The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
"The Woman Warrior" by Maxine Hong Kingston is a unique blend of autobiography and cultural myth, exploring the experiences of a second-generation Chinese-American woman. The narrative is divided into five interrelated sections, each tackling the complexities of identity, womanhood, and cultural heritage from varying perspectives. The first section, "No Name Woman," narrates the tragic story of Kingston's aunt, whose illegitimate child leads to her societal ostracization and ultimate suicide. In contrast, the second section introduces the mythical "Woman Warrior," a powerful figure who defies gender norms and societal expectations, embodying strength and resilience. Kingston also reflects on her mother, Brave Orchid, a remarkable woman who overcame significant obstacles to become a physician, and her sister, Moon Orchid, who tragically succumbs to madness due to societal pressures. The final section delves into Kingston's childhood struggles with silence and identity, ultimately highlighting her journey toward self-expression. The work serves as both a personal narrative and a cultural commentary, blending fact and imagination to address the intricate relationship between heritage and individual experience. "The Woman Warrior" is regarded as a significant contribution to the literature on Chinese-American women's lives and has received critical acclaim, including recognition from the National Book Critics Circle.
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
First published: 1976
Type of work: Autobiography
Time of work: From the late nineteenth century to the 1970’s
Locale: California and the China of myth and memory
Principal Personages:
Maxine Hong Kingston , the author and narratorNo Name Woman , Kingston’s aunt, who commits suicide in China after bearing an illegitimate childThe Woman Warrior , a dream figure representing the authorBrave Orchid , Kingston’s motherMoon Orchid , another of Kingston’s aunts
Form and Content
The Woman Warrior is a blend of autobiographical material about the second-generation Chinese-American author and the myths and dreams that constitute her psychic reality. By fusing fact and imagination, Maxine Hong Kingston works toward answers to the central problem articulated at the beginning of the book. This problem is
to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our childhoods fit in solid America. . . . Chinese-Americans, . . . how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese?
The narrative consists of five interlocking sections, each of which explores the central problem from a different perspective.
The first section, “No Name Woman,” tells the story of an aunt who, after bearing an illegitimate child, was forced by neighbors and family to commit suicide. Kingston explains that when she reached puberty, her mother told her the story of No Name Woman as a warning. The story of this aunt is vague and shrouded in the mystery of the unspeakable.
The next two sections picture strong women who refuse to be victims. No Name Woman is the victim of a community which devalues and severely restricts women; in contrast, the mythical Woman Warrior of the second section, “White Tigers,” actively avenges crimes against her community. A Chinese Joan of Arc, she leads an army in defiance of laws which would put her to death for impersonating a man if she were discovered; she also marries for love, gives birth in the saddle, and returns to her family in honor, evading the fate of the Western woman hero. Kingston explains that the Woman Warrior, also based on her mother’s stories, represents her dreams of power and creativity.
The third section, “Shaman,” recounts the life of Kingston’s mother, Brave Orchid. While still living in China, Brave Orchid battled stiff odds to be graduated with honors from a women’s medical college and then practiced her craft against equally stiff odds. Like the Woman Warrior, the Shaman seems to possess superhuman strengths and takes enormous risks. Unlike most Chinese women whose husbands left them to go to America, Brave Orchid eventually follows her husband to “the Gold Mountain” to work at his side.
The fourth section, “At the Western Palace,” recounts the life of Brave Orchid’s sister Moon Orchid. Like No Name Woman a generation earlier, Moon Orchid is victimized by a community which devalues women. After thirty years in Hong Kong, Moon Orchid follows her sister’s advice, coming to San Francisco to find the husband who left her for the Gold Mountain. Now a successful physician, the husband rejects her, and Moon Orchid retreats so far into madness that she is finally hospitalized. With the other psychiatric patients, Moon Orchid is content once more.
The fifth and last section, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” concludes the themes introduced in the first four parts of the work. The first episode in this section concerns the author’s childhood reticence, so intense that before allowing her teachers to see her school drawings she covers them with layers of chalk and black paint. This silence parallels the silence surrounding No Name Woman, who never tells the name of the man who raped or seduced her and consequently loses her own name. Kingston’s silence, however, eventually turns into self-expression. In the second episode, Kingston recalls her mother’s superstitious demand that a white druggist, who has mistakenly delivered medicine, recompense the family with gifts. Kingston learns to lie creatively in order to negotiate between the whites, who do not understand her culture, and her mother, who does not understand the white culture. The third episode builds on the first and second; here, the author acts out her mother’s role as a shaman, attempting to “cure” a silent classmate by bullying and torturing her. Instead of curing her classmate, however, Kingston herself succumbs to a mysterious illness which confines her to bed for a year. In the next episode, the author considers female victimization once more, concluding that the silences surrounding women and girls make them crazy: “I thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village its idiot. Who would it be at our house? Probably me. . . . there were adventurous people inside my head to whom I talked.” The last episode of “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe” explores Kingston’s dream life and the increasing urgency of her need to communicate. In her childhood, Kingston took this urgency as further evidence of her own craziness, but paradoxically, the dreams and the talk are also the means by which she transcends psychic stress.
The last episode of the last section tells the story of the woman poet Ts’ai Yen. Captured and taken into exile by barbarians, she learns their language and music, transforms barbarian idioms into her language, and eventually brings back to her own people poems of great beauty.
Critical Context
Kingston continues the tradition, begun a generation earlier by Jade Snow Wong, of chronicling the cultural lives of Chinese-American women. The first part of a two-part autobiography, The Woman Warrior explores the writer’s relationships with the other women in her family. The second part of the autobiography, China Men (1980), narrates the lives of the men in Kingston’s family and explores her relationships with them. Though published separately, the two books were written almost simultaneously. They are remarkable personal and cultural statements, notable for their brilliant narrative technique, which shows the fluid line between autobiography and imaginative literature. The National Book Critics Circle chose The Woman Warrior as the best work of nonfiction published in 1976.
Bibliography
Blinde, Patricia Lin. “The Icicle in the Desert: Perspective and Form in the Works of Two Chinese-American Woman Writers,” in MELUS. VI (Summer, 1979), pp. 51-71.
Chan, Jeffrey Paul, Frank Chin, Lawson Fusao Inada, and Shawn Wong, eds. The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers. New York: New American Library/Meridian, 1991. Chin has accused The Woman Warrior, shaped by its feminist vision, of being a “fake book,” providing an inauthentic picture of Chinese American history and catering to a racist American culture.
Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. In her chapter on Kingston, Cheung notes the way in which historical and parental silence provokes the author to use her imagination to create possible versions of stories that her taciturn parents refuse to convey.
Homsher, Deborah. “The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston: A Bridging of Autobiography and Fiction,” in The Iowa Review. X (Fall, 1979), pp. 93-98.
Johnson, Diane. Terrorists and Novelists. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Comparing Kingston to Carobeth Laird and N. Scott Momaday, Johnson writes that The Woman Warrior is an “antiautobiography,” a work which blurs the boundaries between fiction and autobiography. Johnson argues that Kingston, in challenging the “female condition,” resists her culture in order to triumph over it.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. China Men. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980. A companion piece to The Woman Warrior. The two works illuminate each other.
Kramer, Jane. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXXI (November 7, 1976), p. 1.
Lim, Shirley Geok-lin, ed. Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s “The Woman Warrior.” New York: Modern Language Association, 1991. This collection of essays is an excellent source for cultural background and close readings of the text. Includes a helpful bibliographic essay, a personal statement from Kingston on The Woman Warrior, a section providing sociohistorical information to help readers better understand references to the Chinese American culture contained in the work, and close analyses of the text. Also highlights different approaches to the text, including feminist, postmodernist, and thematic approaches.
Ling, Amy. Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry. New York: Pergamon, 1990. Ling locates Kingston’s work within a historical tradition of Chinese American writers. She highlights Kingston’s need for “writing wrongs” by “writing about the wrongs.”
Myers, Victoria. “The Significant Fictivity of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior,” in Biography. IX (Spring, 1986), pp. 112-125.
Perry, Donna, ed. Backtalk: Women Writers Speak Out. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Perry’s collection of interviews contains a brief introduction, photographs of the writers, and an interview with Kingston on her work, including The Woman Warrior.
Rainwater, Catherine, and William J. Scheick, eds. Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. Of particular interest is Suzanne Juhasz’s essay “Maxine Hong Kingston: Narrative Technique and Female Identity.”
Smith, Sidonie. A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Smith notes the ways in which Kingston uses autobiography as a means of creating identity and breaking out of the silence that her culture imposes on her. She also states that The Woman Warrior is “an autobiography about women’s autobiographical storytelling,” emphasizing the relationship between genre and gender.
Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Chapter 14, written by Lee Quinby, explores The Woman Warrior as a memoir that shows the “technology of ideographic selfhood.”