I'm writing this review up from my notes unfortunately, as I read it when I was too busy to sit down and type. It's one of the best memoirs I've ever read, marked by sensitivity, sorrow, unresolvable conflict transformed into a breathtaking work of art, an epic canvas unrolling intricacies and intimacies that made me miss my tube stop, get the wrong train, mix up bus routes, so absorbed was I by the character of Brave Orchid, the narrator's mother. This woman she admires and fears and at times feels rejected and hated by, whose behaviour is a mystery to her because she refuses to explain anything, seems to expect her to raise herself Chinese in barbarian America, a land of ghosts. I felt the desire the narrator had to accomplish this feat, her frustration at falling short of performing the impossible taskThis is a feminist text. It opens with a story, told by mother to daughter as a cautionary tale against promiscuity (or rather, the transgression of sexual boundaries) about the death of a female relative. The narrator, given only the bones of this story and perhaps haunted by it, has to imagine the details, and does so repeatedly, reorienting them each time to fit different perspectives. first, she rehabilitates her kinswoman's reputation by imagining her raped, blameless, caught in the fatal web of an intensely masculinist society. Second, she breathes life back into her by constructing a romance in which star crossed love comes to grief. Finally, she reviews the situation from the perspective of the villagers and family, delicately explaining their actions with chiaroscuro. And throughout each of these retellings, she integrates the effect the story had on her life in the USA, the way it changed how she thought about others' views of her and how she tried to behave socially. The result is a braided story that binds women's lives across time and culture, a half-tested guide-rope though hostile environments. A rope is many things, among them both saviour and weapon against oneself as well as others.Rage at the position of girls is worked into wish fulfilling self-mythologising in the delicate and poetic yet fierce story 'White Tigers', in which the narrator fantasises about doing what she imagines a girl must do to be valued. Tellingly this includes assuming a male disguise, but remaining a woman 'Marriage and childbirth strengthen the swordswoman, who is not a maid like Joan of Arc'. This protest story is a self-made talisman for the narrator, and it reflects images of Chinese culture that heal and sustain her, suppressing the words that chafe and damage. She makes her own empowerment by rooting down into her heritage, not by rejecting it. Parallel to this self-care project of making images she can inhabit and revision herself through, run the narratives through which she constructs her mother's humanity and inner life, gradually building images of her she can make sense of and feel for. Once again, to me these vignettes illuminate an unfamiliar style of being, yet one I can appreciate and respect: 'the sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favoured by the gods'. Thus the narrator makes sense of her mother's secret night studying at medical school, covering the tracks of her path to shining success.At times it was almost unbearable to read the things said about girl-children (vermin in rice, for instance) as an adult woman, but the narrator was recalling hearing them as a child. The little warrior screams in protest, throws tantrums uncontained, paints everything black, refuses for years to speak. How did Chinese girls in China avoid such anguish, if they did? What did they learn that protected them? Or what, on the other hand, made the narrator vulnerable among ghosts to the rage and misery such hatred called forth from her? I remembered the miscommunications of The Joy Luck Club, and how lucid Tan made them by working both sides, playing out all the angles as omniscient author, comforting me with the reassurance that however differently, conflictedly and incommunicably, mothers and daughters loved each other. Kingston offers no such clarity. We have the narrator's feelings and her glorious, multivalent fantasies of her mother's inner life, her therapeutic self-mythologising, a patchy, lumpen blending of ways of being and knowing than opens doors and hearts, names spirits, recounts mysteries, but maintains, I felt, a kind of respectful refusal to assume. If Tan's edges cut cleanly, Kingston's are left rough. They scrape and hurt: something is catastrophically lost between China and the ghost country, the possibility of wholeness has fallen into the sea and sunk to the bottom. I gave The Joy Luck Club five stars, but Kingston's rejection of omniscience in this book makes its approach, to me, more... ethical, more admirable. The honesty and care the narrator employs is humbling. she conceives of her need for explanation for her mother's careful keeping of tradition as pouring concrete over a forest, killing the subtlety and cleverness of Chinese communication styles and life, even though it's her earnest desire, and blameless, surely, even admirable, because she is willing to become the carrier of tradition but it denied the opportunity. Yet her mother cannot shoulder the blame either; explanation is not the mode of conveyance needed, only the osmosis possible in immersion could educate the wayward daughter. Locked in the paths or poses of their unanswerable desires, mother and daughter carve their shapes into each other by attrition as they are rocked and rolled by USian waves. There is no resolution, only the story and its scarred traces.
Probably most intriguing about the structure of Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior, beginning with "No Name Woman” and ending in A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” is that it characterizes Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, told in the interesting format of non-sequential episodes, as one that begins in oppressed silence but ends in universal song. When looking at the three woman warrior figures in the book – her aunt, the No Name Woman; the rewritten legendary warrior in “White Tigers” (based upon the Mulan legend); and the poet and barbarian captive, Ts’ai Yen – the characteristics that unite them all are their determined attempts at asserting their own kinds of power, femininity, and individuality in patriarchal Chinese society. The methods through which they do so revolve around words written, spoken, or not spoken: from the silence practiced by No Name Woman, to the words written on the warrior’s back, to the songs created by Ts’ai Yen and, finally, to the stories that Kingston as the author uses to find the marks of the woman warrior within herself, and to do so in a way that allows the readers insight into a life that even the narrator is grappling to understand. The words that open Woman Warrior, which begins with the story of No Name Woman, are quite interestingly an admonition of silence: “’You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell you’” (3). This admonition signifies a promise, and a breaking of a promise: The narrator’s mother Brave Orchid is showing courage and confidence in her daughter by sharing something that should not be remembered, yet at the same time, her mother is breaking the silence surrounding her sister-in-law, the titled No Name Woman. This is one of the first of many of the narrator’s mother’s talk-stories, ones that were told with a purpose to aid her children in life events, while sealing the bond between child and mother. The story of the woman warrior, who is the protagonist of “White Tigers,” is created in history and then transformed by the narrator into one of triumph through the breaking of silences. Inspired by Kingston’s childhood and the stories of Yue Fei and Mulan, the chapter becomes another way for the narrator to celebrate the breaking of silences, something that continues throughout the book. This union between mother and daughter the novel can be seen as the compromise of generations, an idea carried out in Kingston’s appropriation of myths and stories seen in the retelling of these woman warriors. Her mother, in fact, is the narrator’s guide of the methods in which to appropriate talk-stories for her own purposes. Kingston’s retellings are part of the idea that a culture growing up in one country can appropriate the lessons of their parents, who grew up in another. It is the idea and the hope that stories created by a patriarchal culture can still make room for its daughters, ultimately one the most important ideas Kingston communicates in her beautifully rendered book.
What do You think about The Woman Warrior (1989)?
[3.5 stars]After experiencing Kingston’s writing in China Men two months back, when I saw the opportunity to read The Woman Warrior next, I was excited to begin reading. The premise of China Men didn’t appeal to me as much and, perhaps because of that, it was slightly boring for me, but The Woman Warrior was a much better read now that I knew what to expect from Kingston.The Woman Warrior does what China Men did best, which is to blend and fuse fact with fiction with an expertise I’ve only experienced in Kingston’s novels. While the effect of her writing is not as potent as it was in China Men, I still loved her for breathing fiction into reality. It just makes for a better reading experience, it makes reality better.Another aspect I thought was enjoyable was the intertextuality of the memoir. At several points in this book, we get to see her refer to characters we’ve already met in China Men and I felt more comfortable to have already been familiar with some of Kingston’s other relatives; to have already read some of their stories in China Men. I’m not sure which one was meant to be read first in this case, but I felt more comfortable with Kingston’s storytelling having already known her as a novelist.What I was uncomfortable with in this book, though, are her assumptions about Chinese as a whole despite herself having only half a Chinese experience. As someone who was born in India but raised in America, while I do (unfortunately) have to lump together a lot of assumptions about Indians via my own experiences, I do comprehend that not all Indians are the same and I cannot judge one person based on my conversations with another. At times Kingston, maybe simply for convenience, merges all Chinese together with certain attributes and I’m a bit doubtful of this approach. Is she simply assuming we’ll know better even though she doesn’t explicitly say so? Or is she really merging all Chinese together based on her own experiences (good or bad)?This is something that keeps me thinking because at times, her “moral of the story” is clearly illustrating how we often forget about the places we come from and why there’s a problem with this, but then in other moments, she just outright says something along the lines of “Chinese men…Chinese women…Chinese schools…” and a lot of generalizing occurs here. I noticed she also did this a bit in China Men and I’m aware that she’s also been accused of rewriting Chinese mythology without ever having gone to China in the first place. While I can see why she plays with certain elements and stereotypes in China Men, since it’s tagged as mostly fictional, in The Woman Warrior however—a memoir, or so it is labeled—, it’s a bit unsettling.Regardless I can’t say this was not an enjoyable read. I would recommend it if you want to learn a bit more about the Chinese-American experience in an impressive writing style.
—Yamini
Began feeling like a magic realism mental trip and evolved into biography. More than many books I've read, felt like stepping into the author's stream of consciousness and working, with her, on trying to sort out what's real and what's family legend about her own life. A worthwhile journey for an outsider to Asian culture, old and transplanted. I wonder if others raised in North America who experienced two realities -- theirs and their parents -- would react more strongly than myself. Either to empathize or reject the author's perspective.
—Lynda
I wish we had read this in sophomore year of high school instead of Catcher in the Rye. This book is an amazing, lyrically written book about growing up as a girl between two cultures, neither of which is particularly empowering to adolescent girls. What I didn't like about the school system teaching Catcher in the Rye as a 'universal story of adolescence' was because I felt it was a very masculine story of adolescence--the things Holden does (punch walls, order a prostitute, be overly protective of his sister) are very male-oriented and didn't particular resonate with me as a 16-year-old. Kingston shows the equally anguishing process of growing up girl, and the meanness that can come out of that in a much more passive aggressive way that society tends to sanction more for girls. But she also carves out a new path for creating identity and purpose and strings together beautiful metaphors to make it happen.
—Lindsey