768 The American Century: Literature since 1945and aiming, somehow, for a new synthesis. So, in the second movement, “White
Tigers,” Kingston revises the story of Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior of ancient
Chinese legend. The mother of the narrator, Brave Orchid, also tells this story. It is a
measure of her ambivalence as a guide and mentor, in fact, that she can tell
emancipatory tales as well as cautionary ones. Or, as the narrator says of her mother,
“she said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she taught me the song of the
warrior woman.” In the retelling of the story here, however, Kingston craftily
reshapes the story, attributing some of the exploits and experiences normally
associated with male legendary warriors to Fa Mu Lan. Her aim, she has said, was to
take male power “for women” and also to write myths that are “new, American.” Like
The Woman Warrior as a whole, “White Tigers” is a reinvention of tradition that
invests old stories with a new, liberating and feminist bias – and dramatizes the
point that a diversity of cultural influences, Chinese, American, and so on, may and
perhaps must lead to the creation of hybrid narratives.
The solution The Woman Warrior offers to the problem of being both a “Chinese
‘I’ ” ad an “American ‘I’ ” is not to collapse these dualities and differences but to
accommodate them. The final story, “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” offers
further illustration of this. It is about an actual historical figure, Ts’ai Yen, who was
captured and forced to live in “barbarian” lands for many years. A mother, warrior,
and poet, to her “the barbarians were primitives,” we are told. But she heard a strange
music among them, made on reed flutes; and she learned how to sing in a way that
somehow “matched the flutes.” Returned to her own people at last, Ts’ai Yen “brought
her songs back from savage lands. One of these,” the reader discovers, is called
“ ‘Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,’ a song that Chinese sing to their own
instruments. It translated well.” Clearly, Ts’ai Yen supplies an analogue for the author
and narrator’s own status as a woman warrior of words, using the instruments or
forms at her disposal to “translate” her experiences, dramatize her own mixed
heritage and diverse experience. Equally clearly, there is change here, since the old
story is rewritten as it is retold, and there is also consistency – not least, because this
version of the story is retold by both mother and daughter. “The beginning is hers,”
Kingston discloses, “the ending, mine.” The young girl remembered in The Woman
Warrior is someone who seems habitually stifled and silenced: her inability, in
particular, to speak with confidence in English is linked to a crisis in identity. What
she learns is what the narrator demonstrates and discloses: how to find refuge and
redemption in telling, writing books like this one. “The reporting is the vengeance,”
the narrator declares at one point. Words are the weapons of this woman warrior,
her way of getting back into the world.
The book that followed The Woman Warrior, in 1980, China Men, also depends on
family history. As its title implies, however, it concentrates on men and on a difficult,
uncommunicative relationship between father and daughter. A hybrid like its
predecessor, it also draws on history, law, and imaginative revisioning of historical
fact. Her aim, Kingston said, was to “claim America” for Chinese-Americans by
showing how deeply in debt America is to the labor of Chinese men, her forebears
among them, who cleared the land, built the railroads, and created fertile farmlandGGray_c05.indd 768ray_c 05 .indd 768 8 8/1/2011 7:31:44 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 44 PM