesn’t read in class, because she is trying to convince herself that she has a voice.

In "Woman Warrior," Brave Orchid cuts Kingston’s tongue. For a long time, Kingston believes that this was to keep her from speaking, but her mother tells her that she cut her tongue to help her speak. I think this is another example of a first generation American being caught between cultures. Once again, when I read this I was reminded of a scene from “Double Happiness.” Jade Li is getting ready to leave home and she tells her mother that she and her father never told her that she was pretty, talented or smart. He mother replies that they didn’t say those things because it was bad luck and so they said the opposite. Jade grew up in Canada going to school with students whose parents praised them. If she had grown up in China, then she would have understood the motivations of her parents, because those motivations would have been shared with others in the community. I think this is part of the reason for the misunderstanding Kingston has with her mother about the tongue cutting, that if Kingston had grown up in China, there would have been other such practices discussed among the schoolchildren, and she would have understood the place of such an act in the context of the surrounding culture. With the perspective of years, Kingston grows to believe that her family loves her and she is worthy of eating food, and that when they said, “When fishing for treasures in the flood, be careful not to pull in girls (52),” it was because that was just what people said about girls, and didn’t specifically apply to her.

As I said, the students in my class seem to think that Kingston resents her childhood. Even the back of my book says the book is “anti-nostalgic,” whatever that means, but I didn’t really see that. Maybe because of the way I was brought up, with few resources and with distant parents, but I saw the book more of a celebration of finding voice. Yes, Kingston hears terrible things about herself because she is a girl, and because her behavior is not very Chinese, but without those experiences, without the talking story about the no-name aunt and Fa Mu Lan, and without the cutting of her tongue, Kingston would not have the voice she now has. I often worry that the other students in the class are projecting their own values and morals onto the characters we read about, and I am probably doing the same here, but I know that I wouldn’t be who I am without the problems I faced, and I have to think that Kingston feels similarly.

I have read about Kingston’s work with the Vietnam War veterans, and I think that struggling to find her voice as a child has led her to teach the power of storytelling to others. She ran workshops for veterans from both sides of the conflict, and asked them to write their stories. In a way, the people returning from the war were immigrants, because they had experiences that the people at home did not want to hear, and so these veterans were trying to speak in a language that no one else understood. As a result, they lost the ability to talk story. Kingston taught these men and women how to tell their story and use that to again become a part of our culture by adding to it. I cannot believe that she can regret her childhood when it has helped heal so many people.

Written on 30 January 2009.