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| As we celebrate our 125th anniversary, join us on a trip through the archives to see some of our spectacular reviews, interviews and essays. |
| THE WOMAN WARRIOR by Maxine Hong Kingston | Review first published Nov. 7, 1976 |
| We know as little about the Chinese, now that we have taken up their revolution, as we ever knew — and probably even less about the Chinese in America. Whatever our pretensions, we are not friends but enthusiasts, and there is something glib and in the end patronizing about enthusiasts. Our curiosity is complacent and safe and rarely penetrating. As China watchers we are a little like grown-ups at a puppet show, and it is no wonder that the Chinese are so suspicious of us, so perverse with our visas, preferring the company of a dozen industrialists on a trade mission to the attendance of one armchair partisan. |
| Chinese Americans must find it even more bizarre that we have dismissed the mystery of China for the mystique of the Chinese Revolution. Ten years ago they bewildered us and we ignored them. Now we peer at them in their American Chinatowns, desperate to discover if they belong to Peking or to Taiwan — as if the answer to that one question were all we needed to complete our understanding. Ten years ago they were the clichés of immigrant America. They were the Chinese waiter, the Chinese laundryman. Now they are part of our new rhetoric, and they are still anonymous. |
| Maxine Ting Ting Hong Kingston is a young Chinese American writer, and “The Woman Warrior” is her first book. It is a brilliant memoir. It shocks us out of our facile rhetoric, past the clichés of our obtuseness, back to the mystery of a stubbornly, utterly foreign sensibility, and I cannot think of another book since André Malraux’s melancholy artifice, “La Tentation de l’Occident,” that even starts to do this. “The Woman Warrior” is about being Chinese, in the way the “Portrait of the Artist” is about being Irish. It is an investigation of soul, not landscape. Its sources are dream and memory, myth and desire. Its crises are the crises of a heart in exile from roots that bind and terrorize it. |
| It begins some 50 years before Maxine Kingston was born, some 30 years before the revolution, in the Hong family compound in a peasant village in Kwangtung Province. Another young woman (she is Maxine Kingston’s aunt, but she has no name, because the family has destroyed her name) is about to bear a child. Not her husband’s child — her husband is in America, working — but a child without a patronym, a child who represents not so much her own disgrace as some dark and profound disequilibrium that threatens everyone. The villagers, masked white, already mourning the calamity, march slowly on the compound, swinging lanterns. With knives and rocks they set to their grim work of destroying everything the family owns. Later that night, the young woman gives birth in the family’s ravaged pigsty, and then she drowns herself and her baby. The family finds the bodies, but there is no more mourning. The aunt with a name becomes “No Name Woman”; she becomes a story, one of the admonitory “talk-stories” that Kingston’s mother will tell years later to her California-born daughter. |
| The Chinese ideograph for the female “I,” Maxine Kingston says, means slave. Who was the slave woman? What was she? Chinese names are secret, powerful, substantial. Without a name, she has no explanation; without an explanation, no identity. “The Woman Warrior” is, in a way, about identifying her — this long-dead Chinese woman in whose ghost Maxine Kingston identified herself. |
| “My aunt haunts me. … I do not think she always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.” |
| Maxine accepts the substitution. Among the living, she will speak for No Name Woman. She sets out in her imagination for the China that “even now … wraps double binds around my feet,” and she arrives there more surely than a hundred real visitors. |
| Maxine Kingston grew up in San Francisco, surly in a household ruled by inexplicable taboos and fetishes, furious in a family that could hang a picture of a group of Chinese villagers, who are fishing for treasure and throwing back the girls they catch. In her fantasies, she is a warrior, like Fa Mu Lan, the girl of her mother’s chants who fought gloriously in battle centuries ago and became a legend to the Chinese people. Fa Mu Lan was initiated into superhuman strength and courage among the dragons of the mind and the white tigers of the earth, her parents celebrated her with a son’s feast, carved their grievances on her back, and sent her fourth to avenge an emperor’s tyranny. She led an army of a million peasants and destroyed a dynasty. She became a legend of “perfect filiality,” and then she took off her armor to be a perfect, obedient wife in her husband’s house. |
| Maxine’s parents, in fact, grieve unavenged. Her father leaves his village to earn money in America and never goes home again. Her mother, Brave Orchid, is alone when she loses her first born son and daughter. At the age of 38, she sails alone to Canton to become a doctor at the To Keung Midwifery school. She is a hard woman, and very skillful. She exorcises the hairy ghost that haunted her dormitory. She hides at night, for two years, studying her textbooks, so that no one would ever know how difficult she finds the work. By the time her husband sends for her, she has acquired a slave girl for $50 and has a thriving practice in the province. |
| At 45 in California, she bears another child, Maxine, her “Biggest Daughter,” but she never even once calls her “First Born Daughter.” Consolation is something she refuses. Brave Orchid has five more children in America, and no midwifery practice. She and her husband own a laundry, lose it, buy another and lose that, too, to an urban renewal project. The family that was land-poor in China is slum-poor, immigrant-poor in California. Brave Orchid is querulous and in her way indomitable, but she will not draw her grievances on her Biggest Daughter’s back and send her forth to conquer California. |
| The old Chinese accommodate their ghosts or exorcise them. But Maxine Kingston grew up with too many ghosts to either accommodate or exorcise. The ghosts of her mother’s talk-stories, the ghosts of her warrior fantasies, the ghosts that milled around her and were the American ghosts — the teachers and the classmates, the milkman and the garbageman, the pharmacist from whom she has to beg candy to sweeten the curse of a bottle of medicine sent, by error, to her parents’ house. And she has too many grievances of her own. With 207 childhood grievances pounding in her head, she fights to find a voice for them. |
| Brave Orchid has told her that her tongue was cut, at birth, to make her eloquent — a charming, sweet-voiced future wife. But the confusions of her childhood silence her instead. She flunked kindergarten. For three years, she cannot bring herself to talk at school. Her voice, when she does talk, is the “dried-duck voice” of her disguises. At home, she burrows under piles of laundry, hides herself in closets and secret corners of the cellar. At school, she torments another little Chinese girl — a girl who never talks at all. She pulls her hair, pinches her cheeks, she screams “Talk, talk!,” as if a single word from the bruised and sobbing child would free them both. In the end, she leaves, like any American daughter. She goes to Berkeley on a scholarship, marries an American, apparently — and settles in Hawaii. |
| In her own way she lays to rest the ghost of No Name Woman. “Now colors are gentler and fewer; smells are antiseptic. Now when I peek in the basement window where the villagers say they see a girl dancing like a bottle imp, I can no longer see a spirit in a skirt made of light, but a voiceless girl dancing when she thought no one was looking.” |
| Maxine has told her mother that she, also, talks-story. I wonder if Brave Orchid knows how well she does. Maxine Kingston writes with bitter and relentless love. Her voice, now, is as clear as the voice of Ts’ai Yen, who sang her sad, angry songs of China to the barbarians. It is as fierce as a warrior’s voice, and as eloquent as any artist’s. — Jane Kramer |
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