About The Woman Warrior
The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
is Maxine Hong Kingston’s first and most famous book. It was published in 1976
to great critical acclaim, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Nonfiction. In addition to being a canonical work, The Woman Warrior is
considered a landmark in Chinese-American literature. It is widely taught in
high schools and colleges, particularly because of its relevance to young
adults.
Although most of the literary
community welcomed The Woman Warrior with open arms, ohers who criticized it.
Some readers found Hong Kingston’s writing style unnerving. The book is
certainly not traditional as memoirs go. In fact, it defies genre. Though classified
and awarded as a work of nonfiction, it is truly a hybrid of fiction with
nonfiction because it alternates, often seamlessly, between fantasy and
reality. Because much of the book comes out of the oral tradition, where
stories constantly change between tellings, it is only natural that Hong
Kingston’s stories should not be definitive versions of reality.
One major critic of The Woman
Warrior is the Asian-American writer Frank Chin. In a 1991 article, “Come All
Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake,” Chin complains that The
Woman Warrior (along with other seminal Asian-American works) misinforms people
about what it is to be Asian-American. He calls Hong Kingston’s impressions of
her culture “fake,” “revisionist,” “Westernized,” “stereotypical,” and
demeaning. Chin was not the only one to censure Hong Kingston for her
impressionistic view of Chinese-American culture. Many of her critics tried to
discredit her work by pointing out that she was not an expert on Chinese or
Chinese-American history. Hong Kingston has defended herself over the years by
explaining that The Woman Warrior was never meant to be a definitive guide to
Chinese-American identity. Rather, she says, it reflects her and her family’s
personal experiences.
The Woman Warrior consists of five
chapters: "No Name Woman," "White Tigers,"
"Shaman," "At the Western Palace," and "A Song for a
Barbarian Reed Pipe." It contains memories from Hong Kingston’s own life,
written versions of her mother’s stories, and retellings of two famous
warrior-woman legends. It is important to note that not once in the book does
Hong Kingston mention herself by name. Her narrator is unnamed and often
elusive, changing perspectives and even inhabiting the story of the warrior, Fa
Mu Lan. By distancing herself from her narrator, Hong Kingston tells us
implicitly that The Woman Warrior is not to be taken literally.
Because the book is so
multifaceted, it continues to generate wide critical response more than thirty
years after its first publication. In addition to giving heart to its readers,
The Woman Warrior has inspired other acclaimed writers, perhaps most notably
the prolific Chinese-American novelist Amy Tan.
Character List
Brave Orchid
The narrator's mother. She is an unwavering woman who
immigrated to the United States from a small Chinese village during World War
II. She had two children in China, but they died before she left. In China, she
was a renowned doctor. In America, she and her husband run a laundry. Brave
Orchid is wedded to Chinese tradition. She cares about her children, but she
considers them ungrateful and disrespectful because they do not understand her
ways.
Crazy Mary
A neighborhood woman, the daughter of Christian converts.
When she was a toddler, her parents emigrated. They sent for her when she was
"almost twenty and crazy." The narrator and her siblings avoided
Crazy Mary at all costs. It is Crazy Mary's prescription that the pharmacy
mistakenly delivers to Brave Orchid.
Fa Mu Lan
A legendary woman warrior. At the age of seven, she is
summoned into the mountains, where two kindly immortals teach her how to fight.
When her family is conscripted, she returns to her village in a male disguise
to fight in her father's place and save her brother. Fa Mu Lan becomes a great
army leader and helps unseat the corrupt emperor and reclaim her village from
the hands of an evil baron.
Moon Orchid
Brave Orchid's sister, who immigrates when she is already a
senior citizen and has not seen her sister for thirty years. She has one
daughter, who is already in America and married to a Chinese-American man. Moon
Orchid does not wish to see her husband, but Brave Orchid forces her to
confront him. After he breaks her heart and shames her, Moon Orchid slips into
a state of paranoia from which she never recovers.
Moon Orchid's Husband
He immigrated to the United States many years before, and he
has no contact with Moon Orchid or their daughter other than sending them
money. In Los Angeles, he is a brain surgeon and is remarried. When Moon Orchid
confronts him, he tells her she should not have come and that he never wants to
see her again.
Moon Orchid's Daughter
She is Moon Orchid's only daughter. Brave Orchid helped her
gain citizenship by matching her with a "tyrant" of a
Chinese-American husband. Like her mother, she does not feel angry towards her
father and is hesitant to confront him in the way Brave Orchid wishes.
Narrator
She is a first-generation Chinese-American who grew up in
the Chinese immigrant community of San Francisco. The narrator feels distanced
from Chinese culture but at the same time wants to understand it. She generally
has a hard time speaking up, except in the case of her mother. From an early
age, she was determined to be the opposite of what her mother expected. The
novel is her exploration of her cultural and familial inheritance.
Other Major Themes
Birth
Birth is an especially important
topic in a book centered on the mother-daughter relationship. The moment of
birth is when mother and daughter first live as separate sentient beings who
can begin a new mutual relationship. Because the narrator’s relationship with
her mother is so conflicted, it is not hard to see why she makes birth a
recurring theme in The Woman Warrior.
Of all the births she mentions in
the novel, the most poignant is her own. The narrator is born in America, a
world away from her mother’s homeland. Because she is born on American soil,
America is her homeland by default. This fact of geography makes all the
difference for the mother-daughter relationship. According to the narrator,
where one is born makes all the difference regarding who one will become. For
much of her life, the narrator feels inadequate next to her deceased older
siblings. They were “real Chinese,” as Moon Orchid says, because they were born
in China. This makes them closer to the narrator’s parents than she can ever
be. Were she born in China, the narrator would have learned from her parents
nearly all the skills she needed to survive. She could look up to them as
teachers and wise elders, as Fa Mu Lan looked up to the old man and woman. But
because the narrator was born in America to Chinese parents, her mother and
father cannot teach her everything she needs to know. For example, she flunks
kindergarten because her parents do not teach her English.
In The Woman Warrior, birth
is often seen as a catastrophic event. This trend begins in Chapter 1, “No-Name
Woman,” in which the narrator’s aunt drowns herself and her baby in the family
well. The baby is born healthy, but its birth is a tragedy because it is
destined to be an outcast like its mother. Another tragic birth from Brave
Orchid’s talk-stories is that of the baby born without an anus. That child’s
birth was tragic because not even Brave Orchid could save it from certain
death. Instead, it was left to die alone in the family’s outhouse. The narrator
marries birth with misfortune again when she describes the village practice of
killing newborn girls by pressing their faces into ash. The birth of even a
healthy girl is a misfortune because girls are destined to “desert their
families.”
Taken as a whole, the narrator’s
birth stories reveal her anxiety about finding her identity and inner strength.
Having heard so many horrifying tales of birth, for her the event represents
powerlessness. The baby has no choice in whether it is born, how it is born, or
where it is born. It is therefore, in that moment, powerless over its identity
and its future. Babies haunt the narrator because she often feels as helpless
to decide her destiny as they are.
Culture Clash
Characters in The Woman Warrior
experience culture clash in different ways. Brave Orchid and the narrator’s
husband faced culture shock when they emigrated from China to the United
States. In their homeland, they both had distinguished careers. Because careers
often do not translate between cultures, they became manual laborers in
America. They feel alienated from American culture, which is why they refer to
their non-Chinese neighbors as “ghosts.”
The narrator experiences culture
shock from two directions at once. She occupies the liminal space between
Chinese and American cultures. As much as she is both Chinese and American, she
feels as though she has little claim to either identity. To the narrator
growing up, non-Chinese people are “ghosts” and Chinese immigrants—including
her own family—are “barbarians.” The narrator spends much of her childhood
trying to overcome her dual culture shock and reconcile Chinese and American
cultures. As she states, “Those of us in the first American generations have
had to figure out how the invisible world the emigrants built around our
childhoods fits in solid America.” Only at the book’s end does the narrator
admit that much of her perception of Chinese tradition was magnified by legend.
As an adult, she knows that her parents would never sell her and that her
mother wants her to be a success, not a slave. Being caught between cultures
often makes the narrator feel guilty. She knows that, being American-born, she
has an advantage over her parents. She may not fit in perfectly, but she is
able to navigate the non-Chinese world much more easily than her mother or
father could. As a child she sometimes lords this privilege over her
unsuspecting parents, as when she mistranslates her mother’s complaints to the
pharmacist.
Moon Orchid is a compelling example
of the negative effects of culture clash. To begin with, she is already a
senior citizen when she arrives in the United States. She is also emotionally
frail by nature, which her husband points out when he tells her she is not
strong enough for America, and culture shock causes her to lose her spirit and
her mind. Brave Orchid and, to an extent, Moon Orchid, think that they can
reclaim Moon Orchid’s Chinese marriage in America after thirty years.
Moon Orchid’s husband, in contrast,
has not had much trouble with culture clash. He is a successful brain surgeon with
a new, younger wife and two children. He has “a new life” and wants nothing to
do with her or their daughter. His sending Moon Orchid away is the ultimate
shock for her. From then on, she experiences paranoia, a magnified fear of the
unknown. She is afraid of the Mexicans in her daughter’s neighborhood. Then she
becomes afraid of the American government. Moon Orchid experiences such a
severe clash of cultures that she becomes convinced that America is a place
where people die just by leaving the house.
Ghosts
The word “ghost” has several
meanings in The Woman Warrior. It can refer to a disembodied spirit like
the Sitting Ghost. It can be an outcast like the “no name” aunt. It can be the
memory of someone who died, like Moon Orchid. It can be a non-Chinese person, a
“White Ghost” or a slightly less intimidating “Black Ghost.” When Hong Kingston
calls the book “Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts,” she is referring to her
experiences with all of the above. Many of the ghosts in the book are
frightening or malevolent; these include “no name” aunt, the babies Brave
Orchid could not save, and the Sitting Ghost. Examples of benevolent ghosts
include Moon Orchid, whose story makes her female relatives swear never to be
cheated by a man, and Fa Mu Lan, whose legend or memory encourages the narrator
to be strong. Two ghosts whose presence the family always feels are the
narrator’s older siblings who died in China.
Ghosts are synonymous with
mysteries. They “shimmer” in a liminal space where things are unclear and fact
is inseparable from fiction. Brave Orchid is not afraid of ghosts because she
is a “shaman” who can bridge the physical and metaphysical worlds. For the
narrator, in sharp contrast, ghosts signify confusion and insecurity. She feels
as though she has inherited ghost stories and that she is herself a kind of
ghost. She struggles with her identity and does not feel as though she belongs
completely in Chinese or American culture. Because the narrator suffers from a
ghostly sense of indefiniteness, she craves logic, clarity, and simplicity. She
says, “Concrete pours out of my mouth to cover the forests with freeways and
sidewalks. Give me plastics, periodical tables, t.v. dinners with vegetables no
more complex than peas mixed with diced carrots. Shine floodlights into dark
corners: no ghosts.”
Insanity
The narrator is fascinated not only
by women warriors, but also by especially unfortunate women. For her, the
epitome of misfortune is in going insane, losing one’s reason and sense of
security. The most central story of insanity in the book is Moon Orchid’s. On
some level, Moon Orchid knows that confronting her husband is the wrong thing
to do. Still, Brave Orchid forces her to travel to his office in Los Angeles.
Moon Orchid is not emotionally strong to begin with, so she cannot withstand
her husband’s rejection. Until that point, Moon Orchid has been happily living
in a dream. As long as she does not see her husband, she can pretend that they
still have a marriage and that he is the same man he always was. She believes
she is loved. When the fantasy shatters, Moon Orchid is left with no sense of
self. Whereas before the incident, she was flighty and chatty, afterward she
withdraws and becomes overly serious. Eventually, she becomes paranoid about a
government conspiracy and has to be placed in a mental asylum. In the asylum,
Moon Orchid regains some of her happiness, but never her reason.
Another aunt, “No name” aunt, is
certainly very unfortunate, and in some ways she fits the profile of insanity.
She commits infanticide and suicide in one stroke when she throws herself and
her newborn into the well. The narrator suggests that the villagers make “no
name” aunt lose her mind. In every way they can, the villagers make her feel as
though she does not deserve to live or to have ever lived. Even her own family
members call her a “ghost” and pretend that she does not exist. In one way,
drowning herself and her child is a valiant act of defiance. In another, it is
the act of a woman driven to irrationality.
Another insane character is the
village crazy woman in China. Like her future daughter, Brave Orchid is
compassionate when it comes to insanity. She tells the villagers that the woman
is not really trying to signal planes, no matter what she may say. Still, the
villagers stone her to death. In “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe,” the
narrator describes “half a dozen crazy women [who] are girls” who live in her
neighborhood. The foremost is Crazy Mary, whose prescription accidentally gets
delivered to Brave Orchid. Crazy Mary is the only one of her siblings born in
China. Her parents emigrated without her. By the time they sent for her, she
had gone mad.
Another “crazy woman” is the one
the children call Pee-A-Nah. She is “the village idiot” and seems to think she
is a witch, given the pointed hat she wears and the broom she pretends to ride.
When Brave Orchid is not there, Pee-A-Nah chases the children and frightens
them. There is also a woman next door, possibly bipolar, who alternates between
being extremely talkative and social and being very antisocial. She spends two
years in the mental asylum but is never quite cured.
The narrator says at one point, “I
thought every house had to have its crazy woman or crazy girl, every village
its idiot. Who would it be at our house? Probably me.” The narrator thinks that
she is crazy because she “hear[s] voices in motors and [sees] cowboy movies on
blank walls.” Whether these things are ghostly visions or manifestations of her
creativity, they certainly make the narrator abnormal. Because she feels she
does not belong, the narrator sympathizes with the insane; she does not know
what it is like to lose one’s mind, but she at least knows about feeling
ungrounded.
The Power of Expression: Silence
and Talk-Stories
The power of the spoken and written
word is one of the most central themes in The Woman Warrior. Throughout
the book, the word is doubly powerful. Things that are spoken or written are
equally powerful as things that are purposely kept silent. Hong Kingston
introduces both silence and talk-stories in the book’s first phrase, “You must
not tell anyone.” Brave Orchid is talking-story but she is also inducting the
narrator into the “old Chinese” code of silence.
Let us first examine the power of
the talk-story in The Woman Warrior. Brave Orchid claims she cut the
narrator’s tongue to make her eloquent. As a master of the talk-story, she
wants her daughter to be able to speak well. Brave Orchid’s stories save the
narrator from believing all the sexist things she hears among the emigrants.
She recalls, “At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power,
my mother talking-story … She said I would grow up a wife and a slave, but she
taught me the song of the warrior woman, Fa Mu Lan. I would have to grow up a
warrior woman.” The legend of Fa Mu Lan convinces the narrator that standing up
for one’s beliefs is valiant, no matter how much they clash with authority.
Even the story of “no name” aunt, which is really about silence, gives the
narrator a sense of purpose. As an adult, she commits the story to paper in
order to expose the wrongs done to her aunt and redeem her spirit. The Woman
Warrior itself is a talk-story even though it is written instead of spoken.
Stories are so important to the
narrator because silence makes her furious. Some of the silence in the Chinese
emigrant community is kept due to fear of deportation. In one instance, the
narrator recounts that she could not tell her “ghost” teacher that her father
had run a gambling house. In another, she explains that the emigrants avoided
talking to the government or police at all costs; they even made it a habit not
to report crimes. The silence that really infuriates the narrator is between
parents and children. She says of her mother, “She never explained anything
that was really important. [We] no longer asked.” Brave Orchid expected her
children to respect and follow tradition, but she did not take the time to
explain it. They learned about tradition when they would break it and Brave
Orchid would slap them. The parents’ generation subjects her to their silence,
their lack of explanation.
That generation also silences
women. It expects them to be obedient and subservient. The narrator feels as
though the community code of silence muffles her. She is not allowed to ask
questions about ‘anything that is really important.’ Sex is unspeakable, death
is unspeakable, and shame is unspeakable. She suspects that her mother cut her
tongue not to make her eloquent as she claimed, but to shut her up. The things
she wants to say are trapped inside, and when she tries to speak she has an
ugly “duck voice.” When the narrator bullies the quiet girl in school, she is
taking out her anger at the whole community. The incident at school mirrors her
outburst in “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” There, she directly accuses her
parents for silencing her and not sharing information with her. At the book’s
end the narrator uses the story of Ts’ai Yen to explain that she finally found
her voice by struggling against alienation and frustration.
Tradition
In The Woman Warrior,
tradition is a source of both pride and embarrassment for the narrator. In
chapters such as “Shaman” and “White Tigers,” it is clear how much she values
“old Chinese” values. The narrator depends on her mother as the bastion of
tradition. Having never been to China, she constructs much of her impression of
China from her mother’s “talk-stories.” The tradition of The Woman Warrior
is especially important to the narrator, who invokes the legends of Fa Mu Lan
and Ts’ai Yen to guide her. She shows special respect for these “old Chinese”
stories by the way she uses them in the book. The story of Fa Mu Lan gets
almost an entire chapter. In it, the narrator tells the story from Fa Mu Lan’s
perspective. She goes seamlessly from her own narrative to Fa Mu Lan’s,
allowing herself to be, at least in fantasy, the great heroine.
The narrator saves the story of
Ts’ai Yen for the book’s conclusion. She does not explain why she has chosen
the legend, letting it speak for itself. In doing so, she stands behind the
wisdom of ancient Chinese stories and of tradition. In “Shaman,” the narrator
shows her reverence for her mother’s “old” talents. She is proud of her mother
especially for being a shaman, being able to bridge the physical and metaphysical
worlds. She also says that her mother is a “great power” when she is
“talking-story,” engaged in the oral tradition.
As much as the narrator values
tradition, it also embarrasses and frustrates her. Her biggest conflict is with
the sexism she sees engrained in “old Chinese” tradition. She feels pressured
to become a “slave” of a wife. As a child, she thrashes on the floor when she
hears the older generation repeat old sayings about girls’ worthlessness. For
example, her father tells her: “Chinese smeared bad daughters-in-law with honey
and tied them naked on top of ant nests … A husband may kill a wife who
disobeys him. Confucius said that.” The narrator becomes determined to act the
opposite of what tradition mandates. She revolts by being messy and
disobedient, not demure and charming like Brave Orchid wants.
The narrator’s problem with
tradition comes to a head when the subject of marriage comes up. Her parents do
not seem to appreciate her good grades or her determination to become a
scientist. Brave Orchid tells her to follow suit like the other neighborhood
girls and become a typist. The narrator thinks her parents are so desperate to
marry her off that they will match her with the mentally challenged boy who
follows her around. Even as an adult, living far from her parents, the narrator
still feels her mother's traditions surrounding her. As she puts it, “Before we
can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they
jam-pack with homemade underwear.”
Despite the narrator’s problems
with tradition, she ultimately can take what she wants from it and leave the
rest. Legends of the likes of Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen convince the narrator
that her mission in life is to be brave and righteous, to become a
"swordswoman" of her own kind.
Women Warriors
The legendary women warriors in the
book are Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen. These heroines have much in common. They
begin life as gentle girls and are transformed, by choice or by necessity, into
fierce warriors. They do not give up being women in order to be warriors; both
have children. They do battle far away from their families, always with the
intention of returning home. Aside from being fighters in the physical sense,
Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen have other skills that make them great. Their unique
qualities inspire the narrator to find her own definition of “woman warrior.”
Fa Mu Lan has the unique
understanding that her troops must be happy in order to win. When she sets off
from her village, she takes with her only the men whom their families could
truly spare. She does her best not to break any hearts. Fa Mu Lan also feeds
and sings to her men to give them a sense of support and solidarity. As a woman
warrior, Fa Mu Lan has the unique ability to be both a soldier and a nurturer.
Ts’ai Yen’s literary
accomplishments make the narrator look up to her in particular. Ts’ai Yen
becomes a warrior because barbarians kidnap her. Like the narrator, she feels
alienated even from her own family; her sons are growing up in the barbarian
tradition and do not speak Chinese. The legend of Ts’ai Yen shows the narrator
that she does not have to fight physically in order to be a warrior. She
affirms for the narrator the power of the word.
The narrator also sees Brave Orchid
as a woman warrior. She understands how valiantly her mother has fought to
retain a sense of identity and dignity in America. For Brave Orchid, life in
America is a constant battle against the “white ghosts” who do not understand
her. She is so determined to keep her family safe that she embarrasses her
children to no end. One vivid example is when the pharmacy accidentally
delivers a mentally ill woman’s pills to her family. Brave Orchid marches to
the pharmacy with her daughter to demand that the curse of “sick medicine” be
removed. The young narrator does not appreciate the gesture; she is embarrassed
and thwarts her mother’s plan by mistranslating.
A less humorous example of Brave
Orchid’s warrior-self is when she forces Moon Orchid to confront her husband.
The scene is funny for its absurdity but pathetic because Brave Orchid is
fighting a losing battle. For the most part, until she grows up, she has a hard
time respecting her mother’s for-your-own-good tactics.
In China, Brave Orchid is a more
literal warrior. She vanquishes ghosts such as the Sitting Ghost and the ape
man. The narrator attributes her mother’s immense power to her lack of fear.
When the Sitting Ghost pins Brave Orchid to the bed, she berates and threatens
it, never calling for help. Like the legendary “great eaters” who cooked and
ate ghosts to vanquish them, Brave Orchid is not afraid of any food, including
“squid eye” and other morsels that disgust her children. While the title The
Woman Warrior refers to Fa Mu Lan and Ts’ai Yen, it also refers to Brave
Orchid and the narrator herself.