cheap-imitation clothes and eat whatever food her
family hunts and grows. Desperately wanting to
fit in and be a “model minority,” Lovey feels over-
whelming shame for her family’s lifestyle.
The contrast between Lovey and her peers “re-
minds readers of the multiplicity and variation of
Asian American identities in terms of class, geog-
raphy, and ethnicity” (Ho 51). Even if Lovey can-
not look white American, she at least wants to feel
American and accepted. Throughout the novel,
Lovey notices that all things white and light-col-
ored in American popular culture are privileged:
“Owning white items and eating white items, Lovey
believes, will make her white by association, as her
consumption of white food demonstrates her de-
sire to literally eat her way into what she perceives
as a more socially accepted identity” (Ho 57).
Yamanaka’s debut novel received wide acclaim
when it was published. Critics praised the novel’s
humor and Yamanaka’s ability to write the Hawai-
ian Creole English (pidgin) dialect with accuracy
and ease. Even as we laugh at Lovey’s disastrous
home perm, we share her disgust and sadness
when her father slaughters a family cow that she
and her sister had called Bully and treated like a
pet. At the heart of the novel’s humor and real-
ism, Yamanaka shows her commitment to writing
about the variety of Asian-American experiences
in Hawaii.
Bibliography
Ho, Jennifer Ann. Consumption and Identity in Asian
American Coming-of-Age Novels. New York: Rout-
ledge, 2005.
Amy Lillian Manning
Woman Warrior, The
Maxine Hong Kingston (1976)
MAXINE HONG KINGSTON’s highly acclaimed first
book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
among Ghosts, begins with a mother admonishing
her daughter to keep silent: “ ‘You must never tell
anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am about to tell
you.’ ” The story Brave Orchid then tells her daugh-
ter—who now relates it to her readers in direct
violation of her mother’s command—concerns
Brave Orchid’s sister-in-law, who was attacked by
her townspeople in China for giving birth out of
wedlock, and who afterward killed both herself
and her child. In refusing to keep her family’s se-
cret, the narrator of The Woman Warrior reworks
her aunt’s tragic story and turns a cautionary tale
against sexual impropriety into a powerful meta-
phor for the cultural silencing of women. This
bold literary act—the reclaiming and rescuing of
Chinese and Chinese-American women’s stories
from anonymity and enforced silence—is The
Woman Warrior’s central project.
The notion of the “talk-story,” the liberal blend
of family narrative and folktale/myth through
which Brave Orchid frequently tries to warn her
daughters about the dangers of cultural trans-
gression, is crucial to understanding the book’s
complicated narrative structure. Throughout The
Woman Warrior, storytelling is shown to have been
a tool for the perpetuation of women’s subordinate
status; legends, family anecdotes, jokes, and apho-
risms passed down through generations frequently
characterize women as weak and unintelligent. But
by rewriting ancient stories and creating new ones,
the narrator rejects those characterizations, dem-
onstrating literature’s potential to resist and sub-
vert gender stereotypes.
Because the book freely combines autobiogra-
phy and family narrative with fiction and folktale,
The Woman Warrior’s many editions have listed
its genre variously as “memoir,” “fiction,” “litera-
ture,” and “nonfiction.” While The Woman Warrior
does not fit neatly into any single generic category,
much of its dramatic power derives from Kings-
ton’s extensive use of her family’s history to show
how the silencing of women is accomplished and
sustained through generations. In many ways the
book’s most memorable character, Brave Orchid is
a strong-willed woman whose words and actions
contradict the stereotype of the subservient Asian
wife; aside from the narrator’s, it is Brave Orchid’s
commanding voice we hear most frequently
throughout the text. However, despite her insis-
tence that her children grow to be independent,Woman Warrior, The 315