Ciudin Elena Dana

Anglo American Studies,Ist year,IInd semester

The culture and self discovery in

‘’The Woman Warrior’’by Maxine Hong Kingston

‘’The Woman Warrior’’ focuses on the stories of five women, Kingston’s long-
dead aunt, "No Name Woman"; a mythical female warrior, Fa Mu Lan; Kingston’s mother,
Brave Orchid; Kingston’s aunt, Moon Orchid; and finally Kingston herself told in five
chapters. The chapters integrate Kingston’s lived experience with a series of talk stories
spoken stories that combine Chinese history, myths, and beliefs her mother tells her. The girl,
Maxine, enters into conflict with her mother and what can be explained as an old and
traditional China. Maxine’s own beliefs are found in the newer American way of life with her
attempts to assimilate to the culture, making it difficult for her to feel any relation between the
two very different environments.“You must not tell anyone,’ my mother said, ‘what I am
about to tell you,’” (Kingston 3). In the opening line of Maxine Hong Kingston’s ‚’’The
Woman Warrior; Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts’’, the reader is immediately plunged
into a realm of secrecy one filled with thoughts forbidden and feelings untold a realm that
holds true for the entire novel. “Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things
in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities,
one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What
is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?” (Kingston 6) asks Maxine Hong Kingston in her
novel/autobiography ‚’’The Woman Warrior’’. Kingston combines prose with history to make
a startling novel of self-discovery and definition. In the book, Kingston and her siblings are
raised by their immigrant parents , parents who still live in their Chinese village despite the
American soil beneath their house. The family still lives in China, both in that they live in a
predominately Chinese community, and in that they keep their Chinese customs despite living
in America. In a novel/autobiography where everyone but Kingston seems to identify women
with slaves, where being a girl means that you are bad and to be good is to be a boy, Maxine
struggles with the idea that she was bad before she ever did anything wrong‚’’ her family
follows the traditional Confucian ideologies, where girls are groomed to be wives, and a wife,
“…’’had no power over her own life; her husband's decisions were her own. She was forced
to be completely subservient to her husband's family…” (Fulton 23). Maxine sees a future of,
“…‘looking after a household, cooking and sewing, flower arrangement, embroidery’ and,
above all, to obey, without question”. (Fulton 25). “As a culture, we were taught to have a
low profile, to become invisible. Something was lost to us because of that. But it's the kind of
thing you learn when you are subjected to the kind of racial attacks we were,” said Felicia
Lowe.

Kingston is on a search to find her identity. She tries to find herself as a Chinese in
American society. There is a struggle within herself to distinguish that which is Chinese from
that which is American. Kingston tries to find herself and her voice in America. She does not
believe in her own attractiveness. She feels a need to become another person to be accepted in
American society. There are two of her mother’s stories in Maxine’s childhood that aid this
battle. One will be examined in detail: The No Name Woman, and the other is examined in
less detail, but still has a large impact on Maxine , the story of Fa Mu Lan. Maxine’s mother,
by telling her these stories and by acting like the woman warrior Fa Mu Lan, provokes the
conflict in Maxine. Maxine does not know if she should follow her desire for freedom or to
conform to the Chinese ideal of a woman , meek, submissive, hardworking, and obedient.
The No Name woman story tells Maxine to be the submissive woman, or else terrible
consequences will befall her. The second story of Fa Mu Lan and Maxine’s mother’s actions
tell Maxine to be someone who stands up for herself , a woman warrior. According to Joanne
S. Frye in "The Woman Warrior: Claiming Narrative Power, Recreating Female Selfhood,"
‚’’thus does Kingston claim for herself the power of Ts'ai Yen, the power of language both to
shape and to convey reality: the power of narrative to bridge cultural barriers and to reinfuse
the female identity with the strength of an affirmed selfhood. In merging the realistic with the
fantastic ‚’’The Woman Warrior’’ demonstrates the centrality of the narrative process to
interpreting lives and its special capacity to overcome the isolation of being an outsider
without a cultural identity and refusing identity in femininity as prescribed by either culture.
Through the interpenetration of fantasy and reality in a multi-layered narrative, she has moved
beyond her misogynistic heritage and overcome what she elsewhere calls her own "woman-
hatred." In her autobiography. Maxine Hong Kingston has been able to use the narrative
process itself to refuse the cultural negations she describes and to claim her femaleness as a
source of strength both rooted in her cultural heritage and affirmed beyond that heritage. In
doing so, she enriches her bi-cultural literary heritage and makes it truly her own.’’

At the end of the novel ,Kingston tells the story of Ts'ai Yen, a warrior poetess
captured by barbarians who returns to the Chinese with songs from another land. It is a fitting
conclusion to a text in which Kingston combines very different worlds and cultures and create
a harmony of her own.

Bibliography:
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Random House, Inc., 1976.

Joanne S. Frye, "The Woman Warrior: Claiming Narrative Power, Recreating Female
Selfhood," in Faith of a Woman Writer, edited by Alice Kessler-Harris and William McBrien,
Greenwood Press, 1988.

Internet websites:
Fulton, Jessica. “Holding up Half the Heavens: The Effect of Communist Rule on China’s
Women.” Undergraduate Research Journal;
< http://www.iusb.edu/~journal/fulton.html>

Lowe, Felicia. Chinatown; Interview with Producer/Director Felicia Lowe. .

<http://www.kqed.org/w/hood/chinatown/ctinterview.html>