Week 8: Friday 25 May. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
SUMMARY OF LECTURE: “Perfect filiality.” DM sees TWW as distinctive
achievement within the literary genre of the memoir, one that models the process of
“translation”: literally, carrying across elements –in this case a mother’s “talkstories— of one culture into another. MHK as narrator is the subjectivity
empowered to enact this process: the daughter who becomes the agent of
transmission of what should not or cannot be told about the culture of origin.
Kingston achieves this through a tightly-structured “figural” or “tropological”
organization. DM provides a lengthy discussion of The Warrior: 31, 35, 44-5; and
the writer as an “outlaw knotmaker” who restores the “no-name aunt” to the
family’s “story”, and in so doing, makes a name for herself.
I. MEMOIR AS A LITERARY GENRE
A. Abrams’s distinctions among the terms biography autobiography, and memoir
represent a progressive independence of historical information.
That is, a biography is a narrative based on historical evidence. A biography tells
the story of a life and therefore has a narrator who is more or less overtly present in the
book as the judging, the authoritative witness in discussion of the evidence. A biography
makes a contract with the reader that each thing said in the book is backed up by
historically available and in a sense replicable evidence. When speculation is taking
place, there will be clear rhetorical signals to let you know it. A biography should tell
you about its sources with the greatest specificity so that if you yourself wish to go back
into the evidence, to look at it for yourself, you should be able to do so. It is an
objectifying kind of narrative which rests on, as I say, a contract with the reader that what
you find in the book is not made up and Those kinds of things intervene in it because the
point of reference is to the actuality of human lives and their recoverability through
research and judgment.
An autobiography is also a narrative but it’s not based on replicable evidence.
The source is the person. An autobiography is biography written by the person, him or
herself, and it is shaped as a narrative usually with a kind of a teleological design by
which I mean that the story told is of steady improvement. Getting better all the time is
pretty much what an autobiography is about. And frequently, in our time,
autobiographies are told for the purposes of helping others recover from their own follies
and the idea, the immodesty of the autobiography, why this is a book about me, usually
has to have a point. The message is you who are like me could also change as I have
done. And frequently that is the plot, so to speak, of the autobiography. But it usually
traces a developmental history. It is a book that accounts for the development of the self,
an analysis of the self in its best guise and frequently involves going through a discovery
of folly or a flaw and a correction of it. The contract it makes with the reader is: I’m
going to give you privileged access to me by writing my own story in my own voice and
telling you truths about myself.
A memoir lies at even a further distance from the documentation of fact. A
memoir positions itself in an historical era and gives the privileged witness of a
Wk8-lecture 2
1
participant on that. A memoir positions the self in a milieu of others, and provides the
eye witness account of someone who participated in some historically significant
experience and lived to tell the tale, so that a memoir has a focus, is usually focused
within a time frame and definitely its importance is as a memory, personal memory of
shared time.
Well, that said, what Maxine Hong Kingston has given us in The Woman Warrior
is, as she calls it, a memoir of a childhood among ghosts. So who is she and why is her
perspective important? We need then to revert to the actual person in her historical
documentable self in order to establish a point of reference.
II. THE CULTURAL SITUATION OF MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
Maxine Hong Kingston was born on October 27, 1940 in Stockton, California.
Her mother trained as a midwife in To Keung School of Midwifery in Canton. Her father
had been brought up a scholar and taught in his village of Sun Woi, near Canton. He left
China for America in 1924, but finding no work for a poet or calligrapher, he took a job
in a laundry. He was swindled out of his share of the laundry, but his wife Ying Lan
joined him in 1939 in New York City, and they then moved to Stockton where he had
been offered a job in a gambling house. Maxine, their first American-born child, was
named after a lucky blond gambler who frequented his work. Kingston's first language
was Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese.
Now, this you didn’t learn in The Woman Warrior, right? Right, because the
memoir has no obligation to give background information about the narrator. A memoir
is a literary genre in which the narrator can leave out things at will because the focus is
elsewhere than on the self.
Highly salient to our understanding of this book, however, is that detail about
Kingston’s first language: Say Yup, a dialect of Cantonese. She grew up in Stockton,
California, surrounded by other immigrants from her father’s village; and the storytelling
she heard as a child influenced her later writing. By the age of nine, her progress in
English enabled her to write poems in her new language. An extremely bright student,
she won eleven scholarships that allowed her to attend the University of California at
Berkeley. Kingston began as an engineering major but she soon switched to English
literature. She received her BA in English literature from Berkeley in 1962, and earned a
teaching certificate to teach in the public schools. In 1962, the year that she graduated
from college, she married Earl Kingston, an actor, and they moved to Hawaii.
In 1976 while Kingston was teaching creative writing at a private high school in
Hawaii, her first book was published: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Childhood
Among Ghosts. Kingston’s second book, China Men, was published in 1980. A more
sociologically oriented book, China Men, includes a chronological list of discriminatory
laws regarding Chinese immigrants and it has a different kind of literary shape from The
Woman Warrior. I want to make that a point of reference today because my lectures on
Kingston will once again focus on the transmission of identity through the female
lineage, which is the main theme pursued in The Woman Warrior and in fact provides its
very structure. But I will tell you that in interviews, Kingston has said that her book,
China Mean and The Woman Warrior were initially conceived as one work, one huge
historical aggregation of both the male and female experiences of immigration from a
Wk8-lecture 2
2
single village in China. The transformation of their lives and the survival of cultural
artifact in their lives from China were both treated in the same books, but it was quite
simply too long. And so, it was split apart, and that provided her with the opportunity of
giving a different literary structure to the second book, China Man.
Equally salient to an understanding of the book is what Kingston has said about
her aims as a writer, some of which we touched on in the interview on Wednesday. I
took my quesiton about style from an interview Kingston held with a member of the
Stanford faculty in 1980. This was Professor Arturo Islas, himself the son of an
immigrant family whose first language was not English. At Stanford, Islas taught both
American literature and Chicano Studies, and therefore like Kingston dealt professionally
all the time with the relationship between literature and the politics of representation.
Kingston told him,
There is an expectation among readers and critics that I should represent my
race. I don’t like hearing non-Chinese people say to a Chinese person, ‘well now I know
about you because I’ve read Maxine Hong Kingston’s books’. Each artist has a unique
voice. Many readers don’t understand that. The problem of how representative one is
can only be solved when you have many more Chinese American writers. The readers
will see how diverse all people are. Black writers have already surmounted this problem.
Of course there are Chinese American writers who seek to represent the rest of us. They
end up as tourist manuals or Chamber of Commerce public relations whitewash. What I
look forward to is the time when many of us are published and then we will be able to see
the range of viewpoints, of visions, of what it is to be Chinese American.
She pauses and then adds,
I’ve asked my sisters on a range of one to ten, how odd do you think we were?
How odd was our upbringing? One of them said we were an eight, and that means pretty
odd, which is to say, we are not very representative of Chinese Americans.
She explains how in her books she writes about one small village in South China which is
not representative of greater China. From that village a few people came to American
and settled in Stockton.
A Stockton Chinese is not the same as a San Francisco Chinese. I know that if I
write about some very particular customs, some people will say, ‘no, we don’t have that
custom at all.’
She calls the entire issue of being a representative ethnic writer very bothersome. Her
only resolution to the problem has been to give expression to her own vision.
Because that’s what’s interesting, the way one person sees the world. It’s up to
other people to ask themselves whether they think like that or not. And if they don’t think
like that, you should be very exciting to them. They would read about something that they
are completely unfamiliar with. I just visited Hong Kong and loved seeing Chinese who
were different from myself to think of the possibility of another way of being Chinese or
of being a human being is much more exciting than to see someone who is just like me.
Wk8-lecture 2
3
And so her aim as a writer is not to present a representative Chinese person in any
way. The question then becomes, if she isn’t attempting to put on record what it’s like to
be a Chinese American woman of her generation, what is she trying to do?
I want to mention four things that seem to me obvious and important about
Kingston’s aims as an artist and her accomplishments in The Woman Warrior.
1) The Woman Warrior deals with the liminal position of the immigrant to
America, where the myth of opportunity constructs expectations; thus, her memoir deals
at the psychological level with the way our ego-constructs break down in confrontation
with the culturally dominant Other. America is called “Gold Mountain,” a trope for
magical good fortune. So, Kingston’s book is about that crossing, coming with
expectations, and then about the way that the self constructed in one culture breaks down
in confrontation with the cultural dominance of the American other. It is an immigrant
story. It is a story about how a family and a self recompose themselves in conditions of
great struggle— one of the oldest narratives we have in this country
2) Kingston’s second accomplishment is to decenter the notion that culture is
European. This story looks toward Asia, to China specifically, but also to Viet Nam
which is a constant point of reference in The Woman Warrior because the brother is there
when the book is being written or when the present of the book is being constructed. It
asks about the relationship of a tradition of meaning-making in a new context. What is it
that the ancestors passed on to you, what is it that the high culture and the folk culture
contained that you brought with you in your baggage; something like the weeds that you
bring, not knowing you have them there until you begin to take them out and they start to
flourish in new ground? What, exactly, is going to prove useful? And how can the
cultural past of the previous site of the family, be made to flourish in a new place?
3) For the narrator of The Woman Warrior, the central problem is specifically the
acquisition of audible speech within the dominant culture— not solely a problem women
experience, though women often experience it as women. It’s a problem you faced
(possibly) in coming to Stanford, --in a small way, you in writing papers for this class;
and that I face in giving lectures when I don’t know what you hear when I speak.
However, I at least grew up speaking English. The distance is far greater when the
mother-tongue is not English.
4) Finally, as a writer, Kingston like Zora Neale Hurston is faced with the
difficulty of creating a print version of the speaking voice, and like Hurston she employs
a form of dialect writing. Kingston discussed this issue with an interviewer. “People
don’t seem to understand what I am doing. For example … I don’t spell the words right.
I don’t spell them the way you would find them in a Cantonese dictionary or in a
Mandarin dictionary because I decided to spell them a new way, because Americans
would speak in this new way.” In representing the way her characters address each other
she tried to give a written impression of the psodies of their distinctive speech patterns,
which she characterized as “a combination of Chinese rhythms and American slang.”1
Wk8-lecture 2
4
--So The Woman Warrior is a book that presents itself as a memoir, a literary
view of personal experience of three historically significant kinds: immigration to
America from China; coming into adulthood during America’s most significant war with
an Asian country; and finding one’s voice as a literary artist of those experiences.
III. LITERARY STRUCTURE IN THE WOMAN WARRIOR
A. Tropological organization
How is The Woman Warrior put together? I think the structure can best be
described as a knot, composed of five strands corresponding to the titles listed in the table
of contents. Within each of these five sections, Kingston twists together, like
intertwining threads, a past time and a present time. The past is storied time, the time of
myth; the present is the era of childhood or young adulthood in which the narrator is
attempting to puzzle out the meanings of the myth, that is, relevance of “the invisible
world” to the “solid America” in which she will have to survive as an adult.
Thus,
the structure of the memoir is not chronological but what I’ll call “figural” or
“tropological”— that is, it consists of an elaboration of central tropes.
The plot of action conducted in the memoir can be captured in the word
“affiliation”: in the course of the memoir the narrator finds a way to make use of her
familial and cultural lineage, to affiliate herself with a line of ancestors. She conducts
this action by developing an identification with her mother’s talk-stories via a
transformation of the “invisible world” of stories into useful knowledge. Though the
book is divided into five distinct parts, a set of themes and tropes run through the whole
memoir, repeatedly resurfacing, until they are looped and knotted into a design completed
by the way the last words connect to the first words in the book. “You must not tell
anyone,” says the mother, at the book’s opening; at the book’s ending, having told
everything, the daughter says with great satisfaction, “It translated well.”
Today I want to focus on the site of the formation of major trope that is knotted
into the book: the transformation of the Chinese-American girl into the woman warrior—
which is a trope for the Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston.
B. Trope of the Woman Warrior -- Pages 31, 35, 44-5
The central myth in The Woman Warrior is the folk-tale of the legendary heroine
Fa Mu Lan. MuLan is a woman who disguised herself as a man in order to take her
father’s place in battle. She is a well-known Chinese folk-heroine, who in some ways
correspondes to the fgure of the Amazon in Western Culture. Amazons appear in
classical epics—they are important to the plots of both the Iliad and the Aeneid-- and also
in classical sculpture: most famously, on the frieze of the Parthenon which is conserved
at the British Museum in London. Amazons appear in these epics, I believe, as a
masculine fantasy that embodies projections onto women of the most extreme forms of
aggression permitted to the men who are idealized as heroes in classical legend.
Amazons are seen as their female version of cruel warrior-heroes such as Achilles: they
are ferocious female warriors who live in gynocratic communities, who cut off their right
Wk8-lecture 2
5
breasts in order to improve their skills at archery, and who routinely murder the male
children they bear, and cripple the male prisoners they capture in war, to make them
slaves.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir shows that this mythic figure has a counterpart
in male-dominant Chinese culture; and Kingston makes it explicitly the task of the female
narrator to create space in the symbol for a female subjectivity. What enduring meanings
can be discovered in this myth?
As we know, the Disney studios recently invested in the same question. Hoamny
of you have seen the animated film MuLan? Disney’s MuLan is a romantic comedy, in
which the daughter replaces her father in battle, where she meets the man of her dreams,
and is rewarded by marriage. [Comment on cross-dressing heroines: Julie Andrews in
Victor/Victoria vs Greta Garbo in Queen Christina—actress does or doesn’t project a
fantasy identification with the masculine role. Disney’s doesn’t.]
But Kingston’s version in the section “White Tigers” is a fantasy about
overcoming a specifically female destiny stated at the opening of section 2, “White
Tigers” [p19]: “When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that
we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen.
Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who
hurt her family.”
In Kingston’s version, it is not the father but the mother who provides the model
of a contemporary fulfillment of this fantasy. The myth of Fa Mu Lan provides Kingston
in childhood with a cultural ancestress, a psychological reference point who is and is not
like her mother. In most ways, the struggle to become Mu Lan is what The Woman
Warrior is all about.
So I want to look closely with you at the culmination, in “White Tigers,” of the
fantasy of being recognized as a woman warrior: pages 31, 35, & 45. These are the
strands that are looped together both at the end of the section “White Tigers” and also at
the end of the memoir.
PAGE 31: deals with the vision in the gourd that the warrior-in-training receives on the
day of her first menstrual period.
1. This passage echoes and reverses Brave Orchid’s sinister warning to her
daughter, in the talk-story about the “No Name Woman”. “Now that you have started to
menstruate, what happened to her could happen to you. Don’t humiliate us. You
wouldn’t like to be forgotten as if you had never been born.” [5] The fear of what might
“happen” is converted in the fantasy into options: “we are asking you to put off children
for a few more years.”[31]
2. A important detail in this passage is its reference to establishing “a descent
line.” [31]: “To console me for being without my family on this day, they let me look
inside the gourd. My whole family was visiting friends on the other side of the river.
Everybody had on good clothes and was exchanging cakes. It was a wedding. My
mother was talking to the hosts: ‘Thank you for taking our daughter. Wherever she is,
she must be happy now. She will certainly come back if she is alive, and if she is a spirit,
you have given her a descent line.”
Here the passage gathers up an important strand in the story of “No Name
Woman,” where the narrator speculates about the suicide of her “forgotten”
Wk8-lecture 2
6
anscestress.[15] “She had taken the child with her into the wastes. At birth the two of
them had felt the same raw pain of separation, a wound that only the family pressing tight
could close. A child with no descent line would not soften her life, but trail after her,
ghost-like, begging her to give it purpose.” Equally, this passage looks forward to the
culminating tale of the poetess Ts’ai Yen, who, after twelve years as a captive, was
ransomed and married so that her father would have desirable descendants. 109: “She
brought.. her songs back from the savage lands…one has been passed down to us.. a song
that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well.”
The fantasy warrior, then, is a figure that will depart from home and learn her
disciplines in a savage land, but will be able to return even as a spirit and be recognized
by her family. Integration into the family is one of the two most significant attributes of
the ideal of the woman warrior. “Yes, I would be happy. How full I would be with all
their love for me. I would have for a new husband my own playmate, dear since
childhood, who loved me so much he was to become a spirit bridegroom for my sake. We
will be so happy when I come back to the valley, healthy and strong and not a ghost.”
3. Another important set of details is added in the scene of return, page 35, which
recounts how her parents carve into her back the list of family grievances which it is her
obligation to redress.
First, she is welcomed back into the household as if she were a son. But the
following day, they call upon her to enact a symbolic rebirth [34]: “I caught a smell—
metallic, the iron smell of blood, as when a woman gives birth, at the sacrifice of a large
animal, as when I menstruated and dreamed red dreams.” Here Kingston has begun the
work of affiliating the despised menstrual blood with the power of the warrior. It is not
the blood the warrior spills but the blood that she carries in her own body that enables her
to perform her heroic work. The menstrual flow is sublimated into the flow of blood that
defines her as the family’s representative, in the following paragraphs. [35] “My mother
caught the blood and wiped the cuts with a cold towel soaked in wine.” Necessarily, the
mother assists in this process of sublimation, for it is essential to the valuation of the
narrator’s female lineage that the identity she is forming should not be focused on
identification with the father. “’We’ll have you with us until your back heals,’ she said. //
When I could sit up again, my mother brought two mirrors, and I saw my back covered
entirely with words in red and black files, like an army, like my army. ”
We notice here that it is the mother who holds up the mirror—and holds up not
one but two. In the practical sense, this gesture enables the daughter to read the list of
grievances for which she is going to risk her life. But the double mirror can be seen to
have a symbolic function as well: what the parents see cannot be transmitted directly to
the daughter, but has to be reflected off yet another surface, displaced into a form that she
can read and be motivated by.
4 . Pages 44-45 completes the fantasy in triumph. The woman warrior is
recuperated back into the family without losing her status as a great liberator; she
achieves “perfect filiality” without becoming either a mere wife or a slave.
Let’s look at some of the salient details in these two pages:
a). First, we note on page 44 that she abandons all the female types with whom
she does not identify: the wives kept in the dark by the little bound feet. This older
generation of women “wandered away like ghosts,” she notes—but they too, out of
necessity, turned into swordswomen, returning to haunt and pillage social world
Wk8-lecture 2
7
wherever women are held in low esteem. – I cannot say with certainty, but this may be
Kingston’s comment on the political foundations of a certain strain of contemporary
feminism, which values the ideal of all-female communities.
b) Second, we note that an all-female community is not the outcome sought by the
fantasy shaping this book. No: this fantasy requires return to the family, to achieve the
recognition withheld specifically from females in the family’s culture, and specifically,
withheld from this female (or so she feels) [45]: “I went home to my parents-in-law and
husband and son. My son stared, very impressed by the general he had seen in the
parade, but his father said ‘It’s your mother. Go to your mother.’ My son was delighted
that the shiny general was his mother too. She gave him her helmet to wear and her
swords to hold.” Note how we have moved from the position of 1st person subjectivity
to 3rd person objectification in this paragraph—she is disappearing into her own legend.
And by the end of the fantasy, everything has become subjunctive: “should, would
could,” the grammar of wishes, lies and dreams: “…My mother and father and the entire
clan would be living happily on the money I had sent them. My parents had bought their
coffins. They would sacrifice a pig to the gods, that I had returned. From the words on
my back, and how they were fulfilled, the villagers would make a legend about my
perfect filiality.”
As we know, this passage marks only the end of the fantasy, not the end of the
section “White Tigers,” which like the other sections of the memoir moves from myth to
application. But rather than following “White Tigers” to closure, I want to turn to the
filament from which it is strung in the memoir, the ending of no-name woman, where the
narrator has found an exact meaning for the story she has just told about the dangling
ancestress preserved in family memory as a cancelled person, a ghost (p.16: 2 last
paragraphs.
C. CLOSURE
Kingston’s memoir is, then, quite precisely a creative restitution of this ghost: it
respectfully restores her to a descent line; it translates her and gives her a habitation in
solid America.
On Wednesday I read from an interview in which MHK stated that she did not
believe there was such a thing as a “representative” Chinese American— and certainly
did not wish her book to be read as if it were about “typical” immigrants. She added that
she did not aim for her writing to be “politically useful”; she disavows any aim of
“political correctness.” Nonetheless, the narrator in this memoir develops a distinctively
political consciousness in the course of defining herself within her family and within the
larger American culture where she seeks a way of belonging.
This political consciousness is the direct subject of the end of “White Tigers,”
where the narrator puzzles over the question of the relevance of the myth of Fa Mu Lan
to her own life. [49] “To avenge my family, I’d have to storm across China to take back
our farm from the Communists; I’d have to rage across the United States to take back the
laundry in New York and the one in California. Nobody in history has conquered and
united both North America and Asia. A descendant of eighty pole fighters, I ought to be
able to set out confidently, march down our street, get going right now. …Surely the
eighty pole fighters, though unseen, would follow me and lead me and protect me, as is
the wont of ancestors.”
Wk8-lecture 2
8
Well, they do, in the form of the talk-stories with which they have endowed her—
stories that it will become her particular genius to transform into American idioms. In the
interview from which I have been quoting, for example, Kingston explains the variety of
naming practices that the Chinese in her family adopted when they came to America.
Chinese people give each other multiple names, she observes: “many Chinese have a
baby name given to them by their parents; when they grow up they choose an adult name,
one associated with an ability or a feat. People [also] often change a name to celebrate a
change in their lives. Then [too] most who came to the United States have an American
name. Naming tells the world who you are. It also gives a new American identity; and
one mustn’t forget the paper names for the immigration service.”2
We notice that the narrator is not addressed by name in this book, except once:
when her mother makes peace with her by calling her by an affectionate nickname,
“Little Dog”[108] “She has not called me that endearment for years— a name to fool the
gods,” the narrator comments. “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.”[109] I think we are
meant to notice this moment of nicknaming and naming by family position, and more
subtly, to observe that within the memoir the narrator too is otherwise a No Name
Woman. Eventually, however, she identifies the power of writing as her personal version
of the sword wielded by the mythical woman warrior. She performs the filial duty of
protecting and avenging her family by speaking against the ugly racial stereotyping and
bigotry captured in what she calls [53] “‘chink’ words and ‘gook’ words too.” “The
swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar,” she comments [53]. “What we have in
common are the words at our backs.” And reporting is her vengeance—not beheading
and gutting her enemies, but countering their force with written words.
[added 6-6-99] Yet the narrator remains a No Name Woman thoruhgout the
memoir; we do not see her acquire either her married name or the name by which she is
known as a an author. Why not? This issue of being named is a theme in several of the
works by women we have read this quarter. In To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay is
known only by her married name. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the heroine
acquires a string of names that are the equivalent in her life of educational degrees: she is
first called “Alphabet”; then Janie, with no family name; then a series of married names
which she never applies to herself: Killicks, Stark, Wood.
In Kingston’s memoir, the narrator is never called by the name “Maxine.” Her
American name, we observe, is therefore the outcome of having written The Woman
Warrior, an ambitious and original work of American literature. The publication of the
book transforms her into an author. Like the white horse of her fantasy, the white pages
of her book carry her name on into the future, on a saddle ornamented with cranes, the
device associated with her ancestress the pole fighter who invented crane boxing [20]; on
a book jacket covered entirely with words in red and black files. The current
embodiment of the long line of talk-storytellers who have stoked her imagination,
Maxine Hong Kingston emerges from anonymity to preserve their memory, and affirm
her connection to them by the power of words. Perfect filiality. It translates well.
“Susan Brownmiller Talks with Maxine Hong Kingston,” The Woman Warrior: A
Casebook, ed. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Oxford UP, 1999), 177.
1
Wk8-lecture 2
9
“Maxine Hong Kingston,” interview with Arturo Islas, Women Writers of the West Coast, ed. Marilyn
Yalom (Santa Barbara: Capra Books, 1983), p.15.
2
Wk8-lecture 2
10