They weren't kidding.
Considering that I only just finished this book minutes ago (probably about an hour by the time I finish this review), my thoughts are not completely processed, but I wanted to put up this one last review before we go into IWMCW's awkward season--AKA, the school year, during which my reviews can be far between and come in flocks. Although I hope it won't be long before I can review Origins, another science book!
Maxine Hong Kingston grew up the oldest (although maybe just the oldest surviving) child of Chinese immigrants during the 1940s and 50s. In her memoir, she tells in five short-story-like chapters of her experiences balancing cultures and trying to understand that which she has never directly been a part of but is expected to know all about. She focuses particularly on being a Chinese-American woman. Themes of silence, mother-daughter relationships, culture, tradition, sexism and racism, insanity, and stories convey these experiences.
Throughout her memoir, Kingston struggles to understand the Chinese culture that her parents can't stop living in and that they expect her to fully be a part of. She expresses frustration that "[t]he adults get mad, evasive, and shut you up if you ask" about traditions, holidays, symbols, and rules, and wonders "how they kept up a continuous culture for five thousand years" (166). She's raised with all this without having a true insider's understanding.
This lack of understanding amidst desire and pressure to have it is not helped by the stories, which also feature so prominently in The Woman Warrior. Her mother tells "talk-stories" about China, her family, and her own experiences. There comes a point where Kingston begins to doubt the truth of these stories, many of which have plainly disturbed her. In chapter 3, "Shaman" (all about Kingston's mother as a college student, a practicing doctor in China, and an emigrant), Kingston recounts several talk-stories that particularly frightened and disgusted her. They give her recurring nightmares about stepping on shrinking babies and about invisible airplanes dropping bombs.
The stories also seem to start Kingston's fear of insanity. In "Shaman", her mother tells her stories about crazy ladies in China. Chapter 4, "At the Western Palace", centers around Kingston's mother and aunt, the latter of whom ends up dying in an insane asylum. In chapter 5, "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" (the final chapter, and the most unrestrained and wild), Kingston describes crazy people in America and comes close to wondering out loud if she, too, is mad. All these stories of insanity are told with an obsessive dual fear-fascination.
But near the end, Kingston hints that she has gotten reassurance that she is not crazy, when she has an outburst at dinner (I'll return to this great scene when I talk about silence!) and her mother corrects all the misconceptions that fueled everything she's just shouted. Many of these misconceptions have come from seeing the world the way Kingston believes the talk-stories portray it. This implies that perhaps Kingston's mother thoughtlessly tells the stories as a Chinese-born woman, not really understanding that American-born Kingston's perspective will be different, let alone what that perspective might be. The story theme reaches its climax here, but Kingston does not give up on stories. She finishes her memoir by writing down a story told by her mother that transitions into Kingston's own retelling (which is absolutely chilling, immense, and symbolic) of Ts'ai Yen, a second-century Chinese poetess-warrior captured by barbarians and eventually released.
This duet of a story peacefully finishes out the story of a tumultuous mother-daughter relationship. Kingston's mother appears in every chapter. Sometimes Kingston describes her fondly; sometimes the mother is a tyrant, and mean. Very rarely is she portrayed with any sort of indifference. Brave Orchid--her name revealed in "Shaman" and used again throughout "At the Western Palace"--embodies nearly every characteristic that Kingston assigns to Chinese women, which often makes her contradictory. Kingston's opinion of her is clearly just as mixed. Brave Orchid represents empowerment and independence as a graduate of medical school and a fighter of ghosts--she is a warrior woman like Fa Mu Lan, a legend whose persona Kingston assumes in chapter 2, "White Tigers"--but she falls significantly from her grand position when she joins her husband in America and becomes just another housewife. Fa Mu Lan also has a husband and a child and performs homely duties once she has won her war, but Brave Orchid is different. She fails the Fa Mu Lan standard by being consistently sexist towards her daughters. She carries on the traditions of her birthplace that tell girls that they will grow up to become wives or slaves. (This expands into a trend of sexism being demonstrated by women, as men are hardly present throughout the entire book. The implications of that are fascinating and horrifying.) Kingston describes some of the things that Brave Orchid does like they make no sense. And sometimes Brave Orchid does seem to be lacking the faculty of reason. But, as I said above, Kingston's own perceptions alter a lot of her experiences of others. The relationship between Kingston and her mother provides a foundation for the whole book and turns up new discoveries with practically every page. "At the Western Palace" in particular focuses on Brave Orchid, telling the story in third person from her perspective.
Brave Orchid conveys a lot of the messages Kingston gets about silence, my second-favorite theme in the book. Paradoxically, both Chinese and American culture suffer from silencing their women and girls. From chapter 1, "No Name Woman" (about Kingston's aunt who drowned herself in China, and about whom she is never supposed to speak), all the way to Kingston's dinner outburst in "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe", silence underlies everything. In the first and last chapters, though, it's most obvious. It's so huge I don't even know where to begin, but "A Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe" includes some stunning paragraphs and scenes about silence. It's a tool of oppression, an expression of cultural confusion, a refuge, a barrier. Kingston plays it perfectly.
My favorite theme (which is really more of a motif) is ghosts. Brave Orchid calls all non-Chinese people ghosts, and so the US is full of said ghosts. Kingston learns to think of people this way, which partially helps her identify what it means to be Chinese, but also prevents her from understanding others and being a full American. The Chinese immigrants call Kingston and her fellow first-generation peers ghosts as well, since they are American-born and in many ways very American. There are also ghosts in China, but they're different, and, to Kingston, unfamiliar. She feels almost comfortable among the American ghosts. But in a paragraph near the end where Kingston writes about how she "leave[s] home in order to see the world logically" (182), she reveals that she has begun to leave behind the ghost-human being dichotomy and humanize the non-Chinese. "Shine floodlights into dark corners: no ghosts", she says (182). With the exception of this ending, calling people ghosts grew more and more natural as the book went on, and eventually I started using it in my annotations. It made the most sense in context. I definitely have an obsession with uses of "ghost" in unconventional ways, and so of course I loved this take.
Kingston also writes beautifully. The wonderful themes are elevated by her wild, occasionally near-nonsense writing. Telling stories of her past and of legend and then breaking in with her present thoughts gives as much variety to her writing as the mysterious, magical mountains do to Fa Mu Lan's ordinary village life, and creates a sense of a continuous story--Kingston keeps living and puzzling out the old confusions and paradoxes of childhood.
But dear God and Fa Mu Lan and Sitting Ghosts and all that, this book is so hard. "Challenging", the book list said. Uh-huh. That doesn't begin to describe the half of it! Apparently a book that is about 95% Things That Have to Do (Often Distantly and/or Paradoxically) With Some Weird, Elusive Theme or Another is ridiculously hard to read and understand. I am looking forward to the discussion that we will probably have in English (partly for purposes of actually understanding particularly absurd bits of the book), but making any annotations that made sense and weren't utterly off-base and that I could actually make something out of should that be required of me... Well, yeah. About that. Most mind-devastating thing I've done pretty much ever.
You are duly warned.
In short, I would recommend The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a girlhood among ghosts to anyone interested in Chinese-American women or people in general. I have learned about both through reading this book. It's incredibly challenging and incredibly lovely.