The mother’s story, “Shaman,” is situated in the middle of the book. The Woman Warrior not only chronicles the development of the daughter Maxine but also the mother’s struggle for self-definition.”Shaman” records Brave Orchid’s passage from a traditional woman to a respectable woman doctor.
After the deaths of her two children born in China,Brave Orchid decided to leave her uneventful life in New Society Village to study medicine in Canton,the capital of the province. In the medical school Brave Orchid earns outstanding grades and summons the courage to challenge the “Sitting Ghost.” She volunteers to spend a night in a haunted room in the dormitory, reportedly defeats the ghost as it tries to attack her, and mobilizes the whole student body to participate in her exorcising ritual. In a sense Brave Orchid’s struggle with the Sitting Ghost is a symbolic battle with the limits of traditionalism.
Back in her village Brave Orchid uses her intelligence to establish herself as a renowned doctor. Not unlike the fantastic swordswoman, Brave Orchid “has gone away ordinary and come back miraculous, like the ancient magicians who came down from the mountains.”
Brave Orchid’s American daughter must also learn to fight the “ghosts” in her life. the Woman Warrior is subtitled Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. “Once upon a time,” the narrator recalls, “the world was so thick with ghosts, I could barely breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars.” While some readers may find this use of ghosts jarring, Kingston does not use the term in any pejorative sense. Her world of ghosts is a result other parents’ refusal to acknowledge America and of the shadowy residues of the Chinese past in her childhood and young-adult life. The narrator protests, “whenever my parents said ‘home,’ they suspended America.
They suspend America. They suspended enjoyment, but I did not want to go to China.” Significantly, the reconciliation of the mother and the daughter in “Shaman” occurs after the mother finally gives up on the ancestral homeland. “We have no more China to go home to,” the aged Brave Orchid laments. The daughter, now released from the “ghost” of China that was imposed on her as a child, can freely acknowledge her matriline age: “I am really a Dragon, as she is a Dragon, both of us born in the dragon years. I am practically a first daughter of a first daughter.” This reconciliation of mother and daughter precedes “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” the last section of The Woman Warrior, in which Kings-ton recalls her struggle with a personal voice from kindergarten to the narrative present: “My silence was thickest @ total @ during the three years that I covered my school paintings with black paint, “Kingston writes. The blackness of her paintings is not a sign of mental disturbance, as her American teachers have assumed: “I was making a stage curtain, it was the moment before the curtain parted and rose,” the adult Kingston explains. Once the curtain is up, there is “sunlight underneath, mighty operas.” This transformation of blackness-inarticu- lateness into carnivalesque drama provides an excellent metaphor for Kingston’s development as a writer. Later, in Tripmaster Monkey, a mighty opera unfolds in Wittman’s theatrical production. The psychodrama of young Maxine’s linguistic struggle is concretely enacted in an incident that takes place when she is in the sixth grade. One day young Maxine confronts and physically attacks a quiet Chinese American girl, admittedly her double, in a basement bathroom after school. But only “sobs, chokes, noises that were almost words” come out of the girl, never a comprehensible word. “If you don’t talk, you can’t have a personality,” Max- ine shouts (to herself as well as to the other girl). Maxine’s sadistic cruelty signifies her own inner trauma of inarticulateness. After this underground encounter, Maxine spends eighteen months in bed “with a mysterious illness” and the quiet girl lives under the protection other family for the rest other life.”?@ After years of silence the teenager Maxine finds an angry voice in a confrontation with her mother. Before this showdown Maxine has tried un- ‘ successfully to confess to the two-hundred-odd offenses that she has committed in her young life, such as tormenting the silent girl and stealing from the cash register at the family laundry. “If only I could let my mother know the list,” Maxine thought, “she @ and the world @ would become more like me, and I would never be alone again.” Yet the mother puts a stop to Maxine’s attempt at communication, and the pain of silence finally drives Maxine to shout out her defiance of Chinese- misogynism and her desire to leave home. This triumphant voicing, however, is immediately under- @nr h\r thp narrat-nr’s sorrowful reflection as an older and wiser person: “Be careful what you say. It comes true. It comes true. I had to leave home in order to see the world logically, logic the new way of seeing. I learned to think that mysteries are for explanation. I enjoy the simplicity. Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and sidewalks. Give me plastic, periodical tables, t.v. dinner with vegetables no more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghost.” Her ghost-free new life is based on a rootless sterility represented by the concrete and plastic culture. She has escaped the Chinese interdiction of female speech at the expense of a maternal inheritance of rich imagination. It takes years for Maxine to come to her right artistic voice.
At the end of The Woman Warrior, Maxine finishes her story of development with a return to her matrilineage. This reconnection is mediated through that talk. story. The daughter continues the story that her mother has started “The beginning is hers, the ending, mine” telling about T’sai Yen, a poet who had been abducted by a nomadic tribe, had two children with the barbarian chieftain, and later was ransomed back to China. T’sai Yen brought her song, “Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” back, and it “translated well.” For Kingston, T’sai Yen is an emblem of the artist par excellence, whose poetic power is capable of trans forming a weapon, the whistling arrow, into a musical instrument. Like the transformed swordswoman in “White Tigers,” T’sai Yen is a word warrior who serves as a model for the author of The Woman Warrior. Thus, the interpenetrating stories in The Woman Warrior provide a link between Kingston’s past and present. The central metaphor of the book is a Chinese knot in which various strands are interwoven into a work of folk art. Kingston, as “an outlaw knot-maker,” weaves the past and the present together into an intricate pattern to create her “mother book.” By talking stories she successfully builds a matrilineage to counterpoint the traditional Chinese patrilineage and unmuffles a personal yet rooted voice for herself. were supposed to be she decided to take the men’s stories out of her first book because they seemed to interfere with the Kingston wanted to call this father book “Gold Mountain Heroes.” Later, however, she changed the title to China Men because she. feared the original title might confirm a stereotypical concept that the early Chinese immigrants were merely gold diggers. Moreover, China Men, a literal translation of the Chinese characters for Chinese, overturns the use of the pejorative Chinamen. Hence Kingston’s neologism at once embattles the historical insult of the Chinese immigrants and proudly acknowledges the ancestral roots of Chinese America.
The foremost political agenda in China Men is to claim America for Chinese Americans. Directly influenced by William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (1925), which she calls a biography of America, Kingston purposely starts her story in 1860, where Williams stopped, and carries the American story forward. “In story after story Chinese-American people are claiming America, which goes all the way from one character saying that a Chinese explorer found this place before Leif Ericsson did to another one buying a house here. Buying that house is a way of saying that America -and not China is his country,” declared Kingston in a 1980 interview with Timothy Pfaff. In China Men she extends the narrator’s personal story to re-construct a family history, which in turn questions the “official” national history of America. Like the swordswoman in “White Tigers” who substitutes for her father in conscription, the narrator wages a linguistic battle to claim America for four generations of China men. In The Woman Warrior Maxine is weaving a strand of matrilineal line into patrilineage; in China Men she weaves her own subjectivity into the strands of men’s stories. This “appropriation” of the male position also presents a continuation of the word warrior’s “revenge by report” proj
Kingston also attempts to “educate” her readers. She compares China Men to “a six-layer club sandwich or cake,” interlacing six present-day stories of her male relatives with vignettes of myths. She deliberately leaves it up to her readers to figure out the intertextual relationships of the myths and the modern stories. In the prologue, “On Discovery,” Kingston revises an episode from a classical Chinese romance: while searching for the Gold Mountain, Tang Ao gets trapped in the Land of Women. He is forced by a group of Amazons to have his ears pierced, to have his feet bound, and to serve at the queen’s court. In Tang Ao’s story Kingston embeds a double-edged criticism of Chinese sexism and American racism. By highlighting Tang Ao’s suffering in his state ofeffeminization,Kingston created a feminist critique of Chinese sexist practices and an allegory of the ??emasculation??of the Chinese immigrants in America.By opening the book with Tan Ao??s story Kingston underlines her two main goals in China Men :to retrieve the Chinese past and to reexamine American history.
The narrator of China Men identifies herself as a family historian with the self-assigned and sometimes distrubing task of safekeeping family histories and memories. In a chance encounter with her newly immigrated aunt from Hong Kong, for example, the narrator first feels reluctant to listen to the aunt??s horror stories of the past, but then she recalls her “duty”: “I did not want to hear how she suffered, and then I did .I did have a duty to hear it and remember it.” In ??Personal Statement?? Kingston talks about how women play the role of keeper and weaver of stories, whereas men tend to alienate themselves from the past: ??The men have trouble keeping Chinese ways in new lands. What good are the old stories??KWhy not be rid of the mythical, and be a free American??? Claming an American birthright through storytelling, however, the daughter-storyteller proves the men??s desire to forget the past to be mistaken. Kingston??s ??rememory??of family struggles exposes a history of discrimination and paves the way for personal and communal healing.
As she opens The Women Warrior by retrieving the silenced discourse of a nameless aunt, Kingston prefaces the present-day stories in China Men with a story of her father??s repressed Chinese past.?? You say with the few words and the silence: No stories. No past. No China,?? the narrator says of her father??s denial of the past. She aims specifically to counterpoint his repressive silence:?? You fix yourself in the present, but I want to hear the stories about the rest of your life, the Chinese stories?K.I??ll tell you what I suppose from your silences and few words, and you can tell me that I??m mistaken. You??ll just have to speak up with the real stories if I??ve got you wrong. ??In ??The Father from China ??the daughter-narrator proceeds to ??immigration to New York. Later, Kingston admitted that she found her father??s reactions ??satisfying??because she has successfully engaged him in a literary dialogue through marginalia that he wrote in a copy of a Chinese translation of China Men .Tom Hong wrote his commentary on his daughter??s stories in beautiful Chinese calligraphy ,giving her the satisfaction of having been treated as an intellectual equal instead of as an object of a abusive language in her father??s misogynist curses. Moreover, she finally ??lured?? her father out of his habitual reticence and won his appreciation. Thus, the daughter succeeded in returning the repressed language to the father through her literary creation.
In ??The American Father?? Kingston describes the father she had known as a child in Stockton. The daughter??s most painful memory in this section is perhaps the recollection of how her father became a ??disheartened man?? after losing his job in the gambling house. His inertia was finally broken when her sister made him so angry that he leaped from his easy chair to chase her (although this sister claims that it was the narrator who was chased.) Lured into action the father starts the family laundry business.?? The American Father?? ends with a description of how the father planted many trees near their house,?? trees that take years to fruit,?? symbolizing the slow yet firm rooting of the Hong family in America.
??The Great Grandfather from the Sandlewood Mountain?? and two vignettes on mortality again foreground the importance of speech. As a contract worker on a Hawaiian sugar plantation, Bak Goong (Great Grandfather) is forbidden to talk during work. As a trickster figure, the ??talk addict?? Bak Goong then invents ways, such as singing and coughing, to circumvent this interdiction:?? The deep, long loud coughs, barking and wheezing, were almost as satifying as shouting. He let out scold disguised as coughs.?? His final liberating act is to organize a shout party for his fellow Chinese workers. He mobilizes the workers to bury their homesickness and anger in a huge hole:?? They had dug an ear into the world, and were telling the earht their secrets. ??After the party they could and sing at work without interference from the white overseers because the workers?? unrestrained demonstration of emotion and strength has caused fear among the whites. Moreover, the new ritual of shouting attests to the fact that these Chinese workers in Hawaii are actrually Americans because they help to build the land. As Bak Goong proudly exclaims,?? We can make up customs because we??re the founding ancestors of this place.??
??The Grandfathers of the Sierra Nevada Mountains,?? ??The Laws,?? and ??Alaska China Men?? highlight the tenacity of the Chinese Americans faced with racial discrimination in the American legal system and in daily life. The narrator places her emphasis on the collective identity of Chinamen-her own grandfather included-in their efforts to conquer natural obstacles and to survive exclusion in American. The American railroad system is physical evidence of China men??s contributions. As the Civil War, China Men banded the nation North and South, East and West, with crisscrossing steel.?? Thus, the granddaughter-narrator proudly calls her forefathers ??the binding and building ancestors.?? The narrator provides a vivid description of how Ah Goong and other Chinese workers risked their lives setting off dynamite manually in baskets dangling over ravines. The group spirit of the Chinese workers is most apparent in a rail-road-strike episode. After failing to gain equal treatment with white workers decide to stage a strike and pass on the plan inside the summer solstice cake. Their slogan for the strike is ??free men, no coolies, calling for fair working conditions,?? and their pursuit of freedom resonates with the spirit of American Revolution.
In the middle of China Men Kingston includes a catalogue of anti-Chinese exclusion laws from 1868 to 1978.This intrusion of legal documents at first seems incongruous .Yet the juxtaposition of Kingston??s personal language and government legal language underlies the victimzation of Chinese American by political manipulation. At the end of ??The Grandfather from the Sierra Mountains” the narrator describes how Chinese workers were “driven out,” even murdered, after the railroad was completed. Speaking as the daughter of those Chinese American victims, Kingston again illustrates the importance of recovering and remembering the past.
“The Making of More Americans,” “The Wild Man of the Green Swamp,” and “the Adventure of Lo Bun Sun” include Chinese American and sinocized European adventure stories about where and how Chinese immigrants build their homes. It also registers an ambivalence about where the “home” for Chinese Americans is. Each of the protagonists in the five family stories told in “The Making of More Americans,” for instance, needs to decide on their home address. The ghost of Say Goong (Fourth Grandfather) lingers until his brother tells him to go back to China; cousin Mad Sao cannot continue his American life until he escorts the hungry ghost of his mother back to her home village; paranoid Uncle Bun flees America. Kau Goong (Great Maternal Uncle), on the other hand, renounces old China and his old wife and is buried in America; the Hong Kong aunt and uncle immigrate to become the newest addition to the narrator’s Chinese American family.