Brave Orchid is equally determined that they will
not become “Americanized” and thus lose touch
with their Chinese heritage. The narrator and her
brother and sisters therefore feel a constant ten-
sion between an America whose dominant racial
culture they can never be a part of, and a China
whose history they know only through harrowing
stories of violence and the punishment of women
who transgress social taboos.
The Woman Warrior is composed of five sec-
tions: “No Name Woman,” “White Tigers,” “Sha-
man,” “At the Western Palace,” and “A Song for a
Barbarian Reed Pipe.” Each is a blend of realistic
and nonrealistic (or “fantastic”) narrative styles,
allowing Kingston to slip easily between the world
of everyday experience and the worlds of memory,
myth, or legend. Often the female characters in the
present-day sections, set in 1970s California, find
themselves haunted by ghosts or other ancient su-
pernatural entities who threaten to render them
powerless against oppressive forces. Conversely,
“White Tigers,” a retelling of the life of the legend-
ary Chinese female warrior Fa Mu Lan told in the
first person, is written in a spare, unsentimental
style that lends a modern and contemporary feel
to a very old tale of honor and retribution.
Each of the book’s five sections tells the story
of a central female character’s struggle against
cultural and domestic male dominance. Some of
these characters, such as the narrator’s suicidal
aunt and Brave Orchid’s sister Moon Orchid,
are irreparably hurt or utterly destroyed by that
struggle, although their tales survive as damning
testimony to their destruction. Others, such as the
narrator and Brave Orchid herself, succeed in re-
sisting their oppressors, but only at tremendous
costs to themselves and others.
In “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” for ex-
ample, Brave Orchid proudly claims to have cut
her daughter’s tongue when she was a baby, in
order to free up her tongue for speaking any of
the world’s languages. Instead, when the narrator
enters public school she is afraid to speak aloud
for the first year. In a harrowing scene late in
the section, the young narrator, now in the sixth
grade, corners another young, silent Chinese girl
in the school bathroom. The narrator tortures the
little girl for hours, yelling at her, pulling her hair
and pinching her face until the girl weeps softly:
“I could work her face around like dough. She
stood still, and I did not want to look at her face
anymore; I hated fragility.” Seeing in this young
girl a reminder of her own enforced silence, the
narrator finishes her abuse with a menacing echo
of her own mother’s words which opened the
book: “Don’t you dare tell anyone I was bad to
you.” Silence and self-loathing are ingrained in
the narrator until, as a young woman, she comes
to understand the potential of writing to interrupt
that cycle and help her fashion a new identity in-
dependent of her family and cultural stereotypes:
“I continue to sort out what’s just my childhood,
just my imagination, just my family, just the vil-
lage, just movies, just living.”
The Woman Warrior won the National Book
Critics Circle General Nonfiction Award in 1976,
and was named one of the top 10 nonfiction books
of the 1970s by Time magazine. It was followed by
a companion volume, CHINA, MEN, in 1980.Bibliography
Crafton, Lisa Plummer. “ ‘We Are Going to Carve
Revenge on Your Back’: Language, Culture, and
the Female Body in Kingston’s The Woman War-
rior,” In Women as Sites of Culture: Women’s Roles
in Cultural Formation from the Renaissance to the
Twentieth Century, edited by Susan Shifrin, 51–63.
Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002.
“Staging Woman Warrior: Maxine Hong Kingston
retells her ‘talk-story,’ ” Boston Globe, 4 September
1994, Arts & Film, p. A1.
Wong, Sau-Ling Cynthia. Maxine Hong Kingston’s
The Woman Warrior: A Casebook. Casebooks in
Contemporary Fiction Series. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999.
Woo, Eunjoo. “ ‘The Beginning Is Hers, the Ending,
Mine’: Chinese American Mother/Daughter Con-
flict and Reconciliation in Maxine Hong Kings-
ton’s The Woman Warrior.” Studies in Modern
Fiction 9, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 297–314.Eric G. Waggoner316 Woman Warrior, The