Maxine Hong Kingston - The Woman Warrior (1975)

 

Who was Maxine Hong Kingston? 

It is important to emphasize that Maxine Hong Kingston will have difficulties because of her dual identity of having Chinese Ancestry and American Ancestry, and so we see her dual identity and we see the difficulties and conflict between her Chinese Ancestry and American modernity. Particularly in her work The Woman Warrior, she tries to express her own female voice and she explores her dual identity and the conflict between modernity in the United States and her Chinese Heritage. The Woman Warrior is a perfect example of Chinese American literature. Therefore, we see how Hong Kingston tries to express her bicultural identity in her writings, and she’s not only interested in the interplay between ethnicity and being a woman, but also in the conflict between different generations (mother-daughter relationships).

What is "The Woman Warrior" about?

The "Woman Warrior" is a memoir about how Maxine herself abandons childhood and becomes an adult woman, and it blends autobiography and fiction, since we find myths and tales from Old rural China. However, it is also an autobiography because it is a coming of age memoir about her growing up and finally becoming a woman. It is also a combination between the past, present and future, and we find the past from the Chinese Ancestors of Maxine and her family members, and Maxine is going to tell the story of her own mother and aunt (story of her Chinese Ancestors and family members). Several distinct chapters or stories make up "The Woman Warrior," with each focusing on various facets of Kingston's experiences and Chinese-American identity. There are stories with folklore, personal history, and cultural insights, combining memoir and myth. The chapters frequently delve into topics like gender roles, silence, the immigrant experience, and the significance of storytelling. The stories are structured in a non-linear way.

The Main Characters of the Story:

-Maxine Hong Kingston: The main character and storyteller, contemplating her life as a girl of Chinese-American descent.

-The Mother: Kingston’s mother, who had a considerable impact on her life and embodied strength, heritage, and the challenges faced by immigrant women as we see the retelling of her life and what she studied and who she married, showing us the challenges she faced and the bravery she had. 

-The Father: Kingston's father, whose immigrant experiences shape the family's cultural dynamics and perspectives.

-The Ghosts: Figures of symbolism that embody ancestral spirits, the cultural past, and the burdens of expectation that the narrator is supposed to follow. 

Important quotes from the novel The Woman Warrior: 

·pg. 67: "My mother may have been afraid, but she would be a dragoness (“my totem, your totem”). She could make herself not weak. During danger she fanned out her dragon claws and riɽed her red sequin scales and unfolded her coiling green stripes. Danger was a good time for showing oʃ. Like the dragons living in temple eaves, my mother looked down on plain people who were lonely and afraid": In this quote we see the strength of Kingston's mother, who is represented with the symbol of the dragon, that symbolises fierceness and bravery.  In Chinese culture, the dragon represents power, and Kingston emphasizes her mother’s capacity to confront danger and hardship by connecting her to a dragoness. The notion of "showing off" in the face of danger implies that her mother directly confronts challenges with great inner strength. 

·pg. 87: "To make my waking life American-normal, I turn on the lights before anything untoward makes an appearance. I push the deformed into my dreams, which are in Chinese, the language of impossible stories": This shows the challenges of being in-between two cultures: American and Chinese. We see the desire to feel safe and "normal" in an American context, pushing aside her Chinese heritage and her cultural identity, repressing uncomfortable truths about her background. 

·pg. 97: "Whenever my parents said “home,” they suspended America. They suspended enjoyment, but I did not want to go to China. In China my parents would sell my sisters and me. My father would marry two or three more wives, who would spatter cooking oil on our bare toes and lie that we were crying for naughtiness. They would give food to their own children and rocks to us. I did not want to go where the ghosts took shapes nothing like our own": We see the protagonist's fear of going back to China, which is linked with the fact that she has no family support, and we see also the brutal truths of life in China (trading daughters, fathers taking multple wives, ...). The protagonist realizes she does not form part of the conventional stories of her ancestors.

·pg. 166: "It was when I found out I had to talk that school became a misery, that the silence became a misery. I did not speak and felt bad each time that I did not speak. I read aloud in first grade, though, and heard the barest whisper with little squeaks come out of my throat. “Louder,” said the teacher, who scared the voice away again. The other Chinese girls did not talk either, so I knew the silence had to do with being a Chinese girl": Here we see the pressure and isolation experienced by the main character, especially in her role as a young Chinese girl in America. The silence she feels is connected to her cultural identity and the difficulties of fitting in at school. This is not only a problem faced by her, but all of the Chinese girls of her classroom also have troubles expressing themselves and remain "voiceless", without speaking even a word. 

·pg. 183: "There were secrets never to be said in front of the ghosts, immigration secrets whose telling could get us sent back to China. Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese": The ghosts represent the burden of family secrets in the immigrant experience, since the ghosts represent the cultural past that still endures in the new context they are in. We see the vulnerability of these families and also the complexity of their stories. 

Works Cited: Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior. Vintage, 1 Sept. 2010.