Maxine Hong Kingston Essay, Research Paper
Maxine Hong Kingston
(27 October 1940-)
Pin-chia Feng
National Chiao-Tung University, Taiwan
See also the Kingston entry in DLB Yearbook: 1980.
BOOKS: The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (New York: Knopf, 1976; London: John Lane, 1977); China Men (New York: Knopf, 1980); Hawaii One Summer: 1978 (San Francisco: Meadow Press, 1987); Through the Black Curtain (Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft Library, University of California, 1987); Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (New York: Knopf, 1989).
OTHER: “Cultural Mis-readings by American Reviewers,” in Asian and Western Writers in Dialogue: New Cultural Identities, edited by Guy Amirthanayagam (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 55-56;”Personal Statement,” in Approaches to Teaching Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1991), pp. 23-25.
SELECTED PERIODICAL PUBLICATIONS -UNCOLLECTED: “Duck Boy,” New York Times Magaune, 12 June 1977, pp. 54-58; “Reservations About China,” Ms., 7 (October 1978): 67-68; “San Francisco Chinatown: A View from the Other Side of Arnold Genthe’s Camera,” American Heritage, 30 (December 1978); 35-47; “A Writer’s Notebook from the Far East,” Ms., II (January 1983): 85-86; “An Imagined Life,” Michigan Quarterly Review, 22 (Fall 1983): 561-570; “A Chinese Garland,” North American Review, 273 (September 1988): 38-42; “Violence and Non-Violence in China,1989,” Michigan Quarterly Review,24(Winter 1990):62-67.
One of the most outspoken contemporary feminist writers, Maxine Hong Kingston states in her autobiographical book The Woman Warrior (1976), “The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. . . . What we have in common are the words at our backs. The idioms for revenge are ‘report a crime’ and ‘report to five families.’ The reporting is the vengeance – not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words.” With prose that both unsettles Chinese American sexism and American racism, Kingston is a “word warrior” who battles social and racial injustice. It is perhaps surprising that Kingston could not speak English until she started school. Once she had learned it, however, she started to talk stories. Decades later, this once silent and silenced woman is becoming a notable Americanwriter.
Maxine Hong Kingston was born to Chinese immigrant parents, Tom Hong and Chew Ying Lan, in Stockton, California, on 27 October 1940. Her American name, Maxine, was after a blonde who was always lucky in gambling. Ting Ting, her Chinese name, comes from a Chinese poem about self-reliance. The eldest of the six Hong children, Kingston had two older siblings who died in China years before her mother came to the United States. Kingston recalls the early part of her school education as her “silent years” in which she had a terrible time talking. Later Maxine, who flunked kindergarten, became a straight-A student and won a scholarship to the University of California, Berkeley. In 1962 she got her bachelor’s degree in English and married Earll Kingston, a Berkeley graduate and an actor. She returned to the university in 1964, earned a teaching certificate in 1965, and taught English and mathematics from 1965 to 1967 in Hayward, California. During their time at Berkeley, the Kingstons were involved in the antiwar movement on campus. In 1967 they decided to leave the country because the movement was getting more and more violent, and their friends were too involved in drugs. On their way to Japan the Kingstons stopped in Hawaii and stayed there for seventeen years.
At first Kingston taught language arts and English as a second language in a private school. In 1977 she became a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii at Honolulu. A few days after she finished the final revisions of China Men (1980), a Honolulu Buddhist sect claimed Kingston as a “Living Treasure of Hawaii.” Kingston herself, however, was still looking homeward, having always felt like a stranger in the islands. She and her husband moved back to California, while their son, Joseph, stayed in Hawaii and became a musician. In 1992 Kingston became a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Kingston’s writing relies heavily on memory and imagination. “We approach the truth with metaphors,” declared Kingston in a 1983 essay, “An Imagined Life.” She also told Paula Rabinowitz in a1987 interview, “The artist’s memory winnows out; it edits for what is important and significant. Memory, my own memory, shows me what is unforgettable, and helps me get to an essence that will not die, and that haunts me until I can out it into a form, which is writing.” Kingston denies, however, that the use of memory in her writing is simply a form of exorcism, but she insists that it is a way to give substance to the “ghosts,” or “visions,” in her life. Her writing also denies classification: she is recording the biography of a people’s imagination. Her first two books are Kingston’s biographies of ancestors whom she has never met and records of things about which she has only heard. Imagination becomes her way to approach these characters and incidents. For instance, she imagines five ways for her father’s arrival in America in China .Men. She is proud of this imaginative feat because by inserting multiple stories into her “biographical” works she is able to transcend generic boundaries and protect the illegal aliens she is writing about at the same time. “To have a right imagination is very powerful,” Kingston told Rabinowitz, “because it’s a bridge between reality.”
The major sources of Kingston’s memory and imagination are her mother’s stories and her father’s silence. Kingston’s father, Tom Hong, was a scholar trained in traditional Chinese classics and a teacher in New Society Village before his immigration. In the United States he washed windows until he had saved enough money to start a laundry in New York with three of his friends. Later, Hong was cheated out of his share of the partnership. He moved with his pregnant wife to Stockton and started managing an illegal gambling house for a wealthy Chinese American. A major part of his work, besides taking care of the club, was to be arrested; he was silent about his true name and invented a new name for each arrest. World War II put him out of this cycle of managing and getting arrested because the gambling house was shut down. After a period of unemployment he started his own laundry and a new life for himself and his family in America.
Brave Orchid (or Ying Lan, in Chinese), Kingston’s vocal and practical mother, was a doctor who practiced Western medicine and midwifery in China. She did not join her husband in New York until 1940, fifteen years after they had parted. In America, Brave Orchid exchanged her professional status for that of a laundrywoman, cleaning maid, tomato picker, and cannery worker. Undaunted by the difficulties in her life, this “champion talker” educated her children with “talk stories,” which included myth, legend, family history, and ghost tales. “Night after night my mother would talk-story until we fell asleep. I could not tell where the stories left off and the dreams began,” Kingston recalls in “The Women Warrior. Through her talk stories, Brave Orchid extended Chinese tradition into the lives of her American children and enriched their imagination. Yet Kingston is also aware of the fact that the mother’s talking stories were double-edged: “She said I would grow up a wife and slave, but she taught me the song of the woman warrior, Fa Mu Lan,” Kingston recollects in The Woman Warrior. While Brave Orchid’s storytelling was educational, it also reiterated patriarchal and misogynistic messages of traditional Chinese culture. Moreover, as in traditional Chinese education, Brave Orchid did not explain her stories. Kingston needed to interpret her mother’s stories and became a storyteller herself.
Her community also played a decisive role in Kingston’s writing. Comparing herself to Toni Morrison and Leslie Silko, Kingston argues that what makes their writings vivid and alive is their connection with community and tribe. Yet Kingston refuses to be “representative” of Chinese Americans. “A Stockton Chinese is not the same as a San Francisco Chinese,” Kingston stated in an interview with Arturo Islas. Unlike “the Big City” (San Francisco) and “the Second City” (Sacramento), Stockton, a city in the Central Valley of California, has a relatively small Chinese population. At most the Stockton Chinese American community is a minor subculture of Chinese America. Yet Stockton became a “literary microcosm” for Kingston, whose knowledge of China derives from its people. And the language spoken in this community, a Cantonese dialect called Say Yup, supplies Kingston with distinctive sounds and rhythms. What Kingston has done in her writing is to translate the oral tradition of her community into a written one.
Moreover, the physical environment and social class in which Kingston grew up played an important role in her “education” as a writer. Kingston spent her childhood on the south side of Stockton, an area populated by mostly working-class and unemployed people of mixed races. The “Burglar Ghosts,” “Hobo Ghosts,” and “Wino Ghosts” that crowded young Maxine’s childhood memory testify to the importance of street wisdom and survival skills. Kingston insists on the audiotape Maxine Hong Kingston: Talking Story (1990) that had she been born in a middle-class suburb, her struggle to be a writer would have been harder.
In contrast Kingston calls her seventeen years in Hawaii an extended vacation. Her time there provided her with the necessary distance and perspective to sort out identity problems and to finish her first two books, The Woman Warrior and China Men. Kingston was uncertain how her work would be received when she finished The Woman Warrior. She was ready to send this collection of fiction to other countries or keep it for posthumous publication if she failed to find a publisher. Luckily, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. gambled on this unknown writer and published Kingston’s book as nonfiction. To the surprise of both publisher and writer The Woman Warrior became an immediate best-seller. The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction in 1976 and was rated as one of the top ten nonfiction books of the decade. As late as 1989 it was still on the trade-paperback best-sellers list. Kingston’s next book, China Men, earned her a National Book Award. Both books are widely taught in literature, women’s studies, sociology, ethnic studies, and history classes.
Kingston’s success, however, earned her the enmity of some Asian American critics. The most fundamental objection to The Woman Warrior is its generic status. Some Asian American critics question whether it is valid to call the book an autobiography when there are so many fictional elements included in her personal experience. Moreover, they fault Kingston for presenting her personal experience as “representative” of the Chinese American community. The real problem, however, seems to rest on those readers who have misconceived the text. In her 1982 essay “Cultural Mis-readings” Kingston herself laments the fact that many critics of the dominant culture have misread her and measured her against the stereotype of the exotic, inscrutable, mysterious Orient. Kingston’s first two books belong to the postmodernist mixed-genre tradition. Her books are not autobiographies as a specific genre but an “autobiographical form” that combines fiction and nonfiction.
One way to look at Kingston’s major works is to regard them as different stories of growth. In The Woman Warrior the first-person narrator explores her identity formation in relation to her mother and female relatives. In China Men the narrator grows in her understanding of the stories other male ancestors. Together these two books reveal the development of a Chinese American woman by uncovering the repressed stories of her family and of Chinese American history. Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989), her true fiction, on the other hand, reports the artistic education of a young Chinese American bohemian, Wittman Ah Sing. Another dominant theme in each of Kingston’s major books is finding a mode of articulation for her characters: the silent aunts and the narrator in The Woman Warrior, the reticent father and suppressed grandfathers in China Men, and the olaywright-to-be Wittman in Tripmaster Monkey. Evolving along with her writing, Kingston recorded her own growing pains and her struggles to find a distinctive voice.
Kingston’s main project in The Woman Warrior is to avenge oppression by reporting stories about the women in her family. The book opens with “No Name Woman,” a story other nameless aunt in China. This aunt became a family outcast for getting pregnant out of wedlock and finally drowned herself and her newborn baby in the family well after the villagers raided her house. Brave Orchid reveals this family secret to the young Maxine on the onset of the daughter’s menstruation to caution her against sexual indiscretion. At the same time, the mother attempts to suppress this story by forbidding the daughter to repeat it. Kingston, however, purposely reports the story as an act of political resistance to Chinese patriarchy and repression in general. Furthermore she contrives different reasons for her aunt’s pregnancy: the aunt could have been a victim of rape and patriarchy; she could also have been a passionate seductress and an individualist. Through active imagination, Kingston gives this aunt life and immortality in her own way.
In “At the Western Palace,” the fourth sectic of “fhe Woman Warrior, Kingston tells the story of her other silent Chinese aunt, Moon Orchid. Th “thrice-told tale” – told to Kingston by her sister, who in turn heard it from her brother – is the only third-person narrative in the book, and it communicates the hazard of poor adjustment to American reality. Moon Orchid, whose name alludes to her insubstantial presence, has lived comfortably in Hong Kong on the subsidy from her husband. Through the manipulation of Brave Orchid, Moon Orchid is forced to come to America to collect her lost husband and claim her title of first wife. After she discovers her thoroughly Americanized husband, a successful doctor who has remarried, to an English-speaking wife, Moon Orchid’s old Chinese life based on an illusion of changeless stability is shattered. Becoming paranoid and morbidly afraid of change, Moon Orchid repeatedly claims she is being followed by foreign “ghosts.” She is finally sent to a mental asylum, where she dies.
By telling Moon Orchid’s story, however, the narrator creates a voice for this oppressed woman from the East. Brave Orchid diagnoses Moon Orchid’s mental disorder as stemming from her mis-placed spirit. By recording her aunt’s disintegration, Kingston gives Moon Orchid a place in her “mother book” and appeases the aunt’s spirit. She even transforms the mental hospital into a quasi-utopian community of women. For the failing Moon Orchid her stay in the mental institution paradOxically brings her needed stability and a temporary place to anchor her spirit. She also finds acceptance from her “daughters,” psychiatric patients of different races, and therefore is able to talk “a new story” about perfect communication instead other old one of persecution.
The second section of The Woman Warrior,”White Tigers,” is an often anthologized and discussed part of the book because of its fantastic portrayal of a female avenger. This story of the swordswoman is derived from the tale of the leg-endary Chinese heroine Fa Mu Lan, who substitutes for her aging father in a military conscription.
In Kingston’s version the swordswoman studies martial arts from a pair of mysterious old couples and leads a peasant uprising against the tyrannous emperor. After she decapitates the misogynist baron who has exploited her village and ruined her child-hood, the swordswoman renounces her masculine power and returns to the traditional roles of daughter-in-law, wife, and mother. In “Personal Statement,” Kingston calls the story of the swordswoman “a fantasy that inspires the girls’ psyches and their politics.” By adopting the story of an exemplary woman who has successfully balanced her roles in the public sphere, which is almost always dominated by men, and in the private sphere of home, Kingston is imagining victory over the androcentric Chinese and Chinese American traditions.
While Kingston has been faulted by Asian American critics and sinologists for inaccurate allusions to Chinese stories, the strength of “White Tigers” comes from her rewriting of traditional legends and mythology. In “Personal Statement” Kingston explains that “myths have to change, be useful or forgotten. Like the people who carry them across the oceans, the myths become American.The myths I write are new, American.” In “White Tigers,” for example, Kingston creatively rewrote traditional myths and appropriates male heroic legends for her woman warrior. Through this creative mythmaking Kingston created a heroine who transgresses traditional gender boundaries. The swords-woman describes how her parents carve their names, vows, and grievances on her back. Although undeniably an act of bodily mutilation, this act rep-resents a coveted family acknowledgment for Chinese and Chinese American women. Furthermore Kingston’s description of the script on the swordswoman’s back is a deliberate combination of physical and artistic beauty: “If an enemy should flay me, the light would shine through my skin like lace.” Through this revision of the chant ofFa Mu Lan, ‘Kingston vicariously satisfied her urgent desire for family recognition.