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A review by solette
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston
5.0
I have mentioned earlier that I wasn’t able to place this book within a genre, and now I just believe it doesn’t really have one. Kingston seems to believe the same; that the boundaries of memoir/autobiography/novel, more often than not, crisscross and meld through her writing. Her characters are not really fiction, but never entirely real. The merging of the real experience and the fictive one is so simples and unnoticeable, we’re left to wonder about the “facts”.
A most remarkable thing about this novel happens when Kingston herself admits, during her childhood, that it was difficult to perceive what was the memory of a Chinese culture, and what was the invention of villagers who left home long ago. Kingston doesn’t exaggerate or disregards the boundary between memoir and fiction carelessly, but seems to draw from this quality, refusing to be wholly imaginary or wholly factual.
"No Name Woman", the book's first chapter, offers a description of a family secret. But because the parents refuse to tell the story in any detail, Kingston establishes a few plausible occurrences on her own. Because the first-generation, during wistful reminiscences of their childhood village, refuse to completely dispel the obscurity of their past, Kingston’s need to appropriate the stories, fill in the gaps through speculation, and consequently step from memory to invention seems unavoidable. Without that knowledge she remains lost between cultures: Chinese, American, and Chinese-American. And throughout the entire book, there is the same restless ambivalence that is found in "No Name Woman": the yearning to reconcile a divided identity. Also, there is the desire to simply embrace her heritage and China, and the anger at the injustices suffered by Chinese women and girls.
There are also two other important aspects (that will be significant throughout the book) in this first chapter: the silence and the second-generation sense of rootlessness.
The Woman Warrior, though taken up with several kinds of fantasy and full of anecdotes from the author’s childhood, is a sober narrative of an immigrant culture, and a family’s story. Even though the Chinese immigrant community is familiar to the author, she does not feel at home there, because the cultural disconnect between first and second-generations appears impossible to overcome. One of Kingston’s wishes is to be reunited with her own estranged family.
The final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”, suggests that Kingston identifies herself as living among “barbarians” - her own community and family. Kingston compares herself to the second-century poet and musician Ts'ai Yen, who was taken captive by barbarians, and is best known for her Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe, a series of short songs about her life among her captors and her longing to return to her own people.
At the ending of the story [and of the book], Kingston only briefly notes the poetess lamenting over her separation from her native land and her eventual return to her homeland. Instead, focuses on Ts'ai Yen as she recognizes eventually the validity of the barbarians' culture. I believe this suggests an ability to live amicably in both American and Chinese [and Chinese-American] cultures. That this story implies that as Kingston has accepted her Chinese past, so her family (especially her mother, Brave Orchid) learned to accept the American influence.
A most remarkable thing about this novel happens when Kingston herself admits, during her childhood, that it was difficult to perceive what was the memory of a Chinese culture, and what was the invention of villagers who left home long ago. Kingston doesn’t exaggerate or disregards the boundary between memoir and fiction carelessly, but seems to draw from this quality, refusing to be wholly imaginary or wholly factual.
"No Name Woman", the book's first chapter, offers a description of a family secret. But because the parents refuse to tell the story in any detail, Kingston establishes a few plausible occurrences on her own. Because the first-generation, during wistful reminiscences of their childhood village, refuse to completely dispel the obscurity of their past, Kingston’s need to appropriate the stories, fill in the gaps through speculation, and consequently step from memory to invention seems unavoidable. Without that knowledge she remains lost between cultures: Chinese, American, and Chinese-American. And throughout the entire book, there is the same restless ambivalence that is found in "No Name Woman": the yearning to reconcile a divided identity. Also, there is the desire to simply embrace her heritage and China, and the anger at the injustices suffered by Chinese women and girls.
There are also two other important aspects (that will be significant throughout the book) in this first chapter: the silence and the second-generation sense of rootlessness.
The Woman Warrior, though taken up with several kinds of fantasy and full of anecdotes from the author’s childhood, is a sober narrative of an immigrant culture, and a family’s story. Even though the Chinese immigrant community is familiar to the author, she does not feel at home there, because the cultural disconnect between first and second-generations appears impossible to overcome. One of Kingston’s wishes is to be reunited with her own estranged family.
The final chapter, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe”, suggests that Kingston identifies herself as living among “barbarians” - her own community and family. Kingston compares herself to the second-century poet and musician Ts'ai Yen, who was taken captive by barbarians, and is best known for her Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe, a series of short songs about her life among her captors and her longing to return to her own people.
At the ending of the story [and of the book], Kingston only briefly notes the poetess lamenting over her separation from her native land and her eventual return to her homeland. Instead, focuses on Ts'ai Yen as she recognizes eventually the validity of the barbarians' culture. I believe this suggests an ability to live amicably in both American and Chinese [and Chinese-American] cultures. That this story implies that as Kingston has accepted her Chinese past, so her family (especially her mother, Brave Orchid) learned to accept the American influence.