''The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts'' is a book written by

Chinese American Chinese Americans are Americans of Han Chinese ancestry. Chinese Americans constitute a subgroup of East Asian Americans which also constitute a subgroup of Asian Americans. Many Chinese Americans along with their ancestors trace lineage from ...

author

Maxine Hong Kingston Maxine Hong Kingston (; born Maxine Ting Ting Hong;Huntley, E. D. (2001). ''Maxine Hong Kingston: A Critical Companion'', p. 1. October 27, 1940) is an American novelist. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, wher ...

and published by

Alfred A. Knopf Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. () is an American publishing house that was founded by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in ...

in 1976. The book blends autobiography with old Chinese folktales. ''The Woman Warrior'' won the

National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".''TIME'' magazine's top nonfiction books of the 1970s. Portrait of Maxine Hong Kingston in c

Genre

The specific genre of ''The Woman Warrior'' has been disputed due to Kingston's blend of perspectives, specifically traditional Chinese folktale and memoir. With this mixture, Kingston tries to provide her audience with the cultural, familial, and personal context needed to understand her unique position as a first-generation Chinese-American woman. Susan Stanford Friedman's assessment of autobiography with regard to women and minority groups explains Kingston's intricate blend of perspective and genre: women and cultural minorities often don't have the privilege of viewing themselves as individuals isolated from their gender or racial group. Kingston illustrates this condition through her use of Chinese talk-story, her mother's traditional Chinese perspective, and her own first-person view as a Chinese American.

Plot summary

The book is divided into five interconnected chapters, which read like short stories.

"No Name Woman"

In the first part of this chapter, the narrator is recounting how her mother once told her the story of the No-Name Woman. The chapter essentially opens as a vignette told from the mother's point of view. She tells the story of the No Name Woman, her husband's deceased sister. The middle portion of this chapter is Kingston's retelling of the No Name Woman Story. Kingston uses her own experiences with Chinese tradition and culture to substantiate alternate "versions" of the tale. At the end of "No Name Woman", Kingston reflects on the importance of her mother's story. She concludes that the real lesson is not how No Name Woman died; rather, why she was forgotten.

"White Tigers"

In the first part of "White Tigers", Kingston recounts her mother's talk-story of Fa Mu Lan, a woman warrior who took her father's place in battle. Kingston reverts to talking about her life in America and compares it to the story of Fa Mu Lan. She cannot gather the courage to speak up against her racist boss, let alone save her people in China. In the end, Kingston decides that she and Fa Mu Lan are similar.

"Shaman"

Using her mother's old diplomas and photos from her years in China, Kingston recounts the story of her mother's life as a lady scholar. Brave Orchid, Kingston's mother, returns home after two years of study. Kingston was born during World War II and grew up with her mother's talk-stories. Her mother taught her that all white people around her were "ghosts".

"At the Western Palace"

"At the Western Palace" opens with Brave Orchid, her two children, and her niece at

San Francisco International Airport San Francisco International Airport is an international airport in an unincorporated area of San Mateo County, south of Downtown San Francisco. It has flights to points throughout North America and is a major gateway to Europe, the Middle E ...

. Brave Orchid is waiting for her sister Moon Orchid to arrive from Hong Kong. Moon Orchid is emigrating to the United States after being separated from her sister for 30 years. The sisters arrive back at Brave Orchid's house in the Valley. They are greeted by Brave Orchid's husband, who has aged significantly in Moon Orchid's eyes. Moon Orchid spends the summer in Brave Orchid's house. Brave Orchid, her oldest son, Moon Orchid, and Moon Orchid's daughter drive South to Los Angeles. They are on a mission to find Moon Orchid's husband. At the end of the chapter, Moon Orchid declines in mental health and is forced to return to live with Brave Orchid.

"A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe"

In this story, Kingston reveals that her mother cut the membrane under her tongue. Kingston despises a Chinese girl who is a year older than she is because she refuses to talk. One day, she finds herself alone with the girl in the lavatory. Kingston writes about other eccentric stories. After Kingston screams to her mother and father that she does not want to be set up with the developmentally disabled boy, she launches into a laundry list of things she is and is not going to do, regardless of her mother's opinion. In the final part, Kingston tells the story of Ts'ai Yen, a poet born in A.D. 175.

Themes

Necessity and extravagance

In an essay about ''The Woman Warrior,'' Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong writes about "the protagonist's struggle toward a balance between self-actualization and social responsibility... identified as 'Necessity' and 'Extravagance.'"

Language and narrative voice

The language of ''The Woman Warrior'' invokes a complex juxtaposition of cultural and linguistic voices. Kingston tries to capture and emulate the nuances of Chinese speech through her prose. Huntley, pp. 35–36. Trying to transmit a

Sinitic language The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is ...

by means of an

Indo-European language The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch ...

was no easy task, and one that Kingston had to pursue actively. Nevertheless, ''The Woman Warrior'' is not pure talk-story. There is in fact a blending of first, second, and third person narration. The first-person narration of Kingston is her own American voice, the second-person is that of the Chinese talk-story, and the third-person (which only appears in "At the Western Palace") is a mixture; a talk-story transposed from Kingston's Chinese parents to her American siblings, and finally back to Kingston herself. What results from this combination of voices can only be described as a "fusion language" unique to Kingston, almost like her own type of

Creole language A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...

. Writing in this "fusion language", which is an American language with Asian tones and accents, or rhythm, is a way that Kingston brings together Chinese and Western experiences. This "melding" of the two experiences – the images and metaphors—is what makes Kingston's style her own. Kingston admits that one of the ways she works to bring these two together is to speak Chinese while writing or typing in English.

Writing process

The completion of ''The Woman Warrior'' came from Kingston's on-the-spot writing of her thoughts. She wrote down anything—until some of it started falling into place.Biography of Maxine Hong Kingston
, ''Voices from the Gaps'', 6 March 2008. Retrieved 9 June 2010 via the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, ...

. It was this habit that allowed Kingston to complete ''The Woman Warrior'' in just three years while teaching at a boarding school that demanded she be on call twenty-four hours a day. The original title of ''The Woman Warrior'' was ''Gold Mountain Stories''.Kingston, Maxine Hong. Interview by Jody Hoy. "To Be Able to See the Tao." 1986. Chapter. ''Conversations With Maxine Hong Kingston.'' Ed. Skenazy and Martin. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Print. p. 48 As Kingston states in a 1986 interview with Jody Hoy: '' "The publishers didn't like a title that sounds like a collection of short stories; they never like to publish collections of short stories. I wasn't that happy with either of those titles, I think that calling that book The Woman Warrior emphasizes 'warrior.' I'm not really telling the story of war, I want to be a pacifist."'' In terms of Kingston's decision-making process in what to include and exclude from her story, she admits to using only what she deemed was "necessary" cultural imagery. She didn't want readers to approach her work as "exotic." What cultural references she did allow to remain in ''The Woman Warrior'' she considered to be more "American-friendly." This, of course, was a very subjective endeavor on her part, and, in a more recent reflection she had on ''The Woman Warrior'', Kingston was quoted as calling the cultural references "really Chinese."

Criticism

Since its publication in 1976, ''The Woman Warrior'' has maintained a "vexed reception history that both attests to its popularity and questions it." Much of the debate concerns "autobiographical accuracy, cultural authenticity, and ethnic representativeness," while the central concern is whether or not Kingston offers a faithful representation of Chinese and Chinese American culture. Asian American scholars have expressed strong criticisms of ''The Woman Warrior''. Writer

Jeffery Paul Chan Jeffery Paul Chan (August 19, 1942 – January 11, 2022) was an American author and scholar. He was a professor of Asian American studies and English at San Francisco State University for 38 years until his retirement in 2005. Biography Chan w ...

criticized Kingston for posing the book as non-fiction despite the many fictional elements of its stories. He stated that Kingston gave a distorted view of Chinese culture: one that is partially based on her own experience, but mostly fictional. Chan also noted Kingston's mistranslation of the Cantonese term, "ghost", and Benjamin R. Tong, another Asian American writer, stated that this mistranslation was done deliberately to "suit white tastes so that her book would sell better." BENJAMIN TONG

Tong further stated, based on ''The Woman Warriors fictionalized elements and inaccuracies about Chinese culture and history, that Kingston manipulates her white audience by giving them what they think is Chinese culture, which in reality is only a caricature based on Western stereotypes of Chinese people. Scholar Sheryl Mylan stated that Kingston constructs an Orientalist framework to separate herself from her mother and her culture, but in the process she replicates the ideologies of the American culture. Professor Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong stated that Kingston's "Orientalist effect" is the result of Kingston's failure to commensurately critique the patriarchal values or

institutional racism Institutional racism, also known as systemic racism, is a form of racism that is embedded in the laws and regulations of a society or an organization. It manifests as discrimination in areas such as criminal justice, employment, housing, health ...

of Western society, resulting in a lopsided and biased commentary regarding Chinese culture. Scholar David Li suggested that ''The Woman Warrior'' functions as "a means of contesting power between the dominant culture and the ethnic community; whose value lies in foregrounding the representational issues that have accompanied growth of Asian American creative and critical production." Among the most caustic criticisms was author and playwright

Frank Chin Frank Chin (born February 25, 1940) is an American author and playwright. He is considered to be one of the pioneers of Asian-American theatre. Life and career Frank Chin was born in Berkeley, California on February 25, 1940; until the age of s ...

's, who accused Kingston of being "unChinese" and "a fake". Chin criticized Kingston for giving her readers a fictional and exaggerated representation of Chinese people based on American stereotypes, and also criticized her readers for accepting these stereotypes. Chin also accused Kingston of "practising an inauthentic Orientalism inherited from the apologetic autobiographies written in the Chinese American 'high' tradition." FRANK CHIN1975

In Kingston's defense, reviewer Deborah L. Madsen claimed that this accusation showed Chin's tendency to privilege the low, working-class tradition of Chinese American writing as "authentic", which is not Kingston's tradition. Madsen claimed that autobiographical Chinese American writing is full of competing discourses that differ both culturally and racially, and as Chinese American writers seek both Chinese ethnicity and American citizenship, the result may be "a subversion of racial authenticity", which she believed to be the case with Kingston. Other reviewers, such as Jeehyun Lim, believed that the criticism accusing Kingston of representing the Chinese American community as barbaric "misreads her play with ideas of foreignness and nativeness." In 1982, Kingston herself wrote a rebuttal essay entitled "Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers" in which she disparaged her critics whom she believed were insisting she represent the Chinese to some standard of excellence. "Why must I 'represent' anyone besides myself?" Kingston asked. Others, however, noted that Kingston's stories are fictional and therefore do not represent herself, either. The San Francisco Association of Chinese Teachers warned: "Especially for students unfamiliar with the Chinese background, 'The Woman Warrior''could give an overly negative impression of the Chinese American experience."''Chinese American Literature Since the 1850s''. p. 242. Even a Chinese American female scholar sympathetic to Kingston wrote that "for a minority author to exercise such artistic freedom is perilous business because white critics and reviewers persist in seeing ictionalexpressions by ingstonas no more than cultural history."

References

Bibliography

*. * * * * *. * * Rpt. in * * *Kingston, Maxine Hong. "No Name Woman". 1975. ''Making Literature Matter''. Ed. John Schilb and John Clifford. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006. 1154–1163.