The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

 Source of book: I own this

 

When the Library of America came out with a Maxine Hong Kingston volume, I decided to buy it. While I collect most of my books used, I will occasionally purchase a new one, particularly from minority or female authors, to encourage publishers to increase diversity.

 

Maxine Hong Kingston is a bit controversial as an author, so I figured I would start out with a look at the controversy and my take on it. The basic idea is that other Chinese and Chinese-Americans have accused her of exaggerating the misogyny in Chinese culture, catering to Western stereotypes. In addition, she has been criticized for using Chinese mythology in her writing, but modifying it (again, supposedly to be more acceptable to Western readers.) 

 

She has disputed both of these, and made the counter accusation that her critics (most of whom are male) are all too eager to silence the voice of a woman who criticizes her own culture. Which is, well, kind of the point of her writing about misogyny, right? 

 

I will chime in here with a few observations of my own. First, “but my male relatives weren’t like this” is definitely not a defense. In fact, one of the members of the misogynistic cult group my wife grew up in came on my blog recently and did the whole gaslighting thing just like this. Your good experience does not make another person’s bad experience go away. Kingston experienced some really bad misogyny within her family, and the community she grew up in. 

 

Second, Kingston points out a very important truth about the particular cultural practices that maintain misogyny. Specifically, the practice that a woman becomes part of her husband’s family when she marries. The parents of the woman lose a child, so to speak, while the parents of the man gain a child. This makes girls into a liability rather than an asset. I’ll talk a bit more about this later.

 

Third, this misogyny and cultural practice is widespread within Chinese culture even today, despite some attempts of the revolutionary communists of the past trying to change things. This has led to a significant imbalance of the sexes - a shortage of women, so to speak. 

 

As to the second issue, I am at a bit of a loss to understand the belief that mythology needs to be static. Honestly, this is a huge problem in my former religious tradition - once the stories got written down, they became “inerrant” and unchangeable. For the ancient myths of any culture, there is no “one true definitive” version and never has been. There have always been different versions that change over time to meet new cultural needs. It’s literally how myths work. (I am using a broad definition of “myth” here - something can be both rooted in historical events and be a myth. Much of every holy book is this kind of material - stories told for a purpose, not as literal fact.) 

 

So, my own conclusion is that Kingston is fully within her rights to draw on cultural myths and reshape them for her own artistic purposes. In fact, some of the most compelling writing of our own time has been the reimagining of myths for a new era. See: Madeline Miller.  

 

So, that initial discussion out of the way, what sort of a book is The Woman Warrior? It is difficult to nail down its genre. It is, to be sure, a memoir, and autobiography of sorts. But it also combines multiple perspectives, mythology, and what the author refers to as “Chinese talk-story,” where the past, present, and myth can be combined. 

 

Probably the best way to explain this is that Kingston cannot simply tell her story without a lot of context. What she experienced and what she did make sense only in light of her family and culture, her specific situation, and the stories she was raised on. 

 

White male authors often like to imagine that they can tell stories “objectively” - divorced from any cultural baggage. This is malarkey, of course. What is really happening is that white males are allowed to assume that their particular cultural baggage is universal, the norm from which everything else is a deviation. I’m not meaning this as a diss to white male authors - I read plenty of them, and some are more self-aware than others. It’s just the, well, cultural baggage. 

 

For Kingston, so much of her experience is driven by her reality as a female child in a traditional Chinese family, while at the same time being an American child. 

 

The book consists of five long chapters, each of which can stand alone as a short story. They are all interconnected, but look at separate segments of the story of Kingston’s family. 

 

The first chapter, “No-Name Woman,” is a story that Kingston was told as a child. Her father had a sister that is never talked about. Back when the family lived in a village in China, the men went to America to earn money. In order to lure them back, they were married off to village girls the day before their departure. One of these women was this sister. Her husband was away for several years, during which time, she became pregnant. When the villagers found out, they destroyed the home and fields of her parents, because she brought shame. The next morning, she was found dead with her newborn in the village well - a suicide. 

 

Kingston tells the story as it came from her mother’s voice, then goes back and reimagines other ways of telling the story. Was the woman raped? Entirely plausible. Was this a love match? Maybe. Since the father of the child was undoubtedly part of the mob that destroyed her house, how was he able to sacrifice his lover to protect himself? 

 

In the end, Kingston realizes that this woman doesn’t even have a name - nobody ever said her name. The fact that she was so thoroughly forgotten is chilling, and thus the author concludes that this is the real tragedy of the story - and the reason she tells the story now. 

 

The concluding passage really stuck with me. 

 

My aunt haunts me - her ghost drawn to me because now, after fifty years of neglect, I alone devote pages of paper to her, though not origamied into houses and clothes. I do not think she always means well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging down and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute. 

 

The second chapter, “White Tigers,” is a retelling of the legend of Fa Mu Lan, the woman warrior who took her father’s place in battle. Kingston imagines herself in that role, finally being given the respect she deserves, and transcending her assigned role as a female. At the end, she confesses that she lacks even the courage to stand up to her racist boss, let alone save China as Fa Mu Lan did. But there are similarities. 

 

Disney’s film, Mulan, is loosely based on the Fa Mu Lan stories, which date back to the 6th Century. Kingston’s version is a lot of fun to read. She makes it into a lyrical prose-poem, with landscapes both natural and emotional. Throughout, her own yearning to somehow earn the love and respect of her family is palpable. And then there is that return to reality. 

 

My American life has been such a disappointment. 

“I got straight A’s, Mama.”

“Let me tell you a true story about a girl who saved her village.”

I could not figure out what was my village. And it was important that I do something big or fine, or else my parents would sell me when we made our way back to China. In China there were solutions for what to do with little girls who ate up food and threw tantrums. You can’t eat straight A’s.

When one of my parents or the emigrant villagers said, “Feeding girls is feeding cowbirds,” I would thrash on the floor and scream so hard I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t stop.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. Bad, I guess. You know how girls are. ‘There’s no profit in raising girls. Better to raise geese than girls.’”

 

Oh man, so much to unpack here. It relates to my own experience as well. 

 

Let’s start with this: when a child acts out, it isn’t because the child is “bad,” but because the child is stressed. Kingston wasn’t throwing tantrums because she was a bad girl, but because she was being insulted and disrespected. But, due to cultural expectations, a “good” girl was expected to remain silent, compliant, and submissive. 

 

Note: this is not to say that children are never bad. Or that poor parenting can reward bad behavior, thus reinforcing and amplifying it. But most behavior by children that is deemed “bad” is a response to something in their lives. Often just being at a stage of development, or being tired or hungry. This was something I had to learn as a parent, in large part deprogramming from the way I was taught to think about children. The teachings of the false prophets my parents and so many like them followed said that children were inherently evil - selfish and rebellious - and that the role of a parent was to teach them unquestioning compliance, submission, and silence, by punishment from the parent. 

 

I was thinking a lot about this lately, after an incident with my mother, where it became clear that we were still having the same argument we had when I was a child. The only acceptable response I could have to anything she did was silence and compliance. Any discomfort that I caused was always my fault. And it still is, as far as she is concerned. 

 

The other thing that this passage illustrates is the way that the cultural practices related to family affect how children are treated. I noted above the practice that daughters belonged to their husband’s extended family, and thus were seen as a cost, not an asset. They eat food, but then go on to benefit another family. Why invest in them? Maybe you can sell them, if you have too many? 

 

This too intersects with my own family experience. I probably should do a whole post someday on the way my mom latched on to fears, then made sure that those fears came true. 

 

One of those fears was essentially the opposite of traditional Chinese cultural practice. In her view, when your daughter married, your family gained a son. Whereas when your son marries, you lose a son. Male children belong to the in-laws, if you will. 

 

And lo and behold, my mom did her best to alienate her daughters-in-law and favor her daughter to ensure her fear would come to pass. 

 

I think that this expressed itself in the way I was treated, particularly as a teen. It wasn’t that my parents didn’t value me, but that they didn’t invest in the relationship the way they did with my sister. I was less valuable than she was, because I would just be stolen away by my eventual wife. The most important relationship was always the one with my sister, and thus she would be kept happy, even if it hurt or harmed me. I believe this is one reason why I didn’t have a chance at normal college, and why they never built a relationship with my wife. (My sister has some narcissistic traits, and does not like competition.) 

 

More generally related to this chapter, I have a couple of other observations. First is the difference in how misogyny is expressed in different cultures. There are, to be sure, similarities, but some fascinating differences. 

 

In the ultra-conservative, authoritarian fundamentalist subculture my parents increasingly embraced during my teens, women are not outright devalued the way Kingston describes. Rather, the misogyny expresses itself primarily in a rigid set of gendered roles and expectations. This, in turn, results in some women being devalued, while others are privileged. 

 

Because the ideal of “femininity” is an idealized 1950s white suburban housewife, those who have the economic privilege to be full time stay-at-home moms are given elevated status. Those who either choose to work outside the home or who must work as economic necessity (whether due to poverty or divorce or widowhood) are devalued. As the “tradwife” movement is making increasingly clear, this is inseparable from the white supremacist goal of making lots of white babies. The value of women - even the privileged ones - is tied to their reproductive capacity. 

 

The second fascinating fact surrounding this chapter is Kingston herself. She cited Orlando by Virginia Woolf as one of her favorite books. I haven’t yet read it, but it is about a person who lives first as a man and then as a woman. It is considered a pioneering work about sexuality and gender. For Kingston, who did not consider herself transgender as we understand it today, did fantasize about being able to be human without the social and cultural limitations of being a woman. My wife is in the same category - she is comfortably cisgender but chafed at the limitations that she was expected to accept within the cult group she grew up in (and later that my mother tried to impose on her.) In a world where women have options, there is probably less of a desire to become male for that reason alone. 

 

Again, this chapter closes with a great passage. 

 

The swordswoman and I are not so dissimilar. May my people understand the resemblance soon so that I can return to them. What we have in common are the words at our backs. The ideographs for revenge are “report a crime” and “report to five families.” The reporting is the vengeance - not the beheading, not the gutting, but the words. And I have so many words - “chink” words and “gook” words too - that they do not fit on my skin. 

 

Kingston’s difficult relationship with her mother (which, as subsequent chapters will illuminate, is complicated) is to a degree the central fact of this book. Unable to fight back in other ways, she fights with her words. They are her weapons, her revenge, so to speak. 

 

I very much feel the same way. As a child, I had to just take a lot of things - sibling favoritism, medical quackery, a cult, denial of college opportunity - with very little I could do to fight back. Words were all I had. And to a degree, they are all I have now. I cannot make my parents accept and respect my wife and kids. I cannot go back in time and keep them out of the cult. I can’t change the sibling favoritism. And I certainly am not going to go pay back for the corporal punishment by hitting my parents. Words are all I have, and really all they can do is help warn others. 

 

And, like Kingston, I am refusing to let words stick to me like they used to. I am not “rebellious,” I am not “too flawed for any woman to truly love,” and I am not one who “never takes responsibility for my actions” - that one is pure projection, as I have come to understand. 

 

Moving on to the next chapter, “Shaman,” this is where the book starts to make Kingston’s relationship with her mother a lot more complex. 

 

It turns out that her mother, left behind in China while her husband was in America, decided to go to medical school after her two children died. (We never learn what happened, but they died young, and she was left alone for a decade and a half.) She completed school and became essentially a midwife and village doctor. 

 

Then, when her husband decided she should come, she was brought to the US, where her credentials had zero applicability, she struggled to learn the language, and ended up doing drudge work at the family laundry business rather than enjoying the status and fulfillment of her previous medical career. 

 

Ooof. So, maybe part of her mother’s hostility toward Maxine was displaced anger at her own loss? It seems plausible. I certainly would have been pissed about it. And I can tell you my wife would not have simply dropped her life to go make more babies with a man who spent 15 years on the other side of the world. 

 

Anyway, this chapter recounts the stories that her mom told about medical school and her life afterward. It particularly focuses on a time when she intentionally stayed in a room that was supposedly haunted, and then spun a whole ghost story out of it which she used to gain status and respect with her classmates. It’s pretty wild, and it isn’t clear at all that it was all made up - her mom seems to have genuinely believed in the existence of ghosts, but dang she sure spun things to her advantage. 

 

Kingston herself observes that what women really want is independence, and Communism, particularly at first, attempted to give them that. (See Wild Swans for more about this.) 

 

The Revolution put an end to prostitution by giving women what they wanted: a job and a room of their own. 

 

This is something to keep in mind when it comes to the goals of the reactionary right wing. Women (and men too!) mostly want a job - something that gives them income and purpose - and some space of their own. The fact that this is more available to women than before is a significant reason that marriage rates have declined. Men have not adjusted to an egalitarian world, and many of them still think they are entitled to have a little female servant with benefits. That women would prefer not to is unsurprising. (Don’t worry: if marriage adjusts like it has in the past, people will still get married. Just not to entitled dickheads.) 

 

The medical school experience sounds a bit…different. Just like I am sure that our own medical schools teach a lot of stuff that sounds odd to other cultures, the Chinese schools taught a bit of stuff that seems odd to us. For example, studying ancient texts “as old as the Han empire, when the prescription for immortality had not yet been lost.” That’s a fun bit of universal human mythology right there. Funny how people kept misplacing the most important recipe in existence…

 

There is one final thought from this chapter:

 

Before we can leave our parents, they stuff our heads like the suitcases which they jam-pack with homemade underwear.

 

I didn’t write down any quotes from chapter four, “At the Western Palace.” However, I do want to mention it, because it is a truly heartbreaking story. Kingston’s mother’s sister has been left in China then Hong Kong for 30 years. Her husband came to America, and never brought her over, leaving her alone with her young daughter. Later, the daughter comes to America and starts her life, before being able to sponsor her mother. 

 

There is a good reason why she hasn’t been summoned by her husband: he has taken another wife and has another family. He has, however, faithfully supported his first wife in style in Hong Kong. 

 

When the aunt comes over the US, she has difficulty fitting in. Kingston’s mother insists she confront her husband, which she resists. The eventual confrontation goes spectacularly badly, and leads to a rapid decline in mental health for the aunt, who ends her days in an institution. 

 

Perhaps the whole episode is a brilliant lesson in the idea that maybe trying to run other people’s lives is not a great plan. 

 

The final chapter is “A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe.” It starts off with Kingston’s memory of bullying another girl at school. From there, it recounts several other instances from her childhood, and ends with the story of the female poet Cai Yan. 

 

There are a few lines here that I thought worth noting. First is a truth about being an immigrant community in a racist society. 

 

Don’t report crimes; tell them we have no crimes and no poverty. 

 

This could lead into a whole discussion of why the right-wing approach to undocumented immigrants actually increases crime. When law enforcement is the enemy, crime goes unpunished and unprevented. 

 

Kingston was told she had her tongue frenulum cut as a child, supposedly as a cure for her unwillingness to talk. As Kingston explains, however, her reluctance to talk was actually connected to the fact that people didn’t listen. Her parents didn’t listen, white people didn’t listen, nobody listened to her. 

 

In her story, she creates this list of things she actually wants to tell her mother about herself, but every time she starts to say them, her mother ignores or redirects her to something centering on the mother. 

 

Maybe because I was the one with the tongue cut loose, I had grown inside me a list of over two hundred things that I had to tell my mother so that she would know the true things about me and to stop the pain in my throat….If only I could let my mother know the list, she - and the world - would become more like me, and I would never be alone again. 

 

I never did a formal list like this, but I have had, for a long time, a list of true things about me I wish I could tell my parents. And that they would listen. Things like how I wasn’t actually a rebellious teen - I cared so deeply about pleasing them, but I was deeply frustrated by the decisions they made that negatively affected my life. Things like how their focus on obedience kept them from hearing my hopes and dreams. Things like how I didn’t tell them they were wrong (when they very much were) out of spite or unkindness, but because they were wrong about things that I cared deeply about and that directly affected my life in a way it did not affect theirs. Things like how long I tried to preserve some part of our relationship, only to see it eaten away bit by bit along with my respect for them as they embraced increasingly toxic religious and political ideologies. And how I really hoped for so long that if I could just explain myself better, if I could just show them who I was, they would give me love for who I was, not for who they thought I should be. 

 

I too feel what Kingston feels, when she finally lets loose with some of the truths, including “Not everybody thinks I ‘m nothing.” And also when her mother responds with “I knew you were going to turn out bad.” And “Who’d want to marry you anyway? Noisy. Talking like a duck. Disobedient. Messy.” 

 

Oh, man, have I heard those all from my mom over the years. And pretty much repeated lately. (Except the marriage one - I think I deeply disappointed my mom’s expectations by marrying a beautiful and intelligent and assertive woman. She truly believed that I needed to change my entire personality - to become less “difficult” - before any woman could love me.) 

 

For Kingston, she eventually did make that escape. She graduated from Berkeley, and eventually taught there. She married a man and they have been together since 1962. Hey, she even got herself arrested in her 60s for protesting the Iraq war. (She was right, by the way.)

 

That is the way of life. We are born, we grow up, we separate from our parents. Some of us successfully transition to a healthy adult relationship with them. Some of us are unable to do so. Some of us write about the journey. 

 

The Woman Warrior is a bit of an unusual book, but it was fascinating to read. It brings out a lot of complexity of culture and gender and relationships, as well as the inevitable conflicts which come with cultural change, whether as the result of immigration or just the passage of time and the evolution of culture. 

 

Kingston was not and is not a “well behaved woman,” and, indeed, I find her sort to be my favorite kind of woman, both in my personal life and in my reading.