The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior

On the English literary scene there comes, once in a while, a distinctive voice that catches the public’s attention. However, such cases are rare for writers who come from minority groups. A decade before the success of The Joy Luck Club from Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston published a nonfiction work called The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts that won her the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has since been known as one of the greatest Asian writers. However, despite Kingston’s careful design in storytelling, readers today may consider Kingston’s documentation dour, her effort in incorporating the Chinese mythic element mottled.

Composed of five sections and each focus on a different stage of life, The Woman Warrior is a close examination over the early Asian women immigrants and their survival in America. The first part, No Name Woman, opens with her mother’s incomplete revelation over an aunt who killed herself, a family secret that cannot be told nor mentioned. Kinston then begins an imagined retelling of the story that fills the blanks left out by her mother. To this aunt whose name is erased from the family history, Kinston devotes her words, in a way to appease the cursed soul and absolve it from the blames. Kingston’s tactic works fine up to this point, and yet her imagination may well be the only light on this otherwise too gloomy novel.

Thematically, the book is so ill-proportioned that it weakens the impact it could have over such an ambitious title. As it turns out, the book is not merely a simple memoir. Kingston pours in fictional elements that turn the book into semi-autobiography. Consequently, the blurry line between the true events and the make-believes confuses the reader. Kingston gets all tangled up in her attempt to allude to Chinese folklore in the second part, White Tigers, where she imagines herself to be a heroine that protects the family from harm. For readers, especially Chinese, who knows the references by heart, Kingston’s effort seems awkward and contrived. While reading along, we find the misadventure ludicrous and absurd.

As a humble contemporary reader, I cannot overthrow the work’s value simply because it lost its impact that it may originally created when first published. There are two types of literary work, or so I believe, one that transcends the time and the other gets caught in its own age. For the readers nowadays, The Woman Warrior evokes things that are too familiar, themes that we too repeatedly encounter, that it may arouse only little interest and scarce compassion. Like the women in the novel, who find themselves caught between their Chinese tradition and the American culture, the book, after over three decades, sadly finds itself stuck in its own time frame and becomes an old time cliché.