The American Century: Literature since 1945 767begin in one another,” Ralph’s father once told him. Now, Ralph is starting to see how
opposites begin in him, since Chinese past and American promise both form part of
his character and fate.
Maxine Hong Kingston is certainly the most widely recognized contemporary
Asian-American writer. Her first book, The Woman Warrior (1975), is subtitled
Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. It is, however, not so much a memoir as an
intentionally hybrid form, blending elements of several genres: myth, fiction,
autobiography, and biography as well as memoir. Negotiating both the sexism of
traditional Chinese culture and the racism of white America, Kingston recounts the
childhood experiences of a young girl. Interweaving adolescent confusion and
uncertainty of perspective with ironic adult commentary, she describes someone
caught between her Chinese inheritance and her American upbringing, between
Canton and California. The narrative as a whole is separated into five sections or
movements, each one pursuing the theme of the development of the young girl into
the inspirational figure of the woman warrior. Each section, in turn, tells the story of
a particular woman who has a formative influence on the protagonist, who is also
the narrator. These maternal figures, who are both actual and mythical, ghostly and
real presences in the life of the young girl, gradually, cumulatively promote a growth
from silence to speech. For what the book slowly discloses is the power of story to
shape character and behavior: the opportunity, and even the necessity, to speak
oneself into being and identity. To that extent, the woman warrior is the writer, the
author of The Woman Warrior. Tellingly, the book opens with an injunction to
silence. “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you,” Kingston’s mother
warns her, before revealing the true story of Kingston’s aunt’s illegitimate pregnancy,
shaming, and eventual suicide. This is the “no name woman” of the first movement.
The story is told by the mother as a cautionary tale and as an injunction against the
passing on of familial shame. The narrator, however, makes her own use of what she
is told. As “a story to grow up on,” the history of her aunt is reimagined as an eman-
cipatory narrative: the account of a woman who had her vengeance on Chinese
patriarchal culture, and those who would shame and control her, by casting her
body into the family drinking well. For Kingston, “deliberately forgetting” her aunt
has been the cruellest punishment meted our to her by her family. Now, by “telling”
about her she is redressing the balance. She knows the perils attendant on this. Her
aunt, she recognizes, is an unquiet ghost who “does not always mean me well.” But
she is willing to take that risk in order to discover in the past what she needs for her
own speech and survival.
Like the opening movement, the other four movements in The Woman Warrior
show the ability of the protagonist and narrator to sift through the cultural fragments
she inherits through her mother and reinvigorate, reinvent them for her own
purposes. She acknowledges the dilemma of living in a divided world. “Chinese-
Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese,” she asks,
“how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood ... from what is Chinese? What
is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” Nevertheless, she strenuously pushes a
solution to that dilemma by separating out the different strands of her experienceGGray_c05.indd 767ray_c 05 .indd 767 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM